Good times in the history of freedom.

Hinkson, John

As the first phase of the Iraqi campaign drew to its end, George W. Bush declared: 'These are good times in the history of freedom'. His supporters agreed. All around the globe triumphal declarations of victory were accompanied by a pouring of scorn upon those who opposed the war, as though their opposition hinged around the speed of that first phase. The need to defend freedom against those who threaten it and the evangelizing need to introduce freedom to those lacking it, were major justifications of the campaign.

One way of thinking about this assertion of freedom as a way of life is to reflect on its use as a form of justification. A simple example was the childish conflation of evangelizing freedom with the interests of the United States, say in respect of oil. But if this kind of simplistic ideological usage is to be expected, the manipulation of fears about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a threat to freedom has been an example of a different order. It may well deserve to be treated as a new form of war crime.

When almost all the evidence from former and current UN weapons inspectors, as well as substantial intelligence reports, saw no significant threat from Iraqi WMD, the US administration and its followers were undeterred. They showed little regard for the truth, even as their claims rent apart the Western Alliance. The rhetoric of freedom and potential dangers to freedom justified almost anything.

The misuse of 'freedom' in the rhetoric of justification is a central question. But whether these are 'good times in the history of freedom' also deserves a different kind of scrutiny. 'Freedom' carries other meanings, and these suggest issues that go well beyond the manipulation of publics.

Philosophies of freedom were, of course, central to the emergence of the modern West. Drawing in a broad sense upon transcendental religious traditions, the questions of what constitutes freedom and how it can be best achieved for individuals in this world have been preoccupations of political philosophies of both the Left and the Right. It is this broad inheritance that requires renewed scrutiny under contemporary conditions.

Such an investigation would especially involve examination of the institutional structures that are said to support freedoms. These include legal and political structures that defend the rights of the individual and can be said to characterize modernity itself--at least in the modern West. Here freedom entails material institutional structures--practical freedom--and what deserves attention is the degree to which this practical freedom is now mutating in disturbing ways.

Institutional freedoms are always subject to critique by those who observe their imperfections or who wish to advocate a certain form of 'true' freedom. Whether freedom is consistent with a class-based social structure is a good example of questions arising from such critiques. These are familiar and proper challenges to the modern traditions of freedom. But at what point might an apparent imperfection become an expression of structural change? When free societies such as the United States deny legal freedoms to people within their ambit of power, is this an aberration or is it structural and likely to be repeated systematically? If they employ strategies to avoid legal entitlements such as due process or habeas corpus, or deny the rights accorded by the Geneva conventions to prisoners of war, are these reflections of abnormal circumstances or are those circumstances themselves manifesting a structural shift? Is engaging, directly and indirectly, in torture the hidden but necessary reality of statecraft, or is it a significant new phenomenon marked off from the era of modern freedoms.

A broader question here would be whether we could expect a return to 'normality' after the demise of George Bush, or has the era of modern liberal freedoms been surpassed? Taking the examples above individually, this is not an easy question to resolve. But another example casts strong doubt upon any return-to-normality thesis.

The response of the United States to the crisis of September 11 in terms of massive technological surveillance illustrates a broad trend: the increasing tendency of 'free democratic societies'--especially the United States--to be characterized by technological surveillance. Here accepted understandings of freedom are clearly being brought into question. Indeed, in terms of accepted notions of freedom, such a society is quite like what Hannah Arendt called totalitarian. What is presented as an aberration, an unfortunate necessity in abnormal circumstances, looks more like a structural tendency with fundamental implications for freedom as we have known it.

Donald Rumsfeld, not noted for his philosophical finesse, touches on this problematic of practical freedom when he identifies and defends a practical relation between freedom and destruction. When the first instances of looting emerged in Iraq, Rumsfeld added to his notoriety by claiming that the looters were expressing their freedom. He accepted a relation between freedom and destruction as the price of freedom. Such a claim would not do well in 'Philosophy I', where freedom or liberty would be distinguished from licence. But in today's setting, the principles of 'Philosophy I' are increasingly naive. There are both empirical and structural reasons to suggest that 'freedom' and destruction are no longer opposites; that the actual relation of freedom and destruction is counter-intuitive. Rumsfeld has stumbled upon a significant truth. A new relation between a practical everyday 'freedom' and destructive chaos has emerged that is shocking to our understanding of the tradition of freedom.

It is empirically easy to identify the chaos that has resulted from the first stage of the US campaign for freedom in Iraq. It has already called out new acts of terror in Saudi Arabia and Algeria. Iraq itself is now typified by disorder, a form of anarchy largely attributable to the irresponsibility of the occupying powers. This chaos could of course be temporary--a necessary disorder to facilitate the establishment of a new order. But there is reason to think otherwise. The meaning of disorder becomes clearer when Rumsfeld says that he does not wish the United States to occupy Iraq for very long. While most commentators do not believe this, it seems that Rumsfeld and his fellow neo-conservatives have an agenda that does not fit with that history of occupation that engaged in nation-building. He is ready to move on to the next piece of the action regardless of the chaos he leaves behind. He is the champion of the super-charged blitzkrieg, a contemporary Genghis Khan with a new technology. But what is the practical institutional relation of freedom to this process of destruction?

The importance of freedom as a perspective for the neo-conservatives can hardly be doubted. In part this draws on a long history of freedom as an orienting value, one they correctly relate back to the establishment of the United States. While a little bashful about the terminology, they also celebrate the undeniable emergence of a US empire in the decade since the collapse of the Soviets. They do this by associating this tradition of freedom with that of Empire itself. Thomas Donnelly, the author of Rebuilding America's Defenses, written for the leading US think-tank 'The Project for the New American Century', sees that association in positive terms. He wants to associate the contemporary freedom-loving empire with the whole history of America. The term Thomas Jefferson used, Donnelly reminds us, was 'empire of liberty', which is to say, Donnelly's concept is one of an ever-expanding liberty within an umbrella of power provided by the United States. Both the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq are expressions of a 'non-negotiable demand' for the American principles of liberty and justice to dominate. The neo-conservatives wish 'to preserve and extend Pax Americana throughout the Middle East and beyond'. When George Bush recently offered his vision of a free trade pact between the United States and the Middle East, he may have been naive, but he was not kidding. The free trade concept, inseparable from the neo-liberal market, is an aspect of an institutional package that propounds an overall concept of freedom conceived as a US-dominated strategy of civilization.

The question can be posed, of course, as to just what freedom could mean in such an empire. For example, wouldn't the size of the empire and associated power structures close down political freedoms? But there is a more pressing need to place this view of power and freedom in a broader context. Donnelly, fellow neo-conservatives and most political commentators across the spectrum, regard the notion of freedom to be unchanging. In this view the United States was founded upon the same free institutional complexes that are in place today. That is to say, while society has changed in some quite basic respects since Jefferson, the institutional complexes that promote freedom work in much the same way as two centuries ago. Any difference, in this view, is one of degree. I want to argue that the difference is profound.

The freedom that was so stunning in Jefferson's day was relative, institutionally speaking. Those institutions that promoted liberty--legal institutions promoting the rights of the individual, political institutions allowing the expression of individual power, the free market of Adam Smith--existed in relation to a vast array of community-based and other institutions. These latter institutions worked on principles of social organization and social order that were solidaristic. They were not oriented to the freedoms of the American Constitution. The individual was likely to find that the central institutions of everyday lives--family and community--did not especially enhance individuality. But where these institutions were supplemented by institutionalized liberty, the resulting mix gave a unique institutional balance: communal forms of social life co-existed with liberal society and the social spaces that allowed the enhancement of individuality.

A perspective on freedom viewed from the standpoint of social institutions leaves little basis for the lyrical excesses of George Bush. All social institutions have effects that may be seen positively and/or negatively. They all, for example, carry a form of constraint. Institutions that help form and weld together a community of tangible persons in face-to-face situations shape the experience and social relations of people. Such communities may be valued or viewed as a burden, but the shaping effects of their institutions are ever present. Modern freedom was in practice then, a limited social transcendence of tangible community, and was experienced as 'freedom from society'. The institutions that made this experience of freedom possible also carried their own shaping imperatives. The valuing of the social possibilities of individuality supported by the liberal freedoms has always had a hidden social agenda, for example, the market, and the very particular set of life choices embedded within it. Be this at it may, it is these free institutions, providing a definite social space for the development of individuality and a variety of legal protections for the individual both from social groups and from the state, that have been so valued in Western modernity.

