Battle in Print: On Liberty in America

Alan Miller, 30 September 2006

When New York, ‘the city that never sleeps’, passed a ban on smoking in all public places a couple of years ago, I was deeply disappointed. I had always thought of New Yorkers as particularly vocal in their passion for civil liberties and their right to enjoy their private lives uninhibited by meddling bureaucrats.[1] Nowadays, however, it has become increasingly popular – and respectable – to target personal behaviour and create legislation preventing certain types of activity. Increasingly, this is promoted using a new kind of morality-speak, which claims to make a healthier/safer/nicer (substitute at will) world for the majority of people.

This reordering of John Stuart Mill’s concept of utilitarianism – the maximisation of good for the greatest number of people – has come to embody our times. Politicians, bereft of any substantial ideas for how to improve or change the world that we live in, have been reduced to tinkering with our personal habits. Even more infuriatingly, they do so erroneously, on the basis of suggesting it is to protect the civil liberties of the majority of people in society. So whether it is to prevent the (unproven) harm of ‘passive smoking’ or to reduce the risk of paedophilia, it seems that there is an unhealthy desire to legislate across our private lives to regulate society’s behaviour. Often this is presented as a benevolent act to protect decent folk.

Thirty years before Mill was born, America achieved its independence from the despotic rule of Britain. A triumph of personal and collective struggle by a new and dynamic nation, which drew on the ideas and writings of Enlightenment thinkers, America came to represent, much in the same way that Revolutionary France did, the values of liberty, fraternity and democracy. While there clearly were shortcomings to the aspirations for freedom for all, it was generally accepted that citizens could be relied upon to have the capacity to act and shape society in a positive way. Liberty stood for the formal freedoms and rights that were to be universal across society for the first time in history. While not all enjoyed these rights immediately, the precedent had been set to make this possible.

American identity has been shaped significantly by the idea of liberty. In the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’, there is still a strong belief in various sections of society with regard to the sanctity of freedom for individuals and the ability to pursue prosperity and happiness unencumbered.

However, it has become increasingly popular to call for limitations to our personal freedoms. Unfortunately, some of the most vocal promoters of this censorious climate originate from what was understood as the ‘left’ in politics. Having failed to win the arguments and battles, they resorted to arguing for bans and stifling opponents’ free speech. Much has been said about the ‘Culture Wars’ in America. Significantly, many of the protagonists who would have associated themselves with a liberal perspective ended up being supporters of gagging orders – whether to silence racists and homophobes or to outlaw gun ownership.

True liberty is dependent on the belief that people are worthy of being treated as rational subjects with the capacity to make up their own minds about things. It is also premised on the belief that they are worthy of being trusted to act rationally. This belief comes under increasing pressure in our mistrusting times. We seem to be more prone to think about our fellow citizens as problems rather than colleagues or compatriots. The adage that we once casually warned our children with, ‘Don’t talk to any strangers’, has been turned into a mantra that we need fear others in society, a corrosive ‘stranger danger’.

Perhaps one of the most striking areas where this is true is in our dealings with children. Not so long ago, there was an expectation that adults could rely upon one another to ensure that they informally regulated behaviour. So, if children were petulant and rude, we would expect other adults to say something – and we would support them when they did. Today, in my local park on the West Side of Manhattan, signs at the children’s playground where I take my son to play declare that ‘no unaccompanied adults are welcome’. It seems that all adults are to be regarded as potential predators, hovering and waiting for the opportunity to hurt our loved ones, rather than as generally responsible members of society.

When children see adults treating one another as would-be violators, rather than members of a community that has shared interests and aspirations, they learn a very important lesson. The message is that we cannot rely upon one another to get things done in the world. We should fear each other and be cynical about others’ motives. Alongside this trend, the increasing supervision of children by adults in every area of their lives has the problematic upshot of discouraging experimentation by kids with their peers. Then again, who wants experiments when they could have ‘unintended consequences’? This is also why fewer and fewer parents send their children off to summer camp each year (Warner 20.7.2006).

The ‘better safe than sorry’ mantra is tossed around so often today that it has become a kind of truism. Yet if we interrogate the principle of whether it really is better to reorganise our lives around the fears of the most dreadful outcomes – and statistically highly improbable outcomes at that – we begin to notice a very worrying trend. We are becoming obsessed with viewing the world as a series of dreadful scenarios that we are at risk from. These doomsday scenarios are likely because humans, we now believe, are mad, bad, dangerous and out of control.

On college campuses across America and Europe we have seen a steady rise in the regulation of personal behaviour. Whether it be a reinterpretation of harassment – a wandering eye or a random remark – or codes of behaviour and speech, the message is clear and simple. Ordinary people are not to be trusted. We need bureaucrats and legislators to tell us how to conduct ourselves. The idea that a college is a place to inspire young people intellectually – with ideas that may shock and even repulse some – to help them develop into mature and critically minded individuals that can make up their own minds about the world, seems to have lost popular support. Outside of the classrooms, students are regarded as older children who require ongoing codes of conduct so that they do not traumatise one another with ‘inappropriate behaviour’. Where once we believed students could develop ideas to make a better world, now we see them as another vulnerable group.

While many oppose the excesses of the demands for ‘political correctness’, many of its principles have nonetheless become embedded in everyday life. Co-workers are advised on how to relate with one other, with strict codes of conduct on how to behave, as though they were not adults capable of dealing with the daily flow of work. A morbid preoccupation with litigation has further consolidated this ugly trend, so that we often end up second-guessing every social experience and shaping our language and activity.

While all of the above is cause for grave concern, perhaps the worst indictment of our new climate of mistrust and misanthropy is how we have come to perceive ourselves as the problem within society and history, rather than the potential solution. In On Liberty, Mill argued strongly against interfering in matters of personal conduct unless they adversely affected society. He describes the increasingly puritanical decrees on the theatre, dancing, public games and music, as well as the temperance movement:

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong (Chapter IV ‘Of the limits to the authority of society over the individual’).

Here Mill nails the problem of our own times. Increasingly, we see even going to the local pub as a hazardous endeavour involving risky ‘vertical drinking’, date-rape or binge behaviour. It is a terrible travesty that two hundred years after his birth, with all the advances of modernity, we have become so worried with ourselves, so lacking in conviction when it comes to our fellow humans, that we increasingly refer to ourselves in the vernacular of therapy-speak. More and more we define ourselves somehow as ‘damaged goods’ in need of counselling and help from third parties. The Enlightenment view of a universal humanity that could exercise rational self-interest has been overshadowed by a darker view of humanity. Where once we valued stoicism and bravery, now we applaud the status of victim and are strongly encouraged to gush out our innermost feelings at every turn. Rather than being seen as robust individuals, society increasingly views humans as in need of care of some kind. Here, it seems, we again need to popularise Mill’s enthusiasm for personal liberty as well as liberty more broadly in society. After all, as he concludes so fittingly:

...a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished (Chapter V ‘Applications’).

Here is to turning the tide against doom-mongering. The first port of call must surely be to insist that we begin to regard people as decent, rational and responsible. That will be the first step in rekindling our belief that humans have the potential to do truly great things.

Alan Miller is co-director of the NY Salon

 Footnotes

[1] It is worth noting that while the smoking ban was promoted entirely on the basis of junk science, i.e. it was a danger from the point of view of ‘second-hand smoking’, there have been no peer-reviewed epidemiological trials that have corroborated this. See also the information at http://www.davehitt.com/facts/badforbiz.html

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