Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Continued from: Introduction to Neoliberalism and Plutocracy

Liberty is complicated and political. Indeed without politics there is probably no liberty, because somebody is being silenced, deliberately or not.

Liberty is conflictual. It is likely that one group’s ideas of liberty will be in continual contention with other groups who have a different conception of liberty, a different culture or experience, a different sense of what the limits of liberty are, different sense of who should participate in discussion, or who believe in rule by a particular class or ideology.

The Mongol warrior’s idea of liberty is probably not the same as the conquered peasants, and the corporate warrior’s idea is probably not the same as their employees, or disappointed customers.

The liberty of the powerful is often gained at the expense of the less powerful, and the liberty of ordinary people may require the sacrifice (voluntary or otherwise) of the previously accepted liberty of the powerful.

Liberty is probably never gained absolutely but, at best, is being gained and lost in a process of argument and conflict without end.

The mythic origin point of liberty for a nation, usually involves some decisive fight against previously established power relations which are defined as restrictive, and this origin point can be used to hide the ongoing process of gain or loss of liberty – as when people use the American ‘Revolution’ and the ‘founding fathers’ to cover what is happening now.

This blog post will consider: a) the links between liberty and compulsion; b) the relationship between liberty and culture and how culture and continual misinformation can be a constraint on liberty; c) the connection between liberty and responsibility, and; d) the problems of enabling liberty, when in an unequal society, where people will resist an increase in the liberty of those they have previously been superior too. These factors further reinforce the idea that liberty is always political and involves conflict; it is never simple.

Liberty and Compulsion

Liberty is often defined as absence of compulsion, such as compulsion of labour by a particular person, compulsion of tax, compulsion of silence etc. However, this is relative. In every society, there is always some level of compulsion, implicit or explicit.

People often define those compulsions that they like, as not being infringements on liberty. Obedience to the law can be defined as liberty; obedience to a particular interpretation of a religious text can be defined as liberty; obedience to the dictator can be defined as liberty; participation in capitalist markets (and general compulsion of labour) so as to survive, can be defined as liberty or as a non-infringement on liberty. Capitalists tend to support infringements of liberty that stop other people taking their property, or making claims about who really produced the wealth, and so on, as furthering their own liberty.

These favoured, or even reasonable, compulsions are still compulsions – most people are punished directly or indirectly if they don’t participate in, or obey, the compulsions.

Most theorists of liberty argue that liberty does not include the ability to harm other people deliberately, other than in self-defense. But there are many political disputes about what constitutes ‘harm’, what consitutes ‘deliberately’, and what constitutes ‘self-defense,’ and this dispute is necessary to not fall into a mere convention that supports some form of common sense ‘unjust’ rule over others that impinges their liberty.

It seems clear that in modern capitalism the liberty to pollute and poison some people, even kill them, is considered to be fine (or not deliberate) by many polluters, and activity to stop this pollution is considered harmful to that liberty or to some kind of ‘general prosperity’. The French Revolution, dedicated to liberty and fraternity, found it acceptable to kill some people in the name of maintaining that liberty and fraternity, and perhaps that appeared necessary self-defense. Some religious organisations, think the ability to punish people for heresy, or what they define as immorality, is vital to the salvation of their, and others, souls and hence their liberty under God.

Testing these limits, involves politics, and because politics is always about persuading, or compelling, others, for group and individual advantage, or recognition, this process probably cannot stop. This process is often disturbing because it implies that some presently marginalized people may feel the constraints on their liberty, imposed by others, are not beneficial to them.

Without an ability to participate in this process of social governance, then liberty will be lost, as governance will be conducted by those who form the most powerful social groups, institutions and organisations, and who are likely to be more concerned about maintaining their power, prestige and liberties of life, than in the liberties of others.

Liberty, Culture, Education

The culture (common ideas and practices) of a society is also a constraint. Culture shapes what we think, what we perceive as the nature of the world, what we use as common sense and common practice. While it is not an entirely accurate analogy, we can think of culture as part of the programming we receive from life and experience. For example, most people worship the gods of their ancestors, even if in different ways and cherish the media and stories of their childhood.

This apparent naturalness of culture is why eduction in difference is important for liberty, otherwise we will tend to make programmed unfree responses, or programmed reactions to responses (as when someone has a hard fought sense of independence from local culture, by taking onboard a slightly different or more intense form of the culture. They may consider themselves free, but they are still programmed by some tiny variation).

An education in difference not only informs people of their own culture, but of different cultures elsewhere. You cannot really be said to have freely chosen your religion while you are unaware of other religions or other philosophies, you cannot have chosen your economic philosophy if you have not studied the writings of other economists (not just the accounts of other economists by people who believe much the same as you). And so on.

Such education can reveal some of the hidden or unconscious compulsions and commonplaces that may effect your life, although there will still be other such compulsions. And yet many people will object to this, because it challenges their way of seeing the world, and what they define as liberty. Again agreement is probably not possible, and liberty will involve political struggle.