Whatever might be said about modern liberal society, the freedom now typical of global society is different. For global society emerges on the back of the high-tech revolution that has allowed the emergence of new social institutions, such as the mass media and the Internet. These in turn have transformed and supercharged older institutions, such as those of politics and the market of Adam Smith. The 'liberty' of the Internet, for example, represents a change of immense proportions. It engenders a society of constant movement, of persons freed from social bonds with others grounded in time and place. Now politics is the politics of image, quite divorced from grounded publics and the everyday. The market is now so powerful it no longer acts as a supplement to community-based institutions. Rather, it moves into and takes over many of their functions--exemplified in the ethical training provided by the media of individual members of families in the art of individualist consumption. We are 'freed' from the need for community based in place.

The liberty championed by Rumsfeld, Bush and the neo-conservatives, practically speaking, is based in social institutions that promote a form of liberty that reaches into all aspects of being. This degree of liberty was never available to the world of modern liberal freedoms. The neo-conservatives are the right-wing ideologues of the high-tech revolution. They differ in various respects from Left advocates of that revolution. Nevertheless, both are caught up in a process of transformation from one social type to another that in significant respects leaves modernity behind.

This techno-scientific freedom is a liberty of a new kind, supported materially by a new range of social institutions that have their own logic and are no longer offset to any significant degree by social realities shaped by grounded communities. Rather than that sense of 'freedom from society', global society structures freedom differently. It becomes 'freedom as society'. Individuals are so free that they increasingly find it difficult to experience the other directly. It is as though, from the standpoint of experience, society does not exist. Indeed techno-freedom is so radical that it calls us to experiment with liberation from species identity itself.

There is no longer any substantial relation between institutions of liberty and other institutions that carry a ground of community-based association. Relatively speaking, the United States, as our leading example of global society, has broken free of social realities constructed by such associations. Now, lacking common sense, it also lacks empathy. Specifically, it lacks empathy towards social realities that rely on substantial relations between the generations and on the specificities of place in the formation of persons. It is a different social type formed in a technologized relation of freedom (facilitated by relations at a distance) that carries its own constraint: technological surveillance. We should not be surprised that societies of this form are not very responsible towards societies like Iraq. Despite contemporary rhetoric about cultural difference, substantial differences between cosmopolitan, globalized societies and those with a different kind of institutional composition is no longer tolerated. Indeed, such difference cannot be imagined. Increasingly, the United States is unable to comprehend how such societies might work and can only conceive of them as being rebuilt in its own image.

All societies have their contradictions. But in relation to the leading example of global society the very processes--social relations that work at a distance--that produce freedom increasingly shape contradictions. The more we pursue the highly individualistic consumption lifestyle that gives a certain freedom, the more publics come to accept technological surveillance structured by those same social relations of distance. When technological extension takes over as the leading edge of social life, it is not at all clear that 'these are good times in the history of freedom', for surveillance increasingly displaces the liberal freedoms. The 'individuality' that is inseparable from technological surveillance is not one that respects the individual at all. On the contrary, it is indifferent to the individual. This inversion points to the need to re-think the whole tradition of freedom in contemporary circumstances.

This construction of a new social form oriented to a technology-based control--and freedom--culminates in the new form of military campaign. The reconstruction of the military by high-tech allows much Shock and Awe, or massive destructive power, but it assumes no community responsibility. There are no positive actions that follow the destruction. Not unlike the aftermath of the campaign in Afghanistan, the complexity of the various groupings within Iraq is of little interest. Rather than the grind of building everyday institutions, Rumsfeld wants to move on to his next target. He has the mentality of the participant of a computer game. The new acts of terror in Saudi Arabia and Algeria trigger a focus on the next stage of invasion: is it to be Syria or Iran?

The world has never seen a force like this. It is one that combines a certain kind of freedom with the potential for complete destruction. Certainly it has no substantial interest in political liberty. Nor do the unspeakable outcomes of nuclear war bring fear to these warriors. Antony Beevor, the author of Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945, recently commented that the conditions for a public to support almost any policy are a combination of fear and hatred. Fear and hatred, especially fed by a compliant media frenzy, have gained complete ascendance within the attitudes of the US public since September 11. In the hands of Bush, Rumsfeld and the neo-conservatives we have to prepare for the worst over the coming period. They combine the irresponsibility of the new power with the opportunities provided by a malleable public as yet unable to resist their strategies.