Love in the Age of the Evil Freedoms
They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what
you represent. What you represent to them is freedom. That’s what it’s all
about all right, but talking about it and being it: that’s two different
things. It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the
marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free because
then they’re going to get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that
they are. They’re going to talk to you about individual freedom, but when they
see a free individual, it’s going to scare them. It makes them dangerous.
- A lawyer’s words of wisdom to his hippy friends in
Easy Rider (1969)
 |
| Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider |
Joshua Oppenheimer’s surrealistic documentary film The Act of Killing follows a group of aging Indonesian gangsters who define their creed as the desire to be “free men.” They explain to the director that “free man” is indeed synonymous with “gangster”. The other notable thing about these men, aside from their freedom, is that forty years earlier, in 1965-66, they killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in their government’s war against communism. Because this elimination of communism was fomented, assisted and approved of by United States government, the genocide of one million people was never condemned, prosecuted or commemorated by the “international community” and its media organizations, although it does occasionally get a mention as an “outbreak of mass violence” and other such euphemisms.[1] By the early 21st century, the Suharto regime in Indonesia was gone, but the killers were still in positions of power, thus there was no movement within Indonesia to make the nation face up to its past. Joshua Oppenheimer expressed how he felt while making his film: “… it’s as though I am in Nazi Germany 40 years after the end of the Holocaust, and it’s still the Third Reich, the Nazis are still in power.”[2] He might also have said that it was just like living in North America while the people who “settled the continent” and fought communism in Asia were still in power and proud of everything that “had to be done to win the cold war”.
The genocidaires portrayed in the film were
intelligent and sophisticated in a banality-of-evil sort of way. They read the
newspapers and knew about the war in Iraq and the UN tribunals for Rwanda and
Yugoslavia. Their desire to be free men was completely ordinary and
understandable, yet forty years after the murders they still justified the
killing of communists as a necessary defense of their freedom—in their case the
freedom to corner the local business in scalping movie tickets or shaking down
Chinese merchants for protection money—which they are shown to still be doing
in the present day.
The American and French revolutions, with their
exaltation of freedom and liberté established the forms of liberal
democracy that rule the world, yet still the masses of people living under and
upholding this system fail to see the deep contradictions of freedom revealed
by the genocidaires’ commitment to being free men.
One has to go back to a time before the neoliberal
order became entrenched, to Easy Rider in the 1960s or to philosophers
like Karl Polanyi in the 1940s, to hear nuanced discussions about the
contradictions inherent in any economic system dedicated to freedom. David
Harvey summarized Polanyi’s thoughts about freedom in his book A Brief
History of Neoliberalism:
____________________________________________________________________________________
In a complex society, [Polanyi] pointed out, the
meaning of freedom becomes as contradictory and as fraught as its incitements
to action are compelling. There are, he noted, two kinds of freedom, one good
and the other bad. Among the latter he listed “the freedom to exploit one’s
fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurate service
to the community, the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used
for public benefit, or the freedom to profit from public calamities secretly
engineered for private advantage.” But, Polanyi continued, “the market economy
under which these freedoms throve also produced freedoms we prize highly.
Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of
association, freedom to choose one’s own job.” While we may cherish these
freedoms for their own sake,”—and, surely, many of us still do—they were to a
large extent “by-products of the same economy that was also responsible for the
evil freedoms.” Polanyi’s answer to this duality makes strange reading given
the current hegemony of neoliberal thinking:
The passing of
[the] market economy can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented
freedom. Juridical and actual freedom can be made wider and more general than
ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few,
but for all. Freedom not as an appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the
source, but as a prescriptive right extending far beyond the narrow confines of
the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself. Thus
will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedoms
generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all.
Such a society can afford to be both just and free.
Unfortunately, Polanyi noted, the passage to such a
future is blocked by the “moral obstacle” of liberal utopianism (and more than
once he cites Hayek as an exemplar of that tradition):
Planning and
control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private
ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No society built on other
foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation
creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers
are decried as a camouflage of slavery. [3]
The idea of freedom “thus degenerates into a mere
advocacy of free enterprise,” which means “the fullness of freedom for those
whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of
liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic
rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property.” But if, as is
always the case, “no society is possible in which power and compulsion are
absent, nor a world in which force has no function,” then the only way this
liberal utopian vision could be sustained is by force, violence, and authoritarianism.
