The Doubter's Companion (18 page)

He was, however, what many people consider to be a man of great charm. The question is what value should be given to whether a leader is polite, happily married or good-looking? Charm, conventional wisdom says, will take you a long way. How far and at what cost?

FASHION

1. A self-destructing paradox. In order to be fashionable you must avoid everything in fashion.

2. A relatively harmless use of the herd instinct.

3. Always right. Female models have continued into the 1990s swallowing cotton balls soaked in olive oil to reduce their hunger, although in the late eighties their lives were complicated by the return of breasts to fashion. Many of the girls felt obliged to have implant operations. The result has been a striking contrast between melonlike protuberances which stick out unnaturally from whippetlike ribcages.

 Ever sensitive to the larger meaning of conflicting social trends, designers have, in effect, invented motherly anorexia. Camera images are kinder to geometry than they are to the natural line and so this fashion has been a great success. (See:
TASTE.
)

4. As demonstrated by the young boy who called out in the street when the emperor passed,
FREE SPEECH
is anathema to fashion of any kind.

FAST FOOD, PHILOSOPHY OF
   See:
MCDONALD, RONALD.

FEAR
   In light of our upcoming disappearance from the world, this is an endemic human condition. The exacerbation and manipulation of fear is used by dishonest people to gain or hold onto power.
HOBBES
made the dishonest respectable by arguing that it was inevitable. See:
PANIC.

FIRST CLASS
   Should a plane crash, those seated at the front are almost guaranteed a clean death. Their passage to the next world is eased by a decent last meal, unlimited alcohol and enough leg room to meet their end with dignity.

The middle classes sitting behind in full economy with their knees pressed neatly up against their throats know that they will have to wait longer to die. They may even be condemned to survive in some horribly maimed condition. As for the lumpenproletariat in the cheap seats at the back, they stand a reasonable chance of walking away from the wreckage in good health, thus being denied release from their vale of tears on earth.

The most galling aspect of this system is that by dying first in First Class, people whose only qualification is wealth find themselves at the head of the line for entrance to heaven or hell. And that at a moment when, given the size of contemporary airplanes, there is bound to be a crowd. See:
DEATH.

FLORIDA
   Former American state. Latin Americans are now locked in a long-term struggle with Canadians for control. The Latin Americans are driven by their need for financial and political stability, the Canadians by theirs for warmth and a place to die. The ultimate weapons of the Latin Americans are politically based para-military groups and organized crime financed by drug money. The Canadians have set up a professional hockey team.

FOREIGNER
   An individual who is considered either comic or sinister. When the victim of a disaster—preferably natural but sometimes political—the foreigner may also be pitied from a distance for a short period of time. See:
SUPERIORITY.

FREE
   The most over-used term in modern politics. Evoked by everyone to mean anything. Samuel Johnson once spoke of patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels. Evocations of what is free and of freedom have now overtaken patriotism.

This has led to a limitless series of oxymorons which have somehow become respectable: free air miles;
FREE TRADE;
the twinning of free men and free markets when history demonstrates clearly that free markets do best under sophisticated dictatorships and chafe under the limitations imposed by democracy (see:
CAPITALISM
); free love; free glasses at gas stations; free offers and in general a free ride.

The problem with this word “free” is that it has two contradictory meanings. One refers to political freedom or liberty and has an ethical value. The other refers to an imaginary state of being in which there is no effort and no cost. Freedom is thus confused with the gambler's idea that you can get something for nothing. That is why Johnson's scoundrels are attracted to it. See:
DICTATORSHIP OF VOCABULARY.

FREE SPEECH
   Not a pleasant or an easy thing, but perhaps the single most important element in any democracy, free speech is afflicted by two widely held, contradictory opinions. The first is that we have it; the second that it is a luxury.

How can you have something which exists only as an
EXISTENTIAL
act? You can declare its inviolability in constitutions and protect it with laws. You can invoke it until you are blue in the face. But freedom of speech is only maintained at sufficiently high levels through constant use.

The exhausting effort which this requires involves a willingness to listen combined with a desire to be heard. Listening means taking into account, not simply hearing what people say. And being heard means being exposed to criticism, even ridicule. That is one of the reasons our élites, who have little desire to be heard as individuals, refer to it as a luxury.

The perfectly natural reflex of those who have power is to try to limit freedom of speech. They do this in an ongoing almost unconscious manner, whatever their particular political opinions. The more structured the society, the more this happens through social convention by euphemism and
POLITENESS
and indirectly through laws and contractual arrangements which make no reference to the thing that they are limiting.

For example, employment contracts almost automatically make the employee's expertise and opinions the property of the corporation. There are also libel laws, which apply a strict interpretation of “the facts” to those areas of public debate in which the people most likely to sue are precisely those who hold back the facts. The court process puts them under no obligation to explain, but focuses on those who seek information and try to use free speech. There are vast and complex laws of secrecy which remove whole areas of public interest from the public domain. And of course there is
raison d'état
which removes the citizens' right to discussion in their own best interests.

A new method of limitation involves arguing that free speech, having been won in the absolute, can now be treated as a luxury. What people need above all, the argument runs, is prosperity. With the physical well-being and stability that brings, people have the time and energy to engage in free speech. It follows,
sotto voce
, that the more unsuccessful those in responsible positions are at running the economy of a country, the less the citizenry should use their free speech.

