The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Positive freedom, on the other hand, is much more complex.115 This, he says, concerns all those issues that centre around the desire of the individual ‘to be his own master.’ This concept therefore involves issues of government, of reason, of social identity (race, tribe, church), of genuine autonomy. If the only true method of attaining freedom in this sense is the use of critical reason, then all those matters that affect critical reason – history, psychology, science, for example – must come into play. And, as Berlin says, ‘all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational’; insofar as man is a social being, what he is, is, to some degree, what others think and feel him to be. It is this, he says – this failure on the part of many to be recognised for what they wish to feel themselves to be – that was ‘the heart of the great cry’ at that time on the part of certain nations, classes, professions, and races.116 This is akin to freedom, he says, and it may be no less passionately needed, but it is not freedom itself. Berlin’s aim in saying all this is to underline that there can be no ‘final solution’ (his words), no final harmony ‘in which all riddles are solved, all contradictions reconciled,’ no single formula ‘whereby all the diverse ends of man can be harmoniously realised.’ Human goals are many, he says, not all commensurable, some in perpetual rivalry. This is the human condition, the background against which we must understand freedom, which can only be achieved by participation in the political system. Freedom will always be difficult to attain, so we must be crystal-clear about what it is.117

  Both Raymond Aron, in Progress and Disillusion (1968), and Herbert Marcuse, in An Essay on Liberation (1969), believed the 1960s to have been a crucial decade, since they had revealed science and technology as real threats to freedom, not just in the form of weapons and weapons research, which had linked so many universities to the military, but also because the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the sexual revolution in general had been underpinned by a psychological transformation.118 For them the whole idea of freedom had been extended; in the third world in particular the traditional Marxist classes still needed to be freed; the influx of Western consumer goods – aided by widespread television – was exploiting a new raft of people. At the same time, in the developed Western democracies, people – especially the young – were experiencing a new form of freedom, a personal liberation, insight into their own character as afforded by the new psychologies. Marcuse in particular looked forward to a new ‘aesthetic’ in politics, where art and the creative act would allow people greater fulfilment, producing in the process what he called ‘prettier’ societies, more beautiful countries. It was at last appropriate, he said, to speak of utopias.

  An entirely different idea of freedom – what it is and what its fate is likely to be – came from Marshall McLuhan. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada in 1911, he took a Ph.D. in Cambridge in 1943, working with E R. Leavis and I. A. Richards, founder of the New Criticism, which gave him an intellectual confidence from which stemmed his great originality. McLuhan’s chief interest was the effect of the new ‘electric’ media on man’s self-consciousness and behaviour, but he also thought this had important consequences for freedom. McLuhan’s notion of the individual, and his relation to society as a whole, was quite unlike anyone else’s.

  For him there have been three all-important watersheds in history: the invention of the alphabet, the invention of the book, and the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electric media, though he also thought the arrival of television was another epochal event. McLuhan’s writing style was allusive, aphoristic, showing great learning but also obscure at times, meaning he was not always easy to understand. Essentially, he thought the alphabet had destroyed the world of tribal man. Tribal man was characterised by an oral culture in which all of the senses were in balance, though this world was predominantly auditory; ‘no man knew appreciably more than another.’119 ‘Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen,’ he wrote. Into this world, he said, the phonetic alphabet ‘fell like a bombshell.’ The components of the alphabet, unlike pictographs and hieroglyphics, were essentially meaningless and abstract; they ‘diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell’ while promoting the visual. As a result whole man became fragmented man. ‘Only alphabetic cultures have succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organisation.’120 He thought that tribal man was much less homogeneous than ‘civilised’ man and that the arrival of the book accelerated this process, leading to nationalism, the Reformation, ‘the assembly line and its offspring the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection that greatly intensified the tendencies towards indivi dualism.121 But with the arrival of the electric media, McLuhan thought that this process was now going into reverse, and that we would see a revival of tribal man.

  The ideas for which McLuhan became famous (or notorious, depending on your viewpoint) were ‘The medium is the message’ and his division of media into ‘hot’ and ‘cool.’ By the former phrase he meant two things. One, as described above, that the media determine much else in life; and two, that we all share assumptions about media, that the way ‘stories,’ or ‘news,’ are reported is as important as the actual content of these events. In other words, content is only part of the story: attitudes and emotions too are carried by electric media, and it was in this sense of a collective experience that he meant a return to tribalisation.122

  A photograph is high-definition, requiring very little work by the viewer to complete its message, and it is therefore ‘hot.123 A cartoon, on the other hand, requires the viewer to complete the information conveyed and is therefore ‘cool.’ Radio is hot, TV cool. Lectures are hot, seminars are cool. In television culture, political leaders become more like tribal chieftains than traditional politicians: they perform emotional and social functions, where supporters/followers can feel part of a collectivity, rather than offer intellectual leadership, thinking for their followers.124

