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Freedom (The American Notion of ‘Freedom’ as Evidenced in the Slogan “Live Free or Die”)
Let us disambiguate here. In the attempt to define so polysemous and tortured a public abstraction as the American conception of ‘freedom’ (political, economic or otherwise, all known forms of human freedom are packed and confabulated under the rubric of this magnificent virtue word), we do well to avoid invoking notions as large and delusive as Locke’s theory of ‘natural rights’ or Rousseau’s ‘liberté naturelle’. As we do well to eschew the facile dogma that most of us receive in the course of a secondary education. Still further from our minds should be the abiding faith in the moral and ethical freedom of the subject that is required of our moralists and legal thinkers. (That faith is a part of our heritage and best reserved for discussions of Kant, the Utilitarians, or Kojève’s Hegel.) The ‘freedom’ we have to consider has neither to do with ethics, nor metaphysics, nor with a famously tawdry red, white ‘n’ blue symbology.
No, our‘freedom’ derives from the dark and sodden terrain of land nestled away in an alternate universe, that known to the political ethicist as ‘Negative Liberty’.
In Negative Liberty… it is there, flying just under the radar of historical consciousness that we come upon the genuine American homeland. A tangle of vines, roots, and detritus that lies deeper within us than jingoism, any ‘Hallmark’ or ‘Rockwell’ moment of sentimentality, or anything on the order of a moral or religious conviction, it’s a land to which no outsider can emigrate, a land in which there are no Indians (only Cowboys), a land to which even the beasts and trees daren’t lay claim. It’s man’s country. It’s there, and there only, that Freemen are truly at home, that there are no laws (there, ethics are superfluous), that one is able to prospect and mine at will the single essence in the epistemology of Freemen, that in which, famously, one thing is certain.
The thing is, the mining and all, even in Negative Liberty, it can only be done at night. For, as is well-known to lovers of Western literature, the sun shines on all of us, on slave and slave-master alike. Which is the reason that, in our homeland—a veritable ‘Land of the Free’—it is always and everywhere night.
(Hegel was onto something when he referred to the existence of “pure self” in the Night of the World.)
In Negative Liberty… it is there, vouchsafed to the pick of the genuine American—in dark of earth and dark of sky, where all political and ontological distinctions melt like Protean vices—that the essence that we call ‘freedom’ is to be found. Indeed, it is found in such abundance, that were the homeland to be opened to the world, De Beers would give up all its claims to Africa for a single beach-head or point of entry! For savvy multi-nationals know well enough that, when the U.S. left the gold standard, she did not, in fact, adopt a floating currency. No, what she did was convert to a different standard: that of the essence we speak of. What she did was establish for the world a virtual El Dorado… one for Americans only. Real Americans…
Freedom, as the American understands it, is its own negation. It’s a process best understood as a logical, political, and metaphysical equivalent of the Jungian principle of enantiodromia. And it comes part and parcel with a second process known as the ‘zero sum game’.
Its paradox was plain for even the Founding Fathers to see—some fifty years before the birth of authentic industrial capitalism in the United States—as is evidenced by the cross-purposes at which the authors of early American political discourse appeared to be speaking. (That Hamilton’s beast needed a leash… that the “all men” of the Immortal Declaration couldn’t be construed as ‘all men’, much less ‘all persons’… that freedom, as we understood it, needed ‘unpeople’ and, importantly, had to be tied to the mechanism of personal wealth… all of this was understood very early on.) That it is ultimately to Hobbes, to the Hobbesian natural state of man—that bellum omnium in omnes—that American political philosophy owes its origins, should hardly surprise us. Morally and ethically speaking, the American people are as much or more the legacy of the rough and tumble world of The Leviathan as we are Jeffersonian theory. We’re the nation of ‘Dog eat dog’. We’re the nation that dropped the bomb, the nation that did genocide right. We’re a people as obsessed with a freakish necessity of Revolutionary Era jurisprudence, the Second Amendment—obsessed with what we think it says—as we are with those parts of the U.S. Constitution that actually do represent epochal advances in human governance: the First and Fourth Amendments, the Due Process Clause, the division of powers, and so on and so forth. We’re the geopolitical superpower willing to lay down international law, but embark upon what Giorgio Agamben calls the ‘state of exception’ when it can and feels the need to. (I recall in this light Professor Fukuyama’s candid observation: “Americans are not a law-abiding people when compared to citizens of other developed democracies”. It’s from the recent monograph State-building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Reading this piece, I was struck by the extent to which Fukuyama failed to relate the relative lawlessness of the American people to the occasional lawlessness of America the state-builder.)
