"When Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart says that the rights of
artists have to be set against the rights of communities to be secure
and safe, she trivialises and marginalises activities that are central
to how we are."
And that is the Blair line on "freedom" in a nutshell: positive
freedoms are mutually limiting. Whenever they wish to abrogate some
negative freedom (e.g. freedom from prior restraint on publishing or
"artistic expression"), this is the line they will use: your freedom
to speak must be balanced against so-and-so's freedom "to be secure
and safe".
One wonders whether they have been studying the Dworkin/MacKinnon
anti-pornography ordinances, which fairly similarly argue for a
mutually limiting relationship between competing freedoms of
expression. The argument there is that porn defines its objects'
sexuality for them, effectively abrogating their freedom of sexual
self-determination; and, in further defining that sexuality in terms
of passive absorption of sexual violence, also abrogates their freedom
to live, form sexual relationships with others, walk the streets etc.
without being threatened by the ambient menace of male violence.
Well, I'm not wholly out of sympathy with this, although I tend to
think that the diagnosis of the causes of the ambient menace of male
violence is a bit iffy - nobody very much is making porn about the
likes of me (qua generic pasty-faced male geek), but I don't make a
habit of wandering around on my own late at night for fairly similar
reasons to those that keep a lot of women indoors. But that's
by-the-by.
The defining feature of this sort of legislation is its emphasis on
the preservation of bare life as over-riding every other kind of
positive freedom - they're not really seeking a "balance", so much as
an all-purpose trump card. The analysis given by the blog Against The
War On Terror (http://againstwot.com/ourblog/ourblog.html) seems
broadly correct to me. It's politics-of-fear stuff; and if you look at
who and what we're supposed to be afraid of, it's evidently a racist,
repressive and reactionary politics to boot.
The virtue of "negative" freedoms such as freedom-of-the-press is that
they effectively suspend judgment about what the "balance" of positive
freedoms should be. "Liberal" politics is structured throughout by
this suspension, which applies first and foremost in economic life
("free trade", etc., requiring the suspension of any judgment about
economic inequalities). The argument (from Acton, Hayek, Popper et al)
is that there's simply no-one entitled or qualified to judge: better
to let things take their course. The "arrogance" of Blair's government
consists in their willingness to posit themselves as a competant
authority in matters in which liberalism asserts that there can be no
competant authority. But not in economic matters - they'll ban hunting
and smoking, suspend habeas corpus on a whim, bang you up for singing
an old Christy Moore tune about Bobby Sands; but heaven forbid they
should ever be accused of tinkering with the pristine mechanism of the
Market.
Dominic
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