The state and liberty
prevent a threatening of the freedom from anxiety or, as in the case of Mustafa Mond, allow them to use their understanding to rule, to realize that his knowl edge and wisdom won’t bring him happiness but can bring happiness to others. In either case, for the nanny state to survive and, as we proved above, continue giving liberty to the majority, the unfortunately intellectual minority must be alienated. This, for me, continues to echo the Soviet Union, as, in the words of Lenin, ‘the state must be a special coercive force’ , in this case coercing the intellectuals as even Isa iah Berlin pointed out that ‘the ideas nurtured in the professor’s study are no less dangerous than those put into practice by the legislative committee’: they can be co-opted to create change, a change which most people would apparently suffer from. Yet, there is another group of people: the intellectuals; capitalists; philosophically inclined teenagers and middle classes led by the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, who think that the nanny state is the antithesis of true freedom and instead what’s required is the ‘night watchman state’ , which allows one to think and guarantees nothing except a minimal standard of physical protection. There are several distinct mechanisms within this attack on the nanny state. The most direct one is that it is easily co-opted for oppression. Berlin argues that at the point at which the state has the moral ammunition to be acting in the common interest or the interests of your ‘rational eternal self’ it can justify the denial of things like freedom of movement or religion to the ‘empirical petty self’. This breeds despotism, tyranny and a poor quality of life. But if we can assume that the state has no manifestly nefarious intentions, that is to say, to purposefully oppress you for no reason, and consider that Berlin’s own experiences of fleeing a tyrannical state which sought to be a ‘special coercive force’ on him, it is still not clear why nanny state is still not advantageous for everybody in providing a freedom from the summum malum . Instead, the attack on the moral content of such a state as denying fraternity and respect of persons is most convincing, in my view, from the non-Hobbesian nanny-state-denier camp. Berlin argues that at the point at which I have a freedom from thought I am placed in a position where ‘I am free to do whatever I desire but I am only free to desire what I am free to do’: my fundamental fraternity is violated by the state. That is to say, the respect for my own individual thoughts, biologically distinct from everybody else’s , is substituted for the thoughts of the state which cannot possibly represent me. They thus force , in Camus’ words, a ‘philosophical suicide’ where I am banned from thought, and thereby self-actualization, on an intellectual and subsequently physical level, as I cannot be free at the point at which my free will is so manifestly tampered with. Thus Berlin would agree with J.S. Mill that ‘it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied’: the nanny state thinks it gives me a total liberty from anxiety but it is so total that it removes my humanity, supresses my fraternity and prevents any kind of self-actualization by imposing a total and systematic oppression of my thoughts. Berlin thinks that all humans have this innate desire for our own little epistemes to be recognized and respected – which is why the nanny state is oppressive. The freedom derived from mundanity in the Soviet Union and the restlessness it breeds soon turns the dolce far niente of the vacation in Sochi to a state of horror and realization that one is not allowed to think. Even in modern social democratic countries, like Denmark, where the state nannies you to perfect mediocrity, liberals would attack the regime, which brought you to a place where you are comfortable enough to have these thoughts, as philosophically suicidal and oppressive, as it imposes its own ends – its own summum bonum – on your life. The thing which must be recognized, however, is that an allegiance to an intellectual fraternity and episteme is contingent on a bodily safety. Hobbes does not wish to be Socrates; he wishes to not be killed by his neighbour.
96
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting