Ping Pong 20: Two sorts of Freedom
It was Rousseau who perhaps more than anyone else saves freedom from the wreckage of established religion, and its modern totemic value. The Rousseau problem here was essentially a double one. On the one hand he wanted to preserve, in something akin to a mortal soul, the idea of human freedom; a freedom which could outlive God. On the other, and he also wanted to ensure that that freedom remained itself a spiritual phenomenon, and was not therefore to be confused with the rights to consume or to scheme. Of these two moves, it was the second that has left us with numerous paradoxes, which were clear even in Rousseau’s time. These paradoxes perhaps centre around two different aspects of this freedom: Firstly the problem of what this means that freedom actively is; and secondly how and where it can be expressed. The former move is the one that will take one to that strange paradoxical land, where freedom needs to be imposed upon the unwilling or unable; whilst the latter opens up the door for the most virulent of nationalisms. Both these aspects will here be considered.
Rousseau’s real originality in defining the concept of freedom lay in arguing that freedom could very easily be understood in two rather distinct ways. On the one hand there was the everyday freedom of life. We choose then to marry or to shop or follow or not follow our desires. This freedom remained for Rousseau a mere expression of animal needs. What we were free to do was therefore merely to follow lusts, and nothing more could be sought from or expected of these lusty thoughts. One was not free, unless one controlled one’s desires. Freedom was therefore carried back one stage. Freedom, real freedom lay in writing the rules, and not in the mere enacting of those rules.
However the problem then of course is - what sense did the individual exist in this state before desire? Where, the question might well be asked, was that state, which existed pre-individual human desire? What was there, and what could be willed in such a place, and so what could be free? Rousseau suggests that the key point of this state was that it was not just pre-desire but also that it was pre-individual. It was therefore the hard rub and all individuals of a nation shared – a general or collective Will. The General Will was distinct from human wills in three regards: firstly it was concerned with abstract individuals, and never with specific people; secondly it was critical in the embodying of rules and constitutions; and finally building on the latter point, it was ultimately the General Will which defined the parameters of our minds, and therefore which defined our freedom, and not the other way around. . Each of these points will then be examined in turn.
It was clear enough that the General Will could not concern itself with any one individual or set of individuals even. It rather floated above all people and all happenings, as the set of rules that would be applicable to all and every one of them. As such it operates as the supreme mandate for armchair thinkers and Cloud Compellers. That is, the General Will demands rules that have no specific case or individual in mind, and no necessary individual experience. All that was needed was a notion of an abstract individual, an appeal to a vapid ‘collective consciousness’, and a passion for inventing rules. It therefore has a tendency to spawn those who think that in the privacy of their own study, they can somehow commune with the higher destiny of a people, and can then form that higher destiny. A destiny that then gives the individual the right to decide what rules should and what rules should not, be followed in the world beyond the office.
Rousseau thereby inaugurates that strange conjunction of romantic and tyrant that cursed both his age and ours.
Robespierre (and St. Just) were just such romantics. That is, apostles of the General Will, who were happy to forget the needs of individual people in their desire for purity. But the same can be said of Hitler and Pol Pot, or even Karadzic. What has then been so very disturbing about the Bush presidency, is that the same fatal combination of misty eyed romantic and steely man of War was more or less indiscernible for Neo-Conservative policy.
The second aspect of the General Will lay in setting the foundation for a state. Nation building, the theory went, should be so very very easy. One just got everyone together in a certain place or at least a certain set of founding fathers, and shook them up and down, and the General Will would manifest itself, and the constitution be written. Once this constitution was in existence, then the Will defined freedom, and everyone could relax and get on with their lives. Well perhaps. Rousseau himself put a caveat in at this point. The problem about defining the General Will, he argues, is that it can only be defined by individuals who actually have a shared purpose or at least a collective set of interests. There is no point therefore merely assembling a rag-bag of individuals in a certain place, calling them founding fathers, and expecting a workable constitution to evolve. All that one could get is anarchy. It was of course the second aspect of this theory that the Americans forgot in Iraq. They assumed that a general purpose would simply spring forth from the rag-bag of people who are crammed together in the modern state of Iraq, and seemed genuinely shocked when this did not happen.
However, Rousseau’s concession that people only could let the General Will stand forth if they shared a degree of collective interest has rather unsettling implications. On the one hand it means that General Wills are always stronger and more decisive if they are confined to a very small number of individuals, all of whom share an interest. Wills therefore become the province of Cliques and Juntas, who can best express and utilize them. On the other hand, there is nothing to stop the General Will changing and evolving with time. As it does so, then the constitution will likewise need to evolve and change. This by itself might be all very well, and yet of course puts a very real threefold tension in the system. Firstly there is of course the danger that the system will change too quickly. It therefore thrashes about, reflecting the contemporary changes of collective will, which does worry so (about knives and guns and dangerous dogs, and booze…). Secondly there is the danger that it changes far too slowly, as vested interests, bolstered by an appeal to history, form a potent brew to stop all subsequent changes. Finally there is a danger that it shatters into numerous subsidiary wills, each reflecting localized interests and agendas.
