“‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long
may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
– Francis Scott Key, “The Star
Spangled Banner”
This June I completed my undergraduate studies in political science at the University of Oregon. After some contemplation, I realized that not once during my entire time at the university did a teacher address the subject of freedom, a subject which one might consider axiomatic for a student of political science. Perhaps in a post-modern world this is to be expected. All words seem to have shed their original meaning; indeed, the very idea that a word can have a clear, discernible meaning has itself been debated. Yet as a student of Hannah Arendt or Timothy Mitchell knows, this is not the case for all languages and it certainly was not always, if ever, the case for our own. Yes, language is always changing. But the world of language is far less inchoate, impenetrable and fluid than one might imagine. It is much easier to visualize change than to imagine constancy. Motion, change and progress are concepts far more accessible to the human imagination than the abstraction of stasis over any extended period of time.
Whatever the case, it seems silly to dive into the minutiae to politics without ever asking what they are meant to achieve, that is, their purpose. And if freedom is the highest goal, as everyone seems to believe, then this seems as good a place as any to begin our inquiry. Let us begin our search for freedom with the conviction that in order to be free one must be willing to ask questions, one must be willing to see things as they are...
________
For the ancient
Greeks, freedom was believed to exist within the polis, the realm of political action, between equals in wealth and
stature. Instead of denoting an individual right, freedom comprised group
action, that is, the ability of peers to work together for a common purpose.
The current notion that people from all classes, both the rich and poor, can be
free would have struck the ancient Greeks as absurd. For it was only by forcing
others, in other words slaves, to pursue life’s essential activities that the
elite secured for themselves the time and means to partake in the exercise of
freedom.
Besides being
qualified by class, freedom was understood to be a political in nature. To the
modern reader, this may sound odd. The Republican Party, for instance – an
organization which self-consciously identifies itself with the values of
Greco-Roman antiquity – has often suggested that politics are actually
antagonistic to freedom. After all Ronald Reagan, the icon of American
conservatism, said in his inaugural address that, “government is not a solution
to our problem; government is the problem.” For the ancient Greeks, however,
freedom was an expressly political phenomenon. The ability to speak freely or
pursue individual enjoyments were not “freedoms” that existed outside of the
political sphere. Rather, they were indicators of one’s privileged political
status, and in fact the preconditions, as opposed to the substance, of freedom.
In short, the Greek conception of freedom finds itself at odds with our own
modern notion of freedom, one which focuses on the individual as opposed to the
collective, and generally regards politics with a wary eye.
This clash of terms
merits the question, why the discrepancy? For today, instead of recognizing the
distinctly political character of freedom, freedom is believed to only exist
outside of the political sphere, even existing in opposition to it. And the
notion that both the poor and rich can honestly regard each other as their
political peers has also become a fixture of political thought. The figment of
the benign capitalist, or benevolent hierarchy, now sits in perpetual though unstated
tension with the ideal of equality between peers.
It is, perhaps,
first worth examining precisely why the notions of freedom that are now in
vogue are, in practice, little more than notional. The political process in
America is a profoundly disillusioning one. Every several years, a list of
candidates is made without input from the greater public. This is followed by a
wave of campaign advertisements which seem to arise out of the blue, most of
which are paid for by shady slush funds whose ponderous names seem to meld into
one another. Next is the most involved step of the process for the average
citizen: they check off a box on a piece of paper and drop it into a container.
True, a string of
speeches, campaign antics and patriotic themes saturate the airwaves. But in
all of this the citizen remains not so much a participant in the political
process as an observer. Their involvement is ordered by patterns of mediation: the
screen of the television, antenna of the radio or veil of the ballot box. It is
hard to imagine that anything could be further from the ideal of direct
democracy; for in this case, participation is vicarious. A citizen watching the
Democratic National Convention, for example, can imagine that they are sitting in
the stands and the candidate addressing them personally. The soaring rhetoric and
airbrushed imagery is not a marketing gimmick, they are told, but rather, a
“fireside chat.” The entire experience is received rather than taken, given
rather than created. It is mediated through the priestly intercessor of the media;
the role of the citizen is fundamentally that of observer; and the process
entails no collective action, no communal solidarity except for that which
exists for and in relation to a distant symbol – the candidate or party. And
this symbol is like a lightning rod. All hopes, fears and desires can be
projected upon it, allotting the observer an opportunity for cathartic release.
Yet its emotional power and mass appeal is largely a product of its ambiguity;
as a symbol it stands for everything and nothing at the same time.
________
Unfortunately, what
has the potential to be the most involved, impactful and community-oriented
mode of human intercourse has become the most inert, unsatisfying and atomized
of activities – if, indeed, can even be said to be an activity. It is,
consequently, no wonder that most Americans view politics with skepticism;
politics is most often felt in its absence, in its insufficiency. The hope that
flickers in the citizen’s heart may draw them toward the polls, but the
campaign’s mesmeric effect rarely outlasts itself. Having been alienated from
the political process, the citizen may begin to feel that freedom from politics
is the solution to their ills, rather than the freedom that exists within the
realm of political action. Naturally, this is a freedom that they are oblivious
to, one obscured by broken promises.
Members of the
political class are just as likely to believe that freedom exists outside of
the political sphere, yet for altogether different reasons. Living within a
bubble of political power, it becomes easy to forget that the freedom they
enjoy is actually political in nature. The freedom that the citizen rejects out
of ignorance is the freedom that the politician overlooks out of familiarity. Just
as a child, oblivious to his parents’ sacrifices, may believe that life would be
better off without them, the politician can rave about the evils of big
government while ironically holding elected office.
And having imbibed
the heady fumes of power and privilege, the politician can also pursue the myth
of American prosperity, indeed, the gilded promise of the American Dream. This is
a much more delicate matter – though, given the blinding nature of privilege, it
is generally handled with all the tact of a hog wrestler. Equality between the
classes is assumed even as certain classes are savaged, leading to amusing
contradictions. Thus, Mitt Romney can praise the essential dignity of the American
people while claiming that 47% of Americans are leeches sapping the nation of
its fiscal vitality. During campaign season, one will find that politicians
inevitably pay homage to the “middle class,” before denying that the phenomenon
of class exists in America altogether. And while odes are sung to the middle
class, nobody will ever mention the existence of a lower or working-class. All
people in America are members of the middle-class, we are assured. Either the
politicians who wax about the middle-class really do not believe that poverty
exists, or their failure to even mention the America’s poor suggest that the
poor just do not matter. They are expendable.
The discomfiting reality is that the poor,
for the most part, really do not matter to the average politician. They are far
less likely to vote or engage in political activism that effectively challenges
the litigious obstacles of the status quo. Just as importantly, they do not
have the money that decides elections. After all, their exploited labor power
is what makes the lavish lifestyles of the corporate elite possible, and
through this, the existence of monetized politics. But the politician’s
ambivalent if contradictory approach to the existence of the American poor goes
beyond pure political calculation. More concretely, the imprecise rhetoric of
the politician – which both recognizes and denies the existence of class within
the same sentence – reflects an imprecise understanding of freedom. The Greek
upper-crust knew that their freedom was made possible through the enslavement
of other people who were tasked with the banalities of life (productive labor).
Today, however, the political class is generally in denial with the fact that
their freedom is made possible by the exploitation, indeed the enslavement, of
America’s poor.
________
So what is freedom?
Or, more appropriately, what was
freedom? Freedom is nothing more and nothing less than the ability of people to
act in concert towards meaningful political change. At present, the type of
freedom enjoyed by the political class is, like the Greeks’, exclusive and
partial. The designated forum for political action is self-selective, dependent
upon money and hostile to those who are not of the same pedigree. Since it is by
nature exclusive it sacrifices the potential for the full realization of
freedom. The political class can act together towards a desired objective, but
their power potential is limited because it exists only at the exclusion of the
average citizen. Their partial form of privilege and power exists in opposition
to the majority of the citizenry; its existence and structural weakness
existing in spite of and because of the untapped potential of the greater
public.
A government’s use
of violence is a good indicator of the type of freedom exercised by the
political class. When a state does not attract the support or power – that is,
solidarity – of its citizens, it relies on violence to crush dissent. This
violence masks the impotence of the ruling clique, even as it admits their own powerlessness.
Governments whose people are free will not need to use violence because the
people are the government, their solidary (power) being the power of the government.
Consequently, a society in which all the people are encouraged to pursue their
potential to the fullest will be the freest of societies. The potential for
collective action and self-realization will be tapped to the fullest extent,
uplifting society as a whole and expanding the feasibility of political action –
freedom.
________
Yet the potential
realm of collective action, and thus, political freedom, is fragmented today. “Individual
liberties” are touted as freedom itself, rather than being the prerequisites of
freedom. Members of the political class suggest that politics is simply a means
for securing these “individual liberties,” negating the role of mass
participation within the political process. This is eminently dangerous. If the
individual is reliant on a distant government to act as intercessor between
them and their “individual liberties” then they are, paradoxically, put into a
very vulnerable position as an individual citizen.
Firstly, their
freedom becomes synonymous with the brute conditions for existence, instead of being
something that ennobles these conditions and is produced from them. To be
deprived of “freedom of speech” is to become a slave, indeed; but what good is
this “freedom” if it cannot be used to reify some higher purpose? What good is
the ability to speak if one lives in a society in which freedom only amounts to
talk, and in fact, this society has become so divided that there is no one to
talk to? Secondly, if a distant government takes on the role of the intermediary
between the citizen and their freedoms, then the citizen is subjected to the
whims of those at its helm. Their freedom becomes subjective – that is, subject
to the caprices of whoever is in office. Freedom becomes malleable and
inconstant; a slave to the commands of someone else. It is no longer a verb which
entails participation but takes on the appearance a noun, something to be given
or traded. The citizen becomes an observer or recipient of freedom. And because
it is something that is given, the citizen has little to no role in its formation,
no input regarding its provisions. It is the freedom of the dependent, the
vulnerable – the slave.
The present
obsession with individual will and liberty is as curious as it is dangerous. Hannah
Arendt explains that the “will” first appeared as a distinct faculty in
Christian thought. Yet the individual “will,” in this context, is never truly
free. Or as the apostle Paul writes, the will of the spirit to do what is right finds
itself in perpetual conflict with the will of the flesh to sin. So while a “will”
may exist, it is itself weak and capricious, unable to transcend the conflict
of competing wills which confuse it at every turn. Arendt writes that “if man
has a will at all, it must always appear as though there were two wills present
in the same man, fighting each other for power over his mind. Hence, the will
is both powerful and impotent, free and unfree” (Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 161).
In Christian philosophy, God’s intervention
allows humanity to transcend this clash of wills. But this resolution is only
sustained through collective action and empowerment made possible through
solidarity with other Christians. The tension between wills persists but is
transcended through collective action rooted in faith. Today’s focus on the
individual’s liberties, however, curiously denies the importance of collective
identity and participation within the decision-making process. This leaves the
citizen vulnerable, unable to transcend their immanence, the confines of their
prejudices, weakness and finitude. Disempowered and dissatisfied, they project
their angst and deferred hopes on a distant symbol, in this case the
preexisting power structure: the sovereign. Yet this valorization of the
unreachable, distant and uncertain creates problems of its own.
Hannah Arendt notes
this when she writes that, “Politically, this identification of freedom with
sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the
philosophical equation of freedom and free will. For it leads either to a
denial of human freedom – namely, if it is realized that whatever man may be,
they are never sovereign – or to the insight that the freedom of one man, or a
group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price, i.e., the sovereignty,
of all others” (ibid., p. 164). In refusing to live interdependently with their
peers, the citizen chooses to become dependent on elite power.
________
The effects of the
corrupted understanding of freedom can be seen everywhere, as indeed it has
seeped into the very fabric of political life. Freedom, for the most part, has
become synonymous with alienation; in other words, slavery. Citizens are
encouraged to take out huge college loans – with interest rates above the
market rates – and this is regarded as a shining example of America’s
enterprising character. The college student, we are told, must shoulder their
entire education on their own back, even as it drives them deeper and deeper
into debt-bondage. In a world of NSA-style surveillance, austerity packages and
corporate propaganda, the debtor prison has become unnecessary, even redundant.
The entire civilized world is has become a prison and the atomized individual
their own cell, complete with a (prison) social security number.
And again, the
freedom of the citizen is essentially the freedom to choose their punishment.
Malcolm X once quipped that, “‘Conservatism’ in America’s politics means ‘Let’s
keep the niggers in their place.’ And ‘liberalism’ means ‘Let’s keep the
knee-grows in their place – but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s
fool them more, with more promises’” (Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, p. 380). Unfortunately, Malcolm X’s
observation remains just as relevant today. One party, we are told, stands on
the left and the other on the right. Yet one’s spatial position is always
relative, implying a certain reference point. In politics, this remains true
for one’s ideological position. One must then ask, to whom does this party
stand to the left, and next to whom does this other party stand to the right? In
practice, both parties have drifted so far to the right that their only
ideological differences are cosmetic. The Democrats may say that they stand up
for the average citizen but it was Clinton who gutted “welfare as we know it”
with the punitive Personal Responsibility Act, a law which literally renounced
the very principle of welfare. And the Republicans can rave about the evils of
big government, but it is they who have racked up the most debt in proportion to GDP while in office.
To borrow from Malcolm X again, the difference between the two parties is that
between the wolf and the fox. Both will try to eat you; one is just smarter
in going about it.
The brand of freedom
marketed by the political class is always one of negation, self-renouncement
and division. This is what is ultimately meant by the supposed virtue of small
government: cut the food stamps, starve schools of funding, kill Medicaid, cut
taxes for the rich and make the rest bear the brunt. What is most telling,
though, are the origins of the pro-states’ rights and small government philosophy.
The most outspoken proponent of states’ rights in the 20th century was
Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who famously said “segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” This is no coincidence. Ever since abolitionists
lobbied the government to end slavery, the mantra of states’ rights has most loudly
been invoked to justify slavery, and later, the persistence of Jim Crow laws on
a local basis. The logic of states’ rights has time and time again been used to
suppress “civil rights,” or the ability of people to meaningfully participate
in the political system collectively. This suppression of civil rights is interchangeable with the suppression of political
rights – in other words, freedom.
Today the logic of
states’ rights is also being used to erode the ability of labor to bargain with
management. So-called “right to work” initiatives are being launched on a
state-to-state basis in order to scare people from participating in union
activity, and get them to believe that unions are their enemy. Workers do not
need to act collectively to voice their concerns, “right to work” advocates
claim. They just need to be able to talk to management on a one-on-one basis,
the so-called “open door policy.” Just as the political elite are the
intercessor between the isolated citizen and their freedom, so management is to
be the intercessor between the worker and their work – their means of
existence. Labor is divided while management is united: “As capitalism creates
a society in which no one is presumed to consult anything but self-interest,
and as the employment contract between parties sharing nothing but the inability
to avoid each other becomes prevalent, management becomes a more perfected and
subtle instrument” (Harry Braverman, Labor
and Monopoly Capital, p. 67).
The idea that strength
does not exist in numbers or that people with the same interests should not be
able to collectively express their concerns is ridiculous, of course. After
all, that is exactly what management is doing! Just as revealing is the fact
that the advocates of “right to work” measures universally frame the problem as
one of freedom and rights, but never express support for the “right to a living
wage” or anything else that would actually help workers. Rights are always
understood in terms of being free from
something: free from freedom.
And this
propaganda of disempowerment can be witnessed everywhere. During the women’s
suffrage movement of the early 20th century, for instance, women
were encouraged to smoke as a sign of their new liberty. Edward Bernays, the
mastermind behind this marketing campaign, came to be known as one of the
founders of human relations, contributing a seminal work to the field which he
entitled Propaganda. Today people
attempt to free themselves from the alienation and despair sensed so acutely in
American society through the use of addictive drugs like cigarettes and
alcohol. In doing so, they become slaves to a destructive habit, one which
threatens their very lives, and makes them peons of a soulless corporate machine
which makes money by slowly killing their bodies.
And within
Guantanamo Bay, the paragon of American freedom, a mass hunger strike is underway.
Over one-hundred prisoners have chosen to collectively strike in protest to
their continued imprisonment without charges, a policy which stands in stunning
violation of international law. This display of collective power is a poignant act
of freedom, a revelation of humanity’s capacity to work in solidarity even in
the most violent and hopeless of situations. The brilliance of their freedom,
their humanity, has managed to reach the outside world, even if only through the
bars of the cages that attempt to confine, separate and degrade their freedom.
Yet the prisoners have refused to surrender their freedom, instead choosing to
fight for it at all costs – even death.
But the government has been quick to explain that the prisoners have no cause for
complaint. After all, those who are force-fed have the freedom to choose the flavor
of protein shake that goes down their neck each day.
________
When I write that
Guantanamo Bay is the “paragon of American freedom,” I mean it – though this
requires an explanation. American freedom is understood in terms of freedom from, never as the freedom to. It is never productive but reactive;
never satisfied but always seeking. During the Cold War, freedom meant freedom
from an attack from the Soviets or freedom from a nuclear holocaust. Today the
definition has been transposed to fit the latest paper enemy, terrorism. It then follows that Guantanamo Bay is paradoxically America’s bastion of freedom, that is, freedom
from the terrorism that it supposedly locks inside, as if it were Pandora’s Box.
Within the American mindset one can never be free unless there is a threat to
confirm one’s freedom, something to be free from.
Yet what the
prisoners in Guantanamo are practicing is, paradoxically, freedom. For, make no
mistake, they are asserting their freedom – the ability to collectively inscribe
their existence on the world, and, in doing so, transcend it. Yes, the U.S. may
have control over their bodies but it can never penetrate their souls, that
deep, primordial drive to live unshackled by the manacles of hate, oppression and
ignorance. Together they are forging a small space in which freedom is not inert and
passive, but vital and active, even painfully so. It is time for Americans,
like the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, to learn that there are worse things than
pain, fear and death.
And the solution is
freedom.
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