Chapter on Politics (6) -- Pre-Modern and Modern -- Preliminary Conclusions

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Continued from here.

From Anthropocentric Freedom to Sociogenic Freedom

The politics of freedom is the art of restricting any particularistic freedom to establish a more efficient set of admissible moves in a comprehensive game of mutually compatible personal freedom.

Freedom-regarding politics is a refinement of anthropocentric freedom enriching it with restraints that enable the spread of large margins of personal autonomy to all members of the community. 

Building Effective Trust - From Violence to Peaceable Dissent

By effective trust, I mean behaviour among humans that exhibits the characteristics of mutual trust. I add the qualifier "effective" to highlight the fact that we are dealing here with trustful behaviour that is not undergirded by sentiments of trust prompted by personal acquaintance.

Building resilient networks of effective trust is the great challenge to human communities that tend toward populousness, exceeding considerably the average size of hunter-gatherer tribes.

People may fail to establish a relationship of mutual trust because they dislike one another. Equally, being strangers, they may simply not have an opportunity to build mutual trust. Yet, in a populous society they may be required to act as if they trusted each other. Many people have neighbours they do not know, share a large part of the day with collaborators with whom they interact at arms-length; we vote for strangers to rule us; we share pavements and roads populated with people who have an unfriendly disposition, perhaps being even dangerous and inclined, if uninhibited, to rob or damage us otherwise. Yet, most of the time, we behave as if we felt trust for one another.

In traditional society, custom and proximity drive trust and effective trust among its members. Indubitably, the repression of anthropocentric freedom — and thus, the impossibility of sociogenic freedom — is a dominant feature of trust building in pre-modern society. Subjugation and violence playing a significant role in ensuring a community's stability and cohesion. In small tribal groups, vitally depending on each member, the element of repression will tend to be stronger than the element of violence, except for encounters with alien groups. Such encounters tend to be extremely violent, with mortality rates a great deal higher than those recorded in modern warfare. In the face of insufficient means to build effective trust with outsiders, the choice is between avoidance or annihilation. Aliens are an existential threat, materially as well as culturally. Functioning as a group depends upon strict cultural conformity, any deviation from it calls into question the identity upon which group survival appears to be predicated.  

Politics - Pre-Modern and Modern

By contrast, in modern individualistic societies, effective trust is achieved in large measure by institutionalising orderly dissent. Every individual is a culture, if you like. Making cultures clash is inevitable. So there is pressure to turn such clashes into civilised events.

In order to contain distrust and violence, to build effective trust and ensure peaceful coexistence, politics in pre-modern societies is geared toward thwarting runaway dissent. Under such circumstances, enforcing a hierarchical, culturally rigid order is the mainstay of political manoeuvring. Societies are trapped in an inefficient equilibrium, where suppression and exploitation of the majority by a small elite of coalising holders of power (who are at the same time seekers of economic rents) is the farthest one can get away from debilitating anarchy. It is the best of all possible worlds, at the time. Before freedom emerges.

What cannot be emphasised enough is that politics—as we contemporaries of the free liberal nation states of the West take it for granted—is the very essence of freedom. Freedom is not the actualisation of some utopian blueprint or vision of, say, a market-based society, but the successful organisation of mass dissent. 

Beyond the broadest strokes by which we may indicate the contours of freedom, the meaning of liberty is indeterminate, contingent upon competitive outcomes and unknown future findings. Liberty is based on the right of every mature person to form her own image of society and the ideals that should prevail in it. It is a way of recognising the human condition that makes each one of us see the world from a different individual perspective. Freedom is the liberation of diversity of opinion. She is an evolutionary adaptation whose strength lies in exploiting the potential that harbours in a population allowed to act upon their multiple perspectives. It is incumbent upon the politics of freedom to orchestrate the raw resources of pluralism in an age that has released the individual from tribe, clan and caste, even the family; liberated it from any authority spiritual or otherwise whose credibility and absolute power depends on  incapacitating the individual's ability to question it.