The “property first” argument is based on a common interpretation of Western history in which the growth of trade and industry created a middle class that began to demand rights. It is a convenient point of view in a corporate society. It reduces the contribution of the citizenry and of
HUMANISM
to a secondary passive role. Instead it is technology and the market which created the edifice. Only then were the citizenry permitted to decorate the rooms.

This is a complete inversion of Western history. Solon was produced by an ethic of public service. And it was economic failure—not success—which provoked him and the citizenry to assume greater power. Socrates and the entire Athenian democratic debating system were the product of a stable, agrarian society. It was undermined and destroyed by the trading pretentions of the empire. Our contemporary concepts of equality, which implicitly include the right to speak out, come from early Christianity and the local assemblies of Northern European tribes. The Magna Carta was not an industrial product. Nor were the linguistic popularizers from Shakespeare to Dante. Nor was
ERASMUS,
who did so much to demonstrate that clear language could be used as a form of public power. Most of our ideas about democracy were firmly put in the public place a century before the industrial revolution got seriously underway. Although the American revolution included elements of taxation and trade, the urban trading classes tended to stay neutral during the war while those on the land, rich and poor, carried the military and political burden.

If economics played a central role in the rise of free speech, the benefactor was more accurately the Black Death than the industrial revolution. The plague so decimated Europe's population that greater concentrations of agrarian wealth were a result and established administrative systems broke down.

The point is not that industrialization played no role in the creation of the democratic system. But its role was secondary. An effect not a cause. We did not proceed from economic change to prosperity to democracy in order to finish off with free speech as a sort of luxurious gold leaf to cover the rampant part of an already completed structure.

It was the difficult and determined emergence of free speech in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which allowed us to formulate our ideas of democracy. In the process those who spoke out were sometimes killed or, failing that, often imprisoned or exiled. But a conscious verbal reverberation gradually unleashed the democratic process—sometimes through reform, sometimes through explosions. It was this affirmation of the citizenry which made it possible to imagine a different kind of economy and to set it in motion.

Within the West the same sort of historic inversion can be heard every day. Our
CORPORATIST
society takes pleasure in insisting on “responsible action.” This is, in itself, an inversion of our concept of the responsible citizen. In a democracy, society's structures are responsible to the citizen who is the ultimate source of power. “Responsible action” suggests the opposite—the citizen must now limit the use of her power in order not to damage the structures in place. This amounts to the institutionalization of banalized
raison d'état.

An irresponsible person is therefore someone who disturbs convention by speaking out. These are by definition people outside of the specializations, the professions and the corporate groups. Troublemakers. In an exaggerated version of middle-class propriety, the quasi-totality of our carefully trained élites see themselves as limited in their public words and actions by their obligation to administer society in a responsible manner.

Thus the structures and the education systems of the democracies have produced enormous élites which are unconsciously but profoundly anti-democratic. They may represent as much as 30 per cent of the population and occupy most of the positions of power. For them, free speech is an indulgence claimed by marginal outsiders and a luxury which responsible people put up with resentfully and only to the extent that they must.

FREE TRADE
   An eighteenth-century theory of international economics limited by the primitive notions of what it was then imagined trade and capitalism might become.

The West has passed through and grown beyond the early industrial revolution and the high period of violent and unstable capitalism. In the process such old-fashioned methods as free trade and its alter ego, protectionism, have become increasingly impractical because of their destablizing effect on developed middle-class societies.

The tendency of those who have not evolved intellectually along with the practical evolution of their societies has been to convert free trade and protectionism into absolute abstract ideologies. Practicality can then be thrown out the window. Only a political debate of principles remains and the interests which lie hidden behind.

This ideological free trade imagines a world in which everyone benefits by specializing in their strong suits and exporting the results to each other. This idea arose as a breath of fresh air in the late 1970s, along with the
GLOBAL ECONOMY.
Of course, the same sort of argument had been put forward by Adam Smith in 1775 in
The Wealth of Nations
before being internationalized by David Ricardo in the early nineteenth century. Its moment of glory was the 1840s debate over the repeal of the British Corn Laws which protected English farmers by taxing imported grain. This was followed by a short period of what seemed to be limited success, depending on where you lived and what you produced. This in turn was followed by catastrophic market instability, recurrent depressions and widespread political violence.

The creaky old crudeness of the free-trade miracle can be seen in its obsession with specialization. Each person in a given place may not wish to devote themselves to coal-mining. They may wish to grow some wheat or research new medications, even if others in other places can do these things cheaper. Should the market be organized so that they cannot grow and sell their wheat or find the cure to a disease? The free-trade theory says yes. They must do only what they do cheapest.

But societies limited to one or two specialties are no longer societies. They are abstract production units and will suffer from the ills of overbred animals which have wonderful legs but weak lungs or a magnificent tail but no brains. Theories of generalized market-driven specialization leave everyone—in all classes—dangerously dependent on one or two goods. And the market is fickle. We can hardly blame it for that. With every shift in the patterns of market-driven production and consumption, whole societies can be thrown into despair.

We all know about the instability inherent in Third World countries dependent on the production of one or two commodities. Free trade, as presented in the last quarter of the twentieth century, aims to convert all of us into the equivalent of commodity producers.

Protectionism offers the exact opposite—the promise of absolute managed stability brought about by closing borders. In theory the result will be a cosy internal balance. But few countries are self-sufficient. The United States alone could perhaps close its borders and survive, but only if it came up with extra energy and water. Besides, few citizens want a society so managed that essential freedoms are negated.