The final aspect of the General Will suggested above, relates to the fact that this Will was somehow necessarily caught up in the construction of our minds. Here initially at least it appears that Rousseau might be really on to something. To watch a child learn is not to watch it grasp one or two or numerous ideas, but rather for it to distil numerous separate opinions and numerous shifting looks and manners that reflect those opinions. It thereby distils a generality and installs it own reality inside that will, rather than simply adapting and mimicking specific adult behaviour. The General Will therefore, allows a system to be learnt, and yet appears to also ensure individual freedom within that system.
To a degree this last point is true, and yet there is also clearly a problem here. The General Will of the adults is ultimately enforced with violence (physical or mental). The individuality of the child is therefore a circumscribed one. Moreover it is from this bounding, as much as it is from the vapid conjecture of generality, that their minds are no doubt also formed. To use this then as a model for human society is to risk putting a portion of the population into the child position in relation to the General Will. Additionally, given that this Will is easiest to define in small communities, and Juntas there will be a tendency for such powerful Wills to predominate, and treat all other wills as mere children, to be corrected and instructed. One slips then from the free world into the world of China or Malaysia.
The infamous Rousseau formula that peoples might need to be forced to be free, that is forced into thinking about the General Will, and not their day to day concerns, becomes then a sinister force in our world. It not only legitimizes any coup or select band of brothers (botherers), with their powerful General Will and associated higher destiny (Neo-Con or Taliban); but also always authorizes the view that incorrect thought is itself a sin, a sin which must be ‘corrected’ irrespective of the consequences for specific individuals (torture or even execution is alright as long as it enforces the General Will).
The second effect of Rousseau mentioned at the start of this Rant, concerned the advent of the nation, and the history of nations. This advent was already present in the above. The problem was always one of exactly how one defined what a General Will might be. Rousseau’s answer is in effect that while it is rather difficult from within a system to define the parameters of that system, one can in fact define the differences by looking at different nations. The French and the British are clearly different, and this difference must be the product of a General Will.
A seemingly innocent move then, yet one that is in fact rather perplexing in its implications. Firstly there is surely an issue of logic here. There is a clear jump between cultural practice and General Will. As one is British or French one is simply being what one is, one is not self-consciously expressing anything else. To burden this being with all the paraphernalia of choice and Will is rather problematic. It makes doing what comes naturally a political issue. Speaking Welsh ceases to be a custom and becomes a political act, and conveyer of a different General Will. A move which might not make logical sense, and yet clearly has had an enormous political significance, making the everyday into the necessary badges of difference, and allowing politics to articulate itself everywhere.
Secondly the jump to culture opens up the move to history. To be British or French is of course an accident or event of history. If one’s freedom is therefore really tied up with one’s expression of oneself in being a nation, then it is tied to history. My History but also my geography gives me my capacity to think and to be free. Rousseau thereby transmutes the problem of freedom into a problem of time and space; or even evolution. This problem will be the topic of next week’s Rant.
Thirdly Rousseau inaugurs a strange connection which haunts all modernity, namely the tie in between freedom and national identity. To be American or to be British or Sudanese is to expect the same sets of freedoms or privileges. This difference remains a deep one, and endures irrespective of appeals to human rights or a general human Will, and clearly persists at numerous levels, both individual and state. At the most basic level, that of the individual, what a Chadian expects of their world and what an American might demand from it are clearly different things. Moreover this difference is enshrined within the consular system. Different nations punch differently in the world and therefore the powers of their consular systems to interfere and intervene, varies very greatly.
On the level of the state, once again there is a clear very basic respecting of national borders. We do not intervene in Sudan or Zimbabwe because what goes on there is an internal concern. States therefore envelope their inhabitants, and claim rights to them beyond mere human (generalised) rights. State oppression is therefore allowable in a way that personal oppression is not. Finally and most critically, modernity has simply accepted the Rousseauan formula that freedom is tied to nations. To be a nation and to be free are almost synonymous with one another. ‘Proto-Nations’ replete with freedoms, and therefore with no real need to be nations as such, nonetheless aspire to declare their own independence (Kosovo). A move which is made irrespective of actual advantage or even political sense! At the same time the select group of United (in being) Nations chooses only to deal with nations. A sentiment which how transfigures the Rousseau formula from whence it came. Rousseau would draw a very sharp distinction between those nations which were merely an imperial agglomeration of people, and those with a long history and culture of their own. However this distinction cannot survive into the realpolitik of modernity, where the equation of nation and freedom is so powerful because it simplifies matters so very much, a simplification which of course makes international politics possible. The Rousseauan element might be fictive (Nation=Freedom) and make little philosophical sense, and yet it is (apparently) the only possible political show in town.
It might well be argued that Rousseau is an important thinker not because of his own profundity but rather because he opens the way for modernity to exist. That is, it is he who selects what we, as a world will choose from the wreckage of established and simply accepted religion. His Choice is Freedom. The oddness of this choice is then an oddness whose consequence is still sweeping us up in its implications. These implications are not merely the stuff of day to day politics and justice, but also infect the way in which history, including natural history have been understood, a topic which will be returned to next week.