On the other hand, what should surprise us—and what I would suggest is the attribute that most distinguishes our conception of freedom from its analogues in contemporary European thinking or from the theories of Locke or Rousseau—is the degree to which, once secured in a positive state, in a Hobbesian State of Society, ‘freedom’ as such has always been undermined from within by those parties and sectors that have always most stood the most to gain from the provisions of the social contract. It’s rarely the little man—more rarely still, is it the subversive or criminal, who stands to gain little aught from functioning social systems—that succeeds in stripping public assets, corrupting politics, bending laws until they’re practically irrelevant, and cheating the state of enough revenue to inhibit its functioning. Little men and the socially outrés don’t rig markets, seek rent, exploit Third World peasants, and gouge consumers. Those that do all of these things—those capable of doing such things—almost universally belong to a social and economic class that is highly dependent both on a strong state and a strong consumer market. It’s the subset of this class, a lot of adventurers whose calling it is to—in the name of what they and we call ‘freedom’, and embracing the deepest, most metaphysical sense of the zero sum game—effectively sabotage the normative functioning of the state... it’s this group we should look to for a proper understanding of what we mean by the virtue word ‘freedom’.
Why? Why them? Why a lot of adventurers rather than a scholar, a judge, or the President? More than any of our luminaries and de jure authorities, it’s our de facto leaders, those who really play the zero sum game—play it to win—and have the moxie to cheat when they can and have to... it’s this lot that moves the needle in this freedom business of ours. It’s they who have the know-how when it comes to undermining the state (the state on which, paradoxically, they are so dependent). They have been to the land I speak of, in Negative Liberty, our virtual El Dorado. They have found and have mined their ‘freedom’. (Have no doubt, they are real Americans!) What’s more, they have at their disposal most if not all of the major media outlets in this country, not to mention a state of the art public relations industry. If spreading wealth and freedom—i.e. their wealth of ‘freedom’—if that isn’t really their thing, if that’s notwhat they do... proselytizing masses to market theology, to the zero sum game, to the sanctity of negative liberty—all the while, setting business expectations—at these arts they masters on a par with painters of the Italian Renaissance; they’re what Bach, Handel, and Palestrina were to polyphonic music. They own the public discourse. What we know—vis-à-vis ‘free’ trade, ‘free’ markets, ‘free’ enterprise—they have, over the past seven decades, succeeded in jamming into our heads. What they scorn—’communism’, ‘cooperatives’, ‘community’ activism—we have, for 30-35 years now, experienced as something akin to a case of the crabs. They’ve engineered a level of consensus for their radical and uncompromising agenda, remarkable, yes, for its deftness and subtlety, but mostly for the astounding fact that the most pressing interests of 99% of those whose consensus has been won are dramatically undermined by said agenda.
For Fox News Nation, they have managed to turn night into day and day into night...
Who else in the world is better suited to tell us what we Americans mean by the word ‘freedom’?
So, it’s the brigands in our midst, it’s the most predatory of our turbo-capitalists that we choose for exemplars. They know the ropes. They know what it means to be free—really free. They have an idea of what needs to be done with those of us who aspire their level of freedom. But more than their knowledge, more than their economic and ideological leanings, it’s their behavior that exemplifies the ‘enantiodromia’ of which I speak. ‘Freedom’—as practiced by the predatory turbo-capitalist—advances the destruction (the negation) of the very conditions of its own existence. It weakens the state—again, the state on which it is largely dependent—the state that enforces its presence abroad, the state that cuts its trade deals, the state that is the sole guarantor of the contract it so cunningly exploits. (Indeed, of the Marxists I know, I can’t think one that doesn’t marvel at the extent to which Reaganomics, the Chicago School of Economics, and Clinton Era financialization have served to make Marx relevant again! The net effect of market liberalization, the destruction of the American Labor movement, and 35 years of regressive and inadequate tax policy—together with aggressive and expensive foreign policy—has been to displace the crisis of capitalism of the late 60s and early 70s onto the Federal Government, a burden that has left the latter in an increasingly inadequate position to further state sector R&D, assist state and local governments, and maintain the nation’s social safety nets. It’s made a handful of economic oligarchs filthy rich, but has put the whole future of the capitalist enterprise in question.) It impoverishes the body politic (the U.S. infrastructure and the net wealth of 90% of Americans are in an increasingly depleted state); it economically disenfranchises Romney’s (in)famous 47%. What’s more, the markets it purports to obey and to worship it consistently depresses and cheats. ‘Freedom’ is creating stunning and deleterious levels of unfreedom in the economy in which it lives, levels which, if pushed to the max—if pushed to their logical extreme—will fall back on ‘freedom’ itself. It will fall back on those who are selling to us. In a word, ‘freedom’ is killing itself. It’s leading itself to its own execution.
