Why Freedom?

The appeal to individual “social responsibility” is just authoritarian window dressing

“That by far the greatest part of humankind ... should hold the step toward maturity to be not only troublesome, but also highly dangerous, will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them…”

Immanuel Kant, Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment, 1784.

For two years now, I have been in awe of the mendacious double think going on in the German speaking world’s neoliberal intellectual class. An awe competing with disgust, to be sure, but nonetheless making me stammer “wow” in disbelief most of the time I happen to come across its open admiration for the recent fascist policies. Luminaries like steampunk softie Sascha Lobo or Berlin commentator Margarete Stokowski who thinks and talks like a pre-pubescent borderline disorder patient[1] fill their authoritarianism-hustle for (online) magazines like Der Spiegel that was once respectable during a short period in the 1960s, but now embodies establishment thought to a degree that would make Mehdi Hasan blush. Another of these outlets, the much smaller, but nonetheless glossy online pamphlet for the Zurich University class, Geschichte der Gegenwart (History of the Present) is the dirtbag academic’s go-to source for updates on PMC issues. Whether they report on climate change[2] or transgender issues, one can be sure that the Cultural Studies-PhD holding elaborate class’s interests are adequately represented, while workers would be met with moral superiority had they been noticed at all.

Representing the email-job caste[1], the editors and writers of Geschichte der Gegenwart stem from the humanities, with a clear bias towards Gender Studies, and unsurprisingly fully support the biopolitical Covid measures, from social segregation to the abolition of the separation of powers. This is argued, among other things, by simply denying that the current regime has any biopolitical motive at all. As editor Philipp Sarasin, a Foucaultian by self-declaration, insisted early in the pandemic, claiming that Covid-19 had anything to do with the biosecurity state, “has very little, if anything, to do with Foucault and his thinking.” Sarasin claims that the “liberal model” which Foucault saw in the government handling of smallpox in the 17th-18th century was where the world was as of March 24th, 2020, as though lockdowns, school closures and subsequent home isolation of kids and the elderly, the surge in domestic violence and suicide rates, cancer patient backlogs, a rise of 40% unemployment in low wage jobs, the supply crisis behind the impoverishment of further 100 million people in the Global South, all facts either predictable or duly known at the time of his writing, were a haven of the innate Rights of Man (which, for him, they may well be).

But where Sarasin is only shockingly smug, the journal’s several professorial Gender Studies contributors have established the trademark of haughty and mendacious double think that leaves no stone unturned in undermining any emancipatory idea that comes their way. Working “at the interface of feminist philosophy and aesthetics” (academics just can’t let go of their technocratic lingo), we hear a Jule Govrin blatantly lashing out at Kathleen Stock, including excessive use of the unfounded, but effective “right-wing” accusation, in the wake of Stock’s badgering at and subsequent resignation from Sussex University over her gender critical views. Govrin’s mission, to take up the cudgels for the trans community and the “self-determination over one’s body as a human right”[1], only ails from the overall line that the very same “self-determination over one’s body as a human right” counts for nothing when state-mandated vaccinations are in question. In the Geschichte der Gegenwart’s world view, the fundamental constitutional right of bodily integrity should be reserved to woke topics concerning no-one but the academic class and lose its validity when it comes to universal human civil rights and freedoms. The insistence that “my body = my choice”, once so close to feminism and now decried as a “extreme-right dog whistle” by their foremost self-declared exponents symbolizes a new level of Orwellian double think, a schizophrenic, self-suspending, and anti-emancipatory approach to social analysis.

