Freedom and Culture in Western Society

Hans Blokland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317798675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Critically examining conceptions of freedom of some of the leading contemporary philosophers from Isaiah Berlin to Charles Taylor, Hans Blokland explores the value and significance that freedom has acquired on our political consciousness. He looks specifically at: * positive and negative freedom * freedom of the individual * freedom and society * emancipation and paternalism * freedom and cultural politics.

1 General introduction

CULTURAL PARTICIPATION IN WESTERN LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

In our Western world, freedom is also unequally divided. Certainly, in general everyone has a constitutionally protected personal realm within which he can go his own way undisturbed by others. But the material and non-material conditions for everyone to do something with this freedom are not equal. Not all citizens of the former ‘Free West’ have the opportunity to develop their capacities fully and be really masters of their own life.

Over the last century, attempts to change this situation have concentrated on the material level. And not without success: prosperity has grown enormously and mutual differences have become smaller, even if in recent decades in countries like the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands that levelling has been again reversed. The cultural aspects of individual freedom, certainly just as essential, have received less attention. After the Second World War, for the first time various Western social institutions, political parties and authorities seriously set themselves the goal of levelling somewhat the great social inequality in the capacity to participate in culture. However, to date, the cultural dissemination policy to this end has not turned out to be very successful. This applies to the dissemination of art, literature, knowledge – of everything which makes a culture into civilization and, as shall be argued, freedom into autonomy.

Empirical research, which will be extensively examined in Chapter 7, points out again and again that cultural participation is declining in absolute figures, or at best is remaining at the same level. It would also appear that people from the lower classes are turning away from culture. Increasingly, it is the higher, better educated and salaried strata which profit from the existing art subsidies. Of current visitors to theatres, concert halls and museums, two-thirds to three-quarters have followed a higher professional or university education. Research also shows that the average time spent on reading books, journals and newspapers during the last four decades has declined sharply, and that reading has also increasingly become an almost exclusive activity of an economic and cultural elite. People with a relatively low educational level born after 1950, thus after the introduction and expansion of television, have largely abandoned the written word.

This inequality in being able to participate in culture is not an accident. Although nowadays most people have had a better education than their parents, social educational inequality has hardly declined. Children from higher milieux still have a considerably better and longer education than children from lower socio-economic classes and therefore get more opportunities to participate in culture. This inequality is not exclusive either. Research shows that a social ‘dichotomy’ within a number of Western societies has become more than a theoretical possibility. For example, paid work is increasingly carried out by a small group of people in the prime of life, between thirty and fifty years old. This privileged group have better incomes, have had higher educations, therefore come mainly from the same social milieu, make the most use of all kinds of cultural facilities and subsidies, are most often members of political parties, action groups and pressure groups and therefore exercise the strongest political influence, and they are people who still read and visit museums, concerts and theatrical performances.

In brief, it is difficult to maintain that in Western liberal democracies, since the end of the Second World War, for example, there has been or continues to be a levelling in the field of the cultural aspects of individual freedom. Even growing differences are imaginable.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM

Although the material and non-material aspects of freedom are related, the division of knowledge and culture cannot be seen separately from the distribution of work, incomes and power, this books deals primarily with the cultural dimension of individual freedom. The reason for this, as has already been remarked, is that it has received relatively little attention in politics or in scientific discussion.

A central question in the following chapters will be how governments or other institutions can make a cultural–political contribution to the development of individual freedom. This latter pursuit is not without problems. The most important question is how a balance can be found between what, in political science, are called ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom. This could be dubbed an emancipation dilemma, a dilemma because it is a matter of two significant, but also partly conflicting, values which cannot be simultaneously fully realized and which will inevitably have to be weighed up against each other.¹

Negative freedom can be defined as the area within which one can, undisturbed by others, do that or be that which lies within one’s capacity. The greater this private realm, the bigger the negative freedom. The judgement that the government has no reason to interfere in the area of culture, that the citizens are old enough and wise enough to determine for themselves what is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, or that the government can only intervene in someone’s private realm if the people involved cause damage to others, is mainly based on the negative conception of freedom.

People who, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the state does indeed have a task in the field of culture, generally appeal to the positive conception of freedom. Positive freedom or autonomy is a much more comprehensive and more fundamental value than its negative counterpart. It refers to people’s capacity to independently give direction to their lives, or be masters of their own existence. The greater this capacity, the greater the positive freedom. Isaiah Berlin, who will be extensively discussed later, states that this conception of freedom arises from the desire to be able to choose for oneself and to be able to justify the choices made by referring to one’s own ideas and goals – the desire therefore to be somebody and not just anybody, someone who is responsible for his deeds and not some object deprived of will, plaything of external forces and powers.

