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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.818)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Justine Meurison. And we're here to talk about her book, Faith and Exposure, Privacy and Secularism in the 19th Century United States. I'm really excited to talk about today's very timely topic. Dr. Meurison, wonderful to have you on today.
Justine Murison (00:23.208)
Thank you for having me, PJ.
PJ (00:25.546)
So, normal question to start out with, why this book? Why did you feel like this is what I want to write and then why does it fit our times?
Justine Murison (00:34.964)
Well, let me start with the first question. My last book, my first book was on the sort of cultural understanding of the nervous system in the 19th century. And it was very medical and literature and sort of thinking about how a sort of understanding of the sort of invisible but material aspects of how our bodies knit together and knit into the environment really transformed how people talked about community, how they talked about how they created literature.
One of the things that I saw dogging a lot of the doctors and a lot of the conversations around the nervous system was accusations of atheism. Like you're destroying the soul or the concept of the soul by making it actually material, something in the body, electrical impulses going through your nerves. And so I was curious about how these accusations of atheism played out in a time when we start to think about the disestablishment of state churches and
It's both the second great awakening, but it's also the sort of secularization of America. And that's where it started. And you can see the elements of that, especially in the first chapter of the book, that is on accusations of infidelity against Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and the literature at the time really being obsessed with the sort of conspiracy thinking around deism.
and the Illuminati and after the French Revolution. But what I realized very quickly was that the story wasn't actually about that. The story was about privacy and privatization. And as I did more research, I realized the disestablishment of state churches, which in the United States, we often pose that culturally as the sort of quintessential definition of the secular state is the separation of church and state.
the idea that there's a wall, as Thomas Jefferson put it, separating church and state. But what I was realizing was that not only were the fights really interesting around it, but the idea of where religion belonged transformed the whole culture. If religion belongs in the private sphere, what does that mean for privacy? How does that imbue privacy with religious and moral functions?
Justine Murison (02:59.512)
The other direction for how this book took shape had a lot to do with the fights. You know, I grew up after Roe v. Wade, right? And my whole life, right, has been a fight about abortion. And one of the things I did know is that, especially Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that established the right to privacy, or the sort of gave us the language of the penumbra.
that in the Bill of Rights that adds up to the right to privacy, that language around privacy, reproduction, marriage, birth control, that's animating late 20th and early 21st century United States was really disconnected with a lot of the literature or scholarship I was seeing on privacy in the 19th century, which...
you know, especially a sort of more traditional or older version was always about being left alone or being in solitude, a sort of transcendental version of privacy, or, you know, the separate spheres series around the private sphere, but these things weren't connecting together. So language about privacy today and language about privacy then, I could see a long trajectory as I started to work more and more on the project.
And I finished, I should say that I finished even the epilogue and through page proofs before the Dobbs decision happened, that overturn you made. But I could see it coming. I could see it coming. It's really, you know, with the courts shadow docket ruling on Texas's SB8. I mean, we all could kind of see it coming. But I had on my mind those things. I also had on my mind.
PJ (04:31.912)
Oh.
PJ (04:35.222)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Justine Murison (04:51.112)
the erosion of privacy in social media. So I think that the present concerns were reverberating for me backward into the 19th century.
PJ (05:01.447)
Uh, forgive me, what does penumbra mean?
Justine Murison (05:04.348)
Penumbra means shadow. It's like a, it's a, yeah, it's, it's a, it has always been a, since, since Douglas wrote that majority opinion in Griswold, it's been a controversial claim because for, for people who were more on the sort of conservative legal side, especially originalists, maybe textualists, penumbra, and it's sort of like the Bill of Rights shadows forth.
PJ (05:06.867)
Okay, awesome, yeah.
Justine Murison (05:30.468)
a theory of privacy, but doesn't use the word privacy. I think my book sort of answers why, which is that privacy is this emerging concept. It doesn't really take its full sort of language and form. It takes the 19th century to do that, but it's not, I think he's right. It's in the Bill of Rights. It's implied in no quartering of soldiers or no self-incrimination, right? This is all about sort of a sense of an inviolable private.
self as Warren and Brandeis would put it later in the century.
PJ (06:05.686)
As you're talking here, you mentioned privacy is like a transcendental form of transcendentalist form of loneliness What do you think about With privacy as Autonomy would be a good way to talk about the 20th century like it like there is that and so Okay, you're nodding your head. So it seems like I'm on the right track
Justine Murison (06:31.796)
Thank you.
PJ (06:32.69)
What is that switch and why is that switch important? Like what made that switch happen and why is that switch important from, honestly it's just kind of strange and maybe that's just how individualistic and how unaware I am of this history that I'm like what does it even mean to have a right to privacy and loneliness?
Justine Murison (06:48.325)
I'm sorry, you froze.
PJ (06:57.546)
Am I here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's okay. All right, can you hear me? Okay. The right to privacy and loneliness, I don't even really understand what we're protecting there, honestly, but that might just be how lucky we are today, right? So can you explain why that's important? What is this switch? Why did that switch happen? And kind of like how it morphed into privacy as autonomy.
Justine Murison (06:57.66)
I'm sorry, you froze mid question. Yeah.
I can now, yeah.
Justine Murison (07:26.152)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that...
