Paper given by Brendan O'Neill
INTRODUCTION
Over the past week, two stories relating to freedom have caught my eye. In the first, it was revealed that as of July all British passports will include biometric data, and eventually a computer chip containing our personal information. Civil rights groups, understandably, were not pleased. They said this was a clear case of bringing in “ID cards by the backdoor”; it was a “draconian measure”, they said, evidence that Britain is turning into a “police state”.
In the second story, it was announced that a new pilot scheme is underway in Yeovil in Somerset. Six of Yeovil’s main superpubs and nightclubs are starting to finger-scan their customers. They are asking all patrons to register their personal details, have their photo taken and submit to a biometric finger scan. All the info will then be stored on a computer -- which means that the next time a troublemaker pops his finger into the machine at the entrance to his favourite pub or club, the bouncers will know instantly to turn him away.
There was very little protest about that new initiative, no complaints of a new “police state”. Police forces around the country and the Home Office are watching how the Yeovil scheme progresses with an eye for repeating it elsewhere. And indeed, it was reported that youthful revellers in Yeovil think the scheme is a good idea and have been enthusiastically submitting their fingers to be scanned. In other words, far from protesting, they volunteered themselves to be monitored; they effectively offered themselves up as objects of suspicion who must be closely watched by local pub landlords and bouncers.
You might think to yourself, it’s only Yeovil, who cares? From what I’ve heard it might even be a sensible measure in those parts. But I think the difference between these two stories, between the passport incident and the Yeovil incident, reveals something telling about how we view freedom today:
-- It shows that formal freedoms are still debated and sometimes defended -- while informally, in our social lives, working lives and personal lives, freedom seems to be of little moment. Activists and thinkers will defend formal freedoms such as not having to carry around ID or the right to free speech -- but informally, in everyday life and everyday relations, freedom seems to have little purchase and is easily bargained off.
-- Also, the Yeovil story shows that one of the main problems today is not a totalitarian elite taking our freedoms away, but the fact that various groups and constituencies in society are initiating or going along with the constraint of freedom. Freedom today is often undermined, not so much systematically from above, but arbitrarily and with a wink and a nod rather than a written decree by a malign government. So in Yeovil, the finger-scanning plan is largely the brainchild of local landlords and nightclub owners. A major problem today is a broader culture of unfreedom, what we might call a “logic of restraint”, which permeates all kinds of situations and institutions.
-- And finally, and perhaps most worryingly, the Yeovil scheme seems to suggest that often we are complicit in the constraint of our own freedom -- we welcome, or at least go along with, measures that curtail our liberty and which very often treat us as children. One question I would like to ask today is whether one of the problems we face is that alongside the authorities having designs on our freedoms, we do not trust ourselves to be free.
FREEDOM AND HUMANITY
Different historical moments attach different value and meaning to freedom -- and in our historical moment, freedom is not valued very much at all. Today there is an emphasis on constraining freedom over celebrating it. People pay lip service to freedom all of the time, and there are often very public wrangles over freedom -- but fundamentally freedom is seen as problematic, unpredictable, possibly even dangerous, and its being eroded in numerous, often insidious ways.
How we view freedom reveals a great deal about how we view humanity itself. In more upbeat, dynamic and optimistic times, freedom tends to be given greater weight -- the balance is in favour of celebrating liberty rather than trying to rein it in and keep it under lock and key. Consider the Bill of Rights that amended the American Constitution in 1789, following the American War of Independence. That is a fiery document which guarantees the right to a free press, to free speech, to religious worship, to protest, even the right to bear arms should the state become tyrannical and have to be dealt with by the people.
What is our equivalent today? The European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into British law by the Human Rights Act in 1998 -- a turgid and sometimes unreadable document, with so many qualifications and ifs and buts that by the time you get to the end of it (if you ever get to the end of it) you’re uncertain which freedoms you possess. Where the US Bill of Rights was about restraining the state, human rights legislation is often about restraining human passions and potential conflict. The Bill of Rights basically called for the state to butt out of certain areas of human life and activity; it was an instruction to the state to mind its own business, to NOT make laws restricting freedom, to NOT imprison people without due process. Human rights legislation, by contrast, encourages state intervention into our lives to manage what it sees as our conflicting freedoms -- it encourages arbitration to balance one person’s right to privacy with a newspaper’s right to publish material about that person; one person’s right to a quiet life with another person’s right to play loud music.
