The Right Not to Know

Dan Savage has written about a "right not to know" about your family's sex life. Of course some things have to be talked about, but for everything else, silence is the best policy.

Anyway it occurs to me that in a big-picture sense we are losing our right not to know about way too many things. If an actor I like has a bad opinion about something, or is bad at sex (or good at sex for that matter), I probably don't want to know! If an obnoxious billionaire is dating a talented musician, I'd rather not hear about it all the time! Kanye is a musical genius, but I'll never get the same simple enjoyment from his music again. (In fairness, Kanye would certainly have found many ways to get negative attention even in a pre-Twitter era.)

I acknowledge there are legitimate complexities here. First of all, when someone has engaged in truly bad behavior, we can't turn a blind eye. Even if we ultimately separate the art from the artist or whatever, there are unpleasant truths that deserve our attention.

Second, there's no doubt a lot of valuable information to be gleaned from the torrent that we are subjected to. I'm not at the moment claiming that Twitter etc. make us worse off on net, though I think that is likely. I'm just observing that an important aspect of pre-Twitter life, the right (or at least ability) not to know all of this garbage, has been lost, and it forces us to contemplate things that were blissfully unimaginable before the Fall.