Ceding the Language of Liberty

We have argued that the war on terror is not simply a plot of the Bush administration, but emerges from deeper problems in our society. We need to analyze and confront the social context in which contemporary anxiety arises. To this end this review of Russell Jacoby’s new book Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thinking in an Anti-Utopian Age covers some useful ground. The reviewer, Ellen Willis, from NYU’s Department of Journalism, writes:

‘Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life.’

The immediate problem is a general acceptance of fear as a founding principle and the consequent abandonment of an agenda based on liberty. As Willis puts it:

the contemporary left has not posed…questions in these terms; on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, “opportunity” and “ownership,” to the libertarian right.

We could not agree more. Ceding ‘the language of freedom and pleasure’ is one of the most serious problems facing us, and accounts for much of the political disorientation and scattershot character of the ‘left-wing’ opposition. We might go so far as to say that, with the absence of debates over first principles, it is hard to identify ‘left’ and ‘right’. Trying to recreate a ‘left’ out of shared opposition to Bush is an ad hoc measure, patching over the fraying tatters of an increasingly disorganized and pragmatic opposition. It also forestalls serious thinking about the future. The only way to rekindle our utopian imagination is by critiquing the way ‘anxiety is a first principle of social life’, and creating the space in which a more positive principle can guide our actions. That is why we think the most urgent thing is to develop a coherent and principled opposition to the war on terror, rather than come up with most immediately effective criticisms of Bush.