The Political Anthropology of Freedom (1) - A Note

Image credit. This image comes closest to what I was looking for: a sculptor being part of the sculpture. A vast landscape part of which are sculptors that keep chiselling away at the massif.

I've decided to rewrite post nr. 2 in my series of posts making up the chapter on "Politics" in Attempts at Liberty. I feel, it's advisable to follow up the introduction ("what is politics", "narrower and wider sense" of the term) with a perspective on the anthropological invariants of politics — this is a particular concern of mine, since I wish to discard the standard liberal notion that freedom is a state of advanced depoliticisation. She's, in fact, the opposite. For more see especially part II below.

I'm very tired today, having slept with, or rather: having been kept awake by, a long-term ECG attached to my body; thus, the following can be no more than jotted notes: 

Image credit.

Part I

The individual is a social construction, a result of social relations. He is a junction of social relations. His individualism is a point of intersection determined by the social relations that run through it. Liberty creates a framework wherein the individual is given more personal discretion to influence these social relations than in prior ages. However, even if the individual is effective in altering the social relations that circumscribe his identity and determine the character and latitude of his individualism, the options on which he may draw to mark out the profile of his personality, biography, and social impact, remain tightly interwoven with the character of the community within which he lives—more so, in important ways, than with personal traits.

Humans of similar character and temperament are likely to be entirely different persons depending on the social circumstances into which they are born — he who is a believer in the patchwork family may have been a catholic patriarch in a different age, an inquisitor instead of a social worker, a slave trafficker rather than one of the Médecins Sans Frontières ("Doctors without Borders").

Politics accounts for a large part of the impact that the individual is making on his social environment. Yet, the possibility of impacting society via political activism is conditioned by the social nature of individual conduct. Social conditions shape the individual, who, in turn, is one of the strongest influencing factors operating on social conditions.

Social relations, being an organic part, but also the corset of the individual, invite and provoke her to affect the ties linking the self to the social forces that define, constrain or enhance it. At the same time, social relations shape the context that conditions, encourages and releases her individuality, her autonomous capabilities.

How the individual and society hang together is a multidimensional issue with many situationally and historically dependent aspects; but there is also an anthropologically invariant side to the matter. And to this I turn now:   

Image credit. The individual is chiselling away on a massive mountain of whose materials he is made. The mountain is making a sculpture of itself, and the sculptors that are cut into the mountain are its collaborators.

Part II

While the development and practice of advanced forms of cognitive discernment (human intelligence) are by nature based on social activities, intelligent behaviour is nevertheless located in the individual mind, triggering personal (locationally dependent) perceptions of its effects and implications. Whereas the individual depends on social interaction to acquire, improve, and advance his own intelligent capabilities and is the central contributing agent to the common, inter-humanly connected hyper-intelligence of mankind, he is nevertheless able to differentiate himself from his reference group and other individuals by adapting his aptitude for intelligent behaviour to his personal needs and ambitions. 

He partakes in the unique cognitive capabilities of the human race by virtue of being a social creature. Yet as a social creature, he is enabled to develop cognitive individuality, that is: an ability to see himself as distinct from the community and his fellow-creatures. He is able to think differently, value differently, desire differently.

Not only does he strengthen the community by being a pliant and subservient, functionally integrated member of it, but he also enhances the community by being different, assertive and deviant, thereby adding unique features, impulses of change and vital shocks of variation to it.

There is a constant tension between the need to coordinate the members of the community and the tendency of its individual members to dis-coordinate the delicate whole by eliciting messages and conduct that are socially deviant. 

"Society", the group, the coordinating institutions, try to exert influence on the individual to align her to the needs of a concerted, functionally sufficient, and balanced order, while the individual tries to exert influence on "society" to make it accommodate her idiosyncratic visions and socially novel, perhaps as yet inadmissible conduct.

This is the fundamental pattern of politics: "society" influencing the individual by proposing and enforcing norms, and the individual influencing "society" by supporting or altering or taking advantage of the processes by which "society" proposes and enforces norms.

The conditions that make man a social being make him ipso facto an individual. In turn, as an individual, inevitably, he tends to call into question and tries to change his status as a social being.

How effective specific individuals are in this respect is a different matter—but the propensity is always at play—slowly and cumulatively, or in a revolutionary burst, embodied in small groups or a figurehead, or dispersed among millions.

Continued here.