human freedom – GV Loewen

Two Types of Freedom: Academic and Civil

Often confused, mainly due to the coincidence of youth matriculating from an unfree state to the relative freedom of new adulthood, academic freedom and civil liberty appear to blend into one another because the young person, in their daily rounds and as a newly freed and fully human being under the law, now steps onto campus and now steps off. This motion, normative, expected, and quotidian, gives the impression of being seamless and consistent. But all experienced adults understand that social context, when consorting with human freedom in general, is of the utmost. Every organization has its intake and internal rules. If one does not wish to conform to them, one should not join in the first place. Yet it is understandable as well, with some little perspective of years, that anyone who has been essentially unfree for the first seventeen years of their life would mistake a sudden and seemingly complete opening up of the space of general freedom in their nascent social being as the all in all. Following directly from this, the ability to speak one’s mind, no matter the issue or context at hand also appears to be a new reality and that by definition.

The actual reality is, however, that the institutional unfreedom of childhood and youth is simply loosened, not loosed. Freedom can only be had within society, as Berger notes, even though for human beings, this also means that the social order has itself, and within it, also by a more adept self-definition, the seeds of its own revolution. In short, all enduring social change comes from within. The young person, who is abruptly an outsider on two fronts – one, and gladly so, forever graduated from the unfreedom of chattel-like status in and around eighteen years of age; and two, suddenly and not by choice, someone who is looking at the adult world from the outside in, and this for a few more years perhaps – has difficulty grasping that the simplest entrance into this second world, and the one that each of us spends the rest of his life inside, is to learn the new rules of conduct and how they both open themselves onto basic freedoms whilst limiting others. The political fashions of the day serve mostly as an exercise in self-expression which is at best annoying and irrelevant and at worst a satire or parody of authentic freedom. These early experiments in a generalized freedom inevitably come up against certain limits imposed by the adult organizations, such as universities and governments, corporations and benevolent societies. Their push and pull constitutes a rite of passage for youth-into-adulthood and should not be given much credit otherwise.

But let us, before continuing, first define the two major types of freedom which are at stake and which, because of their close contiguity in the societal life course as well as the coursing of social life, become easily conflated at first glance.

1. Academic Freedom: this is a technical and professional denotation only relevant to conduct on campus and in the scholarly discourses as published and expressed in other vocational or guild-like settings, such as conferences or virtual pedagogic spaces etc. It adheres only when a student or a faculty member seeks to make a discursive statement about whatever it is in which they have an intellectual interest. A ‘discourse’ is simply the conversation, historical and theoretical, that surrounds a topic, a subject or object, a question, or an idea. Anthropology has a specific discourse, feminism another, economics a third, and so on. That they run into one another, sometimes in a salutary and sometimes in a conflicting manner, is nothing to shy away from, but is rather that which gives continued life to the conversation of humankind and its sense of what our collective brain-trust is capable. Thus, the ‘conflict of interpretations’ to borrow from Ricoeur, is the life-blood of thought itself. Academic freedom means that within each discourse, a student or professional is free to state their case as best they can, mustering this or that line of argument and evidence as the case may allow, and this is all that it means.

2. Civil Freedom: this is a much more general phrase connoting the interplay between the law, mores, custom, tradition, and the individual agency which we, in North America, so dearly prize. It frames the ‘open space of the public’, wherein the Agora-like conversation of the day, of the hour, of the moment, as well as that perennial, may take place unadulterated by the ulterior motives of specific institutions. It may seem that it is in this space where everyone becomes her own Socratic presence, but it is well to remember that just because any single institution or organization cannot, or should not be allowed to, adjudicate the content and rhetoric of this shared space, this in turn means that the entire set of oft-competing institutional suasions is very much present. It is by the check and balance of social institutions and their confrontation with personal sensibilities and individuated agency that civil freedom exists. In a word, our general social freedom is framed by the actual work of all of the aspects of society to which we belong; it is not, repeat, not the same thing as an idealized human freedom. Its very name should caution us to this regard: it is a freedom which is civil and must remain so.

Understood as discrete, it should simply be a matter of committing to memory and thence to practice, for young people, the difference between the two. More than this, one can now recognize that neither academic nor civil freedom approaches the abstraction of freedom ‘itself’ or in general. The former is solely about discourse and ideas, the latter about playing a cultural game which has within it the always-already of social change within its loosened harness. To overstate one’s case within the Offentlichkeit is to betray its collective trust. To claim that one is solely within the truth of things in a world of competing truth-claims, is to sabotage its historical force. This is what university students, for one instance, are currently engaged in, no matter what ‘side’ they have chosen to demonstrate for or against. What is lost in these mise-en-scene is the very freedom they imagine they are expressing.

This is so not due to topic or ‘issue’ – in the same way, academic freedom may be gutted by a zealotry which is in itself value-neutral; it can adhere to any discursive topic and at any time, pending wider influences – but rather to the manner of enacting one’s claims about such. There are, proverbially, multiple sides to every ‘story’, and even within our own biographies, we can never be utterly certain of our own intents, and with failing memories over time, even our own actions once committed. The worlding of the world is also not entirely known to us in the moment. It often takes a while for things to ‘play out’, to see the effects of our actions in the present. For the young person, all action seems to account for itself in the now, but anyone with a little life experience knows that this is hardly ever the case. This ‘now’ is an artefact of a consumer anti-culture which seeks to compel us to satisfy immediate need and greed, and is thus an interloper with regard to the political conversation which must be present to animate any culture, no matter how sophisticated or simple it may be. But for the newly adult person, schooled only in the now of consumption, trained only to react to a stimulus, market or otherwise, and to never either prevent or at the least consider, freedom takes on the mantle only of a commodity, however ‘priceless’ it is said to be. Generationally, it is certainly necessary that young people test the limits of their respective social bonds, for this is an important way in which we older adults may gain a larger perspective and thus join our younger peers in initiating this or that change. At the same time, what is authentic to generational interplay must at some point upshift itself into a true ‘confrontation with the tradition’, something each of us, no matter how aged and experienced, remain a part of until we finally part ways with human life itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, social theory, religion, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Some Overlooked Genres of Domestic Terrorism

The trinity of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century produced much to which we are in debt. Modern democracy, the triumph of reason, mass production are, in a word, the summa of the fruits of this still recent period of human consciousness. Each has its flaws, but it is overdone to simply restate that industry is destroying the planet, that enfranchisement has its disappointing limits, that some dreams of reason indeed produce monsters.

Yet it is the very insidiousness of such dreams that is their true terror. They overlay our society and ourselves, and thus they are most often overlooked. This isn’t a blame game, for no single person is responsible. But there are those who, upon finding themselves in groups of apparently like-minded others, fall for their weakest aspects of their specific characters, just as we as a society might do in times of wider crisis.

The pedigree of ‘concerned citizenry’ dates back to the confluence of the bourgeois coming of age, the 1820s and 1830s. This is the world of Jane Austen, of George Elliot, of Stendhal and for that matter, of Schubert. But great art has a way of hovering above the push and pull of daily life, even if, in all of its radical presence – witness for instance Muller’s famous line from Schubert’s Winterreise; ‘If there are no gods upon the earth, then we ourselves are gods’ – it subverts and overcomes the norms and forms of staid civility and ‘proper behavior’. To one’s sense is another’s sensibility, perhaps. Even so, the efflorescence of a new kind of outlook was on the make, that of the emerging middle classes. It is sage to note that even at the height of this class’s self-consciousness, say the Ward Cleaver tinged c. 1960 or so, only about 60% of American families conformed to the ‘nuclear’ ideal, an apropos adjective, given this other steadily enlarging skeleton in the post-war closet.

Not long after the institution of mass public liberal arts schooling for merchant-class children, coming in part due to the efforts of the first incarnation of ‘bored housewives’ sans internet, the separation of the mentally ill, the criminally insane, and the plain criminal by Pinel, and the inaugural feminism of Harriet Martineau, close friend and intellectual comrade of John Stuart Mill, there appeared the ‘child saving movement’. From factory to school, it represented, at base, a delay in the death sentence of wage slavery. Yet it was also the beginning of the idea that children were not mere chattel. From this point we have, more or less in historical succession, the temperance movement, the suffragettes, the fight against polio etc., including the ‘march of dimes’, and on into our own time. These latter-day saints shall go unnamed here, for wariness of their possible litigiousness, latent or blatant.

Prudence aside, it is rather a kind of possessive prudishness coupled, to use a word advisedly, with a dark desire to express sexual predation upon young people that drives much of contemporary, if overlooked, domestic terrorism. These are grass-roots movements – though some may be in receipt of public funding, shame on us – and thus differ from the sources which spawn events such as sending young people home to change clothes because their apparel was too titillating for school staff members and administrators to control their own longings. The public castigation of youth in this way is a distended and indirect form of surrogate rape; young women are the ‘special victims’ of these assaults. Perhaps the script-writers of CSI might look into these acts if only for a fresh episode. No, these grass-roots groups are not functionaries of State terrorism, as are the schools, but rather have their own agenda, which often seeks to contravene the law as it is, once again, especially in relation to youth. ‘Parents’ rights’ or ‘parental advocacy’ groups are part of this ilk, as are groups claiming they act for the ‘protection’ of children. NGO’s that are currently seeking to ban various forms of pornography fit this bill to a tee, whether or not their motivation is directly ‘religious’. More than attempting to control the freedom of youth, they ultimately seek a wider control over the freedom of all.

But these are not the only overlooked terrorists on the domestic front. We also read of yet another Olympic gymnastics coach accused of much more direct sexual assault, who promptly committed suicide when he was exposed. The easy way out, or perhaps he realized that any penalty the State might render would be too good for the likes of him. We are inclined to agree if the latter was the actual case. This is another pattern; adults who desire to work intimately with youth might well be suspect. Thus coaching and sports organizations fall also under this subcutaneous rubric of potential terrorist threats. After all, part of the very definition of terrorism includes the intent to provoke fear and cause injury or even death to regular persons somehow associated with the ideals this or that group wishes to destroy. Young people’s psyches are destroyed by such coaches, sports parents, media – both public and private – which ‘celebrates’ the accomplishments of young athletes with little enough attention paid to how they became so skilled at their respective games.

But by far the social institution that is responsible for the most per capita acts of domestic terrorism is the family itself. Ninety-five percent of child abuse of all types occurs within its bounds. This normative scene of violence is only heightened, worsened, during a health crisis that forces family members in too close quarters for lengthy amounts of time. This statistic alone puts to rest the incessant decoy of parental groups who, aside from expressing their own desires to control youth, need to provide both cover for and distraction against their ongoing prevarications of the general condition of almost all youth. Counseling programs and social work degrees that focus their curricula on ‘family-based’ solutions are also thus missing the mark, both empirically and ethically, and could be included on the terrorist list.

So, just for the sake of expositional organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, what then do we have?

1. Parent’s groups: whether shilling for greater ‘rights’, advocating for more influence in the schools – surely the most proverbial Canadian case centered round the farcical revolving door of the Abbotsford school board the 1980s and 1990s, where the province periodically fired it only to have it re-elected – or seeking to ‘protect’ children from everyone else but the most statistically real villains, parents groups retain the air of bourgeois hypocrisy better than any other genre of domestic terrorist.

2. Training organizations for youth coaching and sports, including those more informally associated with churches: A combination of the will to exert a fascist control over young people – how many times have I witnessed, even on a casual walk with my wife, some coach or official yelling at a young person, right up in their face, using a physically threatening stance? (Let’s not even speak of the parents on the sidelines) – and a patent voyeurism, given the scanty athletic gear for youth in most sports, these ‘adults’ are somewhere down the same road as the now notorious Olympic gymnastics coaches. The fetish surrounding ‘organized sports’ being somehow ‘character building’ for kids is utter nonsense. What they actually teach is competition, the disdain for the weakest link, and that bullying can be internalized and turned against your opponents. Here’s some simple advice to those with an inclination to coach youth sports; find something better to do, if you can.

3. The family: It has been two centuries of this much vaunted and now nostalgia driven NGO and it is high time it was consigned to the dustbin of a history which aborted itself at the very moment its dreams might have risen above its monsters. I’m open to discuss novel options.

No doubt this list could be extended to include Norman Rockwellian scout leaders and volunteers and ‘ gender conversion therapists’- those latter’s activities soon to be banned in Canada – but aside from that, when it comes to thinking about domestic terrorism, the usual suspects of ‘Alt-right’, Neo-Nazism et al, or the yet more rare ‘revolutionary’ groups whose heyday was the 1970s, just doesn’t cut it either in terms of actual influence or sheer numbers of persons involved. No, rather the groups and institutions listed here are far more dangerous, act to act, event to event, than anything some utterly marginal ‘ideological’ group could ever muster. The grass-roots terrorists adorn themselves with a rhetoric designed to appeal to all of us who actually practice all the things we are not supposed to practice, including in Canada, what can be called Section 43 violations. They have widespread political support, simply because it is in the character of politics to be cowardly in the face of the mob. They align themselves with the prevailing winds of ressentiment and nostalgia alike, both hallmarks of a fraudulent anxiety that seeks to assuage our deeper misgivings about how we yet provide for our children, such as we may do, on the backs of all those who cannot do the same. It is one thing to sheepishly go about one’s business and work for a better world for all, but to take the penumbra of our desires for control and lust and dress them up in the wooly-eyed vestments of both vanity and vindictiveness places us beyond redemption.

If it is the case that human reason does sometimes produce not so much monsters per se but rather monstrosities and perhaps, pace Muller, yet monstrous gods, this is not the whole story. Democracy was strengthened by the first feminist groups, children were placed on the long road to attaining fully human rights – though very few nations have yet reached this ideal – drug and alcohol abuse eventually became a topic of health discourse rather than of that moral, and various diseases were overcome. Even so, we must ask after the costs of these changes, for no ‘good in itself’ can function as a social good without addressing the entirety of each historical process. There are events which are evil in principle – the residential schools, for instance – and knowing this, we tend to desire to balance such a reality with the idea that there must also be things which are in principle nothing but good. This is, for the greatest part, simply not so. Coming to terms with this social fact, confronting those who maintain and promote underhanded desires flanked by a masked militia of neo-fascist domestic euphemisms – ‘protection’, ‘discipline’, ‘teamwork’, ‘character’, ‘family values’, etc. – and fighting back against the too-soothing directives of these NGO’s and others will in fact make our society more democratic, by way of extending an holistic human freedom to its most vulnerable members.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, education, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.