The Bill of Rights was about leaving people to their own devices, trusting that they could get on with things without state intervention; human rights legislation is a device for further state intervention to manage human relations and balance liberties. The Bill of Rights implied that people were rational, capable and generally trustworthy; human rights legislation implies that we are petty, sometimes vindictive and in need of benign direction from above.
The value we give freedom reveals the value we attach to ourselves. In earlier times, great emphasis has been put on protecting and celebrating freedom of speech; the Bill of Rights said the state should make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” This was informed by a view of people as rational agents, who through free and open debate were capable of working out truth from falsehood and making an intelligent choice between competing visions.
Today by contrast, freedom of speech is continually undermined or watered down -- and these constraints are informed by a view of people as fickle, corruptible and easily led. So, the speech of racist organisations like the BNP is restricted because it is feared that they will stir the white working classes to commit acts of racial hatred and violence; the masses are seen as a pogrom waiting to happen. The speech of radical Islamic clerics is restricted on the basis that they might convince young Muslims to truss themselves up as human bombs and kill themselves and scores of civilians. Where earlier generations celebrated free speech, we view it suspiciously, because we tend to view people suspiciously.
So, our attitudes to freedom are shaped by our attitudes to each other, by the broader political and cultural climate. At times when human nature is viewed positively, as a force for change and even good, there is a tolerance of free speech and of social experimentation. Today, the opposite is the case. We could argue that the major threat to freedom now is misanthropy rather than totalitarianism. It is not that there is an overbearing and politically ambitious elite taking away our rights in order to secure its own power base, but that there is a generalised degraded view of people as corrosive and toxic, which is giving rise to new forms of censorship and restraint.
FORMAL AND INFORMAL FREEDOMS
It may seem strange to say that we don’t value freedom today. Debates about freedom are rarely out of the news. There were loud protests by civil rights groups and lawyers against the government’s anti-terror bill for riding roughshod over habeus corpus and for further restricting free speech. Newspaper columnists and opposition politicians have continually berated the government over its religious hatred law. And there are high-level campaigns against the introduction of ID cards, which, it is said, will turn Britain into a police state. To most observers, it must seem as though there is a ruthless government on one hand and defenders of liberty on the other -- and that there is a fresh and lively debate about freedom in Britain in the twenty-first century.
Formal freedoms are essential, and they should be defended to the hilt. The Manifesto Club opposes all government restraints on free speech, freedom of movement and association, the right to trial by jury, the right to silence, or any of the formal freedoms won over the centuries. However, this continuing debate, mostly taking place between ministers and commentators, about the importance of historic and formal freedoms seems to coexist perfectly well with a pretty unprecedented corrosion of informal and everyday freedom. While various civil libertarians get worked up about ID cards or the right to criticise religions, they say little, virtually nothing in fact, about the more mundane and arbitrary encroachments into our personal lives -- which, I want to argue, are often far worse than any anti-terror legislation.
Let me give you an example. This year there have been ongoing protests against the government’s overzealous anti-terror security measures but there was not a jot of protest when the government announced that it would be compiling a list of all the millions of people who work or come into contact with children. In January, education secretary Ruth Kelly announced new vetting procedures, where every adult who works with children, or whose work “offers them the opportunity of regular contact with children”, will be listed, vetted and monitored to ensure that they are not weird or perverted. Just so you know, that adds up to 9.5 million people, including teachers, school caretakers, dinners ladies, lollipop ladies, nurses, doctors, nannies, childminders, home tutors, social workers, sports instructors, priests, policemen and care workers. For good measure it also includes hospital cleaners, catering staff, those who deal with children over the phone or the internet, and those who voluntarily run local sports clubs or after-school activities. McCarthy-style, all of these people will now have their names and details centralised in the name of protecting children from what the government calls “unsuitable individuals”.
These measures to police adult-child relations are, in my view, a far graver assault on liberty than the government’s illiberal curbing of speech and association in the name of combating terrorism. Where anti-terror measures are least intended only to be temporary, to deal with a so-called “emergency”, the child workers’ list is a permanent measure. Where anti-terror measures are directed at small groups of people -- although, of course, they are often wielded clumsily and indiscriminately -- the adult vetting scheme is directed at a full one-sixth of the population. Where anti-terror measures are built on the bullshit notion that a few mad mullahs pose a threat to civilisation -- a notion easily challenged with some facts and debate -- the vetting of adults stems from the far more dangerous idea that adults cannot be trusted to care for or communicate with children. One of the most fundamental and fruitful relationships -- that between adult and child, whether in an educational or recreational capacity -- has now been poisoned by a blanket suspicion of all adults.
There are numerous examples of everyday, informal freedom being corroded in the shadow of the debate about defending formal freedoms:
-- Smoking bans -- restraints in pubs, workplaces, even the home. Children now encouraged to berate their parents, as shown in new government ad campaign.
-- The policing of patients -- doctors used by the government, midwives spying on mums-to-be.
-- Speech codes -- college campuses, stipulations on how to conduct ourselves, talk to each other, sleep with each other. Also undermines professor-student relationship.
-- Harassment codes -- increasing suspicion and wariness between work colleagues.
-- Advertising -- increasing number of guidelines on what can and cannot be shown, and when. Demands for bans on junk-food advertising -- because apparently parents cannot resist pester power.
What we can glimpse in many of these instances is that there is a broader suspicion of freedom today, of leaving people to their own devices. It is seen as undesirable, if not positively dangerous, to leave work colleagues to get along, college students to work out their personal relations for themselves, parents to care for their children, public houses to negotiate with smokers where they can indulge their filthy habit and where they cannot. We can also see that it’s not always the case that the government is removing our freedoms -- rather, various institutions and groups are limiting other people’s freedoms. Universities, workplaces and even local communities are very often at the forefront of calling for an imposing restrictions on people’s liberty. A widespread sense of mistrust has given rise to a “logic of restraint”, a desire to rein people in and keep a close eye on them -- and the thinking behind such measures is more of a problem for us, I would argue, than is the government’s overblown claims about the threat of terrorism or inter-communal violence or whatever.
Our aim is to shake up the discussion about freedom. Even those who defend freedom today, who defend formal freedoms from government intrusion, do so within very strict limits. They balk at the idea of “absolute freedom”, for example -- they will defend certain kinds of free speech but not absolute free speech; the right to choose an abortion within a certain timeframe but not any time during nine months of pregnancy. And often they are motivated by a quite conservative and undemocratic instinct. Their aim is to further formalise freedom, in fact to elevate it above the messy business of life, love and politics in order to preserve it forever. For example, Henry Porter of the Observer recently got into a debate with Tony Blair about the importance of freedom. He argued: “We need a written code which entrenches rights and the rule of law, for now and future generations, a code which may never be altered or distorted…that should be the urgent concern of all democrats.” We can glimpse a conservative sentiment here – the desire to ENTRENCH rights and CODIFY liberties. This is about turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, elevating it above the apparently grubby world of politics and debate and everyday life.
INTERNALISING ANTI-FREEDOM
So, the new culture of unfreedom, the presumption of restraint and caution, can be worse than the old-fashioned totalitarian assaults on liberty. This new culture does two problematic things in particular:
-- It encourages us to internalise unfreedom, to become distrustful of ourselves and our own judgement;
-- It formalises human relations, robbing them of their dynamism, unpredictability and easiness, and instead creating barriers between people at work, between doctor and patient, professor and student, teacher and child, even between parent and child.
This is where we can glimpse what is truly Orwellian about today. The word “Orwellian” is bandied about a lot today, and often inaccurately. The government’s anti-terror measures or ID cards or declaration of permanent war on terrorism are compared to the horrors of life under Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. But the real horror of Orwell’s dystopia was not the neverending war or the boot stamping on a human face, but rather the regulation of personal relationships, which created a poisonous climate of self-doubt and mistrust.
When O’Brian tortures Winston Smith he says: “We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.” Today we can see a similar process in the formalisation of everyday human relations both at work and at home. O’Brian says: “No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.” In the world of 1984, “it was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children.” We can this today in the way women are encouraged to report every domestic incident to the authorities and children are used to blackmail their parents out of smoking or drinking. Winston Smith lived in a world that did not trust people to be left to their own devices, and so do we.
What does freedom mean to us? It means having formal rights but also informal freedoms; it means opposing state interference in our right to speak or protest but also injecting everyday life with a new spirit of self-confidence, openness and critical questioning. It means having the right to free speech, public protest, trial by jury, and also believing that parents know best for their kids, work colleagues would get on better without a plethora of codes, and teaching and learning would flourish without the formalisation of teacher-pupil and professor-student relationships. It means believing in ourselves and trusting each other. It means challenging the contemporary idea that people cannot be trusted to know their own minds and to relate and work with others.
Anyone interested in rescuing and redefining humanism must surely begin by challenging the anti-humanist ideas that underpin the varied and myriad attacks on freedom today. By doing so, we can make everyday life more pleasant, and create the kind of climate in which become more critical and questioning and hopefully open to our ideas.