Tea-Party Protesters: What is Freedom?

So a few days ago there was a huge march in the USA by people who are opposed to something – it may be socialised healthcare, it may be the bailouts, it may be the democrats, it maybe ‘big government’, and it definitely seems to involve Obama.

It’s an intriguing phenomenon, and I thought I might devote a few words to it. After all, at least two things seem to suggest, at first glance, a kinship between me and them: some manner of ‘opposition to government per se’, and some manner of fondness for tea.

On the first point, consider an account of the march here (found via Sociological Images): what is particularly of note is this:

“I would say that the spine of this protest is not any well considered opposition to health care, but to taxes, and to the idea of government itself…one theme that seems to be emerging…is that there is no difference between Obama and George W. Bush…When they protest big government,” they are not Republicans, or even conservatives in the conventional sense of the word. They are defenders of personal liberty against a one party state linked to a secret global system, a state that floods a nation of good white working people with illegal immigrants and freeloading welfare cheats”

Now, of course this can be overstated – a commenter says, correctly, “These people aren’t anarchists” – before going on, bafflingly, to say “and we should be thankful for that. Then they’d be really dangerous.” ‘Really dangerous’ here presumably means something like ‘having a smaller history of violence against civilian persons than almost any other political grouping, and far less than most of the tendencies that were manifested at the march’.

But anyway. Anarchists are already bedevilled by the need to differentiate themselves from anarcho-capitalists, who also use the same term, ‘freedom’, in what amounts to a very different way. To understand how people who I would likely disagree with on pretty much all particular points of politics can raise what seem like formally similar cries requires, I think, unpacking what psychologically terms like ‘freedom’ mean to different people.

What’s So Good About Equality?

An interesting part of Honderich’s attack on Conservatism is the discussion he includes of ‘the left’, in particular of the idea of ‘equality’. He rehearses a series of conservative arguments against ‘equality’, and rejects them, but then finishes with an argument often urged which he thinks it quite correct, what he calls the ‘mere relativities’ argument.

The complaint is that any principle along the lines of ‘people should have lives which are, as far as possible, equal in the satisfaction of their basic desires and needs’ fetishises a certain relative standard, fetishises people’s incomes being similar to other people’s incomes, independently of them being high or low. This seems a bit strange – why should this relative standard be so important?

What’s worse, it seems to generate absurdities. Firstly, it means that if everyone is equally well-off, and we have the option of making some people a bit better off, we have a good reason not to do so (to preserve equality), which seems perverse. Moreover, it means that if some people are badly off and others well off, but that the only way to make them equal would be to make them all even worse off than the badly off, then we should do so – we should make everybody worse off for the sake of equality.

As Honderich presents it, this is a formulation of ‘equality’ that has sometimes been put forward by socialists and liberals, and very often attacked by conservatives, but which is actually very clearly alien to the practice of the socialist and liberal traditions. As he says, nobody has ever seriously suggested taking measures to lower the life expectancy of the wealthy in order to bring it into equality with that of the poorest.

Equality is Freedom

Often on this blog I either make or rely on the claim that freedom and equality are ultimately equivalent, and certainly not in conflict, so I thought it might be a good idea to explain it as clearly and concisely as possible. It goes like this:

Equality means relationships characterised by balanced (i.e. close to equal) power. In such relationships coercion becomes very difficult, because any threat by one party can be matched by the other. That is, coercion, to be practical (rather than senseless and suicidal) requires inequality of power.

Hence the promotion of equality (of power) amounts to the promotion of non-coercive relationships, and hence non-coercive action by individuals. If one is not coerced, then one acts from one’s own desires and judgement, i.e. freely, in at least the roughest and most obvious sense.

So equality means non-coercion, and non-coercion means freedom. Simple.

Two Freedom Agendas

I think we can distinguish two alternative ‘trends’ in the political application of ‘individual freedom’. When I say ‘freedom’, I don’t mean any nonsense about ‘positive freedom’, the freedom from poverty, or anything like that – I mean unambiguously freedom-ish freedom.

The two agendas are what I will call ‘freedom of the privileged’ and ‘freedom of the oppressed’ – but those labels are a little inflammatory and can be misleading. Hopefully what exactly I mean will become clear.

Identification – seeing things from someone else’s standpoint – is important, and who we identify with is very much a product of socialisation. Although it will vary a lot between individuals, there are noticeable overall trends. I’ve written in the past about “the social subject”, the person referred to be words like “someone”, the abstract figure who doesn’t need a qualifying adjective – isn’t a ‘woman such-and-such’ or an ‘asian such-and-such’ but just ‘a such-and-such’.

This social subject is, among other things, white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. It is associated with certain experiences (things which everyone in adverts and sitcoms do) and less with others. People who resemble it will, by and large, have more ‘access’ to the social imagination – it will be easier for others to identify with them because they seem so familiar, so clearly a normal individual. This is what is often called ‘privilege‘.

Based on this, I think we can distinguish one ‘freedom agenda’ that involves those issues that can be imagined as affecting the social subject, and a distinct ‘freedom agenda’ that involves those issues that can’t.

For example, freedom of speech is part of the first, because everybody feels that speaking is something they do – everybody is happy to identify with the figure of the dissident, the courageous political speaker criticising authority. On the other hand, freedom from psychiatric coercion, freedom to avoid being held and controlled against your will by medical professionals on the basis of your mental health or mental difference/disability, is very much a freedom of the oppressed, because the mentally ill or different/disabled are not figures that people in general easily identify with.

Some Observations on Biases

In the last couple of days I’ve been discussing the issue of open borders with a few people, and I feel like I notice a number of interesting habits of thought, biases if you will, which often come up. I’ll discuss three:

1) I support not letting people do X, but not using force against those who do X.

2) I think danger A is unacceptable, but danger B is fine, despite being greater.

3) I think there’s more danger in freedom than in control.

None of these is specific to border controls – they clearly apply in many other areas, especially on issues of personal freedom. But I’ll use border controls as a running example.

What is Freedom? Thoughts on Brave New World

Are the inhabitants of the society in Brave New World free?

I want to say ‘no’. They are very thoroughly enslaved. But saying how is tricky.

Is it a matter of having a choice, per se, about how to live? Well, that can’t be the whole story. In a police state, we have complete choice about what to do – it’s just that many courses of action end in the same, unpleasant, place. We nevertheless get to choose between them. So the issue must involve how good the different options are. That is, in some sense freedom is about being able to make the world respond not just to my choice but to my desires.

But this seems to make the inhabitants of BNWS ‘free’. They do exactly what they want. Every one of their desires are satisfied, because they are constructed so as to ensure that only desires which can be easily satisfied appear.

What I think we want is a conception of “my” and “desires” that satisfies three conditions:

1) It includes my immediate actual desires, however silly they might be, so that when someone stops me doing what I say and think I want to do, my freedom is compromised (even if justifiably); but

2) It goes beyond these, to involve some sense of a ‘higher nature’, of knowledge and experience and so forth, so if I am conditioned from birth to love my servitude, it nevertheless remains servitude; and

3) It recognises the conditioned nature of the human being, its dependence on physical causes, and so will not be undermined by progress in neurology and psychology.

Responsibility, Privilege, and Self-Deception

Skeletor

Pol Pot

This post is about the difficulties of blaming people, and how to deveop part of a philosophically coherent account of responsibility. It’s sparked off by a certain paradox:

Let’s imagine Saloth Sar (AKA Pol Pot) on trial before God. We might ask – did he at the time, when having all those millions of people killed, know that what he was doing was wrong, or not?