The Speech Misheard Round the World
January 22, 2005
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Cambridge, Mass. — SINCE 9/11, President Bush and his
advisers have engaged in a series of arguments concerning
the relation between freedom, tyranny and terrorism. The
president's inaugural paean to freedom was the culmination
of these arguments.
The stratagem began immediately after 9/11 with the
president's claims that the terrorist attacks were a
deliberate assault on America's freedom. The next stage of
the argument came after no weapons of mass destruction were
found in Iraq, thus eliminating the reason for the war, and
it took the form of a bogus syllogism: all terrorists are
tyrants who hate freedom. Saddam Hussein is a tyrant who
hates freedom. Therefore Saddam Hussein is a terrorist
whose downfall was a victory in the war against terrorism.
When this bogus syllogism began to lose public appeal, it
was shored up with another flawed argument that was
repeated during the campaign: tyranny breeds terrorism.
Freedom is opposed to tyranny. Therefore the promotion of
freedom is the best means of fighting terrorism.
Promoting freedom, of course, is a noble and highly
desirable pursuit. If America were to make the global
diffusion of freedom a central pillar of its foreign
policy, it would be cause for joy. The way the present
administration has gone about this task, however, is likely
to have the opposite effect. Moreover, what the president
means by freedom may get lost in translation to the rest of
the world.
The administration's notion of freedom has been especially
convenient, and its promotion of it especially cynical. In
the first place, there is no evidence to support, and no
good reason to believe, that Al Qaeda's attack on America
was primarily motivated by a hatred of freedom. Osama bin
Laden is clearly no lover of freedom, but this is an
irrelevance. The attack on America was motivated by
religious and cultural fanaticism.
Second, while it may be implicitly true that all terrorists
are tyrants, it does not follow that all tyrants are
terrorists. The United States, of all nations, should know
this. Over the past century it has supported a succession
of tyrannical states with murderous records of oppression
against their own people, none of which were terrorist
states - Argentina and Brazil under military rule, Augusto
Pinochet's Chile, South Africa under apartheid, to list but
a few. Today, one of America's closest allies in the fight
against tyranny is tyrannical Pakistan, and one of its
biggest trading partners is the authoritarian Communist
regime of China.
Third, while the goal of promoting democracy is laudable,
there is no evidence that free states are less likely to
breed terrorists. Sadly, the very freedoms guaranteed under
the rule of law are likely to shelter terrorists,
especially within states making the transition from
authoritarian to democratic rule. Transitional democratic
states, like Russia today, are more violent than the
authoritarian ones they replaced.
And even advanced democratic regimes have been known to
breed terrorists, the best example being the United States
itself. For more than half a century a terrorist
organization, the Ku Klux Klan, flourished in this country.
According to the F.B.I., three of every four terrorist acts
in the United States from 1980 to 2000 were committed by
Americans.
The president speaks eloquently and no doubt sincerely of
freedom both abroad and at home. But it is plain for the
world to see that there is a discrepancy between his words
and his actions.
He claims that freedom must be chosen and defended by
citizens, yet his administration is in the process of
imposing democracy at the point of a gun in Iraq. At home,
he seeks to "make our society more prosperous and just and
equal," yet during his first term there has been a great
redistribution of income from working people to the wealthy
as well as declining real income and job security for many
Americans. Furthermore, he has presided over the erosion of
civil liberties stemming from the Patriot Act.
Is this pure hypocrisy - or is there another explanation
for the discrepancy, and for Mr. Bush's perplexing
sincerity? There is no gainsaying an element of hypocrisy
here. But it is perhaps no greater than usual in speeches
of this nature. The problem is that what the president
means by freedom, and what the world hears when he says it,
are not the same.
In the 20th century two versions of freedom emerged in
America. The modern liberal version emphasizes civil
liberties, political participation and social justice. It
is the version formally extolled by the federal government,
debated by philosophers and taught in schools; it still
informs the American judicial system. And it is the version
most treasured by foreigners who struggle for freedom in
their own countries.
But most ordinary Americans view freedom in quite different
terms. In their minds, freedom has been radically
privatized. Its most striking feature is what is left out:
politics, civic participation and the celebration of
traditional rights, for instance. Freedom is largely a
personal matter having to do with relations with others and
success in the world.
Freedom, in this conception, means doing what one wants and
getting one's way. It is measured in terms of one's
independence and autonomy, on the one hand, and one's
influence and power, on the other. It is experienced most
powerfully in mobility - both socioeconomic and geographic.
In many ways this is the triumph of the classic
19th-century version of freedom, the version that
philosophers and historians preached but society never
quite achieved. This 19th-century freedom must now coexist
with the more modern version of freedom. It does so by
acknowledging the latter but not necessarily including it.
It is not that Americans have rejected the formal model of
freedom - ask any American if he believes in democracy and
a free press and he will genuinely endorse both. Rather it
is that such abstract notions of freedom are far removed
from their notion of what freedom means and how it is
experienced.
The genius of President Bush is that he has acquired an
exquisite grasp of this development in American political
culture, and he can play both versions of freedom to his
advantage. Because he so easily empathizes with the
ordinary American's privatized view of freedom, the
president was relatively immune from criticism that he
disregarded more traditional measures of freedom like civil
liberties. In the privatized conception of freedom that he
and his followers share, the abuses of the Patriot Act play
little or no part. (There are times, of course, when the
president must voice support for the modern liberal version
of freedom. The inaugural is such a day, "prescribed by law
and marked by ceremony," as he ruefully noted.)
Yet while these inconsistencies may not bother the
president's followers or harm his standing in America, they
matter to the rest of the world. Few foreigners are even
aware of America's hybrid conception of freedom, much less
accepting of it. In most of the rest of the world, the
president's inaugural address was heard merely as
hypocrisy.
Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is
the author of "Freedom in the Making of Western Culture"
and a forthcoming book on the meaning of freedom in the
United States.
nytimes.com |