How’s that for creative destruction?!
‘Enantiodromia’ I’ve called it. And so it is. Acknowledged as such, however—as an economic and metaphysical ‘self-reversing course’—doesn’t our understanding of ‘freedom’ point to a way out of the vicious cycle it constitutes? Isn’t there a ‘teachable moment’ to be gleaned from its death pangs, one by virtue of which evolution might be possible? If such a moment is possible—and I see no reason why it would not be possible—I’d be inclined to guess that it will consist in breaking the ideéfixe to which we as Americans have been married for too long. That ideé? It’s breaking the marriage of the two processes mentioned above: ‘freedom’ (as we understand it) and the zero sum game. It’s breaking the marriage of the American notion of freedom and the American-style capitalism.
It’s a misalliance. It always has been, even in boom times. The Gilded Age, for instance... named by the most supreme of American ironists. Today, there exists no greater threat to American democracy—which, believe it or not, has some bearing (of however inscrutable a nature) on what we call freedom—than that presented by the specter of American financial capitalism. It’s that simple.
For more than a decade, we’ve spent trillions defending the homeland from ‘the Terrorists’, from ‘Bad Guys’ past and present, from an ‘Enemy’, whether real or imagined. And, where it would be facile and misleading to suggest that “the real Terrorists” have always been on our shores... on Wall Street, “dressed in expensive suits”, and so on and so forth... it’s not at all unreasonable to suggest that, in concert with their addiction to high stakes poker on Wall Street and the depredations of the rogues in their midst, the short-term and otherwise faulty thinking of this nation’s presiding master capitalists has caused more suffering—here and abroad—cost us more money, and done more damage to the nation’s future than bin Laden could have ever hoped to inflict on the American people in the 9-11 attacks. They may not be terrorists, but—I don’t think unfair to say—they might as well be.
At any rate, before I terminate this piece of writing—which, as its title states, is about the virtue word ‘freedom’—I’d beg the reader consider a rather delicious irony. It inheres in a jaunty old slogan, a morsel of rodomontade that presently serves as the motto of the State of New Hampshire, viz. “Live Free or Die!”. Roughly analogous to the Jacobin slogan “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort!”, it’s an implicit command clad in a startling irony that would seem to reflect at least some measure of an insurrectionist people’s most rudimentary ethical substance. In the Jacobin motto, there are two operative words: ‘égalité’ and ’fraternité’; in the American there is one: ‘free’. The former reflects a radical egalitarian, the latter a radical libertarian ethos. In each case, operative language is skewered by the mood of the dictum which is forceful and minatory. Each case stinks with an irony of multiple dimensions. And each is a function of the other. They are two sides of the same coin.
Of course, closer to home, is another motto that bears comparison with that of the State of New Hampshire. It’s derived from a watchword from the Roman Empire.
“Expand or Die!”
As the reader is no doubt aware, the latter is the credo of 20th Century capitalism. Yet, duly considered, it is also the ethos of cancer. To read and to think about both dictums—as before, one as a function of the other—one can’t help but be haunted by the ironies... to the point at which, in their usage, one sees only the ironies, and nothing of the intended meanings.
Lastly, on the subject of ‘freedom’ and the New Hampshire state motto, we would be remiss in our analysis if we failed to mention the case of one George Maynard (Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705)¹.When, back in the 1970’s New Hampshire resident and motor vehicle owner George Maynard found himself troubled by the ideological content of the motto “Live Free or Die!”—less because it was his home state’s motto than because of the fact it had been inscribed on his license plates and was, hence, practically, ascribable to him—he was bothered by another contingency. State law forbade him from trying to cover up the inscription on his license plates. He did so nonetheless, obscuring the words “or Die” on said plates... hence the famous and acrimonious outcome. First the state of New Hampshire fined him, then, after the third or so violation, it threw him in jail. All of this is anecdote, or course. In 1977, a Supreme Court decision, rendered with future Chief Justice Rehnquist dissenting, validated Mr. Maynard’s right to inject the pangs of his particular conscience into a governmental process—an interesting effort at state-level propaganda—with which he had never wanted anything to do in the first place. I suspect it follows that, Mr. Maynard’s considered act of civil disobedience—in fact, the exercise of his First Amendment rights—was vindicated by this decision. Nonetheless, the moral of his story is both clear and revealing:
“If freedom isn’t free, it’s obligatory. There’s no forfeiting the zero sum game!”
Death, after all, is not the worst of evils.
1: http://supreme.justia.com/...
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