Liberal or neoliberal utopianism is doomed, in Polanyi’s view, to be frustrated
by authoritarianism, or even outright fascism. The good freedoms are lost, the
bad ones take over.
Polanyi’s diagnosis appears peculiarly appropriate
to our contemporary condition. It provides a powerful vantage point from which
to understand what President Bush intends when he asserts that “as the greatest
power on earth we [the US] have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.”
It helps explain why neoliberalism has turned so authoritarian, forceful, and
anti-democratic at the very moment when “humanity holds in its hands the
opportunity to offer freedom’s triumph over all its age-old foes.”[4]
It makes us focus on how so many corporations have profiteered from withholding
the benefits of their technologies (such as AIDS drugs) from the public sphere,
as well as from the calamities of war (as in the case of Halliburton), famine,
and environmental disaster. It raises the worry as to whether or not many of
these calamities or near calamities (arms races and the need to confront both
real and imagined enemies) have been secretly engineered for corporate
advantage. And it makes it all too clear why those of wealth and power so
avidly support certain conceptions of rights and freedoms while seeking to
persuade us of their universality and goodness. Thirty years of neoliberal
freedoms have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined
capitalist class. They have also produced immense concentrations of corporate power
in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing (for
example Wal-Mart). The freedom of the market that Bush proclaims as the high
point of human aspiration turns out to be nothing more than the convenient
means to spread corporate monopoly power and Coca Cola everywhere without
constraint. With disproportionate influence over the media and the political
process, this class (with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the lead) has both the
incentive and the power to persuade us that we are all better off under a
neoliberal regime of freedoms. For the elite, living comfortably in their
gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place. As Polanyi might
have put it, neoliberalism confers rights and freedoms on those “whose income,
leisure and security need no enhancing,” leaving a pittance for the rest of us.
How is it, then, that “the rest of us” have so easily acquiesced in this state
of affairs?[5]
_______________________________________________________________________________________
The problem of getting free becomes even more
complex when one realizes just how deeply the economic order has penetrated all
aspects of culture and private life. We live in a world where dating apps like
Match Group (owner of Tinder) have market values of $4.8 billion,[6]
and these apps are just the continuation of changes that started with the rise
of modern capitalism in the 19th century. Romantic love and marriage have been
commodified to a degree that most people would prefer to ignore. The radio platform
France Culture interviewed anthropologist Francois de Smet about his
book Eros Capital,[7]
and posted this summary of the conversation on its website:
Sex for
resources: what if this demonized exchange, stigmatized and thought to involve
only prostitutes and sugar babies, was in reality the foundation of all
romantic relationships? This is the essence of the theory of econo-sexual
exchange, a theory which states that with the rise of bourgeois marriage there
was only a difference in amplitude but not in the nature of relations.
Today, emotions
exist in the marketplace, sustained by the dominant cultural model that has
capitalized on the nature of Homo computantis, a species that never
fails to exploit its own kind. The Internet completed this process of
marketization by turning us all into actors in a permanent market, at the heart
of which the individual evolves as both customer and product. Money and intimacy
are fundamentally linked, but we are perpetually invited to pretend that this
is not the case. Our era is now characterized by a giant denial of human nature
and of the venal aspects of love. This denial requires two apparently
contradictory attitudes: the denigration of prostitution and the elevation of
love as the ultimate religion.
Why did love
never stop being a commodity? Eros and capital go together. The philosopher
Francois de Smet discusses his recent book, Eros Capital: The Laws of the
Market for Love. According to de Smet, if love is an ideal, it has also
become one of the cornerstones of capitalism. How could it be free of the laws
of the market?
