An unending quest

Most humans aspire to be free. This can lead to the confined liberty of a desert hermit. But, in society, freedom can only exist among equals. In the master-servant relationship neither is free, both wear the shackles of their respective situations. A citizen’s freedom comes with equal rights and duties. But enjoying those rights and accomplishing those duties freely supposes an equality of means. Leisure and income must be egalitarian.

The first to theorise freedom were the ancient Athenians. It was an attempt at adapting the ties of clan and tribe to life in a metropolis. To do this they divided space into public and private. The public agora brought together adult male citizens in a free and equal debate. At home, those same citizens became tyrants, the absolute masters of the household’s women, children, servants and slaves. Such were the limits of Athenian democracy, and later those of the Roman republic. Both would succumb to the power of growing colonial administrations. War concentrates power, permanent war concentrates it absolutely, and both cities had thrived on conquest from the start, with booty, land and slaves. It would be the cause of their decline, by hubris and overreach.

The Renaissance brought ancient notions back to life. Among them were freedom, equality and a secular vision of the world. Reformation and Counter-Reformation reacted with fundamentalism and absolutism. So another couple of centuries passed before these primal ideas began to circulate again. Meanwhile the world had changed. A circumnavigated planet had given rise to great commercial cities, precious goods and metals were flowing into Europe from East and West, and feudal privileges were withering away. The social hierarchy determined by birth and supported by religious doctrine was being trampled on by absolute monarchs and contested by adventurers and merchants. After the sombre years of religious fanaticisms, the 18^th century gave Enlightenment.

By 1800 freedom and equality had not progressed much, and had severely worsened for West Africans who were being shipped to American slave camps, and for natives everywhere subjected to the combined effects of small pox, alcohol and gunshot. But the ideas were in the air. Both had been the subjects of rowdy and vehement debates in Philadelphia and Paris, where revolutionaries were inventing new forms of government. However, neither the stable regime in the US nor the volatile one in France put an end to slavery. Finally it was Britain that took the first steps, by banning the slave trade (1809) and enforcing the ban with its almighty navy, and by emancipating slaves in all its possessions (1834). Elsewhere it took longer, France (1848), US (1865), Brazil (1888), or Mauritania (1981) where slavery still survives in a semi-clandestine manner. Abolishing slavery was a move forward, but freedom and equality were still in the theoretical domain.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries conscripted labour was used in most European colonies for infrastructure, mining and plantations. The forced labour camps of the Soviet Gulag and Nazi Stalag came later, and were replicated elsewhere with the same high mortality and low productivity. These new and very wasteful forms of slavery were possible because there was practically no cost in procuring new victims from an inexhaustible source. They dug canals, built railways, mined for minerals and harvested for free. However, by the mid-20^th century mechanisation was replacing picks and shovels. And, as constraint is most effective for simple tasks, labour camps became redundant.

Today, some two thousand years after the end of the Roman republic, the practice of freedom shows little progress. Women and children have reduced the tutelage of the paterfamilias, and not all American convicts work in chains (1), but who can pretend to exercise the freedom of equality? The wealthy few may do so in the upper chambers of power and in exclusive clubs, when domestics and aids have left the room, but never in the public forum. Or members of some communities, mostly religious, who find freedom and equality in ritual assemblies, a fraternisation that is also limited in time, space and participation. Machines have replaced muscles and memory – and may soon compete with creative thinking – all of which has profoundly modified production, whereas the institutions of power and property have not significantly evolved since the scientific and political revolutions of the 18^th century. Athens and Rome dominate now as they did then. But the ideas of democracy and republic were new and exciting for those who opposed feudalism and absolutism, whereas today it seems increasingly obvious that they need to be seriously updated.

For over a century the public debate of free citizens has been monopolised by a centralised control of press, radio and TV. Money has made opinions. Social interaction on internet is breaking that hold and has let the jinni of public discussion out of the bottle. Modern media moguls let their readers do the writing and only suggest what to buy. Digital technology is modifying society from bottom up, and digital natives are inventing a new world. This revolution can be compared to the momentous effects of printing five hundred years ago, though it may turn out to be more systemic and is certainly much faster in its propagation. However, if one follows McLuhan, the digital transformation is a reversal of the one that resulted from printing. Print was the passage from a raucous world of sound and light, of voice and gest, to the silent cerebral activity of reading and writing, from hot emotional subjectivity to cool abstract objectivity. Electronics revived audio and video experiences, and brought back the heat, but for most of the 20^th century their diffusion was centralised. The digital web has exploded that control and offers a mix of text, sound and image. Hot and cold communications are now in the hands of just about everyone on the planet. The citizen’s forum has been reinstated on a national scale. The public debate inaugurated by the Athenian city-state morphed into a debate of representatives, because the expanded nation-state could not bring together all its citizens. But the mandated representatives took power and perpetuated themselves. Representation became a farce, with gerrymandering, lobbying and the electioneering circus. Now that the digital forum is recreating a public debate between citizens, without representation and its concealed machinations, things will have to change.

Freedom can only exist among equals, citizens who have the same rights and duties, and similar incomes and leisure time. The question of equality was concomitant with the Dorian phalanx, a formidable fighting force that contrasted with Homer’s Achaean charioteers. To act as one, the phalanx had to be made up of equals, and the power of a group is greater than the sum of individual powers. This military logic permeated the rest of society. However, the public debate, where all citizens have their say, was no longer possible in the extended expanse of the nation-state that took form in the 18^th century. The freedom and equality of the agora was restricted to a “representative” assembly that governs for itself, not by and for the people. Notwithstanding the media empires, and IF nothing catastrophic happens, the tools are there for citizens to reclaim the public discourse. Technology has created an unprecedented opportunity, but a free and equal society will probably remain in the realm of Nowhere.

1. For working conditions in US jails see:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/16/sweatshop-prisons-the-civil-war-didnt-end-slavery-after-all/