I have caught ‘freedom’ – is it fatal?
Was it me or could one have replaced freedom with plague in Bush’s inauguration speech and still have it make sense? After all, it could be argued that plague is the great driving force of the human history. It undermines all kinds of societies and impels humans on to endlessly new breakthroughs – and new circumstances. It is a force that dominates every aspect of society over which it has control – affecting art and politics and transforming the rhythm of being a human from one time to another. What is more plague comes with its fellow riders – war, death, and famine - and so that together through them the world is endlessly transformed. Bush is now then adding a fifth – freedom (or maybe he is creating a union of all of them to back a giant rider – the free). After all, what does he mean by this freedom – this impersonal force?
I suppose he probably means no torture (well at least not unless the people are not your citizens, well, Hell, they have to be your enemies for you to torture them freely….). I suppose he also means that government needs to be elected – that is, that votes matter according to some reasonable set of rules; and that leaders have the right to force an uncritical public into voting for them by a campaign of fear and absolute imbecility (he might actually mean this one). I suppose he might mean that one has a right to free speech (well as long as one does not try to criticise too much – or even at all – have you ever tried to hire a billboard for non-commercial purposes? – you cannot!) Hell, probably all he really means is that these countries like America (that is, do not actively kill Americans) and are prepared to manufacture cheap goods to sell in America – at the cost of ruining their own society and destroying their environment. I doubt realistically that his ‘freedom’ means much more than that.
But that is neither here or there. What is certainly the case is that freedom is seen by Bush as a simplistic force – an agency which will operate like God – or famine or pestilence to produce an end. To create freedom then, all one has to do is to pull a society apart and then give the citizens of that society the tools to make a free society from the ruins. The idea I guess, being that they will naturally make a free society (whatever that might be) – and that as it is a genuinely free society and we likewise have a free society – we will of course agree with it. I.e., abstract freedom – like abstract plague, is somehow able to spontaneously generate within a society – as maggots generate within a corpse – or death simply happens. There is no real effort involved – bar the initial act of destruction.
This then is the sense of the fifth member of the apocalypse. As a good horseman – it is seen as somehow self-generating – and absolute. Freedom simply happens. It catches up everything within it – and installs itself across the world. We are all its mere passive agents – we live in its wake (as we follow in the wake of God or genes, or any other such ‘cause’). Now what really scares me about this force is not that it is not real, one can after all, have a lot of fun trying to define it, and positively cheer one’s self up. Its absolute obscurity is never the problem – rather, what is so tricky is the fact that in spite of the fact that it clearly does not exist as Bush thinks it does, one could imagine a world where like plague, it spreads. That is, what unites the five horseman of the apocalypse is not their reality but their ‘spread-ability’. They are names for processes that erupt within the world, and drive through it - transforming it in the process. Their point then lies not in some symptomology (that is in what they are - their actually ontology) but rather in their very vapidness. The point of their ‘forces’ is that they remain intangibles – and ‘replicate’ (God I hate that word) ~ as intangibles, and across the planet – and we then recognise them as doing such. One could then imagine that something that Bush calls ‘freedom’ could indeed rip through the world (as it is currently starting to rip through China, and has ripped across the old communist world). That is – it is indeed some kind of impersonal force – something that exists not in being there and being true – but almost in and through the fact that it is not real; and that it exists across and through not being real. In short it exists (to use the old Marxist word) as an ideology, something that explains its own existence not through being right - but rather through the very error made in thinking its existence and that is what makes that existence possible, It lives in and through its errors. It exists across the suffering that it makes.
What then can fight the horsemen when they come riding? The full horror of the situation is of course the is only one force that can fight these horsemen – namely themselves. Famine and Plague stop wars. Wars (by blocking trade roots) can stop as well as create famine. Death can stop war. War can save one individual from dying etc. Reason or being true is clearly never enough - these things never exist in that way. Nor does humour which is simply ignored. The only other possibility I guess is absolute and flat denial of the existence of what is being so falsely described. And yet in the face of that very force’s clear ability to make more of itself, that denial will itself be difficult. For example the cause of freedom was justified in many eyes when the communist world collapsed. Freedom, the argument went, must be right - look what it has just achieved. That is, the only force likely to be able to stop this extra horseman which Bush has bequeathed to us – are other equally unpalatable ‘truths’. Moreover (and this goes without saying) this new horseman has a habit of creating other riders. I suspect that riding alongside freedom, there is another horseman – that of religious intolerance. And that these will paradoxically join the posse together - and no doubt enrich the opportunities for the other four.
In short, what is for me really so very scary about Bush is not that he is not right – nor that he is an inconsequential idiot in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Nor even that he will no doubt singlehandedly destroy America – all these things are transitory. But rather that in his bizarre way, he has given a name to what was as yet, an unnamed and unrecognised force within the universe. A name – ‘freedom’ that once started, will spread itself across the world – catching us all up in its wake – and leaving us (quite literally) to pick up our shattered lives within the fear and destruction that it creates.