dream of freedom
Anthony Holiday
If the year 2000 marks the border of humankind’s entry into a futuristic fantasy, then the year 1999 places us on the fringes of that reverie. It will be a year of a dream about a dream wherein we taste the first false fruits of the promised land of an unreal freedom.
We are a futuristic species and have wished so long for the libertarian excitements and technological wonders of the approaching millennium that it seems unkind to sour optimistic speculations with glum prophecies.
Indeed, there is reason to suspect that, even by the end of the coming year, certain powerful circles of geopolitical theory and practice will view such pronouncements as a sort of heresy.
Already it has become something of a dogma among us that the new age just around the cosmic corner will see the fulfilment of the Enlightenment’s vision of a liberated humanity; that the Age of Reason’s bright hopes for rational governance over the whole planet will at last be realised, and that Immanuel Kant’s 18th-century ideal of the reasonable and free individual will be actualised.
Significantly, our reasons for believing that all this will come to pass rest largely on the technical achievements of the present age.
Information technology, we are endlessly telling ourselves, has shrunk our globe into a hamlet, making it a home to all, a place where race and creed and place of origin have ceased to matter, a paradise of the unprejudiced.
The television and the computer screen, the cellphone and the satellite, we expect, will free us from the tyranny of counter, desk and office routines. Bob Crachitt, liberated from his demeaning stool, will become Robert the Smart Worker, a kind of free-floating super-being, unanswerable to any Scrooge, but ”interacting” in free ”interface” with the universe of work.
In our new utopia, market forces will be allowed to ebb and flow with delightful disregard for the artificialities of national boundaries. Indeed the nation-state itself will become otiose. The resultant release of productive energy will make all of us richer. And the world will be as one.
So enticing is this prospect that we are often reluctant to dwell on its obverse features and to admit that these technological marvels pose as many threats to individuality and freedom as the promises they hold out to advance them.
We fail, for instance, to remind ourselves that the screens we use to observe the world not only have built- in distorted effects, but may also be used to observe us.
We are less alive than we might be to the possibility that our new communication toys – even as the manufacturers shrink them to ever more convenient sizes – could be turned by a new breed of manager into ubiquitous invaders of our privacy.
Our cellphones, after all, are only devices for our personal use so long as we can turn them off.
At a less Orwellian, but more practical and proximate level, the all-pervasive, ever-spreading network of information, analysis and opinion poses its own paradoxical threat to freedom of expression.
Journalists, particularly those working in the ”quality” print media, have become far more powerful than ever before in the history of their profession.
As the demand for more and more accurate information grows and the machinery to disseminate it becomes more sophisticated, their capacity to influence political and – most crucially – economic climates will increase even further.
Given the labile and interconnected condition of the planet’s stock and money markets, it is a matter of time before powerful voices in bodies like the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund begin calling for some form of universally sanctioned restraints on what such journalists may or may not publish.
These curbs could end by giving us a media which tailors the politico- economic perceptions of the many to suit the interests and profiteering ambitions of the few.
But, grave as such matters are, they are not the aspects of the new, single- word configuration which cast the darkest shadows over our individuality and its prospects for survival. That role is preserved for the implacable homogenising dynamic which promises to destroy all culturo-linguistic diversity in our world before its drive towards global uniformity has run its course.
Already uncounted minority languages and the ways of life in which they nestled have disappeared before the vast commercial, industrial and colonising impulses that have brought us over centuries to the point where we now stand.
As you read this, the major languages of monetary and commodity exchanges – English, German, French and Japanese – are in a position of such dominance that the preservation of such minority tongues as Afrikaans, Pedi, Basque and Gaelic has begun to look like some anthropologist’s costly idyll.
This situation will not improve after we cross the millennium line. It will grow more dire. For not only are the instruments for mass communication and the requirements for efficient global trading hostile to the survival needs of minority languages, they are toxic even to whatever is idiosyncratic, poetically concrete and regionalised in hegemonic languages.
Despite what some advertising agencies may like to claim, you don’t clinch a mega-deal simply by waxing lyrical about your product. And computer-speak has no special need of accents or dialects.
The fact is that the discourses dominating the ”information highways” are increasingly technical and mathematicised.
Indeed it is mathematics, rather than the natural languages which Americans, Britons or Germans speak, which bids fair to become the real Esperanto of the future, the true key to economic ”empowerment”.
Not only do our algebraic hieroglyphs, our logical calculi and quantum formulae hold the key to physics, the most advanced science of the age, and to the science of computing itself, they are also indispensable entrance tickets to what economists are saying and thinking.
These considerations, while they may not precisely point towards the realisation of Gottfried Leibniz’s hopes for the birth of a universal mathematical language, a characteristica universalis which all men of goodwill would use to settle their disputes, do indicate the development of an imbalance which will dramatically enhance numeracy and ratiocination at the cost of drastically impoverishing natural language.
We can see this happening already in the ”smart classrooms” of our schools and universities, where computer literacy is beginning to be valued above genuine literacy. Studies in the arts and humanities are now being regulated to a sort of dunce’s corner while studies in mathematics, the natural sciences, computer science and business economics are accorded pride of place.
Most academics and educationalists, who care about the humanities (and many evidently don’t), are convinced that worse, far worse is to come.
Already there are universities aplenty (including in South Africa) where one cannot study or teach certain areas of literature or examine certain authors, unless such exercises can be fitted in to an agreed ”programme” with predictable ”inputs” in terms of student interest and ”outputs”, measured by the likelihood of the programme leading to employment.
Are we looking towards a time in which the rich ribaldry of Catullus or Rabelais, Chaucer’s astonishing parade of pilgrims or the depths of Dante’s account of damnation will be the property solely of those so wealthy that they do not need to work for a living?
But what has this to do with the diminishing importance of individuality? How does preserving the innermost citadels of our language against erosion by mathematicised technicisms match up with the notion of protecting the uniqueness and autonomy of the human person?
The best route to an answer to these questions, I believe, goes via a dictum from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the greatest philosopher of the century we are about leave behind us.
”To imagine a language,” Wittgenstein famously remarked in his Philosophical Investigations, ”is to imagine a form of life.”
Wittgenstein had borrowed the phrase, ”form of life”, from the pessimistic historiography of Oswald Spengler, who seems to have meant by it whatever is unique to the cultural existence of people or community, its soul, so to speak.
To identify language and life-world in this way is to recognise in natural language not only what confers particularity and uniqueness on any given society, but also the source which enables individual members of that society to express their own uniqueness and to set ethical limits around themselves, limits which determine what may and what may not be done to or even for them.
>From this it must follow that whatever depletes language, makes it less rich, less diverse in its possibilities and more artificial and conformist, endangers individuality and its right to flourish.
When we diminish ourselves as speaking beings by making our language resemble the sort of thing computers do when their manufacturers claim they are ”speaking” to one another, we also inevitably diminish ourselves as moral beings and run the risk of treating one another like complex machines.
Has this not already begun to happen? Have not the over-privileged inhabitants of the ”developed” world grown entirely accustomed to watching the emaciated children of the ”underdeveloped” world die of starvation in televised newscasts?
Are we not by now used to the idea that genetic sorcery will soon enable us to ”engineer” the introduction of a perfect human species, while we simultaneously ”engineer” the exit of those specimens of humanity we deem defective?
When last have you, dear reader, held a genuine conversation with someone – by which I mean, not a merely mechanical exchange of ideas, but a dialogue in which the spoken and unspoken meaning of every phrase mattered terribly and even the silences spoke?
I know that I have painted a dismal, even demonic picture of the condition we are about to enter. But I am not entirely without optimism.
I believe that, even as the demons of conformity tighten their grip, pockets of resistance to their tyranny will spring up in precisely those sectors of social life where they most need to exercise absolute control.
The sort of resistance I have in mind is not of a military or of a political sort. (We will continue to witness horrific acts of terrorism, but they will strengthen rather than loosen the grip of established global power.) No, the rebellion I mean will take the form of what the British philosopher, Roy Holland, has called a ”resistance of the spirit”.
It will consist in those who cannot endure the reification of their lives and language, asserting their individuality in what is left of their private lives and (chiefly) their work.
There will be schoolteachers and academics who refuse, whatever pressures are put upon them, to teach anything but the best and most beautiful things they know.
There will be philosophers and linguists who will continue to expose the myths of reductionist ”theories” of meaning and artificial intelligence.
There will be journalists who refuse to tell subtle lies for the sake of the rewards doled out to the ”responsible” members of their guild.
There will be priests who still insist on speaking of the sacred and of the soul.
This brand of resistance will be difficult to crush, partly because those who choose to engage in it do work which enables society to reproduce itself more or less placidly, but mainly because it is a subtle form of defiance which need not involve head-on clashes with the law.
It will be difficult to put people on trial for doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and according to their lights without irreparably damaging the legitimacy of the new millennium’s new legal order.
It may even happen that, in the end, the resisters achieve a change of sorts and that the true meaning of human individuality is rediscovered.
At least I hope so. For otherwise the new millennium is an historical domain in which I have no wish to live.
Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government