The Origins Of Our Freedoms

By Gwydion M Williams

In the wake of the Iraq War, the USA sees itself as the grand defender of freedom. Champion of the cause since 1776, creator of liberty in Europe and the world. Hero of the 20″ century, thanks to its role in two World Wars and the Cold War.

This view assumes a single monolithic entity, ‘freedom’. And the discussion is confined to democratic and constitutional structures, which the USA did genuinely pioneer. This is the line of many ex-Marxists who have coincidentally switched from the ideology of a sinking ship.

The rhetoric of freedom can be traced back into the 18′ century, indeed. But the same name has implied a very different set of rights and duties across the decades. Many of the freedoms that we now take for granted were pioneered in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries—notably the removal of class barriers and the rights of women. On racial equality, global communism was the pioneer— read Nelson Mandela’s account in Long Walk To Freedom, for instance. The USA was very much the tail-ender, promoting segregation and a `democratic racism’ that could easily have become the global norm.

The USA was the first large country to have governments fully under the control of an electorate of most adult males (though not blacks until the 1960s). The USA also helped with the breaking down of class barriers, not least because their own attempt at a ruling class was clueless and never taken very seriously outside of the US itself.  But such social equalising was just the expression in the North America of one strand of opinion.

The USA believes that it can create a Western system in Iraq, because it thinks that it created one in Germany and Japan after 1945. But both countries had been moving from autocracy towards liberal-democracy before 1914, without being pushed by any outside influence. It was the Great War and then the Wall Street Crash/ Great Depression that pushed those countries back into autocracy.

Germany had had votes for all adult males from 1871: Britain’s Parliament wasn’t even elected by a majority of adult males until 1884, and only in 1918 did most working-class men get the vote. Japan had had an electoral system since 1890 and votes for all adult males from 1925.

Neither Germany nor Japan saw the sort of long-drawn-out conflict between Monarch and Parliament that Britain had seen, which meant that their elected representatives had fewer formal rights than their British equivalent. But when Germany opted for war in 1914, and when Germany and Japan opted for authoritarian government in the 1930s, it was with the support of the elected representatives of the people.

Authoritarian solutions were chosen in the 1930s, because Classical Liberalism and Classical Capitalism had brought misery and break-down. The US in the Keynesian era insisted that it was promoting ‘Free Enterprise’ or `Mixed Economy’. It was not until the 1970s that significant numbers of the defenders of the Western system agreed that theirs was a capitalist system. And all through the Cold War, the rhetoric of `freedom’ went along with a willingness to support right-wing dictators and to support or even organise coups in Greece, Brazil. Indonesia, Chile etc. Anywhere where actual democracy might lead to a departure from the US global system.

When it comes to building democracy, the most stable and open Third World democracy is India, where US influence was minimal and where the state was shaped by the socialism of the Congress Party. And the hardest transition was multi-racial democracy in South Africa, achieved by the Communist-influenced ANC. The white regime made repeated efforts to get a different solution, sectarian strife between Zulus and other tribes. And it’s very hard to believe that they’d have dared do this without some sort of US approval.

It was the era 1945-1970 that was most successful in consolidating democracy in Europe, and in transmitting Western values elsewhere in the world, especially Fast Asia. Its best success happened when it was semi-capitalist, the system that the New Right boasts of having rescued us from.

The weakness of Keynesianism was its failure to produce effective reformers in the 1960s and 1970s. Lots of people wanted to defend the Status Quo, far too few saw the need and logic for reforms like Workers Control. The right of workers to control their own workplace would have radically extended Keynesianism in a way that would have pleased an increasingly prosperous and self-assertive working class. Instead, left-wing ideologists told lies to working-class militants, assuming that socialism would follow if they could manage to bust the existing system.

The system was disrupted, indeed. But not in favour of socialism, and not a return to older values either. Working class people in Britain and other Western countries had been interested in controlling their own lives as workers through some sort of Industrial Democracy. But when this was blocked, they dropped futile opposition to One existing system in favour of personal freedom as well- paid consumers and house-owners.

The big surprise since the 1970 is the discovery that bourgeois culture and capitalist economics are inherently separate, just accidentally joined in British culture when Britain industrialised. It was this that made nonsense of the Thatcher/ Reagan idea that they should restore ‘natural’ economics, after which’ natural’ culture would spontaneously reemerge.

The finest ideals that money can buy

You must understand the utter novelty of what sprang up in the 1970s, capitalism that was uninterested in the former middle-class or bourgeois order. It used the official forms for a while, but has been increasingly discarding them. Crude cash-driven populism is the order of the day, the finest ideals money can buy.

Bourgeois culture and capitalist economics are both rigid impositions on an inherently disorderly natural world. And they were not linked except by historic accident. The actual history of the last two decades has been a continued withering of traditional values, plus a massive shift of wealth towards people who were already rich. The health and welfare systems which gave some security to vulnerable people have been damaged or removed.

All of this was done in the name of `Freedom’, of course. But whose freedom? Which particular set of freedoms? The US constitution defended slavery, and did not establish democracy. The American War of Independence was regarded as a “democratic rebellion” in Britain, but was aided by the same French monarchy that caused the French Revolution by resisting moderate reforms in France itself. And the newly independent USA did not think of itself as a democracy: the Constitution left it to each state to decide how it should choose its representatives in the Federal Government.

By the 1830s, electoral power had passed to average white males,. and those states which had had an established religion had chosen to abolish it. (The Constitution only prohibited an established religion for the Federal government, but in practice everyone came into line). Votes for women were legally established as part of a general wave of female rights throughout the Western world. Racial discrimination against free Afro-Americans was formally abolished after the Civil War, but was the norm up until the 1960s, and has not really ended. (The Republican Party owes its success in the last three or four decades to an influx of southern racists who used to be solid Democrats.)

The aim in 1776 and for a long time afterwards was to create a new and better Switzerland in North America. Slavery for Afro-Americans was seen as wholly compatible with this goal, and the idea was for each state to choose its own direction. But in practice, a fairly uniform social and economic order has been imposed, mainly via the US Supreme Court discovering that anything non-standard violated ‘Freedom’.

Which is why the exact definition of `Freedom’ is a weighty matter. You may have heard of the controversy about remarks made by Rick Santorum, the third most senior Senator in the Republican Party. Under current laws, you are not free to commit sodomy if you live in Texas. Of course a lot of people have no wish to do either, yet it is a clear limit on choice. But the Senator reckoned it was a legitimate law:

“The Rev. Robert F. Drinan, a Jesuit who served as a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts from 1971 until the Vatican asked him to retire in 1981, said Santorum was “dead wrong” to lump homosexuality together with incest, bigamy and polygamy in his AP interview.

“Santorum was describing the possible precedent if the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law against sodomy. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery,”.

“He said to the gays that if we allow this, we have to allow incest, That’s ridiculous,” Drinan said. “Catholics have no right to impose their views on others. Even if they say homosexual conduct is unfitting for a Catholic, they have no right to impose that on the nation.” (Washington Post, 25″ April 2003)

US law reserves a lot of matters to the USA’s constituent state. Each state has its own murder law, for instance, and laws on sexual conduct also vary a lot. It was established practice that a marriage valid in one state was valid in any state, and this meant that divorce became legal when a few states allowed it as a scam to attract visitors. But while the US did a lot to actually undermine the former Western norm, it has not lost its nostalgic feelings for ‘family values’.

Adultery is normally not illegal in US states, though it has been in the past. Incest has been outlawed by a great diversity of very different human societies, and remains a crime. Bigamy normally implies deception, but polygamy is a possible social arrangement, one which works well in some non-Western societies.

Our Western and Latin-Christian tradition is dominated by Pagan-Roman features—divorce was easy, but at any one time there could only be one valid wife (rather like the USA today). Monogamy seems to have become Jewish practice by the time of Jesus, but there were many cases of polygamy in Jewish tradition.

Islam standardised on different values from Christendom. Adultery was a serious matter, but a man could have up to four wives, each with a valid status, each theoretically equal to the others. The Chinese were different again, there might be a hierarchy of wives and the child of a concubine could be a valid and legal heir if the senior wife failed to produce a son (which greatly helped the continuity of the various Chinese dynasties).

Senator Santorum and his critics are agreed that polygamy is not a valid human freedom, the argument is over how to classify homosexuality. Religious scriptures are secondary: the Old Testament is just as strong against adultery as homosexuality, it was the mediaeval Catholic Church that decided that adultery could be winked at, while homosexuality must be stamped out as an abomination.

In Islam it was rather the other way round, homosexuality is officially forbidden, but actually allowed so long as the official moral order is not challenged. In a debate on comparative religion, the representative for Islam stated that homosexuality could only be punished if there were four Muslim men as witnesses, implying that a gay couple would have to perform sex acts in front of an invited audience of homophobes or personal enemies in order to run foul of the law.

