“Freedom, that most general of negative words, looms over us. It no longer means just the absence of a few specified evils—slavery, oppression, error—or the entrance ticket to certain specified goods—attractive personal and political choices. It no longer means freedom from or to do anything in particular. It has spread itself to cover isolation from most of what gives life meaning: tradition, [community], influence, affection, personal and local ties [except to criminal and pathological groups], natural roots and sympathies, Hume’s ‘sentiment of humanity.’ Yet it presents itself as an absolute demand, a new but unanswerable moral demand.”— Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Routledge, revised ed., 1995) I am not sure if this was part of the first edition of 1978, or placed in the revised edition of 1995.
The “freedom” in question here is that of radical libertarians and their fellow travelers on the radical right who have eviscerated the notion of “conservativism” through their regressive apocalyptic-like politics of annihilation, wherein political “policies” are by design and default the privatization of public and common goods and deregulation in the name of financial and technocratic turbo-capitalism, albeit contradictorily framed in the ideological rhetoric of nationalist or patriotic exceptionalism. In other words, this snippet from Midgley’s book takes us some distance in accounting for the radical right’s singular, obsessive or maniacal, and habitual if not ritualistic invocation of “liberty,” which thus occurs untethered to any sense of moral or political need or justified wants. Its volatile, manipulative and largely inchoate meaning is acquired in the politics of the moment or event by way of evanescent yet emotionally powerful and perhaps subconscious association. What Midgley describes, paradoxically, as an “unanswerable moral demand” is in reality incoherent with regard to the obligations or imperatives of morality, indeed, it is conspicuous by its severance from morality and Liberal (and by implication, democratic) politics, its rhetorical power perhaps a result of a lingering scent from its hallowed and meaningful history, acquired at least since (and to some extent before) the European Enlightenment in general and the French Revolution in particular.
Comments