We cannot discriminate in most domains, but we can discriminate in love. This is expressed sometimes as “sexual liberty.” Love is not as pure as we would like to believe, and to gain emancipation and equality, we rely more on our genetic heritage than our cultural heritage. In the end, love is a disguised econo-sexual exchange, rarely recognized as such, with its winners and losers. We’ve hypostatized the notion of love, enshrined it in our culture and turned it into a place of refuge. To get out of this deceptive situation, we have to recognize this reality, face our human nature and adapt our culture into new ways of living together.[8]
In the interview, de Smet stressed that sexual
liberty became a double-edged sword. With the rise of industrialization and
urbanization, young people were able to leave their villages, go to the big
city, and attempt to rise in social status through marriage. Traditionally,
their marriage options had been limited to a few eligible locals, and decisions
were controlled by relatives and religious customs.
In the new freedom of the city, men had to gain wealth
and status in order to make themselves appealing to women while women were much
more able to, but also confined to, trading on their genetic endowment. In this
market, individuals were free to make their choices with extreme prejudice. No
one wants, and no one should want, affirmative action policies enforced in the
personal sphere of life, but one can’t deny that millions of similar private
choices have political consequences. In recent decades women have attained more
in education and professions and thus can also leverage these qualities in
searching for a mate. Overall, the move to the city became like a trip to a
casino in which a great game of life is played out during one’s prime. The
evolution of marriage into this econo-sexual exchange has turned marriage into
the means by which class divisions expand and solidify through assortative
mating. Even though powerful romantic feelings and commitments may be sincere and
may be what is consciously experienced, the cold calculations and economic
advantages involved are present and may be suppressed or denied.[9]
The normalization of this reality penetrates all
facets of culture. Just consider the classic 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail
for how it portrayed the mating market when society was turning from the dating
the old way, through the real-world physical presence of the other, to dating
the new way, through textual exchange in the physical absence of the other. The
female protagonist has decided to look for love through email chatrooms during
a time of her life when her economic survival is at stake. Her small bookstore
is threatened by the construction of a mega-bookstore in her neighborhood. The
owner of the mega-bookstore chain becomes her nemesis in real-world encounters,
but unknown to both of them is the fact that they have anonymously become
attracted to each other through email exchanges in which they have used
pseudonyms. When they finally find the courage to meet in person, the heroine’s
face registers angry tears, but she quickly overcomes her contradictory
feelings and surrenders by declaring “I
wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.” Did her love arise
from the ethereal textual exchanges about their philosophies of life, or from
their mutual physical, adversarial presence—from voice, mannerisms, and gestures,
as well as from observations of how the other interacted in society, and, most
significantly, who they were in the social hierarchy? I thought at the time I
first saw the film it would be interesting to change the setting to occupied
Paris in 1942 and have the heroine exchanging anonymous letters with a Nazi
officer. The final, “freely-given” submission to the powerful male in the
social hierarchy would be no different. The final irony of the story, clear in
hindsight twenty years later, is that we know the mega-bookstores soon came
under siege from Amazon and had to close branches just like the small stores
they had displaced.
All of this raises intriguing questions about what
we want when we say we want to be free. Referring back to Polanyi’s writing: could
the passing of market economy become “the beginning of an era of unprecedented
freedom”? How would our most private and personal decisions be affected by the
elimination of economic insecurity and anxiety about social climbing—if freedom were not “an appurtenance of
privilege, tainted at the source, but [were rather] a prescriptive right
extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the
intimate organization of society itself”?
Notes
[1]
Peter
Dale Scott, “Still
Uninvestigated After 50 Years: Did the U.S. Help Incite the 1965 Indonesia
Massacre?” Asia Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 31, No. 2, August 3,
2015.
[2]
“’The
Act of Killing’: New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders
Re-enacting Massacres,” Democracy Now,
July 19, 2013.
[3]
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press Second
Edition, 2001, first published in 1944).
[6]
Steve Bertoni, “Tinder Hits $3 Billion Valuation After Match Group Converts Options,” Forbes, August 31, 2017.
[8] “Pourquoi l’amour n’a-t-il jamais cessé d’être un
marché? (Why did
love never cease to be a market?)” France Culture, February 1, 2019.
[9]
Claire Cain Miller and Quoctrung Bui, “Equality in Marriages Grows, and So Does Class Divide,” New York Times, February 27, 2016.
No comments: