The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  “The calling of business is to support the reality and reputation of capitalism,” says Mr. Novak, “and not undermine [it].”

  But undermining it is precisely what the men of WorldCom et al. have done. It is their single most destructive act.

  * * *

  Edward Younkins of the Acton Institute distills Mr. Novak’s philosophy into “Seven Great Responsibilities for Corporations”: satisfy customers with good services of real value; make a reasonable return to investors; create new wealth; create new jobs; defeat cynicism and envy by demonstrating internally that talent and hard work will and can be rewarded; promote inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity; diversify the interests of the republic.

  As for business leaders, their responsibility is to shape a corporate culture that fosters virtue; to exemplify respect for the rule of law; to act in practical ways to improve society; to communicate often and openly with investors, pensioners, customers and employees; to contribute toward improved civil society; and to protect—lovely phrase coming—“the moral ecology of freedom.”

  * * *

  To look at the current Big Money crisis armed with Mr. Novak’s views on and love of capitalism is to understand the crisis more deeply.

  Businessmen are not just businessmen. They are not just moneymakers. Businessmen and -women are representatives of, leaders of, exemplars of an ethos and a way of life. They are the face and daily reality of free-market capitalism.

  And when they undermine it with their actions they damage more than their reputations, more than the portfolios of investors. They damage and deal a great blow to our country. They make a great and decent edifice look dishonest and low because they are dishonest and low.

  When we call them “thieves” or “con men” we are not, with these tough words, quite capturing the essence of the damage they do and have done.

  It would be good if some great man or woman of business in America would rise and speak of that damage, and its meaning, and how to heal it. It would be good if the Securities and Exchange Commission held open hearings in New York on what has been done and why and by whom, and how they got away with it until they didn’t anymore. It would be good if the business leaders of our country shunned those businessmen who did such damage to the very freedoms they used to make themselves wealthy. And it just might be good if some companies, on the next casual Friday, gave everyone in their employ the day off, with just one assignment: Go read a book in the park. They could start with “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” and go from there.

  On Privacy…

  These two pieces are about the lost world of privacy. I still grieve it. When you have lost a sense of privacy you have lost something intimate to yourself, something innate and personal. Think of your own most private thoughts. Think of their being broadcast to the world. Think of how you would experience that, as a gross violation of your personhood.

  * * *

  We All Know Too Much about One Another

  The Wall Street Journal: May 21, 2010

  This column is about privacy, a common enough topic but one to which I don’t think we’re paying enough attention. As a culture we may be losing it at a greater clip than we’re noticing, and that loss will have implications both political and, I think, spiritual. People don’t like it when they can’t keep their own information, or their sense of dignified apartness. They feel violated when it’s taken from them. This adds to the general fraying of things.

  Privacy in America didn’t fall like the Berlin Wall, with a cloud of cement dust and cheers. It didn’t happen over a few days but a few decades, and it didn’t fall exactly, but is falling. If you’re not worried about that, or not feeling some nostalgia for the older, more contained and more private America, then you’re just not paying attention.

  We are all regularly warned about the primary threat of identity theft, in which technologically adept criminals break into databases to find and use your private financial information. But other things, not as threatening, leave many of us uneasy. When there is a terrorist incident or a big crime, we are inundated on TV with all the videotape from all the surveillance cameras. “We think that’s the terrorist there, taking off his red shirt.” There are cameras all over. No terrorist can escape them, but none of the rest of us can either. If you call 911, your breathless plea for help may be on tonight’s evening news, even though a panicked call to the police is a pretty intimate thing.

  Do you want anyone who can get your address on the Internet to be able to call up a photo of your house? If you don’t, that’s unfortunate, because it’s all there on Google Street View, like it or not. Facebook has apparently taken to changing its default settings so that your information—the personal news you thought you were sharing only with friends—is available to strangers and mined for commercial data. And young people will say anything on networking sites because they’re young, because no one has taught them not to, because they’re being raised in a culture that has grown more exhibitionistic.

  In the “Oxford English Dictionary” the first definition of privacy is: “The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion.” The third definition casts some light on how our culture is evolving: “Absence or avoidance of publicity or display; secrecy, concealment, discretion; protection from public knowledge or availability. Now rare, or merging with sense 1.” You said it, OED.