In the USA, the Republican Party is split between the Religious Right and the Libertarians. One side says that homosexuality is not a valid human freedom, the other that it is. Both sides accept the basic idea that stopping people doing `the wrong thing’ is quite compatible with human freedom, a necessary part of

All of them talk about ‘respect for choice’. This does not however mean respecting other people as they are, it’s a matter of wishing them to be another sort of person. To be hated for what you are is not nice. But it is maybe less insulting than to be harassed to be what you can’t be, or maybe don’t wish to be. People within the Republican ranks are sort-of allowed to be gay, but also maybe not, and the ambiguity must sooner or later be resolved.

The Religious Right and the Libertarians are locked in a battle over the modern definition of the Standardised Individualist. At least one of them must lose, the two ideas cannot in the long run coexist. For both have a fervent determination to turn everyone else into a suitable version of a Standardised Individualist.

More human societies have normalised polygamy than have normalised homosexuality. In fact limitations on marriage seem like later rules, with polygamy and polyandry as the original norm. Polygamy was sometimes seen as oppressive of women, which it 14 Labour and Trade Union Review certainly could be. But that’s also true of regular marriage.

`Let us start from a dogmatic assumption that all of my prejudices are shared by God Almighty’. This is not something you’re likely to hear anyone saying. But it’s exactly what most people assume when they start talking about freedom. Or else ‘Let us start from a dogmatic assumption that all of my prejudices are shaped by Objective Truths (maybe Genetic Blueprints or Selfish Genes)’. One must allow for the ‘Rationalists’, whose mode of thinking is clearly inherited from their religious background.

The New Right is full of ‘smoke- and-mirrors rationalism’, the appearance of reason arrived at by believing some unlikely ideas. (Not so much the Holy Ghost as the Ghostly Hole, as with Adam Smith’s unproven beliefs that markets naturally find harmony and that personal profits for a rich minority will always add up to general social welfare.)

For the New Right—and indeed for many on the centre and left—there is a wonderful entity called ‘Freedom’, which does not include people freely choosing the things that shall be forbidden.

In fact all societies have categories of the forbidden, discouraged, neutral, encouraged and compulsory. Even this is a simplification, the reality is more like a continuum, and with different rules for different people. Women up until recently typically had fewer rights but also fewer demands on them. In any case, thinking about five categories for an undifferentiated population is a simplification, but sufficient to show the defect of freedom-ideology. And if you want to figure out what people really believe, look at what they do when their own interests are at stake.

Do you break a good rule, on the grounds that a good result would be achieved?

No.

It is necessary to be blunt, definite and unbending about such matters—always assuming we do really see a particular rule as a good rule. For social rules hold only when most people keep them, and when proven breaches are condemned and punished. And the best way to trash a rule which one privately disagrees with is to make breaches and exceptions in the name of more freedom.

It’s tempting and easy to say that it isn’t really freedom, when people exercise their freedom in ways you dislike. And it’s a temptations that must be resisted, because it amounts to claiming to be objectively at the centre of the universe, a denial that your own viewpoint as just one of many. Elevating your own viewpoint almost to divine status, in fact.

Some theologians would claim that a restriction on freedom imposed by Divine Will isn’t really a restriction on freedom. Like a lot of theology, it strikes me as a dishonest evasion, serious religion insists that God does have the right to limit human freedom, which is a logical consequence of the religious view. History also shows that the wealth and strength of a society depends on imposing a standardised system. This was done in a highly authoritarian fashion in Britain between the 15th and 18th centuries, with the aristocrats and the prosperous minority with parliamentary votes imposing their values on the rest of the society. Only in the 20th century did the majority of the population get the vote, and only then did the state start serving the interests of the majority. And only in the 1960s did traditional patterns of deference break down.

The right-wing tactic since the 1970s has been to play up to anarchic individualist feelings among the poor and among the working mainstream. People are flattered and tricked into thinking that they can do better as detached individuals than as part of a system. As with pensions, where people left secure publicly- run schemes in the belief that they’d do better on their own. And where younger workers remain passive and unconcerned as their employers opt out of responsibilities that used to be normal and unquestioned.

