Training | 2010.02.08
The afflictions of liberty | Tristram Riley-Smith
Obama may have grasped that the ideal of freedom Americans so fiercely cling to is fracturing their society
After a year of setback and struggle, Barack Obama last week sought to revive his programme, to reboot the American Dream. A generally solemn State of the Union address culminated in a rousing call to the nation "to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more".
Commentary focused on the president\'s efforts to connect with the needs of middle-class America, those blue-collar workers whose lives are profoundly affected by the jobs market, taxation and interest rates.
But another feature of this address is just as remarkable – for its absence. The word "liberty" was entirely missing , and the term "freedom" was used only once.
Prior to Obama\'s election, these terms had been liberally sprinkled over every address for the last 25 years. They represent a mission statement for America that has become hardwired into its logic circuitry.
There is no way of knowing if Obama is seeking to wean his fellow citizens off the "f" word. But my analysis of the conflicted state of contemporary US society points to a country that is hooked on freedom – and suffering from the afflictions of liberty. This ideal has grown inflated and unstable, and is now fracturing the society it defines.
The US is not, of course, a Hobbesian dystopia . The Founding Fathers sought the perfect balance between liberation and regulation, and contemporary America can appear to fulfil this vision. A sense of consensus emerges in the give and take of the free market; shared narratives played out in the cinema; the ritualised battles of sport; and the year\'s cycle marked out by feast days and public holidays. But this doctrine of liberty has developed a bias towards hyper-individualism, engendering a sense of insecurity about personal and national identity.
The political scientist Louis Hartz described this condition as "psychic inflation" – a term that chimes with the Jungian concept of the neurotic who believes an idealised image to be the real self. This spirit of freedom is intoxicating, but it threatens to turn the American dream into a nightmare. For Jung, psychic inflation could be overcome through patience, humility and self-analysis, and there are countless US citizens practising these as they agonise about the unsettled states of America. No less a figure than President Obama stands in the vanguard for change.
But the steep decline of Obama\'s ratings in the polls and the apparent resistance to much of his programme – reflected in the loss of the Massachusetts senate seat to the Republicans – may suggest that millions of Americans regard their brand of liberty as a commodity that needs to be protected.
The idea of liberty beloved by the US seems quite different from the British conception. These two Anglo-Saxon cultures, characterised by the common law, representative government, strong civil society and traditions of individual freedom, adopt surprisingly different approaches. Hartz wrote of England containing "an indefinable germ of liberty, a respect for the privacies of life" that the US cannot duplicate. American expatriates in the UK often praise the quality of tolerance in British society, and many cite this as a reason for migrating.
British society seems to have moved away from the libertarian tradition that was transported to America. There seems to have been a notable shift in British opinion in the 1880s. Gladstone shocked many in the Liberal party by supporting the agenda of collectivists in his cabinet. The individualist current abated, and while Lord Salisbury (leader of the Conservatives) proposed public grants for working class housing, the Fabian Society advanced principles of social democracy and laid the foundations of the Labour party.
Fifty years ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin provided a clue to these differences. He spoke of "negative" and "positive" attitudes to freedom – the difference between protecting and taking liberties. And he suggested liberty might need to be constrained so that all can be free – a liberal morality underpinned by notions of equality and social justice.
Western liberalism, as Berlin recognised, faces an irreconcilable dilemma: if we desire freedom to be the ultimate end for humanity, none should be deprived of it by others, nor should some enjoy it at the expense of others.
The radically positive approach contained in the idea of Land of the Free exacerbates this dilemma. An American pupil of Berlin, the philosopher John Rawls, seemed to agree. He argued that in order to achieve equality of liberty, the defining precept for a society like the US should not be freedom but justice: a shared conception of what is fair.
If America could adjust its frame of reference by tempering its brand of liberty, it might come closer to the vision of the Founding Fathers. Given the temper of the times and the mindset of so many American voters, however, this would be a brave change, indeed. But I suspect Barack Obama understands why it matters. And this might explain why the key omission from this year\'s address was any extensive reference to the great American fetish – freedom.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ama-state-of-the-union-freedom
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