[Newspoetry] Slavery and Freeda: essaying the news

[DL Emerick]

    National Identity or American Imitation?
    By Serge Halimi
    Le Monde Diplomatique

    Wednesday 18 April 2007

Why France's Elections Matter to US

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042307G.shtml

Serge Halimi's masterful recounting of how UMP candidate Sarkozy has used the
American Republican's playbook to undermine social solidarity in France reviews
the tactics still in use in the US, while Jordan Stancil vividly reminds US
progressives of the importance of the European laboratory for social welfare
that a Sarkozy victory could dismantle.

 

 

This is one of the shortest, yet most exhaustive profiles of the rhetorical
demagoguery of the right-ring that I have ever read, sadly.  Most of the major
strategic frauds of the right-wing are enumerated.

 

Yet, there is something, of a kind of truth, to the very fact that the
right-wing strategy works.

 

For instance, people hate, perhaps not naturally, perhaps unnaturally.  Indeed,
from what I have seen of children, they learn, as the musical South Pacific so
well explained and said, "You've got to be taught, before it's too late, before
you are six, or seven, or eight, to hate all the things your relatives hate.".
Hate is not natural to man, as he is born into the world. 

 

How strange that Rousseau could opine upon freedom, saying that "everywhere man
is born free and yet he is to be found only in chains everywhere."  Rousseau
thought, with a certain amount of directness upon the problem, as did some of
those who worried enormously over the living condition of the people, of the
masses, as against the privileged classes of any society.  Marx, for one, was
quite acute in his almost poignant observations, of impoverished and demeaned
life among the vast class of working poor persons in civilized England.

 

The directness of such observations, of poverty, resulted, so I think, in a
short-fall of adequate theory, about how society achieves sub-minimal living
conditions for so many, by permitting a privileged few to live so well, off the
fat of the land.  Some later theorists have attempted more subtle explanations,
focusing on such social structures, after the mode of Mill in his classic
The_Power_Elite, as to how the privileged, in the oft quoted words of
Fitzgerald, "do not live like the rest of us".  (Paraphrastically, or, perhaps,
periphrastically speaking.)

 

Damn right, too.  The privileged do NOT live like the rest of us do, struggling
to stay alive, or in gasping like fish out of water,  in those small rest
periods that we quaintly and curiously call evenings, weekends, vacations.  The
privileged are not hounded by the collection agencies of society: debt
collectors, rent collectors, the police - all those institutional testimonies to
the omnipresent poverty of the people.

 

The promise of any "social revolution" - of bettering the daily lives of the
many - seems, so often, to be unrealizable - perhaps, perhaps, because of the
very directness of the means employed, the attempt to equalize disparity and to
level the wage pyramid, to forbid any activity that smacked of individualism,
that permitted freedom of expression, of entrepreneurialism and ever always of
dissent.

 

In a sense, then, social revolutionaries failed because they failed to think the
nature of freedom, given the diversity of society.  They did not appear to grasp
that freedom is not universal or generalizable, like a substance.  Freedom is
not a particular and definite set of relationships, between man and his world.
Freedom is not, in short, some order imposed from a social point of view upon
man.  When it is such, man only exchanges the conditions of one kind of slavery
for those of some other kind of slavery.  And, then, Rousseau's truism is
historically validated, all too sadly, once again.

 

Freedom is not some indivisible substance, but neither is it some equally
indivisible universal spirit.  Already, in the very word freedom there is some
enslavement of the mind, to an idea of unity, in a concept, perhaps.  If I were
to neologize, I would say we need - always - to speak of no simple unitary
"freedom", as GW Bush mindlessly does, in his vain and empty promises to the
people of America that we advancing the cause of "freedom" in the world or in
Iraq.  His sense of "freedom" lacks all content -being neither negative nor
positive liberty - promising no restraints yet, in fact, allowing no man any
license, except that that comes of personal wealth, either.  We need "freeda"

 

In one of his wisest speeches, for example, FDR set forth four characteristic
modalities of freedom, in his Four Freedoms Speech.  (See, not only,
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/4free.html, but also see this fine piece of
commentary, http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/4free3.html.)   An extract of that
speech is presented below, though the entirety of the speech needs to be read
and to understood, translated and updated, meaningfully today.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world
founded upon four essential human freedoms. 

The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world. 

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere
in the world. 

The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means
economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime
life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world. 

The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a
world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion
that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression
against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.

There is no doubt about the values of these differing freeda, though the third
of them is perhaps easiest to understand, but most difficult to implement.  What
are those "economic understandings" when they are driven down below the level of
nations, to the relationships necessary between actual living persons, in some
national society, such as our own?  How do we advance the cause of "freedom from
want" when we do not distinguish, strongly, as a people, anymore, between "want"
and "need", as even FDR's reference does not.

 

Once, we would have understood "want" as "need", but the Age of Nakedness, of
Raw Desire, but this is no longer an equation we have, of the sense of need and
of want.  Such terms have become alienated from one another, by socially
divisive rhetoric, though each term references some absence of things that are
missing or lacking, an essential kind of emptiness.

 

Philosophically, this emptiness could be termed the "nothingness" of existence
that being may discover, as a kind of truth about ultimates of all kinds - see
Derrida on khora or aporia.  But, people who lack food, clothing, housing or
shelter do not need philosophy to explain their conditions of material
neediness.  It is those, perhaps, who are not lacking in such minimal
subsistence for non-metaphysical "primary" needs, that might, perhaps, be moved,
philosophically, or even altruistically, to consider the plight of others, "less
fortunate", as their own responsibility, to alleviate want in the world.

 

That is the root of those economic understandings that FDR had in mind, so I
would claim - the "socialist" idea that we are all one people when and only when
we care for all of us, as much as we care for our own individual selves.  Only
in the deepest sense of such social understanding, of oneness, can the common
good of all be realized, in economic understandings, of allocating resources
between private and public "purposes".  Freeda insure the survival of man,
personally and collectively.

 

We are, thus, always and already, obligated, to our kin, to our friends, to our
neighbors, to our society in all its diversity, and even to our world, to people
everywhere.  Such social bonds are not Rousseau's chains, but the very
conditions upon which our lives, personally, depend.  When we fail to recognize
the necessities of such social bondings, then, indeed, we become as slaves to
masters.  We become Eliot's hollow men, empty of life, robots following routines
of orders not written as our own will, freely.

 

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