YouSaid · the spoken record

Tiffany Jenkins

lines on the record: 54
first: 2025-04-28
most recent: 2025-04-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Safety is the kind of trump card in a lot of these discussions about surveillance. And so that sort of means we need to trust ourselves and each other to keep us safe rather than tech or kind of any type of surveillance. That requires a sort of confidence leap. And ultimately, it means also having a sense that public life is a space which is a place to transact affairs in common, to think about how to make a better world and to sort of, if you like, re-enchant the public realm, to be out in public a little bit more, to do more things together, to be less personal in our political life, less just more open to people having different points of view, for example. So you have to kind of champion the possibilities of public life as well as creating a space. To protect private life where you can just leave it, leave public life altogether.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not hypocrisy or anything like that. It's just there are different facets to our individuality, that it's beneficial to keep those things separate. And I also think, you know, a lot of the sort of surveillance today and the kind of performative culture I think probably comes out of distrust and a sense that tech will save us and keep us safe.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“might be a bit anachronistic but effectively that's one way you decide and i think people do feel that today um if you look at you know even just on a tech level you see lots of young people are just putting their phones away and and if you want to get hold of them if you're if you're a parent you cannot get hold of them and you cannot find out about their lives so they're doing something right because they want some sort of they want a delineation they want to border and we live in a fairly borderless world it's quite difficult with people working from home the 24 hour communication it has to go beyond the individual you can't just leave it up to individuals but i think that that separation that desire i think there is a desire for that sort of separation to do that though i think we have to have a sense that there are differences between being in public and being private and it's not false or inauthentic to have a different public face to the one that you show your friends and your family”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we do need privacy. I think we do need private life. We need it for the development of the self, for individuality, to just be off, you know, to kind of be an idiot in private, to develop intimacy for trust. And I think that makes a better citizen because you know what it's like. You mean even just simply you've had a busy week, you go home, you have a drink with your friends, you be with your loved ones, you go back into the world feeling a better, you know, you're more equipped at dealing with it on the sort of fundamental day-to-day level. It's important. So I think that human need exists. And I think what's interesting about sort of the beginnings of privacy in the 17th century is that, you know, Thomas Moore and Martin Luther weren't attempting to create it in any way whatsoever. This is unintended consequences. But I think they needed to be able to trust themselves about how to run their own lives. I mean,”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And then the usual ignorance about what messages are retrievable. And also because people leak all the time. And I think one of the SNP ministers had this sort of joke between them, which is that deletion is a bedtime ritual, basically, as I put my pajamas on. I delete these messages. And of course, now we've got them.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or not put it in the public realm. You see that, particularly over WhatsApp messages, which are, I mean, WhatsApp is a peculiar medium in terms of the way we use it, but it's entirely understandable that it'd be used during a pandemic. But government, I think, ministers certainly use it thinking, and they certainly justified it internally, secretly this way, because they thought they could delete it and it would be gone. But this is a really important record of how they made their decisions. And so Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock tried to keep it from the public domain. And we have to be really careful about that because it does mean we are not functioning properly as a democracy if information is just secretly removed.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's right, because in an age when public and private is blurred and when our discussion about privacy is narrow, we assume, I think incorrectly, that it just means everything's available and everything's out there. But it's not, and I did this program on non-disclosure acts, the things that people have to sign not to say anything, and they're everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere. And you realize, particularly in the public realm where information needs to be open to have a democratic and accountable society, it's just being kind of siphoned off and removed. And you saw that, I think, over the COVID inquiry. You know, it's so important that we work out what decisions were made, when, why and how, so we can not repeat same mistakes, so we can learn from it. This was an international pandemic. And our politicians are constantly trying to remove that information.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It couldn't otherwise gather. At the same time they were installing surveillance cameras in the offices of the New York Times. So you have this sort of acceptance really and resignation. Can be too technical. It doesn't really talk about who's got the power, what do they have the power to do and what does it mean. It ends up being about cookies or it ends up being about blame and blaming the individual when this is the landscape in which if we want to search, if we want to communicate with people, there's often an element of data collection. I also think talking just simply about data collection. Oh, it can be a bit technical. can't it and so our privacy discussion is very reduced and you just end up having kind of you know tech people who know a lot but don't necessarily know how to say why it's important and lawyers and then they're never very exciting even though they're really important”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the state, particularly post-9-11, what you have, I think, and I think you have this more generally with tech, is that tech is seen as a solution to whatever problem it might be. Just more tech and actually more surveillance. So post-9-11, you do have that program. Total information awareness, where we just need to collect all the data, all your data, and we'll find the terrorist in this kind of mountain of data. There's a moderate political reaction to that sort of thing, but it's sort of half-hearted. And I think people kind of shrug it off because it feels like the argument's already lost. You know, when the New York Times did this year-long investigation called the Privacy Project, which was to look at the collection of data and the surveillance and the sort of the kind of relationship between the state and companies, which basically means the state can gather data.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She sets up a webcam, no idea what it's for, really. And of course she becomes certainly national, if not international star appearing on David Letterman. And she makes a really important, I think, interesting point, which is she sort of says there's no difference between two things being online and offline, right? This is reality to very 1990s what happens online is reality. And she also says, well, if If you're not doing anything wrong, why be worried about it, which is obviously what the big tech people say, isn't it? If you've got nothing to hide, don't worry about it. And that's already sort of people's lived experience in the 1990s. And then big tech comes in. And I think social norms and behavior have already kind of deleted the public-private divide. And so Big Tech just sort of accelerates it.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are much more relaxed about being in public and being themselves. And that is when you do see something like Big Brother. This is pre-internet, but it's completely normal and interesting to talk about your private life on TV. At the same time, I think you have a kind of shrinking of the public realm. best way to sort of talk about it, I suppose, is a sense in which all the big questions are off the agenda with that great sense then of the end of history or there is no alternative, that just maximum. So this is it. And so people do, the private realm just become the only game in town. And then big tech comes in and it is interesting that the one of the first things that people start thinking about doing is webcasting. Somebody like Jennifer Wrigley in the 1990s. She sets it up as an American college student.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“as suspicious. So a good example of how that happens is that in the early 70s there's in Britain a report on privacy where they start talking about with all the new tech which is basically wiretapping maybe we need to be cautious about how these things are rolled out and how do we protect privacy but the end of the report does then conclude well actually excessive privacy is a problem so that kind of culture of openness is beginning to see that privacy in the Victorian way of understanding it is a problem and you get you get much more narrow sense of privacy in terms of the way people are talking about it so it's definition changes people are much more so people I don't think begin to see this separation between public and private if you're if you're not doing anything shameful why keep it quiet and being out and proud is a political act”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I think two things are happening. One, you have the breakdown of public and private. So that border that we have beginning with toleration and the 17th century between what you do in your public and political life and your private life, that begins to kind of erode. You've got scientists like Kinsey going into the private realm and talking to people about their sex lives and people are very relaxed about this because it's not the government. There is always a suspicion of the state or the government going into people's private lives, but when it's other bodies like scientists, people are much more relaxed. You've got the feminists kind of also going into the private realm and then you've got the right taking the private realm and putting it in the public realm. So that's all going on. I think the way to put this, it sounds quite abstract, is to say public and private have become blurred. And the old form of privacy that you saw in the Victorians, which was the private realm being separated from society, is seen as”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always thought it was Big Brother. No, exactly. Of course, the other interesting. You know, because they were constantly under scrutiny. They changed their lives and not necessarily for the better.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“family homosexuality and a host of other issues that you see with the rise of the moral majority. So they're galvanized and it does mean that then the right are kind of and you can still see it to this day with the recent kind of turning over of the right to abortion as a constitutional right in America. I think it's partly because they see it as kind of it's now an issue that they can talk about. It was opened up in the 1970s and they can go for it.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and starts picking each other off. So Kate Millet is kind of told off by other feminists for not being open about her sexuality. She's bisexual, but she's married to a man and it's just all a bit, you know, it's like many people's private lives a bit complicated. But the sort of the lesbians would like her to be much more open about it. You can understand why because obviously we live in a very different climate where we're much more relaxed about being gay, straight or whatever. But she didn't really want to talk about it. But they turn on her. So they turn on each other for their decisions about their own private lives. Whereas the right are galvanized. And in fact, they are part of really what gets Reagan into power. This coalescence of people that were previously quiet about things starting to campaign around abortion, feminism, which they see as anti-”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who is an American conservative who begins to target things that were previously not partisan issues, abortion, for example? So it's both Democrats and Republicans in the early 70s were open about legalizing abortion. Ronald Reagan passes a bill in favour. But you begin to get with the politicization of the private realm and private choices that partly the feminists did open up, you see that the right begin to no longer leave it as a private issue and politicize it too. So they get in and start talking about the private realm in a way that they hadn't before, but they push it into the public. Previously they would have been quiet and now they start talking about it. Whereas for the left, I think what you have is you get the left sort of turns in on it.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bet he's got both of those. I don't think anybody else. So you look at the 70s in terms of kind of sexual culture, it's much more open. You also have beginnings of Stonewall and gay rights. And you have liberation. You have liberalism. So people are much more relaxed about being open about their private lives. But at the same time, it's becoming kind of politicized. So it's a new type of scrutiny. It's freedom on the one hand, but it's also a new type of scrutiny. And you do begin to get people like Phyllis Shaffley.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But So, once you've had the sort of the radical feminists going into the private realm and saying we need to target this because society will be better, you also have a kind of a traditional separation between religion and politics being broken down by the right. And I'm talking about sort of the end of the 1970s here. So you have episcopalians, you have Jimmy Carter, you know, the first president to be on the cover of Playboy magazine. You have quite a kind of...”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With public life. So my favorite is more the 18th century where you have everybody having a really good time. You get the valuation of the public realm. You get the coffee houses, the print, the debates, the societies, the libraries, but also you get the sort of beginnings of that nice private realm web where people have freedom in their private life for the first time. Now, obviously, you don't want to go back to the 18th century. It needs to kind of be updated. So women have access, total access to the public realm, and both realms are seen as valuable. So I think 19th century, the private realms overvalued. You want something where you basically have a border between the two and you recognize the values of both realms.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something you do not do because the private realm was sacred. You have these fantastic controversy over a journalist who steals the etching of Queen Victoria, private etchings of Queen Victoria and Albert, and they go to court and get them back. They have drawn some of their kids, but some of them are their dogs and things like that. But this is a huge privacy scandal and society is up in arms. I think that is the height of a separation between public and private. But I think at that time the public world was beginning to look a little bit seen as a negative and the private realm had risen in kind of in value too much. So I think it's sort of they're two separate. The public realm is seen as sort of this dark place. I think you begin to see this sort of disenchantment with what can be done.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say it's a golden age. So what you have in the 19th century is a highly idealized private realm. And you have all these kind of, as you say, eruptions, privacy panics, first privacy panic 1844 in Britain, where you have this Italian exile living in Britain, Corbazini. He's a nationalist, and you have the state, the British state, after being asked by the Austrians to open his letters. And he finds out because he can see that he sends himself empty letters with poppy seeds and strands of hair in it. And when he opens them, they aren't there and he just thinks, yeah, somebody's invading my letters, somebody's opening my letters. And it's a huge, but it's a national scandal. You know, pages and pages of times are covered with coverage about how we do not invade the privacy of anybody. I mean, who knows, and they wouldn't have agreed with us politics. It's just.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dissolve that border between the two and start targeting private life and you get feminists like Kate Millett really going for that or Carol Hannis who wrote this wonderful essay The Personalist Political. So you then get the feminist movement begin to say yeah we need to go into the home we need to regulate how you bring your children up we need to regulate relationships between your lovers and your husband and wife or whatever and we need to regulate voice what you say so you're gonna get this beginning of the kind of intrusion into the into the private realm for ostensibly good reasons but it does knock the border down between public and private”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“women MPs that there's better childcare or 24 hour childcare or whatever it is so we can get women into public life I think that's very important but then I think there's a disenchantment with that that sets in in the 60s and you begin to get the sense well actually it's the personal that is political and that begins to this sense of you know the personal and political being two different spheres you have this sense that actually no we bring need to”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is more important for the way society is run, how we educate people in the home, how we socialize them, you know, the sense that it gives me a boy and I'll show you a man and therefore if that's the case, if what happens later in society is due to how we socialise young kids, then obviously we need to go into the home. The flip side of that is, well, what about education? What about social structures? What about what's happening in the economy? You know, these things in kind of in society. And so there's been that kind of constant debate. I think, however, in the 20th century, you did have a kind of disenchantment with changing the social structures, something that Betty Friedan, one of the first feminists who wrote the feminist mystique in 1963, would have liked. So we need to change social structures so where there are more judges, more”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It will turn domestic trifles into a public spectacle. And it's the husband's role to decide how the family operate, not society's. So there are many kind of, there are many laws in terms of domestic violence and abuse that do need to happen. There's also this kind of perennial discussion, which is...”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to be accomplished, to be mothers, they weren't educated for their intellect. And there's as great debate as to whether they are naturally stupid, to which most of the feminists at the time said, were not a chance. They don't get the education the boys get. Educate them and they will have autonomy over themselves. They still think that women would probably want a home and think that's a very important role in their life, but they also want access to public life. I think in the 20th century and beyond that's probably not enough for many women. And then there are conditions within the home because you have the situation where it's something that there are very few laws about what happens in the home. So the law against rape in the homes, not passed in Britain until 1991. There's a sense if we intrude upon the private realm.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not an easy one to resolve, and each generation of women reacts to the conditions they're in. So 19th century women, and sort of building on from people like the Duchess of Devonshire, the home was to a large degree a cage in that they couldn't leave it. So it wasn't so much as an attack on the home, but it was an attack on the barriers that meant that they couldn't go into public life and that they're kind of their day-to-day life was heavily regulated by social expectation and the law to a degree. And so you've got people like Mary Wilsoncraft, vindication of rights of women, but also Mary Astell, two very different women in terms of their lives. Astelle's an Anglican believes in the divine right of kings, but she starts talking about the problems of limiting women's education because women were educated as wasncruft also said to be pretty.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Far over the kind of into the realm of the man, as in the public man talking about politics, she was monstered and was very much seen as just as a step too far. She was meant to be in the home. She was meant to be caring for the children. That was seen as having a very important role, you know, because that's the next generation, that's a generation of young men who are going to be running the country. So it's a very important role. You're not just knitting, but nonetheless, that's your domain. So also the separation between public and private can be very restrictive. Men can do the public stuff, women have to do the private stuff.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sense of women's inequality. So Duchess of Devonshire is this wonderful figure who is fascinated by politics. One of the 200 families that run the country. So she has a lot of influence behind the scenes. And two great extent publicly. She's written about in the newspapers, it's a very well-known Whig. She follows Fox. She does, however, step too far out of the kind of whispering at dinner parties area that women have the influence are able to make an influence and into the public realm and by canvassing too actively and too obviously in the elections of 1784. And she's monstered by the press, which is a horrible, the press had lauded her for some time, respected her public speeches, but once she'd gone to”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To a degree. It was both, I think the development of the private realm in this period is both a kind of, it's a very positive thing, but it's also because it values certain things about private life, but it also they were much more confined to it in the way that men were. Men were the ones going to the coffee houses, banging on about whatever play they'd seen.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russo, no, exactly. And he just sees these wigs and these beauty spots and this kind of decadent society. We haven't had the French Revolution yet. So there's all these aristos kind of draped around the chairs pontificating at length. And he just finds it soulless. And he doesn't, you know, he sort of, he begins to think that everything is false. So many of the ideas about sort of being phony and authenticity, you can see although he never uses that word, but you can see he's in kind of Rousseau's head at the moment and he sort of retreats to this place outside of Paris, paid for a nice patron, and he writes his books and all the rest of it and just says, you know, everything that glitters basically out there in the public realm was false. In terms of women, and he would like to keep women in the private realm.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“reasonable criticism to be made of it. Rousseau is one of them. So he sees, you know, he's in Paris, he's hanging out with all the Enlightenment philosophers and the aristocrat.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I mean, public and private is trying to write this book, pinning down public and private. It's like an octopus. It's always moving. But whatever position it's in, it always has a tremendous impact upon all aspects of our lives. So it's a valiant endeavor anyhow. So yes, you have, I mean, you have this very interesting period, though, in the 18th century. get a real recognition of the categories of public and private, as in the public is seen to be something which moderately ordinary people, merchants, workers can begin to enter and their judgments are important. So you have the sort of valuing of this public space in that way. And then you have the valuing of the private in the as a sanctuary away from public life. But almost immediately, that experience does trigger critics. And there are right.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had work on theatre, you know, people would go to the theatre, but the novel is something you can read. And so although a lot of people are reading in public and all the coffee houses where everybody's arguing over the best play or whatever's been done in the political realm, they're also reading quietly, silently, which is a kind of the development of the mind that's happening there.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“acquire a certain value that it didn't have in the ancient world so the ancient world you know you don't get novels extolling the emotions and something like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Caruso which is all about very Catidian daily domestic activities even though he's on an island you know he's cooking in his little pot and the word home is repeated again and again in the book so you get this you get this beginning kind of not quite sanctification but you get this beginnings of a kind of social and written recognition of the values of the private realm that's not just domesticity which is kind of in the in the defoe but it's also the emotions you know the internal world the novel I think is a really important development whereas previously”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You do get the invention of the corridor. But it's not kind of rolled out until in terms of normal people's homes until the Victorian period. So you also have this veneration beginning of the private realm. So previously it would have been a place of commerce. You know, you make your own soap, you wash your own linen, you sell your own produce, everybody's working. And that begins to slip away as work is something that people begin to go out and do. And that kind of frees the private realm to be a space of intimacy and privacy. It's still quite fluid that people, you know, people are going to balls, they're going to the libraries that are opening up, the museums, something like the British Museum, the Vauxhall Gardens. It's a very public culture in that people are going out a lot. But they're also entertaining in their home. But the private run begins to...”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Addison, the spectator who wanders about town describing the wonderful propulsion of commerce and how suddenly there's rich in, you've got tea being transported to every end of the country. And with that money, you also have the sort of cushioning of the private realm. You have curtains, cushions, don't quite yet have corridors.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a very, it's a funny old process. So if you look at something like ancient Athens, you have a very strict delineation between public and private. Public life is where men, only citizens, so not all men, citizens participate and they go to war, they recount great heroic acts in the agora. There's wonderful public speeches. And then you have the private realm, which is really a realm of deprivation. And you have women and slaves who serve the patriarch. And women have very little power within the private realm. And they have very little kind of access to the public realm. So 18th century, you do begin to see this strict separation, not strict. You begin to see a separation between the public realm and the private realm. You've got the news media, which suddenly after sort of the ending of censorship, there's this kind of watershed of publications, newspapers in London, and then across the country. And you have periodicals like Joseph.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you have this sort of relative tolerance, a relative toleration. And people talking about conscience in matters of sex.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“sex with now he's he boasts about it he reflects on whether it's a good thing or not he's sort of turning to not just conscience but enlightenment thinking which is kind of coursing through society which begins to sort of rationalize human behaviour in in their kind of intimate life. So sex becomes relative to what it was before a private matter. That is it's for the individuals concerned to decide who they have sex with, how they have sex and all the rest of it. Now obviously compared to today it's nothing like the kind of much more relaxed attitude we have towards what people do in their private lives but you have the beginning that this is actually a private matter. Sex is however very public so you know you've got prostitutes on the street, you've got”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“terms of what I do with my own body and who I have sex with is just a kind of almost like an overnight thing. Pregnancies before marriage suddenly rise. You know, I think a quarter of women are suddenly turning up to the altar pregnant, which would have not been possible beforehand. You've got James Boswell, a fantastic figure who has insatiable appetites and he not only has kind of appetites that he satisfies with prostitutes, with Rousseau's mistress, with ordinary women. He writes about them. He boasts about his virility on every single page of his diaries. And this is also quite interesting because previously the sort of beginnings of diary culture, if you like, were with the Puritans who write about how much they pray. I prayed in the morning, I prayed at 11 o'clock, I prayed at 12. I went to public prayers. I prayed privately. And now you suddenly got somebody like Boswell writing about how many women he has.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's fascinating because in the period we'd just been talking about in the 17th century, you know, sex outside of marriage is verboden. You've got these things called the bum courts where the both the church and the community police each other. So you even have a case in 1640 where a woman called Susan Doughty is executed for the sin of adultery. The guy she's having an affair with isn't. So there is always a sort of slightly uneven rolling out of how that is done. But come the 18th century. Ideas about conscience which were kind of everywhere in the 17th century. Hundreds and hundreds of pamphlets are being kind of penned. They extend from religious toleration, so conscience and following faith in a particular way to sex. And people are suddenly sort of talking about how, actually, if I can decide this in the most important matter of life, I believe, maybe I can do it and...”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“they begin to kind of talk about freedom and liberty of conscience. So we can kind of follow our own consciences in the way we worship. And you begin to talk about, they begin to talk about toleration and freedom of conscience in really interesting kind of ways that then once it's kind of established expands. So you get these sort of slivers of ideas and then gradually things expand to include others.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe there's a better way. Maybe there is a better way of organising society. So belief isn't mandated entirely one way down from the top to the bottom. We want to follow God the way we want to. They begin to rationalize that. So it's a very curious thing because they obviously all think whatever they are, whoever they are, whatever Protestant sect they are, or whether they're Catholic, they all think they know the true way. They know the true way to God. They are not relativists. They're not like anything goes. You can worship how you want. They think their way is the true way, but they're beginning to have to rationalize their departure from the mandated way of worshipping and organizing. And they're beginning to have to recognize that actually if they've made this choice, maybe other people can also make this choice.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So once you've had this sort of splitting of public and private, which is what you have with the assertion of individual conscience and you have people who are particularly both kind of Protestant sect, but also Catholics, they're worshiping secretly. They're saying the oaths in, you know, they're going to church, they're saying the oaths, they're signing the forms that Henry's men have sent around to get the signatures for, but privately they are they're worshipping. And so you've got Catholics who are going to church and stuffing kind of cottonwool in there ears so they don't hear the priest and then they're going home and worshiping the way that they want to do so you've got this networks also being formed of different believers and they're beginning to think actually”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in so doing, he then creates a sort of massive discussion about his conscience. What did he mean when he said my conscience will not let me take this oath? He ends up kind of creating this kind of path that Luther has already sort of set out upon about what conscience is. Is it scripture? Is it the individual? following the Catholic Church, which in Thomas Moore's case thinks it is, but it effectively unleashes this idea of a spark of conscience that then kind of just causes chaos because it effectively authorizes the individual over whatever authority it might be, whether it's the Protestants or the Catholics, the individual does come out of this.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the believer and the subject so how they have to live their lives The oath. He hopes he can get away with it by being silent, thinking no man can be prosecuted for his silence, but Henry will not have that and tries to force him to make the oath. And you had this very interesting process that's happening at the same time where many strong Catholics as they are now, as they became then, took the oath to Henry, even though in their hearts they didn't see him as the supreme ruler. So you get this sort of division between what they're saying publicly and privately. It's a very dangerous thing for them. Dissimulation is frowned upon. You know, Henry did not want them. Henry wanted everything of them. He wanted them minds as well as their voice. So you get this sort of division that's happening already. But Thomas Moore really kind of personifies it because he is then executed for not effectively taking this oath.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interior life that you really do get with Protestantism. See Thomas Moore is very different. He sees what Luther's doing as extremely destabling, destroying the authority of the church and all chaos will be rained down. I think he's the first person to use the words anarchy in English and that's what he means is that Luther is creating anarchy because it's displacing the Catholic Church, the church, the universal church. He follows his conscience in not taking an oath that Henry VIII has mandated that every citizen, every subject in Britain has to take, which basically does two, there are two types of those. There's one that recognizes his marriage to Anne Boleyn, which Catholics are very unhappy about, and the other that says he is basically the supreme ruler. So again, he's knocking the Pope off its perch and he himself now in power is in charge of both the soul”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I don't think they mean to do this in any way whatsoever. But what you have with Luther is wanting to follow scripture. And in that sense, he's trusting his own judgment and his own reading of Scripture and kind of trying to displace the Catholic church's authority in there. So the church would tell you the meaning of God. They would be the intermediary between heaven and earth. And he sort of pushes them aside. And in talking about his own personal conscience and doing that, he is kind of saying, I am better than the Pope at deciding the best way to follow God. And there is a certain degree with that and with the, you know, there's the kind of, he takes advantage of the printing press. You've got the beginning of translations into English and German out of Latin. So there is this sort of triggering really of an internal orientation.”
2025-04-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT