Let Them Mind Their Own Affairs

 For most of this week, I successfully managed to avoid paying any attention to the "Kiss Cam" story about the Coldplay concert. I instinctively felt it was none of my business—and that the social media schadenfreude surrounding the humiliation of the two people caught on camera—without their consent—was fundamentally distasteful. But yesterday, a friend finally backed me into watching the video. I had no choice. I've now seen those five seconds of footage—like, apparently, all the rest of the nation. "Now you've done it"—I told him; "you've forced me to formulate a definite opinion on this. Which means I'll have to write a blog about it. Thanks a lot for adding another item to my to-do list!"

Having watched the video, I concede that there is some inherent physical comedy in the scene—particularly in the man's conspicuous dropping out of view. It's worth a couple seconds of laughter. But now, someone has lost his job for it. Two people have been subject to public humiliation and shaming. Their lives may be destroyed. They may be dogged by this everywhere they go in public until the end of time. And for what—a couple seconds of laughter on our part? Was that worth it? Is a momentary "lol" on social media for us worth "years of regret and grief" for them? (Dunbar). 

There are a lot of people who—of course—feel that the public shaming of the two people caught in an apparent extramarital dalliance—is actually righteous. They not only delectate over the schadenfreude—but they feel that they are entitled to do so. They view themselves as enforcing collective justice—as bringing "accountability" for a rich CEO who would otherwise escape consequences for his actions. This, to me, is the most distasteful aspect of the whole scene: people convince themselves that their gossipy scandalmongering is all for the sake of some public purpose. It's not just a guilty pleasure—they boast of it—"as if the abounding gutter were Helicon / or calumny a song," as Yeats once put it. 

In his Notes on Democracy, H.L. Mencken suggests that the moral puritanism of the mob has its roots in envy and resentment of anyone who appears to be having a good time. Hence the public's great obsession with scandalmongering about the rich and famous. "Every district attorney goes to his knees every night to ask God to deliver a Thaw or a Fatty Arbuckle into his hands," writes Mencken. This is surely the psychic root of the mob's desire to enforce brutal collective justice on this particular CEO as well—it's not that they are so morally pure themselves; it's that they hate to see others doing what they would most like to do themselves—and getting away with it. A CEO caught having an affair becomes an easy target. 

And so—for this psychic reason—the "leaders of the crowd"—as Yeats called them, in the poem quoted above—will always seek "to pull down established honour / hawk for news / whatever their loose fantasy invent." This desire to humiliate the lone individual caught enjoying themselves, and insisting that they not be allowed to get away with it, is, in other words, the root of the public's insatiable obsession with tattling on celebrities and wealthy or powerful people. Here, in this will to "add our voice to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage" and "to trample savagely on the fallen"—we find, as Matthew Arnold put it, "the eternal spirit of the Populace."

To which I can only say, with Robert Lowell—if only we could learn instead to "pity the monsters." If only we could learn to apply the wisdom of Justice Brandeis—when he wrote that a fundamental right, implicit in all the Bill of Rights, is the right of privacy—the "right to be let alone"—the right, if one is in fact having an extramarital affair—to keep that between one's family and oneself; one's conscience and oneself; and not have the whole busybodying public weigh in on it for purposes of their own prurient gratification, which they then have the gall to dress up under the trappings of "moral" concern. If only we could learn to apply the great principle of noninterference, for which A.E. Housman once called in a great poem: 

The Laws of God, the Laws of Man

He may keep that will and can [...]

And if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.