[A follow-up to this; related to this.]
After reading Ed Champion’s interview with Alain de Botton, and the essay that accompanied it, some reconsideration may be in order.
De Botton makes it clear in both essay and interview that his remarks to Caleb Crain were intended as a private communication, and that the public display of that communication was a mistake. He also makes it equally clear that any sense of regret he might feel is over that mistake, rather than the content of it.
It is good that de Botton has clarified his position a bit, though some take issue with it. Of the mistake itself, some find it laughably implausible that he wouldn’t have understood the public nature of blog comments. And with regard to his attitude, where he seems regretful only about the fact that his comments we delivered publicly instead of privately, some perceive that tone as proof of an unforgivable lack of contriteness.
For myself, I don’t know quite what to think (but please, keep reading anyway). In the first objection, we have no way of knowing Mr. de Botton’s level of technical knowledge, beyond his own testimony; as for the second case, our own individual mores determine just how sorry we think he should be, and precisely what it is that he should be sorry for-so, while I might touch upon this subject in the present essay, I will mostly pass over it for now. For the moment, let’s address the intent of private communication.
Private communication has become something of a deprecated concept, and this is especially true of electronic correspondence. Over the past decade or so we’ve become accustomed to seeing public tweets, blog posts, comments, forum entries, and so on; but we’ve also seen many, many examples of emails that have been made public, of private chat logs being posted in public spaces, of private, real-life conversations being transcribed in blog posts.
While even the most sophisticated Internet users may occasionally forget themselves (though these missteps are often ameliorated by the victims’ obscurity), the common sense of electronic communication is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Acting as though one believes otherwise is often seen as naive-or foolish. This should explain some of the disbelief with regard to de Botton’s assertion that he though his communication would be private. But perhaps he was honestly mistaken?
The question that follows from this is: How does an expectation of privacy justify the vitriolic nature of de Botton’s comments? In other words, what’s the difference between wishing ill on someone in private, versus in public?
Well, private insults at least suggest that the person doing the insulting is not attempting to publicly shame his or her target. That’s got to be a positive-if not necessarily noble-thing, surely. Contrast this with the Alice Hoffman situation, where an author clearly intended to seek revenge against a reviewer by attempting to rally the public to take punitive action, while also publishing that reviewer’s personal information. Private humiliation can hurt a person’s feelings. It’s public counterpart, however, may have far more serious repercussions.
Another advantage to blowing one’s stack over private channels is that it’s much easier to apologize, if one feels the need to so. Insulting someone where no one else can see it provides an opportunity to later smooth things over with one’s target, to assuage hurt feelings in a low-stakes arena. If my personal pride has been hurt by someone behind close doors, a sincere apology will suffice to repair it. In public, however, my pride may require an eye-for-an-eye in order to be satisfied. Such arguments may never be resolved.
Of course, this is not to say that de Botton’s actions are admirable, exactly. He let his rage get the better of him, there’s no doubt about that. Also, he never explicitly stated whether or not he believes that Crain’s review was motivated by stupidity, infernal malice, or both. (One suspects both. Certainly, any other options de Botton dismisses out of hand.) In the first case, well, de Botton is hardly impartial; in the second, we’d need to see some evidence that Crain really does harbor evil intentions against goodness and value generally, or de Botton personally, before we could really credit such an argument.
In the end, though, perhaps it doesn’t matter. If de Botton was out to repair the damage to his book’s eventual sales goals that might have been caused by Crain’s review, perhaps all this publicity will be worth it. In any case, it’s hardly likely that Crain will ever be paid to review any future works of his (unless there’s some desperate editor out their who might be willing to try such a stunt), which I’m sure pleases de Botton.
I look forward to seeing Crain’s side of the story soon, but unless some wild new revelation is forthcoming, I suspect that my interest in this specific conflict will begin to wane. The question of whether or not de Botton should be forgiven is not mine to answer, since he hasn’t done anything to me. That’s going to be up to Crain. Or vice versa. Or something. I don’t know-I’m even boring myself, right here.