While we all live by borrowing and transforming existing culture (“No man is an island, entire of itself “), if we are not careful it can constrain our liberty, by programming our thought into accepting constraints which are not necessary.

It is a well known assertion of philosophy that liberty depends upon knowledge of one’s self and the social and environmental ecologies one finds oneself within, plus a degree of self mastery. This recognizes that a person is not born totally free, but works within social and other constraints. Freedom comes as a process of critical learning. This traditional position is made more complicated by the more recent hypothesis of unconscious processes and conditioning. Proceeding from this, it follows that as part of the study of liberty, it also becomes necessary to explore the orientations of a society, how its dynamics influence the choices a person has, and how it conditions them to respond, or even to engage in the paths of (self) knowledge and understanding (or not).

It may be that some societies are more strongly oriented to produce addictions, unconscious compulsions and lack of knowledge than others, and this needs to be explored as part of the discussion of liberty. For example capitalism may well encourage self-indulgent consumerism, and the accumulation of what might appear to be pointless items, to keep the economy going and people dependent on employers, rather than for them to function as independent citizens. It also might make it hard to survive for large numbers of people, and keep them so exhausted and unsatisfied by work, that they never gain the time or focus to gain self-knowledge, knowledge of their environment, or any real liberty. I shall argue elsewhere, that misinformation is central to the operation of the capitalist economy, and that this also affects peoples’ capacity for relating to reality and hence for freedom.

Dominant groups can also attempt to control culture so as to control their ‘underlings’ thought and hence control their liberty – they may brand certain innovations as ‘degenerate,’ un-religious, un-patriotic, ‘socialist’ and so on, and try to keep the culture they are familiar with, and which gives them status and the power to try and control the culture and communication of others. So culture can also involve political struggle, and be created in such struggle.

We should, however, not think of culture as entirely restrictive; it also enables the thought, shared meaning, basic ethics and collaborations which make liberty and political action possible. Culture is, in that sense, paradoxical; it is necessary for freedom, and may inhibit freedom.

So in summary of these sections we can suggest that freedom involves the paradox that liberty is probably not possible without some form of compulsion, or restraint, but the compulsion can be more or less pervasive, and more or less subject to participatory argument, or to exploration.

Liberty and Responsibility

There are many sayings connecting liberty to responsibility. But again responsibility for what? One position might be the responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions which in the complex systems of society and ecology will not always have the results one intends, or for making sure people (including oneself) do not impinge unnecessarily upon the liberty of others. Again we might wonder if capitalism encourages dominant groups to take responsibility for their actions, or to excuse their actions by reference to the demands of an impersonal market, or to the corporation which dissolves the personal responsibility and liability of shareholders? In any case these sayings imply a constraint that can be argued about, and is not immediately obvious.

The only person I know who expouses full liberty devoid of restraints and responsibilities, is de Sade. And the world that de Sade describes is probably, for most people, deeply boring; with huge sexual and power compulsions. Indeed most people in de Sade’s worlds have no liberty at all, other than the liberty to work for others, be sexual victims and die painfully. This, he also implies, is the real state of the world.

This may well be true, however most people would probably not describe this as liberty, if they were one of the victims.

For me, de Sade’s visions also suggest the argument that individual liberty cannot exist by itself. Liberty involves groups that support the liberty of others. If groups do not support liberty, then those groups which support either oppression, or their own liberty at the expense of others, will win out and be untrammeled as in de Sade’s worlds.

Seeing people as pure individuals can seem, rather paradoxically, disempowering, as they will engage in the politics of liberty by themselves struggling against those dominators who team-up. The idea of culture, and learning, also implies that individuality generally grows out of a group experience, or the experience of groups, rather than precedes it. For example, as suggested in the culture section of this post, we don’t invent our own languages, we borrow from others, but it becomes our language to a greater or lesser extent through use, experimentation and the responses of others.

Liberty is social and cultural, not just individual.

Liberty, comparison and change

On a lesser level, liberty is often comparative, dending on how people see their power over other people, (and almost nobody would argue that adults should have no power over their children to stop them harming themselves or others). For example, men can complain that their freedom is curtailed if women get more freedom, and previous liberties granted to the men, such as intimidating or fondling women, or screaming at those they see as “bad girls” or “whores” etc, are curtailed. Corporations can complain their liberty is curtailed by taxes or regulations, which may be beneficial to others, or which stop the corporations from shifting costs and pollution onto parts of the populace. Wealthy people can object to any increased freedom of poorer people to organise, or team-up, for better wages, conditions, and access to power. Similarly people can be envious if other despised people are perceived as happy, and try to prevent this.

So some forms of what some people call liberty appear to involve harming others, and the repeal of that harm is also seen as a harm; a non liberty. Again, the point of all this discussion is that liberty is embroiled in argument, conflict and politics as part of its nature. It is not easy to define.

Positive and enabling Liberty

This leads us to another conception of liberty, which adds to the problems and arguments. What we might call ‘positive liberty’

Positive liberty is the liberty that comes from becoming able to do what you would like to do as best you can, within the agreed upon, or argued upon, restraints. It is slightly more than equality of opportunity, because it wants that relative equality to exist.

It is inhibiting of mathematical genius if a person cannot be taught, or learn, maths, because of social prohibitions or just the absence of maths training for people of their class or lack of money. It is inhibiting of artistic genius if the person cannot afford the materials for art, or to receive any basic training or, in both cases, have to spend their life slaving and exhausted to survive. If you are a business genius you may never get going if your society prohibits business, or confines it to a class – as when women had to get the backing of a man to get a bank loan. You may even have to have some training, before you find your areas of competence and enthusiasm. Without that ability to access that education, your self-knowledge and your liberty is curtailed.

While some people are capeable of overcoming what seem like impossible obstaces, through good luck, patronage, ability and work, this is not the case for most people – without some rare fortune, it can be hard to ascend, or find your liberty.

Consequently, there is a level at which liberty may need to be enabled for it to exist. Of course not everyone has equal talent, application or good fortune, so there never are grounds for expecting equal success, but you can diminish extraneous things like the importance of wealth of parents, hostile parents, the class you grew up in, or the deliberate exclusions put in place by professional groups, or particular privileged social categories (“a woman cannot be a doctor!”).

Again this is subject to argument. Do we really want untrained or innumerate engineers building bridges, because we give them the liberty to do so?

This blog post has repeatedly suggested that liberty is political and involves struggle. So one aspect of enabling liberty is to enable people’s participation in political struggle. If people cannot participate in meaningful and effective politics, then they effectively have no liberty at all. They are vulnerable to whatever the more established, connected and powerful groups decide to do. Simply saying that the State should not take liberties away is not enough, as that may simply free up the powers of those who are already in charge to keep the gateways closed, and the people down.

The reality is that people with perceived similar interests and positions will ‘team up’ to increase their power and capacity, and sometimes to keep others down. The more the already established have the capacity to team up without opposition, and the more they can prevent others from joining together, the less liberty remains.

In a society dominated by wealth, which can buy all the other forms of power, those without wealth are far less able to contribute to the general discussion or to the defense of their liberty, other than as tools, or objects to be manipulated in the service of someone else’s power and privilege. The information promulgated by the rulers can keep them programmed and unable to engage in the knowledge processes that help liberty. Without a process of enablement, whole groups of people are likely to become victims.

There is a genuine question as to whether we can have liberty if a society has severe inequalities, or if we have large gaps in power between the ranks in a hierarchy. The greater the divisions in access to different modes of power, the greater the likelihood that some peoples’ liberty will be impinged, and that the impingement will be hidden or not even be noticed.

Just as with the struggle for the ‘liberation’ of women, or the freedom of ethic minorities, such enabling can be resisted by those with privilege, who may not even have realised that they were curtailing liberty. They would rather keep the exclusions going, their places secure, and claim that such liberty is interference with their privilege. Not that they will put it that way; other people’s failure will not be said to arise because of the dominant groups’ abuse of power, but because of the dominated’s lack of skill, talent, work, or god’s approval, and it will be implied that helping to overcome these restrictions is bad.

For me this is one of the possible uses of a state, when it is controlled by the people. This is, for me, the socialist ideal that the people should be able to be enabled to engage in liberty and self-governance, rather than simply left alone to sink under the rule of others, whether they want to or not. Of course no one should have to accept the enabling if they do not want it, but no one should be prevented from accepting it either.

Conclusion

All I can hope to do here is suggest liberty is complicated, subject to argument, and something which is either continually opened or curtailed as a result of politics, and that liberty cannot exist without politics and perhaps without a recognised place for politics and struggle.

Liberty also seems paradoxical, as it probably cannot exist without some range of compulsions and limits. Culture is one kind of limit which also enables discussion and human existence in the first place, but it is probably necessary to be aware of a large range of cultural responses to be free.

Individual liberty grows out of group liberty. Liberty is an ongoing social and political process, which involves people testing limits and imposing limits, teaming up and resisting team ups. Liberty for some groups can challenge the liberties of other groups – especially when the challenging group has previously been suppressed. This may not be easy to resolve, as the oppressing groups may not even be aware of their acts of suppression.

Liberty may need to be enabled to exist. It does not come into being, merely by removing constraints. Established groups may still prevent people from other groups using their liberty, and refuse to admit this is a restraint, people may not receive the education to follow their inclinations, or may be deliberately excluded from participation.

The liberty of different groups may conflict, and it is vital for everyone’s liberty, that these struggles have a place to occur, and that the struggles are recognized. At the least, liberty involves being enabled to participate in the politics around liberty with enough force to be heard and not completely bypassed by others. The ability to organise with others is necessary to defend liberty from the organisation of dominant or ‘imperialist’ groups. It also helps enable and extend personal action, thus giving people more liberty to fully engage in life and protect themselves. If the struggles are reduced to one type of liberty, one type of culture, or one type of power, then it is highly probable that this will be the liberty and power promoted by the ruling class.

Liberty is social or it does not exist.

Continues in Neoliberal Liberty and the Market.