  We increasingly know things about each other (or think we do) that we should not know, have no right to know, and have a right, actually, not to know. And of course technology is not the only force at work. An exhibitionist culture will develop brutish ways. And so candidates and nominees for public office (and TV stars) are now asked—forced is a closer word—to make public declarations about aspects of their lives that are, actually, personal, and private. “Rep. Smith, 45 and unmarried, has refused to answer persistent questions on whether he is gay. But bloggers have revealed that he owns antiques and has played badminton.” Those who demand that everything be declared see themselves as street fighters for the freedom in men’s souls. But they’re not. They’re bullies without boundaries.

  “The private life is dead in the new Russia,” said a Red Army officer in the film of Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago.” There were many scarifying things in that great movie, but that was the scariest, the dry proclamation that the intimate experience of being alive would now be subordinate to the state. An odd thing is that when privacy is done away with, people don’t become more authentic, they become less so. What replaces what used not to be said is something that must be said and is usually a lie.

  When we lose our privacy, we lose some of our humanity; we lose things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as, actually, children of God. We also lose trust, not only in each other but in our institutions, which we come to fear. People who now have no faith in the security of their medical and financial records, for instance, will have even less faith in their government. If progressives were sensitive to this, they’d have more power. They always think the answer is a new Internet Privacy Act. But everyone else thinks that’s just a new system to hack.

  At technology conferences now they say, “Get over it.” Privacy is gone, get with the new world. But I’m not sure technologically focused people can be sensitive to the implications of their instructions.

  We all think of technology as expanding our horizons, and in many ways of course it does. How could we not be thrilled and moved that the instant transmission of an MRI from New York to Mumbai can result in the correct diagnosis that saves a child’s life? But technology is also constricting. It can restrain movement and possibility.

  Here is a fanciful example that is meant to have a larger point. If you, complicated little pirate that you are, find yourself caught in the middle of a big messy scandal in America right now, you can’t go to another continent to hide out or ride out the
storm. Earlier generations did exactly that, but you can’t, because you’ve been on the front page of every Web site, the lead on every newscast. You’ll be spotted in South Africa and Googled in Gdansk. Two hundred years ago, or even 100, when you got yourself in a big fat bit of trouble in Paris, you could run to the docks and take the first ship to America, arrive unknown and start over. You changed your name, or didn’t even bother. It would be years before anyone caught up with you.

  And this is part of how America was born. Gamblers, bounders, ne’er-do-wells, third sons in primogeniture cultures—most of us came here to escape something! Our people came here not only for a new chance but to disappear, hide out, tend their wounds and summon the energy, in time, to impress the dopes back home. America has many anthems, but one of them is “I’ll show ’em!”

  There is still something of that in all Americans, which means as a people we’re not really suited to the age of surveillance, the age of no privacy. There is no hiding place now, not here, and this strikes me as something of huge and existential import. It’s like the closing of yet another frontier, a final one we didn’t even know was there.

  A few weeks ago the latest right-track-wrong-track numbers came out, and the wrong-track numbers won, as they have since 2003. About 70% of respondents said they thought the country was on the wrong track. This was generally seen as “a commentary on the economy,” and no doubt this is part of it. But Americans are more interesting and complicated people than that, and maybe they’re also thinking, “Remember Jeremiah Johnson? The guy who went off by himself in the mountains and lived on his own? I’d like to do that. But they’d find me on Google Earth.”

  What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

  The Wall Street Journal: August 16, 2013

  What is privacy? Why should we want to hold on to it? Why is it important, necessary, precious?

  Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past?

  We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror.

  Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens’ communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

  * * *

  Among the pertinent definitions of privacy from the “Oxford English Dictionary”: “freedom from disturbance or intrusion,” “intended only for the use of a particular person or persons,” belonging to “the property of a particular person.” Also: “confidential, not to be disclosed to others.” Among others, the OED quotes the playwright Arthur Miller, describing the McCarthy era: “Conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration.”

  Privacy is connected to personhood. It has to do with intimate things—the innards of your head and heart, the workings of your mind—and the boundary between those things and the world outside.

  A loss of the expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate, and it will have broader implications. That is the view of Nat Hentoff, the great journalist and civil libertarian. He is 88 now and on fire on the issue of privacy.

  “The media has awakened,” he told me. “Congress has awakened, to some extent.” Both are beginning to realize “that there are particular constitutional liberty rights that [Americans] have that distinguish them from all other people, and one of them is privacy.”

  Mr. Hentoff sees excessive government surveillance as violative of the Fourth Amendment, which protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires that warrants be issued only “upon probable cause… particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

  But Mr. Hentoff sees the surveillance state as a threat to free speech, too. About a year ago he went up to Harvard to speak to a class. He asked, he recalled: “How many of you realize the connection between what’s happening with the Fourth Amendment with the First Amendment?” He told the students that if citizens don’t have basic privacies—firm protections against the search and seizure of your private communications, for instance—they will be left feeling “threatened.” This will make citizens increasingly concerned “about what they say, and they do, and they think.” It will have the effect of constricting freedom of expression. Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.

  All of a sudden, the room became quiet. “These were bright kids, interested, concerned, but they hadn’t made an obvious connection about who we are as a people.” We are “free citizens in a self-governing republic.”

  Mr. Hentoff once asked Justice William Brennan “a schoolboy’s question”: What is the most important amendment to the Constitution? “Brennan said the First Amendment, because all the other ones come from that. If you don’t have free speech you have to be afraid, you lack a vital part of what it is to be a human being who is free to be who you want to be.” Your own growth as a person will in time be constricted, because we come to know ourselves by our thoughts.

  He wonders if Americans know who they are compared to what the Constitution says they are.

  Mr. Hentoff’s second point: An entrenched surveillance state will change and distort the balance that allows free government to function successfully. Broad and intrusive surveillance will, definitively, put government in charge. But a republic only works, Mr. Hentoff notes, if public officials know that they—and the government itself—answer to the citizens. It doesn’t work, and is distorted, if the citizens must answer to the government. And that will happen more and more if the government knows—and you know—that the government has something, or some things, on you. “The bad thing is you no longer have the one thing we’re supposed to have as Americans living in a self-governing republic,” Mr. Hentoff said. “The people we elect are not your bosses, they are responsible to us.” They must answer to us. But if they increasingly control our privacy, “suddenly they’re in charge if they know what you’re thinking.”

  This is a shift in the democratic dynamic. “If we don’t have free speech then what can we do if the people who govern us have no respect for us, may indeed make life difficult for us, and in fact belittle us?”

  If massive surveillance continues and grows, could it change the national character? “Yes, because it will change free speech.”

  What of those who say “I have nothing to fear, I don’t do anything wrong”? Mr. Hentoff suggests that’s a false sense of security. “When you have this amount of privacy invasion put into these huge data banks, who knows what will come out?” Or can be made to come out through misunderstanding the data, or finagling, or mischief of one sort or another. “People say, ‘Well, I’ve done nothing wrong so why should I worry?’ But that’s too easy a way to get out of what is in our history—constant attempts to try to change who we are as Americans.” Asked about those attempts, he mentions the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Red Scare of the 1920s and the McCarthy era. Those times and incidents, he says, were more than specific scandals or news stories, they were attempts to change our nature as a people.

  What of those who say they don’t care what the federal government does as long as it keeps us safe? The threat of terrorism is real, Mr. Hentoff acknowledges. Al Qaeda is still here, its networks are growing. But you have to be careful about who’s running U.S. intelligence and U.S. security, and they have to be fully versed in and obey constitutional guarantees. “There has to be so
mebody supervising them who knows what’s right… Terrorism is not going to go away. But we need someone in charge of the whole apparatus who has read the Constitution.”

  Advances in technology constantly up the ability of what government can do. Its technological expertise will only become deeper and broader. “They think they’re getting to how you think. The technology is such that with the masses of databases, then privacy will get even weaker.”

  Mr. Hentoff notes that J. Edgar Hoover didn’t have all this technology. “He would be so envious of what NSA can do.”

  The MSM Is Suffering from Freedom Envy

  The Wall Street Journal: February 17, 2005

  “Salivating morons.” “Scalp hunters.” “Moon howlers.” “Trophy hunters.” “Sons of Sen. McCarthy.” “Rabid.” “Blogswarm.” “These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.”

  This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it is the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they are talking about bloggers!

  Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It’s the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation.

  When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

  The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn’t. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

  But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point, or rather points.

  Blogging changes how business is done in American journalism. The MSM isn’t over. It just can no longer pose as if it is the Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player.