  For McLuhan all this completely changed the notion of freedom: ‘The open society, the visual offspring of phonetic literacy, is irrelevant to today’s retribalised youth; and the closed society, the product of speech, drum and ear technologies, is thus being reborn…. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalised man can learn a far richer and more fulfilling life … with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all humanity. The old “individualistic” print society was one where the individual was “free” only to be alienated and disassociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfils man’s psychic and social needs at profound levels.125 McLuhan, who knew how to turn familiar categories on their head, foresaw a time when, for example, Italy might choose to reduce television watching by five hours a day in order to promote newspaper reading in an election campaign, or that Venezuela might lay on extra TV in order to cool down political tensions.126 For McLuhan, the idea of a ‘public’ consisting of ‘a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way like cogs in a production line’ was less preferable than a mass society ‘in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus.127

  This appears to change the very notion of autonomous individuals, but then McLuhan did predict, in this new world, the demise of large cities, the imminent obsolescence of the motor car and the stock exchange, and that the concept of the job would be replaced by that of the role. In many ways, though he was strikingly original, McLuhan was (so far) wrong.

  A very similar message came from France, in Guy Debord’s The Society of th
e Spectacle, published there in 1967 but not translated into English until much later. Debord saw the spectacle – mainly the television-dominated society, but also sports, rock concerts, stage-managed politics – as the chief product of modern society. The spectacle, he said, comprised basically the ‘uninterrupted monologue of self-praise’ of the ruling order and the passivity of the rest: ‘Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another…. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere…. The spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation…. The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life … commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.’ For Debord, far from being a form of freedom, the society of the spectacle was the final form of alienation, final because people think they are enjoying themselves but are in reality passive spectators. His book contained a long historical section, on Hegel, Marx, and George Lukács, with Debord arguing essentially that the spectacle was the final banalising triumph of capitalism. (One of his ‘texts’ was Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part 1: ‘O, gentlemen, the time of life is short! … And if we live, we live to tread on kings.’) In later editions he said that he thought Daniel Boorstin, the much-respected Librarian of Congress, who had published The Image in 1972, had got it wrong, because he had regarded commodities as ‘consumed’ in an authentic private life, whereas Debord argued that even the consumption of individual commodities in the theatre of advertising is itself a spectacle, which negates the very idea of ‘society’ as it has historically been known. So for Debord, the society of the spectacle represents the final failure of man’s progress toward ever greater self-consciousness. Man is not only impoverished, enslaved, and his life negated; capitalism, in the society of the spectacle, has deluded him into thinking he is free.128

  In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, positive freedom was not as basic as the negative variety. For John Rawls, professor of philosophy at Harvard, justice comes before liberty, if only by a short head. In A Theory of Justice, completed in 1971 and published a year later, Rawls produced what fellow philosopher Robert Nozick called the most significant work of political philosophy since John Stuart Mill. Rawls argued that a just society will in fact guarantee more liberties for the greatest number of its members and that therefore it is crucial to know what justice is and how it might be attained. Specifically arguing against the utilitarian tradition (actions are right because they are useful), he tried to replace the social contracts of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant with something ‘more rational.’ This led him to the view that justice is ‘the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought,’ and that justice is best understood as ‘fairness.’ It was Rawls’s way of achieving fairness that was to bring him so much attention. To achieve this, he proposed an ‘original position’ and a ‘veil of ignorance.129

  In the original position, the individuals drawing up the contract, the rules by which their society will be governed, are assumed to be rational but ignorant. They do not know whether they are rich or poor, old or young, healthy or infirm; they do not know which god they follow, if any; they have no idea what race they are, how intelligent or stupid, or whatever other gifts they may have or lack. In the original position, no one knows his place in society – and so the principles of justice ‘are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.130 For Rawls, whatever social institutions are chosen in this way, those engaged in choosing them ‘can say to one another that they are co-operating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with one another were fair’; ‘a society satisfying the principles of justice as fairness comes as close as a society can to being a voluntary scheme, for it meets the principles which free and equal persons would assent to under circumstances that are fair. In this sense its members are autonomous and the obligations they recognise self-imposed.’ Rawls further argues that, from this premise of the original position and the veil of ignorance, there are two principles of justice, and in this order: (1) each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others; and (2) social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.131 Putting it another way, Rawls writes, ‘All social values — liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect — are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage.’ His later arguments proved more controversial. For example, he discusses self-respect as a ‘good,’ something a rational man in a just society is naturally entitled to. He discusses envy and the place of shame. All this leads him into direct conflict with, say, Hayek, in that Rawls firmly believes there is such an entity as social justice; in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, there is not enough positive freedom for certain groups, since those groups are not being treated as they would be treated by rational men in the original position behind a veil of ignorance. And because the first principle of justice (justice seen as fairness) takes priority over the second principle, the basic liberties of the disadvantaged come before inequalities of wealth or income however much those inequalities benefit everyone. In other words, even supposing that blacks were better off under white rule than they would be under mixed rule (say), it is still wrong (unjust, unfair) if blacks’ liberty is more proscribed than whites. Equality of liberty comes first.

  This led Rawls into perhaps the most controversial section of all in his book, ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience.132 Here he argues that civil disobedience is justifiable if the majority, perhaps in the form of a political party representing the majority, refuses to grant the minority equal liberties. Attempts to have the laws changed should first be tried, he says; civil disobedience should always be a last resort and take into account the likelihood of other minorities acting in a civilly disobedient way, in which case there might be a threat to overall order, in which case there could be a risk of an overall loss of liberty, in which case civil disobedience is not justified. But these are technicalities. By arguing that self-respect is a natural good, sought and expected by rational men in a free and fair society, Rawls legitimated the idea of social justice that had suffered so much at the hands of Hayek.

  Rawls assumed the original position and the veil of ignorance in order to arrive at the principles of a just – fair – society. His colleague at Harvard, Robert Nozick, took him to task for this. More grounded in the tradition of Hayek, Nozick preferred to start from a consideration of the way things are, the way society actually is organised, rather than by positing some perfect world, as Rawls had done.* In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, partly as a reply to Rawls’s book, Nozick argued that all ‘patterned’ justice, such as affirmative action, was morally wrong, violating more individual rights than was permissible and thereby doing more harm than good as measured by the number of people helped.133 Nozick pointed out what he felt were a number of logical flaws in Rawls’s arguments, but his most important substantive point was to offer the concept of ‘entitlement’ in any social situation.134 In Rawls’s original position, the individuals contributing to the rules of society, behind the veil of ignorance, have no idea of their own attributes – their wealth, status, intelligence, and so on. But in real life, says Nozick, this can never happen, and Rawls’s position is, to that extent, inadequate. No less important logically, people do have talents that vary, and which they are born with. This is inequality, if you like, but it is a special kind, insofar as one person having more of something (say, intelligence) does not in and of itself mean that every other person in that society has less and is worse off. One person having more of a natural talent does not deprive anyone else of that talent. And so, for a society to coerce its members so that the disparity in talent, and what f
lows from it, is removed, is wrong, says Nozick. And it is all the more wrong when, as is often the case, that extra talent is used by the person possessing it to benefit society. Nozick uses a number of deliberately absurd examples to point up what he sees as the shortcomings in Rawls’s arguments. For instance, he compares the provision of medical care with barbering. In medical care, it is generally argued that ‘need’ is the key factor in providing medical care, over and above any ability to pay. Should this therefore apply to barbering? Should barbering services be provided first and foremost to people who are in need of a shave? In another case, assume a woman has four suitors. Do we allow her to choose who to marry, or do we put it to the vote among the suitors? Does it make sense to say that the successful suitor is the one who ‘needs’ the woman more than the others? In giving these examples, Nozick’s aim is to show that Rawls’s theoretical version of the way man arranges his affairs is far too simple; and second, to stress that many areas of life are properly left to the actions and decisions of individuals, freely exercising their naturally endowed talents, because these talents neither impinge on anyone else nor on the overall performance of society. All of which leads him to the view that only a minimal state, performing the basic functions of protection, can be morally justified.135

  A few hundred yards from the philosophy department at Harvard is the psychology building, William James Hall, named in honour of the great pragmatist. From there, in 1972, at the same time that Rawls and Nozick were in residence, B. F. Skinner produced his remarkable book about liberty, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner wrote as a psychologist, not as a philosopher, and indeed he made it pretty clear that he thought a lot of traditional philosophical ideas were wrong.136 Yet his book was deeply philosophical in the sense that he was concerned not with equality and its relation with freedom, but with the fundamental idea of freedom in the first place. As a scientist and a biologist, Skinner saw human nature as the product of evolution (and therefore to a large extent genetically grounded) and as an adaptation to the environment. For Skinner, there was only one way to change (and by implication to improve) man, and that was to change the environment. His second point was to argue that, at base, true freedom did not, and does not, exist. Man’s nature is the result of his history – evolution – in collaboration with his environment. Therefore, man is by definition subject to a certain amount of control. For Skinner, freedom is merely the state in which man does not feel the control that is exerted over him.137 Yet freedom does not primarily apply to feelings, he says, but to behavior. In other words, freedom is the lack of aversive stimuli in the environment, and what we call the feeling of freedom is in reality only the result of this absence. These aversive stimuli will be different for different people, with different histories, but in the concluding chapters of his book he attempted to sketch out a design for a culture where the aversive stimuli are kept to a minimum.138 Skinner wanted to see mankind develop a technology of behavior which recognises that man’s nature, man’s collective nature as a vast number of individuals, is developed as a result of contingencies – rewards and punishments – acting on our genetic makeup. For Skinner, there is no autonomous man, or rather we should recognise the limits to our autonomy, if we wish to be truly free, in the sense of being at ease with our true nature.