Negative and positive freedoms are partly complementary, partly overlapping values. One can only be master of one’s own life if one is not coerced by others to do something one does not actually want to do. Positive freedom is broader because it also includes a notion of ‘self-realization’. People must first have developed themselves to some extent if they want to take their own lives in their hands, independently of others. They must, for example, develop their judgement skills if they want to be in a position to make real choices: they must learn to distinguish alternatives, to evaluate and to choose. In order to make an autonomous choice one must, in addition, be aware of the possibilities of choice. Someone who has all his life been confronted with only ‘popular’ music has no real choice between Mozart and Springsteen.

The idea of autonomy or positive freedom is closely related to the humanistic ideal of culture, the ideal of personal development. The enlightened or autonomous person is seen here as a broadly developed personality, who is not swayed by prejudice, ignorance or habit, but consciously and with careful consideration steers his life, has resolutely taken his own fate in his hands. Both liberals and socialists, social democrats or radicals share this cultural ideal, partly based on the Enlightenment. However, there are differences of opinion on the answer to the question of how society must be organized in order to be able to realize this ideal. These differences of insight are to a high degree the result of a deviating image of man. More than socialists, liberals think that the individual is independently capable of developing his talents. In general, liberals regard the social environment as a potential threat rather than a stimulus to this development, and they therefore emphasize the negative freedom of the individual. Thus the concept of freedom is ultimately intended as a barrier against the people, against the community and the state, and is therefore anti-social in character.

The positive conception of freedom has been mainly formulated in socialist circles. Socialists have a more social image of man and assume to a higher degree that individuals can only develop in interaction with others. The development of intelligence is an illustration: the boundaries of what is possible are genetically determined, but these are rather far apart. The degree to which the potential present is developed is ultimately dependent on the stimuli received from the environment.

There is therefore an important difference between positive and negative freedom, which is relevant for cultural policy. It could be stated that negative freedom relates to the question of whether one can make possible choices undisturbed by others, while positive freedom is also concerned with the question of whether people really have anything to choose, whether they thus possess real choice alternatives and are competent to make a reasoned choice. Related to this is the fact that, in contrast to its positive counterpart, no one is needed for negative freedom. One preferably enjoys one’s privacy on an uninhabited island. However, according to the advocates of positive freedom, one can only become autonomous with the help of others, in a culture.

THE EMANCIPATION DILEMMA

We will return to the idea of social cultural dissemination. Its goal is not to impose a specific ethical or aesthetic preference on people. The goal is to create the situation in which they themselves can make real choices, choices thus on the basis of a reasonably developed capacity for argued choice and a reasonable knowledge of the available alternatives. This capacity and this knowledge can only be acquired through learning. The acquisition of culture, and with it of positive freedom, is therefore closely connected to enculturation, education and socialization. A society and its political frameworks can play an important role in this.

It is obvious that this learning process, which is indispensable for the development of individual autonomy, is at loggerheads with the equally significant negative freedom of the individual. While it is true to say that, to a high degree, a person only develops due to the education or stimuli which they receive from their environment, this development first becomes valuable if they are also allowed the freedom to do something with it. The inevitable balance between positive and negative freedom, which will have to be made by every serious socio-political theory, can be regarded as the first dimension of the emancipation dilemma. This dimension concerns not only children, of whom it can be assumed they have not yet developed any fixed personal preferences of their own and that their capacity for judgement leaves much to be desired, it also refers to adults (in so far as these can be identified) who do not look to their own initiative for alternatives which, if they were familiar with them, they would possibly highly esteem.

Cultural critics who want to bring about change in the current cultural preferences, seen as objectionable or not optimal, run up against the concomitant problem, which can be seen as the second dimension of the emancipation dilemma. If the first dimension refers mainly to an individuality with personal preferences which have yet to be formed, with the second dimension, which can only be distinguished analytically from the first, it is a matter of already existing preferences. The relevant problem is shared by numerous socialists, Christian Democrats and social liberals, who in Anglo-Saxon countries are often designated ‘radicals’ and in the countries of the European continent generally as ‘progressives’. The critics concerned emphasize that the values, objectives, desires and preferences of the individual are to an important degree a product of the social interaction with his environment. The authenticity, and thus the status, of the individual preferences can therefore be placed somewhat in perspective. It can be supposed that the individual has developed preferences which, while they are perceived personally as valuable and original, are in fact a casual, if not objectionable, product of the existing social structures and are not optimal: there are wishes and accompanying gratifications which the individual would prefer to current preferences, if familiar with these alternatives. That the latter is not the case, can have two causes. First, the parties concerned can possess too little of the volition required for autonomy to look for alternative truths, to research whether what has been assumed up to now is indeed true, good or beautiful. Second, and perhaps partly explanatory of this, the existing social structures and processes can make it impossible, to a greater or lesser degree, for the people concerned to come in contact with alternatives. These can also lead them to the conviction that their present preferences are the only ones imaginable. Certainly, if one is not in agreement with these cultural preferences, it is an obvious step to want to change the mechanism of socialization which is operative in every culture. The will for this has always been present in radicals or progressives (and equally in conservative circles). For example, within socialism and schools such as the Frankfurter Schule there has always been an aversion to mass culture, a culture which is seen mainly as the product of the culture industry and which is mainly prominent through its flatness and uniformity.

Because progressives are generally inspired by democracy and egalitarianism, they must wrestle with a dilemma with regard to the regrettable preferences (cf. Benton 1982). This consists of the following: on the one hand, on the basis of the democratic principles subscribed to, they want to respect the existing individual preferences, while, on the other hand, they consider these objectionable, due to content or for reasons of the way in which they have been created, and want to change them. On the one hand, therefore, they assume on the basis of the negative conception that people should be treated as responsible beings, who are capable of making autonomous choices or developing preferences, and should not be patronized in this. However, on the other hand, they refuse to take completely the existing preferences as starting point, as this has the drawback that one is uncritical with regard to the manner in which these have come into being and one can never create the situation which, if they were familiar with it, the people concerned would prefer to the existing one. The question is, once again, how can this preferable situation be shaped without limiting unacceptably the negative freedom of the individual.

To resume: if one wants to disseminate culture and, at the same time, wants to take negative freedom seriously, then it is not possible to implement changes without the permission of those who are affected. However, it will not be easy to obtain this agreement due to the existing cultural preferences. If no changes are enforced, this means in practice accepting the continuing existence of a social system and the cultural preferences and needs produced by it, which are hard to square with the ideals of development cherished. It is, therefore, one thing or the other. If one wants to completely respect the sovereignty of people’s cultural preferences, then it will be necessary to temper ambitions with regard to the self-development or cultural emancipation of large parts of the population. If, on the other hand, we want to make the development of the many possible, then it will have to be accepted, as Benton has remarked (see Chapter 5) that this cannot always be self-development.

The task of getting out of this dilemma as unscathed as possible can be regarded as one of the most important cultural–political problems. In this book, an attempt is made to contribute a solution to this. The development of a conception of autonomy will be made, which makes it possible to break out of the dilemma described above in a manner acceptable to the parties concerned. A central question in what follows will therefore be how government, in particular, by implementing a cultural policy, can contribute to enlarging the positive freedom of the individual, without his negative freedom being unacceptably limited.

Before we start on all this, however, some attention will first be devoted to the nature, possibilities and sense of a political scientific analysis of concepts like freedom and autonomy. Considering the scepticism which has developed in our age in this field, this would not appear to be a superfluous exercise. Also, the objective of this study can be more precisely defined.

ESSENTIALLY CONTESTED CONCEPTS

Terms like ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, ‘emancipation’, ‘democracy’ and ‘paternalism’ form what the American philosopher W. B. Gallie has entitled essentially-contested concepts (1956: 169). The meaning of these concepts can be endlessly discussed because they are always defined in the context of a particular Weltanschauung. If this view is changed then these concepts also acquire other meanings. Weltanschauungen are inevitably based on a number of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical assumptions which are always contestable. The debate about their ‘correct’ meaning, therefore, always remains open just like the debate on and between the various world views.²

The idea that concepts can never be given uncontested contents, is naturally also contestable in itself. According to Gray, it is an expression of ‘the pluralist, morally and politically polyarchic character of contemporary Western liberal society’ (Gray 1977: 337). People with a monist philosophy, who are of the opinion that there is a recognizable order in the cosmos, will not want to subscribe to the thesis concerned. The process of rationalization is taking place within our Western culture, notwithstanding, and unlike what Gray suggests, these people are probably still in the majority. Many amongst us, usually unconsciously, assume that each word has only one correct meaning. Richard Rorty writes that they believe ‘in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities’. The intellectuals who do not share this belief are according to him ‘far outnumbered (even in the lucky, rich, literate democracies) by people who believe that there must be one. Most non-intellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 General introduction
• 2 Isaiah Berlin on positive and negative freedom
• 3 Freedom of the individual
• 4 Freedom and society
• 5 Emancipation and paternalism
• 6 Final balance and synthesis: freedom and cultural politics
• 7 Cultural policy
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography: Freedom and autonomy
• Name index
• Subject index