But for established university lecturers in the humanities, nothing is more remote from thought than the question of freedom. Two years of biopolitical security state paternalism have produced a community of overconformist PhD-holding cowards. Worse still, the conformism and denouncement of universal freedom is passed off as “concern for others”. This glaring disavowal of what once was a cornerstone of emancipation and its replacement by hyper-moralism, penning down anyone not engaged in the notion of “care” as (per usual) “right-wing” is a masterpiece of the demolition of human interests. It reflects the authoritarian character of its herald who bows to despotism and feels most at home in the warmth and safety of its herd, a hallmark of the fascist subject, while holding a range of irrational, self-contradictory beliefs. The nature of the Corona fidel intelligenzia’s thought is religious in that sense, because it requires the immaturity of the subject (on which more below) and does not only leave the thinking to someone else but implores its audience to do so as well. One exponent of such immature kind of thought-jumble teaming up with extraordinary servility to political powers is a Sabine Hark, another Gender Studies professor, in her latest piece “Living with the Virus. Politics of Care in the Pandemic”.[1] In it, she claims that the “central argument for the Corona vaccination is the vulnerability and the well-being of others. The insistence on one’s own bodily integrity (Unversehrtheit) consequently finds its limit where the refusal of vaccination threatens the health and life of others.” There is a lot to unpack here, as well as in the rest of the piece, in which she demonstrates her ignorance of the history of vaccinations and her unabashed Untertangeist, for example when she praises working class enemy Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the not-so liberal-democratic state of Prussia as pioneers of mandating vaccinations in 1874. She is also crudely ignorant of the mode of functioning of the present mRNA-therapy, which she never mentions but classifies along with the smallpox and polio vaccinations. Since the Covid-19 vaccine does neither protect others nor myself from contracting the infection, or spreading it (an admitted fact even in left-liberal circles), her moral appeal to the specific Covid mass vaccinations becomes self-defeating.

But the crucial point of course lies with the moral imposition itself: “Give up your bodily integrity to protect the bodily integrity of others!” Where one’s own bodily integrity is undermined, however, the “protection” of others no longer makes any sense: for this would imply the protection of bodily integrity in general, directly contradicting her thesis. In other words: if I give up my bodily integrity, who will guarantee yours? If I need get one in the face, in order to protect yours, you might need to get one yourself to protect mine. The argument cancels itself out. It is nonsensical to speak of “bodily integrity” for others, but not for me: either there is general bodily integrity, implying mutual respect for one’s physical boundaries, or there is none. Unless of course, we have a state like Hark’s shining example of Prussia.

But in democracies, there is also individual self-determination and the freedom to choose, the real nemesis for our intellectually challenged Gender Studies professor. And here we enter the realm of religion and blind compliance to extra-individual authorities, notably the state and its institutions, that render this little essay a wonderful document of present counter-enlightenment thought. The real reason, then, we must comply to the state’s mass vaccination programme, is the “happiness of contributing to something bigger than ourselves”, to something “that is ‘not me’.” A Catholic boarding school prayer during the reign of National Socialism if there ever was one, this imposition clearly says whose brainchild is at work here. “Something bigger than myself”, indeed: like the allegiance to the swastika, the Roman crucifix, or, of course, a state-mandated violation of one’s right to physical and mental self-determination. Her authoritarianism-hustling however is directed towards the ideology of “care” that in any context known to Man designates the opposite of what it pretends to do. Our individual matter-of-factness is here decried as self-centered and an “irresponsible” egotism, conveniently leaving aside the fact that Pfizer has legally absolved itself from any responsibility regarding harmful side effects from the vaccines.

Additionally, and unsurprisingly, the essay cannot resist portraying the People’s movement against the senseless, harmful, and authoritarian measures as “right-wing” and “conspiratorial”, in line with recent attempts by laptop leftists to brand the insistence on the Constitution as a “extreme-right ideology”. Directly following this degrading judgment, in a shameless non sequitur, the author who has just declared a large group of people, namely the civil rights movement as “indisputable”, laments that this world has become one “without dialogue, populated by individuals who are both carefree and refuse to care, whose understanding of what we have in common is characterised by disinterest and solipsistic self-reflection, by the refusal of dialogue and alarmist communication, by ignorance and disrespect and, last but not least, by the denial of the dependence on each other that we all share.” This is indeed an interesting observation for someone who thinks of people critical of forced vaccinations as Untermenschen. Accordingly, because the community of serfs stands over and above the right to individual freedom, she declares that

“the debate should focus not on the sovereign individual, his or her constitutionally protected integrity and autonomy, but on the fact that we are all dependent on        supportive infrastructures, on economically, culturally, socially, and politically    established networks and ties, and on relationships of recognition that keep us alive.   It is a dependency that we cannot ignore, a non-negotiable fact of our being as corporeal beings; the reason and object also of our dignity as a person, which is      linked to our existence as a body.”

But she refuses to acknowledge that without individual freedom, there is no freedom at all. What would a freedom look like that is “common”, but not “individual”?[1] It would be the freedom of the state to act and impose its will on the citizens, but not the citizens imposing their sovereign will onto the state, as democratic societies have historically vowed to do. It would be the reign of tyrants, not People’s Sovereignty. Our “dignity as a person” depends on individual autonomy. It depends on individual freedom to choose. Without it, one faces a 1984 or a Spanish inquisition scenario, both of which are excellently compatible with our Gender Studies professor’s world view, but would in effect mean the self-abolition of society, the abolition of a life worth living: a real dystopia. In sum, those who surrender individual freedom surrender responsibility to a "higher authority" established at the very moment when individual conscience no longer counts. They establish an extra-personal authority standing over and above individual freedom of decision. The talk of having to choose between individual freedom and social responsibility is an anti-enlightenment position par excellence that obscures the implications of “social responsibility” in individual freedom. Only if I am free, I am responsible for my actions. And if I am responsible for my actions and do not surrender my freedom to the state (or another extra-personal authority), can society be based on mutual respect, “care” (though I cringe at the misuse of this term), democratic values, and progress. Everything else reinforces a self-negating notion of “responsibility”. Everything else is a mendacious deception and authoritarian window dressing.

Against this background, it may be appropriate to briefly remember Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and his notion of enlightenment. To Kant, as is well-known, “Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”, as he writes in his 1784 pamphlet Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? The self-determination and Selbstgesetzgebung (autonomy) of the individual was central to his thought in the wake of the waning of feudalist despotism. Freedom, to Kant, having no meaning except for individual freedom, is the only innate right that a human being has. As one colleague here on Substack, writing about Kantian philosophy, has wisely remarked,

“A pandemic, and certainly not one of the magnitude as the one now plaguing us, is not a sufficient reason to suspend that freedom, both the freedom to think and being   able to make choices for oneself. When we give up that freedom in favour of public      health or a supposed right to körperliche Gesundheit, say, the foundations of a liberal democratic society, in which we have to hold out and tolerate difference of opinion even in crisis situations, are undermined. If you think that the freedom of an individual as its innate right is negotiable, you have never really understood what freedom basically means.”[1]

I rest my case. Sure, today the voice of online leftists and Gender Studies professors is louder, almost a constant screech, compared to Kant’s old school rationalism. But it might be useful to return to what once formed the condition of possibility for the dialogue we do not longer have: freedom.  

Cover: Emma Balfour in George Michael’s “Too funky” (1991)

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[1]

Maturity and Freedom of Thought

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[1] The same argument was made by Hendrik Wüst, former lobbyist and now Minister President of North-Rhine Westphalia, in a TV interview and subsequent Tweet:

Hendrik Wüst @HendrikWuest

Menschen dürfen ihre individuelle Freiheit nicht über die Freiheit der Allgemeinheit stellen. Wenn wir nicht handeln, kommen wir wieder in dieselbe Situation & werden nächstes Jahr die gleiche Diskussion führen. Daher brauchen wir jetzt zügig die Vorbereitung einer #Impfpflicht.

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[1] https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/mit-dem-virus-leben-politiken-der-sorge-in-der-pandemie/

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[1] “Prescribing to people which gender they have to live in means to dispose of their body, to prescribe to them how they have to feel in it, how they have to move, how they have to dress. Therefore, the current discussion is not a marginalised group or minority-problem, but touches on human rights.” https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/terf/

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[1] Canadian trucker Gord Magill in https://americancompass.org/the-commons/how-essential-are-the-email-job-caste/ who decribes this caste (along with the PMC) as “managers and human resources drones who spend much of their time in meetings that produce nothing but policies which paternalize workers and produce no material benefits for us.” An apt description of types like Stokowski, were it not for her additional narcissism.

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[1] Notably, her column “Angry thoughts from my sick bed”, where she describes how “angry” she is about the German government’s Covid “slack” measures, because she is so “sick” and “mad”. It’s notably, and always, all about her. https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/coronavirus-wuetende-gruesse-vom-krankenbett-kolumne-a-6a48ecbf-fcf9-4154-aab8-4b8d2846d3b7

[2] https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/look-up-klimaforscherinnen-als-stars/