Justine Murison (07:31.432)
So the bigger story is the rise of liberalism, right? This idea, and I mean liberalism with a small L, this idea that we are liberal subjects that own ourselves, that enter into contracts, that make choices, the sort of rise of liberalism and individualism, that happens in the 19th century. I mean, it starts in the 18th, but really for US culture, it really takes hold in the 19th century.
And so you get that autonomous subject out of an idea of liberalism. But one of the things that my book really pays attention to is how that movement changed marriage. And the sort of quintessential metaphor of the private sphere is the married couple, especially the heterosexual married couple. And I think that the privatization of religion and the privatization of marriage are happening concurrently.
And the privatization of marriage is all about changing marriage from a public function to a private contract. So it is about not just the individual oneself alone in the world, but about the contractual relations that are replacing sort of more publicly oriented, community based theories of what, say, a marriage does or where a family is demarcated and where a family is not demarcated. I would say that the
there's, I mean, I think privacy is important. Maybe it makes me a liberal subject, liberalism, but I think that it's not just autonomy, it's a shielding of your life from corporate or government intrusion, right, or surveillance. I think right now the fact that we have all sort of given the keys away to like what we're doing quietly in our house,
PJ (08:59.778)
Ha ha ha!
Justine Murison (09:22.68)
I'm more concerned about the corporations having it, but that sense of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, right? This idea of making money off of watching us and keeping track of what we're doing. But I would say that my other concern about it and the argument I make in the book is that the opposite of privacy is not.
publicness so much as secrecy. And I hope that, you know, when we talk about the right to privacy, I think for some people it means the right to keep secrets from prying eyes. But I also think that privacy, because it has this public function, that it's emblematized by a marriage, that one of the things that I think a lot of our pitched battles around what I think is not
PJ (09:53.077)
Mm.
Justine Murison (10:18.892)
not called correctly, but cultural issues, is about people having the right to privacy in the terms of not having to have their lives be secret. So if you think about that in terms of say gay marriage, that sense that you can have an official private life. I know that sounds contradictory, but that you don't have to keep it secret. Or the same thing with say abortion.
Right? That you have the right to have one. It doesn't have to be a secret sin.
It's counterintuitive to think about privacy and secrecy that way, as opposed to those being in the same category, opposed to publicness. But I really do think that privacy assumes a level of openness and transparency, at least in how a liberal society has built it.
PJ (10:58.187)
Yeah.
PJ (11:13.196)
Well.
PJ (11:16.842)
Immediately I think of this metaphor and I just want to make sure we're on the same track. Maybe this is helpful. For me, I immediately think of the difference between camouflage and offense. Like you have the difference between hiddenness and a boundary. We actually do feel this with like, it's not legally held, but we feel that it's wrong for someone like a guy's...
Justine Murison (11:29.209)
Mmm. Yeah.
PJ (11:45.046)
I read about a case where a guy was watching birds and he was looking over someone's fence with binoculars, right? But it's not that you can't look over, like that's a little creepy. Like not a little creepy. It's very creepy, excuse me. Very creepy. I'm not like, I mean it's not too bad. No. It's very creepy, but you can look over someone's fence and it's not a big deal. Like you're just walking by, like no one's gonna be like, how dare you look over my fence? But what's going on over in their fence? Unless it's a, like, you know, obviously if you see someone dragging like...
Justine Murison (11:50.664)
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Justine Murison (11:59.748)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (12:05.028)
you. Right.
PJ (12:14.206)
a murdered body. Like, that's a different thing, right? But for the most part, you're looking over in someone's fence, you're like, that's theirs. That is, you know, if, for instance, you have a high fence and you look over and someone is sunbathing in the nude and you're like, oh, and you're like, well, you shouldn't have looked over the fence. Like that was on you, right? Like that's, that's their private property, right? And so that's, that's privacy as a boundary versus like, oh, I have to keep it.
Justine Murison (12:35.016)
I'm so excited.
Yeah.
PJ (12:44.062)
I mean, you're teaching on, you told me earlier, the scarlet letter, like tomorrow, and it's like, oh, I have to camouflage my sin, right? You have the sin in secret versus, I actually had this written down to talk about, versus the privacy in public, right? It's like, well, this is mine and you can't come in here because this is something I need to take care of, and that you really shouldn't. And there's some...
Justine Murison (12:50.152)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (13:03.59)
Yeah.
PJ (13:13.054)
And you know, I don't know how far you want to go into it, but like there's a lot about like metaphysical claims and like people getting to decide metaphysical claims. Like really, you can't avoid metaphysical claims when you talk about what the good life is, right? And so allowing people to, I mean, this is where it cuts into, not cuts into, this is where it dovetails with religion, right? Religion makes a lot of claims of what the good life is. There's a lot of other ways to make
Justine Murison (13:27.538)
Right.
PJ (13:42.786)
claims about the good life, but that's what a lot of this is about, is allowing people to discover their own good life. And that's the whole idea of the pursuit of happiness, ostensibly. I realize it gets complicated, but am I in the right... Is that a way to talk about it?
Justine Murison (13:43.08)
Mm-hmm.
Justine Murison (14:01.054)
Yeah, yeah.
Justine Murison (14:04.976)
I think so. I think it's one of the jokes I always make at the beginning of talking about this is that I decided to write about two abstractions, privacy and secularism. So I always have to make it more material. I think that because privacy, I think has the positive qualities of allowing you to shield yourself, allowing you to sort of develop a sense of...
PJ (14:14.254)
Good.
PJ (14:17.718)
Right, right.
Justine Murison (14:34.024)
I don't know if I want to say autonomy, but selfhood that doesn't necessarily always have to report. I think that one of the weird things in our culture is that our sense of privacy always has to report. And I think that that's where my hope for privacy and what we actually do, I think, and that's where I think the term that's most important to the study, other than the tone and the title, is authenticity. This idea that your private self has to be
PJ (14:37.761)
Mm.
Justine Murison (15:03.588)
is deeply who you are and who you're showing the world. It's very romantic notion that you're showing the world your real self, but I don't think it's gone away. I think actually this is one of the sort of like vestiges of romanticism that never got sort of pushed aside this idea that like who I am needs to sort of be apparent and that I'm doing anything from a
faux pas to a major sin in not being true to who I am in my deep down self privacy, right? And maybe it's because Freud came along and kind of doubled down on this sort of idea of this deep self, but that sense that who you are is a private person and then you go out into the public, that's the romantic story. And that like the goal is to be as much yourself as possible. And as I say in the book, like,
we learn that through our cultural modes. And so I'm a literary scholar, you know, like we're talking history, we're talking theory, but I very much believe that how we think about ourselves isn't something we discover within, it's the stories that are circulated, it's the way in which you consume media and what you're consuming. And for the 19th century, that's novels, they're hitting their like moment.
Culturally, I mean, people are reading poetry, people love poetry too. I'm not trying to make novels the exclusive thing people are dieting on, but it is, it is the way in which people shape the stories they tell about themselves is through these novels that are constantly posing revelations about characters. And then the long arc is who's the villain or who's the bad person. Villain is often too strong a word, it's very melodramatic. But like,
How do we know Jeffrey Pingen's the big bad in House of Seven Gables is, you know, it's right there on how Hawthorne's describing him. But that you start to read other people that way, but you also start to read yourself that way. So I really do think that understanding that sort of history of the novel as emerging alongside liberalism and modernity is thinking about the novel's form.
Justine Murison (17:23.544)
as well as just fun stories people like to read and that gives us a clue into the culture. But it really gives us a clue into how people perceive themselves and how they interacted with each other and then how they sort of rewrote law based on sort of how we think about our true selves.
Justine Murison (17:44.572)
in a lot of ways, social media kind of does that now, right? I mean, how many times have I caught myself, you know, before Twitter sort of came apart, another thing I couldn't have possibly expected when I wrote that epilogue. Um, but that sense that I would walk around and think, oh, I should write that as a tweet. Like it shaped how I thought about, like, myself interacting with the world, like Facebook posts, like how, how might I put that on Facebook? How might I present myself to the world?
PJ (17:47.746)
Yeah.
PJ (17:52.9)
Hahaha!
PJ (18:11.514)
What kind of TikTok do I want to make? Yeah, no, for sure. I want to return because this is really fascinating to me and I always know there's a reason for it. You wanted to say something about selfhood versus autonomy. Why that distinction?
Justine Murison (18:13.612)
Exactly, exactly.
Justine Murison (18:29.208)
Oh no, I think I would say they're both selfhood. I was saying authenticity, not versus autonomy. I would say probably authenticity as an expression of autonomy or a way of imagining the autonomous self that is also constantly presenting itself to the world. I'm not quite making that quite clear because I think I'm thinking of autonomy in that liberal tradition.
the selfhood that owns itself. When I think about authenticity, I'm thinking more in line with like a romantic notion of a true self. This thing that you want to be true to and thinking about say like Emerson's self-reliance, right? The voice you hear in solitude, that's your true self. And then the culture is trying to shape you into something else.
that idea that there is even an originary moment where there's a true self, and then you go into culture and you hear these things, you know, that would be my argument with Emerson. But that sense that like that idea, that idea that there's this authentic, autonomous self inside you, that's a romantic notion, you know, and made extremely popular by somebody like Emerson. For our culture, especially for our 21st century culture, as Emerson became
PJ (19:48.547)
What?
Justine Murison (19:53.892)
I don't think he holds this place anymore, but he did for a long time in the 20th century United States, this quintessential American voice.
PJ (20:04.506)
So, this is again, just like making sure that I'm on track with you. When you talk about autonomy, we're talking about that fence, we're talking about that boundary, and it's about being able to, and it's an important part of being authentic that you can establish yourself, right? That you can own yourself. I mean, this goes back to even the Lockean idea of like the first rule of property is I own myself, right?
Justine Murison (20:26.021)
It does.
PJ (20:31.106)
but authentic is different because you can still be false to yourself even within that boundary. So the authenticity is different because it also demands a view that you are honest with yourself in order to like fill that boundary properly. Is that a fair way to distinguish?
Justine Murison (20:36.365)
Exactly.
Justine Murison (20:49.228)
And it is, and the only way you can prove that you're being true to yourself is if you're performing it publicly. Like it can't just be alone. This is why the compulsion on social media to constantly perform oneself is about that sense of like, wanting to show your opinion, your authentic self.
PJ (20:56.363)
Mmm.
Justine Murison (21:16.12)
I can be in my house and be my authentic self, but that doesn't really do the work of proving it's authentic. I would say also, you know, this is all complicated by the fact that as two of the chapters deal with, I'm working in the era of slavery. So owning yourself is an incredibly big deal and a privileged position as it is now. But that sense that, you know,
PJ (21:35.255)
Big deal.
Justine Murison (21:43.024)
This is where the paradoxes start coming into what I, as I discovered, and this is where we get really abstract. This idea that privacy is always being, has this public-ness to it, that it has this, in the US, culturally, historically, it has something to prove.
PJ (22:00.118)
When you talk about, so, and I'm just curious, when you talk about social media and this constant proving your authentic self, do you see that continuous proving as a good thing or a bad thing?
Justine Murison (22:09.917)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (22:14.124)
Oh, that's a great point. I think, I mean, now I'm just, I'm going way off track with my book, but I would say that I think it's a bad thing. Ha ha ha.
PJ (22:21.87)
Okay, okay. But you, but in order to be authentic, you do have to prove it publicly, but so, what makes, so, go ahead.
Justine Murison (22:27.122)
Yeah.
Well, I think that it's, I think I don't act, I mean, like, I think if we're going down to brass tacks, I probably had died in the wolf Cody, and I don't think that we have authentic selves. I think the authenticity is a performance precisely because it's what the culture is demanding of us. I would say, I mean, part of my reason with like social media being such a treacherous place is that every time you're...
responding, you're like, I'm emotionally angry. I'm outraged. I'm going to click on this. I'm going to respond. I'm going to retweet. You are feeding the thing that's actually selling your data to corporations. So I mean, for me, it's like a capitalist critique. But I would say also that the drive to do that always opens one up to all of, again, the swirl of accusations around if you're being authentic, or are you just being a hypocrite?
PJ (23:11.694)
Gotcha.
Justine Murison (23:24.844)
is that these things go together. And I think it creates a very toxic environment. And I think that's where maybe I'm the, you might have found my most romantic, if also my most anti-capitalist sort of strain, where I actually give my students what I call the Transcendentalist Challenge and the survey class American Lit to 1865, where it's an extra credit assignment, but they have to unplug and then write about it.
They, you know, we used to say 24 hours, but that seemed way too long these days. And I always told them they better tell all of their like family that they're not going to respond to texts, you know, for like three hours, say. But, but I want them to sort of do what Emerson or Thoreau is talking about, which is having the original relationship to the universe. And I mean that not in that highfalutin way, but just in a, do you ever.
Like, do you walk across campus and are you always piping music into your ears? Are you able to have dinner without taking a picture of your dinner, you know, to post somewhere? Like that sense that, is your, sort of the space between your ears and your whole like sort of private life, meals, friends, going out, even having a drink, like are all of these things caught up with showing other people that you're doing it?
or mediating the experience instead of actually just sitting. And I think that's hard, right? We're a very impatient culture at this point, but that's the challenge part, but it's also, I think they also, this generation really kind of loves it. I think they're sort of really interested in alternative ways of thinking about technology, social relations, they're scared.
they're anxious, but they're also sort of more open, you know, about it. So it's been kind of interesting. I'll let you know how that goes. This is the time I'm doing the Transcendental Challenge. It was easy during COVID. They were like, yeah, I got it, solitude.
PJ (25:23.479)
Ha!
PJ (25:30.462)
Yeah, I'm out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So forgive me, I didn't catch it. You said you're a dyed in the wool what?
Justine Murison (25:40.584)
Foucauldian, Michelle Foucauld. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really do think that like, who we are is sort of like built, through these sort of like regulatory disciplinary, biopolitical regimes. I'd like to think that, there's also a core, but there's a sense in which,
PJ (25:41.607)
Oh, oh yes, okay. Tracking.
Justine Murison (26:07.512)
it's hard to access. I mean, that's Freud's point too, right? We are strangers to ourselves. This thing that might be sort of deep down is not going to be like necessarily revealed easily. It's going to bubble up in weird ways. But I just think that we're more weird and we're more structured by our environment than I think like liberal philosophy would admit.
PJ (26:31.022)
Oh, yeah, I mean, you're talking to, yeah, like my background's philosophical hermeneutics. So there's a strong bent towards phenomenology and psychology. And so, yeah, that, yeah, very, very familiar. And also, yeah, this idea that we are these kind of just blocks to ourselves, that we are like, when we say autonomous, the boundaries are strong. I don't anyways.
Justine Murison (26:34.452)
Thanks.
Justine Murison (26:45.618)
Thank you.
PJ (26:59.062)
That's a whole nother discussion, though. Yes. Right. Uh.
Justine Murison (26:59.32)
Yeah, I mean, I don't even think bodily, like even like, even our bodies don't have that kind of strong boundary, you know, let alone our self-love. I think that like, this is also where I always pull things, you know, back to the material, but I also talk in terms of stories and literature because if I am being sort of constructed outside of myself to think I have this authentic self,
What am I consuming that creates that feeling? How am I learning it? And I think that different people come at that question differently, but I am always thinking about what's popular in reading? What books are people consuming? What television shows are they watching? That kind of thing. And you can really track how culture changes through that and then how people think about culture changes too.
PJ (27:55.19)
Well, when you look at, so for me, I started out with a love of literature. Like I read like a crazy man when I was a kid. And the reason I went into philosophy was not like, there's a reason it's a big questions podcast and not a philosophy podcast. And that like philosophy for me was a way of talking about, um, it was very clear, uh, that when we read fiction, we are learning something and we are growing as people and a lot of the philosophy I encountered.
Justine Murison (28:00.267)
Yay!
Justine Murison (28:09.352)
Yes.
Justine Murison (28:20.465)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (28:24.73)
This is why I ended up in hermeneutics, but a lot of the philosophy I did encounter was not able to account for that It's you know, it's just like well and it's like this is very attractive to people and just saying it that it's pure entertainment is Reductive in a way that does not match the evidence and so yeah that point that you just made is really resonates with me and it's very much a part of My own journey and my own ongoing journey like any projects that I'm moving towards so I appreciate that
Justine Murison (28:42.482)
Really.
PJ (28:56.167)
Something I wanted to say about the social media side of things, to make sure that, again, I'm tracking with you, is it seems that one of the problems with the continuous, right, like there are, it's important to have public moments of proving the authentic self, right? But this continuous proving is that there's a, there becomes this real temptation to...
that there's a continuous exposure to the temptation for hypocrisy. That's a big one. It's like, oh, I need to make sure I'm matching the moment rather than matching me. And part of that is you're also not able to check in with yourself because you are so constantly focused on... You have to create a cohesive identity without checking in with your true self, if that makes sense. So like there is no...
Justine Murison (29:25.767)
Mm-hmm.
Justine Murison (29:29.82)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (29:45.92)
Or like there's a fantasy of a cohesive identity. You know, there's this idea that like, I can keep track of the whole thing. And this is, you know, that I can actually, I can't have conflicting or contradictory. I have to make the statement. You know, like I can't just like see, wow, that situation is extremely tenuous and ongoing, and I'm not gonna like come out with my immediate take.
PJ (29:50.977)
Right, but-
PJ (30:05.131)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (30:14.152)
takes are like the opposite, you know, that sense of, and I think that's one of the things that, I make a joke in the introduction about how hypocrisy is like the sin in the liberal order, right? And I draw from Arendt and Schlar on that, but like that sense that finding out someone's hypocrisy somehow feels like exposing sin in our culture, you know? And I use that loaded turn, I just mean that.
you know, the secularization of it is that like you're exposing someone's sin for being contradictory to themselves. And my students, they used to, they don't do this as much anymore, but would often tell me that Thoreau's mother did his laundry, which somehow negates everything he wrote. And I always, I always come back with.
you know, like a modified version of something that Herman Melville says at the beginning of Moby Dick, you know, he does this sort of location a few times in the novel, but it's like, who ain't a hypocrite, right? Like there's a sense in which there's this idea that we can escape hypocrisy. I don't.
PJ (31:22.998)
Yeah. Well, and that's where maybe saying true self and this is so I'm glad I said that, like I'm saying this because it's not true self, but it's, it's allowing yourself time to breathe and reflect so you can like even recognize within yourself when you have contradictions instead of just being like, I need like flattening yourself to, to be cohesive. And that's like, so that's a better way of putting it. That's, that's really helpful. Thank you.
Justine Murison (31:49.892)
I really like that idea that like what social media demands is a flattening of the self for cohesiveness or for coherence, like that idea that what, well, branding is a great example. Exactly, branding is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, this idea that like, you can come up with a package that's clear and coherent and shallow, right? And easily understood.
PJ (31:59.97)
Personal branding, sorry.
PJ (32:15.368)
Easily understood, yes.
Justine Murison (32:18.096)
I'm very bad at that. So I have like watched and studied and been like, how did you do that? It's like, why don't I talk about all these complexities so that like I make it a paradox upon a paradox upon a paradox, because I can't like let those complexities go. But yeah, branding is a perfect example. This idea that you can be a, what? Oh, your day job is marketing. So you know, that's your goal.
PJ (32:38.646)
Yeah, my day job is digital marketing.
Uh, yeah, so this is- oh man, I cannot tell you, as someone who does like philosophy, I'm like, you know, this will work, but it hurts my soul that I'm telling you this. And they're like, oh that's great! And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm just like- Anyway, sorry, I just wanted to say, like, when you talk about like- Yeah, okay, yeah, so no, exactly, no, a hundred percent that I literally- yeah, you know what, that's a whole rabbit hole, we don't need to go down my frustration with that, but, um-
Justine Murison (32:53.342)
Right.
Justine Murison (33:00.796)
Who ain't a hippocrates?
PJ (33:11.57)
Yeah, I feel that very strongly. I'm sorry, I cut you off, but I just... That was definitely a spoke from the heart.
Justine Murison (33:15.032)
Oh, no, but that's it. So I was just about to say, like, I don't, I'm very bad at that. That's also why I don't tweet a lot too, because like there is a genre to, I feel like, you know, I'm just gonna say Twitter. But like, but that sense of, when people are clever and funny on Twitter, it's amazing, cause it's a very, it's a genre of brevity, so it lends itself to humor.
PJ (33:28.129)
Thank you.
Justine Murison (33:40.7)
but is also a genre that lends itself to outrage and takes. It's all of those things at the same time. Yeah.
PJ (33:49.814)
Yeah, I actually built an account.
PJ (33:56.79)
uh... on twitter back a couple years ago and uh... i went from i went to six thousand followers in three months and uh...
Justine Murison (34:03.773)
Go well.
PJ (34:07.75)
And most of it actually was asking questions that people responded to, which is, uh, and the maid, because people go on, what I figured out was people go on Twitter to give their opinions. And so if you ask good questions, people, people respond and it will drive you up in the algorithm, which is horrific. Um, cause the, uh, the opinions were terrible most of the time, but, uh, I,
Justine Murison (34:12.744)
Mm-hmm.
Justine Murison (34:18.109)
Yes.
Justine Murison (34:22.732)
Absolutely, yeah.
Justine Murison (34:30.214)
What were the types of questions you asked?
PJ (34:32.906)
I was trying to create a writer account. I was looking, I've been working on fiction. And so I was like, you know, if you're going to be a writer, you have to have marketing. And so I started working on that. And I was, I spent so much patience on Twitter that I was impatient with my family. And so I did that for three months and I did not like who I was at home. And I was like, so I deleted it. Which to this day I'm like.
Justine Murison (34:55.357)
Yep.
Hehehe
PJ (35:00.302)
I guess it was worth it. You know, like this is where it draws. This is the capitalistic side of it, right? You're like, but you had six thousand followers. You got to keep it. And I'm like, it's not worth my family. And it's like that that's a hard thing to say. Right. It's like it's, you know, my wife.
Justine Murison (35:02.42)
Whoa.
Justine Murison (35:17.396)
But that's what I meant by the paradoxes of privacy, right? Twitter is obviously a type of public sphere, although I always joked my main approach to Twitter was Twitter is not the public sphere because it actually is not a rational space for debate. I used to not expect it. But it is a sense of you performing your authentic opinions and takes and outrages and emotions on Twitter, but that was actually...
affecting your private life, right? And so that's what I meant by like, privacy isn't this one thing, right? There's these like shades of like, who I am privately trying to say it publicly, there's the marriage and family and the private sphere. And then there's also that sense of selfhood, like what's happening in my head. You know, and I talk about that a little in the introduction because one of the complications of even just talking about the...
private is that economists will talk about it as like the marketplace and feminist scholars will be like, okay, everything but the, you know, like government marketplace over there, the private sphere is like, you know, the home and women's domestic realm in the 19th century, the separate spheres ideology. So like, we don't even have agreed upon definitions depending on which aspects of privacy we're talking about.
PJ (36:38.111)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (36:38.532)
as scholars and talking across disciplines about privacy is really hard actually for that reason.
PJ (36:45.258)
So this is something I wanted to ask you about, I'm glad you said that, because it reminded me, you talked about how marriage transformed from a public function to a private contract. And I think in our culture, there's an immediate like, well, I know what I gained from that. Here's a, this question I'm interested in, what did we lose by transforming marriage from a public function to a private contract?
Justine Murison (37:12.072)
That's a great question. And I don't know if I have a good, clear answer. I mean, I'm really drawing on historian Nancy Cot there, who's brilliant. Her book on marriage is really helpful. And thinking through this, I think one of the things that she says, so I'll ventriloquize her for a second, but one of the things she says is that as...
marriage made this cultural and legal transition, the sense of what made a good wife or a good husband started to harden a bit, started to be, the boundaries stopped being as loose. I would say that by the end of the 19th century, and here I'm just speaking culturally, as divorce became more and more relatively more available, I just said relatively more available. Yeah.
PJ (38:05.567)
Understood.
Justine Murison (38:08.38)
But as it became an option, you know, there's, on the one hand, I think that's what the free love movement is arguing for, right, the ability to enter and exit relationships. As ago, it's not what we think it is. That was what they were arguing for. But that sense that, what is lost? I guess one of the things that gets talked about a lot in the late 19th century in that hardening is,
And it's like a contrast, say, with France. This comes up so much, we joke about it in some of my classes, but authors like Carrie B. Tristoe late in her career, and that's who I'm working on right now, so I'm thinking about her. But we'll always point to French marriages as the example of what we don't do and what is the worst way to organize marriage, which is that women will have no freedom supposedly until they get married and then anyone can have an affair.
you know, it's about that public facing marriage, but it doesn't matter what happens behind the scenes. Now, I'm not saying that's what French marriages were like. I'm saying that's what, that's how, that's the American caricature of French marriages. And that sense that like a marriage as a public facing union where you can have separate lives, where you can be a woman who deviates from expected roles.
PJ (39:14.498)
That was the caricature, yeah.
Justine Murison (39:34.168)
is less possible in the United States. Now, I would also say that this is very much a middle-class version, a very like middling version, middle-class version of marriage taking over the whole culture. So if you look at say 18th century, sort of like lower class, like.
marriages, weddings, that kind of thing, not weddings so much, that's really, I think of that as a very 20th century phenomenon. But that sense that like looseness around when you can have sex before marriage, stuff like that, that starts to harden as marriage becomes more contractual as it gets caught up in both this liberal.
version of what marriage is, but also the way in which a sort of bourgeois middle class version of morality becomes pervasive, it just becomes part of our secular culture. It shapes it, I mean, that's sort of the, I'm just borrowing that argument from Tracy Fesenden and John Martin, but that idea that the secular is really shaped by Protestantism in America.
PJ (40:40.298)
Oh, did you say John Modder? Oh, I've had him on. Oh, I was like, oh yeah, I was like, I know that name. No, I really enjoyed having him on. I want to be respectful of your time. So one of the things I want to make sure we cover, because it's kind of the main thing, the way you frame it at the end of your introduction is privacy's sacredness. But I don't want to leave today without talking about the role that religion plays.
Justine Murison (40:41.984)
Yes. I know, I listen to it.
PJ (41:10.238)
in kind of creating privacy and the way that these kind of religious origins or that sacred nature of privacy folds into domestic life and personal life, like truly that selfhood idea.
Justine Murison (41:28.336)
Yeah, that's both where I ended up, and it was a backwards walking, right? Watching this unwinding of any sort of set, like the sort of claim for religious freedom and the claim for reproductive or marital freedoms being pitted against each other. But that sense that one of the effects of lodging private, sorry, religion in the private sphere
had to change how we thought about what the private sphere's function was. And I think that a lot of, I had really kept trying to find other scholars who were sort of pinning down, like it's a narrative we tell all the time. The secularization was the movement of the religion from the public to the private sphere. And then there's a claim that women were in charge of morality and sort of it got feminized. But there's a way in which that doesn't necessarily
explain how it is that privacy ended up having a moral function, right? I mean, and that's what I was most interested in, that sense that privacy and our private selves could not, we're learning more scripts for moral sociability, moral sensibilities, such that you could, I mean, it's a very, when you start to think about it, it's very weird to describe the private sphere or privacy, the right to privacy as Louis.
as Warren and Brandeis do, as sacred. But that sense that imbuing of it with a religiosity is part of that sort of movement of prosentism into a sort of secular language. And I don't think they mean it religiously at all. They mean it in a very secular way.
but it still keeps with it a sense that it should not be touched, it should not be messed with. Now of course the trick with them is that they only mean a few people get this privacy, but as the chapter talks about, but that sense that privacy demands a certain type of moral orientation just like yourself does and the self is the private self, it starts to concatenate.
Justine Murison (43:52.068)
I feel like I'm getting too abstract, and I definitely feel like I always want to go to a literary example when I do that, because it becomes too abstract. But I think the real insight of scholars of secularism is to really see that religion doesn't disappear, in the secular world. The secular and the religious are defined with and against each other, but that ways in which the dominant culture
does religion is how both the religious and the secular get defined. So that's why it's different in different places.
PJ (44:33.706)
So, I mean, and I think this goes back to our earlier discussion about deism. Of course, Locke claimed to be Christian, but that's probably debatable, but some people say that's probably because he didn't want to get brought up on heresy charges, right? So we see some kind of, really, we're talking about the way that deism works out in Locke, or, well...
Justine Murison (44:40.604)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (44:50.816)
Yeah.
Justine Murison (44:58.429)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (45:01.294)
however you want to look at this idea, there's definite metaphysical claims in this right to property. When you talk about the sacredness, what you're talking about, even this moral orientation, is that there is something deep-rooted, even sacred. All these things is that there's something abstract but fully and firmly rooted in this privacy.
And so it starts out, I mean, this is grounded in, how does Locke make this claim? He makes this claim talking about we are all made by God. And so for all made by God, we're all in the same playing field. And so that's like, that is a metaphysical claim that leads to his view on property, which leads to privacy, which leads to, and you could see like how it, you know, which very grateful for some of the things that happened from it.
But what are the long standing ramifications that have happened from it, right? Like there's always like these good and bad things. You don't see how the ramifications, I don't think he was sitting here and like, he's like, you know, this idea of privacy is gonna interact very strangely with social media, right? Like that's not fair to put that on lock, right? Right? Right.
Justine Murison (46:15.44)
No, not how could he possibly know social media is going. I think though that like, I mean, that that's part of it is like, why would anyone in an era, you know, in a country that does not have an official state church, why would anyone care what anybody else does in their private lives? Right? And that's because privacy is not private in the US. Right?
why would I care if you were married to somebody else that I, you know, like that sense of, or if you needed to get an abortion or like you use birth control, like why would I care is because privacy has a long-standing moral function. And that gets back to those 1790s deists. I think that like one of the things that, can I say what drives me nuts in some of our public discourse?
PJ (46:51.254)
Mm.
PJ (47:01.083)
Oh, go for it. Yeah.
Justine Murison (47:03.848)
As someone who has studied the 1780s and 1790s and has this chapter on deism and fears around infidelity and atheism and sort of the conspiracy thinking, especially after the French Revolution, as I said earlier, I think that use of a language of a sort of just a really very vague gestural Christianity that you see in say founding documents like.
use of the word creator, right, is being willfully misinterpreted in our public culture to mean this sort of deep Christianity to figures who like.
were at best-iests, right? And I think, you know, and that's why I think the Age of Reason by Payne is so fascinating precisely because he writes it in this attempt to stop the French from going like full atheist. He's like, no, there's like reasons. But then it ends up just being, you know, he's like, you should believe in natural religion, that sense of...
PJ (47:48.407)
Right.
Justine Murison (48:10.148)
you know, a deist idea that miracles aren't happening now, but we can still kind of believe the Bible, you know, like that kind of thing. Or, you know, like you just take out all the miraculous stuff and you're still left with a moral code. And Jefferson, I mean, very famously, cut out all the parts of the Bible he didn't like. And then like, he had like the Bible he did, which had no miracles and no revelations, you know, like that kind of thing. And I think that like that.
sense and that thick fabric of these religious fights and these fights over where religion should be located and why so easily forgotten in our public culture.
PJ (48:48.714)
Yeah, so I don't know if I mentioned it with, you know, John Modern. It sounds like the kind of thing come up, but I grew up independent fundamental Baptist. So yes. So when you talk like, I mean, we had the founding fathers and I remember they were like, you need to read these people. I'm like, oh, OK. And also, you know, all these like, like our country is thoroughly Christian. And then I actually was going to bring up I was like, then you get to the Jefferson Bible and you're like.
Justine Murison (48:56.719)
Oh, wow, yeah.
Justine Murison (49:15.644)
Wait.
PJ (49:16.178)
I don't think you guys would like this guy. I don't think you've been checking up on your sources here. Like, and that's just a real part of it. Yeah.
Justine Murison (49:21.324)
Yeah, well, it is. And then what's another group that really hated Jefferson, other than David Walker and sort of the black critics of Notes on the State of Virginia, but that at least in my field is more famous. Pro-slavery Southerners and pro-slavery writers in the 1850s hated Jefferson too. I mean, they just were like, Jefferson's not our man, right?
PJ (49:43.755)
What?
Justine Murison (49:44.112)
because of the all people are created free and equal sort of sentiment in the declaration. They're just like, he's your guy. We don't believe in that, right? I think it reminds me, what you said reminds me of the passage in Franklin's autobiography where he talks about reading anti-Deist writing and then reading like, like reading like, because the anti-Deist writing would quote
and he'd be like, well, I think this deists are right. You know, like he was reading the thing that was supposed to convince him not to be a deist. And of course he also famously hid his deism for a long time, right? Just to, because like, you know, people had that reaction, right? Oh, are you even Christian? But yeah, I mean, I think that the threat of unbelief, it waxes and wanes in our culture, but it certainly waxing right now, but like that sense that like that's beyond the pale.
PJ (50:20.475)
Ahem.
Justine Murison (50:40.956)
Like we can all agree that you should believe in it in religion is central to how we interact in our culture. And I mean largely, and I'm making very broad generalizations obviously. But yeah, I mean, I came to sort of looking at the history of religion because I was actually raised like Catholic. My mother is a liberal Catholic.
you just have a different way of inhabiting religion, even if you're studying, there's intellectual traditions to Catholicism, but a lot of it when you're growing up is sacraments and doing things with a group or embodied types of religious stuff. So it was, and if I were to say growing up, who was the figure that was religiously most important? For me, it would be Mary, which of course is like.
not allowed in Protestantism. So it was interesting to start realizing that in college, sort of seeing how Protestantism shaped how we talk even about secular things. Where does belief happen and why? And what kind of moral codes do you follow and why? And who gets to count as having a religion and who gets...
not to have free exercise of their religion. Yeah, no, that's sort of like the deep history, right, of growing up New Jersey, New Jersey Catholic school. Ha ha ha.
PJ (52:00.983)
Hmm.
PJ (52:09.906)
Yeah, yeah. So we're drawn to a close here. So one, I want to say thank you. It's been a real joy having you on today. If you could leave our audience with one thing to think about and kind of chew on throughout the week, what would it be?
Justine Murison (52:27.988)
I think it would be about, hmm, that's a great question. I'll go sort of towards today and big questions rather than read some more books from the 19th century. They're great. OK.
PJ (52:41.207)
Yeah, let me say, besides reading your book, which everyone should. What? That's... I know, I gotta plug your book though. That's only fair. I gotta plug your book. Besides reading your excellent book, what should everyone do?
Justine Murison (52:44.092)
No, no, not my book. I'm not like, read the start of the letter again. You'll love it as an adult. Yeah.
Justine Murison (52:55.276)
I think to think about the compulsion and inefficacy of accusations around hypocrisy. We touched on that a little bit about like the sort of sense in which like hypocrisy is the one thing, this sort of the way in which we do privacy doesn't want to allow for. My thought is partially like this impulse to say that person's such a hypocrite as if that does moral work.
And to think maybe about why we find disjunctions between public and private selves or contradictions so unable to account for, even when they are always on display and even part of our own sense of life. So I would say, especially in our social media world and of course an extremely polarized.
a nation dealing with, you know, sort of like the sort of questions of politics that we deal with today. What does the desire to expose hypocrites do and why is it not working as well as we kind of think it does? And I think part of that has to do is you have to believe that, you know, you need a full authentic, coherent self. But I would say that just thinking about hypocrisy more, that would be my...
PJ (54:20.098)
Hmm. In another way, because you immediately, I love bringing it back to literature here at the end, you know, as thinking of Walt Whitman, right? Like, do I, we need more people who are brave enough to say, do I contradict myself very well than I contradict myself? I am large, I contain multitudes. And just being like, yeah, that's me, I'm a hypocrite, ain't we all hypocrites, right?
Justine Murison (54:20.594)
My thing.
Justine Murison (54:28.004)
Yeah, well thank you.
Bye.
Justine Murison (54:37.52)
Yes.
Justine Murison (54:45.196)
Yes, absolutely. I think Whitman's a great way to end one of my favorite poets of all time. But that sense that like, that flattening that you talked about that sort of like creating of the coherence, but the flattening of the self that is part of branding, it's part of capitalism, it's part of, it's part of expectations that I think are impossible, and therefore something for us to think hard about why we care.
so much or why we think it's effective even.
PJ (55:14.474)
Yeah.
PJ (55:18.547)
Well said. What a great way to summarize today. Dr. Meyerson, it's been an honor having you on today.
Justine Murison (55:25.704)
Thank you so much, PJ. It was such a wonderful conversation.