One must resist the New Right’s `nanny state’ jibe. Ask them if perhaps they believe in a ‘thug-state’, a system that has a monopoly on force but does not try to make life any better. That is the actual position of some ‘libertarians’, a state machine for police, law and the army, but let the rest go to those who can pay. But since ‘thug state’ would not be a very nice slogan to campaign under, they try to rubbish all non-thug aspects as `nannyish’.

It’s actually a contempt for motherhood, and the whole nurturing and socialising function. Nannies were the only humanised element in the highly abnormal family structures of upper-class Britons. They were paid to perform the necessary mothering role, without which a human baby cannot emerge as a functional human being. But because nannies were wage workers and from socially inferior backgrounds, this whole function was downgraded and the upper class got a totally twisted view of the world.

The authentic upper class has gone, but the New Right apes the fashion of this faded elite. Combining immense snobbery and restrictiveness with loud talk about freedom. Is freedom an entity? Or a generalisation?

In Western society, ‘our freedoms’ currently include the requirement for car-drivers to possess a driving license and display a government-issued number plates. This is never questioned, whereas the possibility of an Identity Card is a monstrous threat to ‘freedom’. Likewise there is a continuing battle on the issue of stopping drunken drivers and dangerous speeding. Speed cameras save vast numbers of innocent lives, but are seen somehow as unfair.

The logic is historic, licenses and number plates were part of motoring from the beginning and were seen as the norm. Speed limits and drink limits were new and so caused offence. Most European countries have always had identity cards and they bother no one, but Britain never did.

Every year some 3400 people die on Britain’s roads, and it’s not news. An average of 30 die on the railways, and it’s always big news, often with long closures. A relatively safe system is always being disrupted, pushing more and more people onto a much more dangerous road system—which also encourages them to think as detached and fragmented individuals, the New Right ideal.

Surely one important freedom would be freedom from media manipulation? But the media have insisted that media freedoms are essential, and defined them as an absence of government control, never mind the disproportionate effect that business interests can have on commercial media.

`Our freedoms’ are an ever-changing thing, and also arbitrary. ‘Our freedoms’ were built on Caribbean slavery in the 17th and 181 centuries, military conscription in the 20th. Also in the USA, you had the attempt to criminalize alcohol, based on Puritan belief but quite against the text of the Bible, which warns against excess but never rejects drink as such.

To claim that the Western tradition is based on freedom, you need to decide that the bulk of possible human actions are not proper and that suppressing them is not really an interference with freedom.

For most people, job security is one of the most important freedoms. From the 1950s to the 1970s, most people in Western countries count on having a job with decent money if they were willing to work to a minimum standard. But to the New Right, this was a horrible infringement of the ‘Rights Of Money’.

Libertarians also say that controls operating through ‘market forces’ are not restrictions on freedom, though the logic for this belief is unclear. They speak of ‘one dollar, one vote’, apparently seeing it as right that the rich should grab more.

New Right economics has a mental model of small producers bring products and exchange, along with crafts. But such systems always depended on a slow and protected economy. The removal of ‘unnecessary’ regulations always encourages large-scale production.

In the real world, it was government restrictions that preserved independent small production. Big corporations have successfully pushed into more and more areas, including the media, whereas ordinary people are encouraged to only worry about government power. But economists have a theory that says that this will not happen. And also that if it does happen, then it’s a good thing. Or even if it’s not a good thing, still it is inevitable.

Talk of ‘free markets’ is a deception. No one actually wants to go back to the weaker regulations of the 1920s, which produced the Great Slump and very nearly destroyed the Western system. Libertarian ideology is all very well for tricking ordinary people into accepting less, but those regulations that suit big business are retained.

Secure small business is a thing of the past. You do have a mass of insecure small businesses, a few of which may grow into big corporations (as Microsoft did, as other small computer enterprises have managed). But increasing insecurity has been the norm for everyone, and in the name of freedom.

The existing package of ‘our freedoms’ is relatively new, and of mixed origins. The current norms for sex and marriage would have been called Communist, 50 years ago, and in fact go beyond what the Soviet system ever allowed. The economic system remained a mix of private enterprise and state regulation, what used to be called Keynesianism and which was originally pioneered by Italian Fascism. But the key element of secure employment has been lost, the idea that there will always be a job for anyone with basic competence and willingness to work. The right to work would be the most important freedom to re-impose in what is always and inevitably an arbitrary package of diverse freedoms.

The right to work would be the most important freedom to re-impose in what is always and inevitably an arbitrary package of diverse freedoms.

First published July 2003.  A PDF of the whole magazine is available at https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ltur-130-july-2003.pdf.