The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
FREEDOM is probably one of the easiest and also most difficult words in social and political vocabulary. Beyond the word, freedom as an experience and human ideal creates conceptual and existential dilemmas that we must ponder.
So many wars have been fought and many lives lost in the name of freedom and its brother; liberation. Every army that comes into existence makes claims to be standing for some freedom or another related cause. Individual men and women in one way or another also make claims to be daily aspiring and struggling for some freedom.
After being alive, I think, the next important thing to a living human being is freedom, followed by its cousin, happiness. Some clever philosophers have actually defined freedom, not as related to happiness but as happiness itself. Political regimes and religious regimes of the world also live by the promise of freedom for communities and individual peoples.
Religions claim to exist for the reason that they will free the believers from their bondage to evil. Similarly, political regimes of power define their existential agenda as the cause of freeing the multitudes from this or that other tyranny and domination by other regimes and political outfits.
As a concept and an experience freedom has become so elusive and vague so much so that we need to question its reality and fundaments. So many things including some monstrosities are circulated around as freedom when in actuality they are other things. When monstrosities disguise themselves as freedom they become more monstrous and dangerous in that they can very easily be embraced and celebrated by unsuspecting victims that live on to regret the day they celebrated and embraced a monstrosity.
So important is freedom that even evil, for it to sail smoothly around, claims to be freedom or to be defending freedom. It might be politically wise for one to be suspicious of any mortal that claims to stand for freedom.
Some Clever Philosophers
In Western philosophy, Jeremy Bentham followed by his keen student John Stuart Mill distinguished themselves as clever philosophers of freedom. They came to be called the utilitarians because they valued the utilities and uses of freedom. In their argument every piece of freedom is as good as what it is being used for; because, some people can use their freedom for evil itself. People and their organisations and societies can use their power, privilege and freedom to be truly bad and evil. In that way, some thinkers have mistaken power for freedom itself because power allows the powerful to do as they please. Doing as you please, licence may look like freedom but it is a bondage to evil.
In their calculation the utilitarians claimed that freedom is the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In that sense, freedom is when the majority of people in a society are happy, and at their happiest. I find this calculation clever but unwise. It implies that a majority can seek and find happiness then forget about the minority in the political community. The tyranny of the majority is a major problem in the present world even in the so-called mature democracies that claim to provide exemplary practices of democracy for all in the planet. It is my inclination that the happiness of powerless minorities may be a true measure of what is a democratic and free regime of power. The very goodness of a society may be judged and understood from the way it treats those that are powerless and have no ability to cater for their own well-being and survival.
In other words, in my view, power is at its greatest when it is generous and kind, not cruel and mean. Power must, if it is to be great, accompanied by some glory. And glory means excellence, elegance and grandeur that can only be a result of goodness at its very magnificence. I dismiss the implication of the utilitarians that freedom can be quantified and calculated based on the number of the people that are happy. It is a mathematical approach to freedom that can only be capitalist and in many ways colonialist. Utilitarian freedom is selfish in that the many free can happily ignore the fate of the few unfree. Many tiles those that have money and political power mistake themselves for the majority and go on to be happy on behalf of the larger populations, and become truly evil until the freedom of the oppressed catches up with them.
Unfreedom as a Signifier
Perhaps, to understand freedom properly, we need to look at its very opposite, the absence of freedom. Freedom may be better known from its absence not its presence, I think. It is only those that are unfree that may identify and know freedom when they see and feel it, I insist. Those people that suffer domination and oppression, they who feel and therefore know it, are the people who can dream the dreams of freedom. Did not the exiled Jews say that it is “by the Rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, and there we wept, and remembered Zion?” Unfree and exiled in Babylon the people of Judah remembered Mount Zion; the seat of identity, history and freedom of the Jews.
For us Hannah Arendt described a deep condition of the unfreedom of those people that do not have the “freedom to be free.” Those are people that cannot access freedom even when they wish. Their state is the “state of exception” that Giorgio Agamben described well. They are people that live outside the perimeters of freedom and outside the protection of public law. People that are not free to be free are people that are on their own in the world and have to fight to be free. Many African liberation movements and political parties were formed by individuals and groups that realised that under colonialism they had no rights, they lived outside the protection of the law and were not “free to be free.” They had to fight to be free. People that are not free to be free become suicidal; they realise that they are dying surely but slowly under oppression and domination, and so they decide to die better, die fighting than watch their very existence evaporate while the oppressors enjoy the fat of the land and monopolise oxygen itself. Fighting for freedom, that is choosing to die fighting because the people who cause unfreedom kill, is the last resort of a living but oppressed people.
Unfreedom is therefore that state of suffering and experiencing oppression that makes one suicidal and reckless enough to challenge power and might. One of the greatest stories of freedom in religious literature is the story of Moses and the Israelites. It began with Moses witnessing one of King Pharaoh’s men oppressing a suffering Israelite. Suicidally Moses killed the oppressor and challenged Pharaoh in that way. Pharaoh was a dangerous king with men and women that were ready to kill for him. The oppression of the oppressor and the suicidal anger of the oppressed became the root of the freedom of the Israelites. It became such a great struggle for liberation that God himself joined it. But it was Moses the man that from his weakness but power of suicide started the struggle. Freedom fighters and fearless radicals, revolutionaries, are produced by suffering and unfreedom.
Freedom is therefore very closely connected to unfreedom. Each is the cause of the other.
The unfree want to be free, and have no choice about it. The absence of freedom is a kind of death that only those that are cowards and do not respect their very lives can live with it. Marcus Gurvey put it very well when he said, if it is true that I am built in the image of God it must be true that I must not allow any oppressor to harass the image of God that I carry in me, or I would have exposed God to insult. Gurvey tried the Moses thing. He built a whole Black Starliner ship and intended to ship back to Africa all descendants of slaves in the United States of America. Just the same way in which Moses shepherded the children of Israel out of Egypt. Is freedom, therefore a religious and spiritual good? Gurvey and Moses represented a religious and spiritualised form of freedom. For the reason that freedom is the first property of life it becomes the property of gods and creators. That is why people sacrifice themselves and their lives on the altar of freedom and for freedom.
Unfreedom therefore, is ungodly, evil and wrong. People who allow themselves to be unfree insult their creator, if we are to take seriously the examples of Marcus Gurvey and Moses. To be unfree is to die in a way. It is to expose the creator to insult. When a living human being dies of oppression a little bit of God dies. And that is the beginning of the end of oppression.
From Freedom to Liberty
Even in this short article I have belaboured the idea of freedom. Freedom is a much smaller object than liberty, much smaller in cause and in effect. Isiah Berlin, that discerning British philosopher deposited important insights on Liberty. He wrote of negative liberty and positive liberty. Positive liberty is liberty to do something while negative liberty is liberty from something. Some people are free to do what they want while others seek to free themselves from some constraints and dominations caused mainly by people who do what they want. Those are, according to Berlin, different freedoms, negative and positive. I submit that liberation combines both negative freedom and positive freedom. The liberators free themselves and others from oppression and use that hard won freedom to be free to create a new and free world for themselves and others, including those that oppressed them before.
In that important way freedom, whether negative or positive, must only be a means and not an end.
A means to the higher goal of liberation. There are freedoms all over the place, they get used and abused, it is liberation that is scarce under the sun.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Free State: [email protected].
