Towards the total state? Freedom at risk from left and right

Totalitarianism has been a cultural bugbear in the modern age. Its implications have been explored particularly in literature (by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell) and film (THX 1138, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Minority Report.) The danger seemed to have receded with the collapse of the Soviet Union towards the end of the 20th century, but in more recent times it has raised its head again in alarming ways. These include the rise of the far right, as well as technological developments in the digital sphere, which embody alarming prospects including the vanishing of privacy. The issue of the erosion of human freedom has become crucial with the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Russia, and its knock-on effects of war and destabilisation.

The basic issue concerns the role of the state, and the tendency of the state to take control of the lives of its citizens. A key concern is the social polarity that exists between academic specialisation at one end of the scale, and mass political ignorance on the other, which makes the democratic system potentially unviable. Democracy needs an informed electorate in order to function properly.

Adding to the problem is that the goal of freedom tends to be sidelined in political discourse, particularly on the left where equality is emphasised at the expense of freedom.

Equality in its turn is sidelined by the focus on identity politics, which – bizarrely - leaves the field open for the far right to pose as defenders of freedom and civil liberties.

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“Woke” culture with its restrictions on free speech is sometimes cited as the bearer of a nascent totalitarianism, but this may be somewhat exaggerated. Youth culture, which tends to see things in terms of black and white, has always contained an element of intolerance: consider the cultural revolution of the 1960s in China, and its echoes in the West. Nevertheless, the values of freedom of speech need to be vigorously defended.

Perhaps the greatest danger of “cancel culture’ is that it gives ammunition to the political right, which poses counterfactually as a defender of freedom.

Attempts to politically define the role of the state extend from those of anarchism at one end of the scale, to fascism at the other. Key issues involve the relationship between social class and the state, the nature of the state itself, its claim to moral authority, its relationship to human freedom, and its tendency to slide into totalitarianism. The most urgent underlying question is: how can freedom and order be balanced, while the opposite tendencies to tyranny and anarchy are avoided?

The tendency of the state to slide into totalitarianism, examined decades ago by the key thinker Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, has been illustrated by responses to the recent pandemic, which greatly increased the coercive role of the state over the lives of citizens.

The ideas of Giorgio Agamben are also fundamental in regard to the modern era, in a situation where public safety has tended to trump freedom. Agamben’s notion of the suspension of civil rights with the imposition of a “state of exception,” and the reduction of human life experience to the status of “bare life,” are particularly compelling in the context of the recent pandemic and related counter-measures.

In regard to the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century, Zygmunt Bauman cites the development of the “gardener state” as a paradigm of totalitarianism, whereby the state aims to foster the development of what is regarded as desirable human life and discard the rest, in the way a gardener separates plants and weeds.

Both left-wing and right-wing politics currently pose dangers to freedom: the left insofar as it favours the bureaucratic, centralised socialisation of the means of production, and the right as it argues for illiberal social values and – at the extreme – for racism. However, populism in some of its manifestation calls for more democracy rather than less, and this call should be heeded, with the essential element of a full and fair public debate as an essential part of the democratic process.

The rise of authoritarianism raises questions about the role of democracy. Democracy presents the danger of the “tyranny of the majority” whereby the majority may vote to curtail the freedom of society as a whole, as with the recent Brexit referendum. The call for more democracy ignores the danger that the electorate may vote in destructive ways. Democracy and freedom are not necessarily synonymous: the electorate can vote in ways that limit freedom rather than expanding it.

The task for those who value liberty is to reclaim the valid insights of populism, including the desire for more democracy, while rejecting authoritarianism.

Probably the greatest threat to freedom arises in the technological sphere, where technology threatens to make obsolete the values of freedom and privacy. This issue is examined in detail by Shoshana Zuboff in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where she explores the way in which capitalism feeds off information, to the detriment of the public.

Authoritarianism of both left and right poses dangers to freedom, but the most insidious danger lies in the sphere of technology, which is burgeoning faster than we can understand, let alone rein in. With the growth of artificial intelligence and the concept of truth becoming undermined, we may be well down the road to a new kind of totalitarianism which exceeds anything that has occurred in the past or was even thought of.

Defence of the values of truth and privacy are needed now more than ever. Otherwise, we may face the threat of what novelist EM Forster called “Fabio-Fascism”: an incremental tendency towards dictatorial control under a constitutional surface.

Total State by Paul O’Brien is published by Eastwood Books and is available for purchase on wordwellbooks.com. It is officially launching on June 22nd at 6pm in Hodges Figgis.