BERKELEY COMMENCEMENT 2005

Benjamin R. Barber

Commencement addresses are where my generation - that has proven it can’t do anything right –lets your generation know where you’ve already gone wrong and warns you not to be like us, even as it invites you, pays and rewards you, to be JUST like us! The key word is “liberty.” You are invited to exercise your freedom by making private choices and exercising personal preferences; by pursuing your own private dreams and treating democracy and politics as spectator sports, so me thing to watch on TV and let other people do.

So maybe it would be a useful thing to talk a little bit about liberty and whether it is something private and personal – all about your rights – or something public and communal, also about your responsibilities. After all, this is the home – or it was for my generation – of the free speech movement, which was about politics and democracy;  and Berkeley remains a great public university where freedom is still associated not with private choice and consumer preferences but with public education and opportunity for all. .

In the days where top down tyrants were the true oppressors, rights and individual liberty were obvious weapons against autocracy. But tyranny is not what is once was in the parts of the world we now can call to some degree free: it is not a matter of vicious tyrants and totalitarian parties and illegitimate states. At least since Alexis de Tocqueville toured the tumultuous America of Andrew Jackson in the 1830’s, tyranny has exhibited to us moderns a deceptively fresh face. “Fetters and headsmen,” Tocqueville already saw, “were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself… monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republic of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind.” 

Nowadays, it is not just the power of public opinion, but of the marketplace itself that has created conditions under which, in Tocqueville’s phrase, “the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.”[1] Our psychological reality begins with the fact that constraint itself is ai me d not at the free body but the liberated consciousness. It hopes to impede our aims, divert our purposes and reformulate our goals. Can it be then that in the new battle for consciousness, the ideology of liberalism has as its true purpose the liberation of the body from public goods in the na me of subordinating the soul to the selling of endless private commodities? Does the post-modern Peter Pan that is the advertising industry and buzz marketing free us from the moral authority of parent and the democratic state just because it wants to indenture us to private consu me rism?

            What I want to suggest to you as you stand on threshold of free lives is that liberty is always public; and that there can be no viable idea of public liberty outside of the quest for a moral and a common life defined by purposes that to some degree are public in character; no securing of liberty that is not also grounded in moral limits and hence in education and civic participation. In the current political climate of globalizing markets, free trade and mandatory privatization, and under the sway of an infantilizing ethos that dumbs down consumers, this strong view of liberty is not well tolerated. This is not to point to some conspiracy of board-room managers manipulating political theory to the advantage of the bottom line. Marketers are not that smart. Nor do they have to be. The emerging cultural ethos does the work for them.

For when we deploy private liberty against public power in a democratic regi me , even if we think we are upholding our rights, what we are really doing is not to assail tyranny but to assault democracy – to undermine not oppressive arbitrary authority but legitimate rational authority.  Liberty in our era is not only positive rather than negative but must be public rather than private -- which me ans education for liberty must also be public rather than private. (Which explains why it is worthwhile for California to support a major public university, state college and community college system).

Citizens cannot be understood as mere consumers because individual desire is not the same thing as common ground and public goods are always something more than an aggregation of private wants. Those accommodating champions of consumer democracy who have tried to have their civic cake and consume it at the same time by deploying notions of a “consumers’ republic” have missed the crucial point.[2] A republic is by definition public (res publica means the things of the public), and what is public cannot be determined by consulting or aggregating private desires. The Consumer Republic is quite simply an oxymoron. Public liberty demands public institutions that permit citizens to treat with the public consequences of private market choices. Being permitted to choose among a plethora of automobile brands does not permit a choice in favor of public over private transportation or in favor of fuel-thrifty rather than fuel-wasting engines. Asking what “I want” and asking what “we as a community need” are two different things: the first question is ideally answered by the market; the second must be answered by the democratic community. When the market is encouraged to do the work of democracy, our culture is perverted and the character of our commonwealth undermined.

Liberty understood as the capacity to make public choices (in Rousseau’s terms to engage in “general willing”) is a potential faculty that must be acquired rather than a ‘natural’ one that can simply be exercised. Rights are certainly moral claims, but their effective exercise rests on competence and hence on learned skills of citizenship.  That is why de Tocqueville spoke of a necessary “apprenticeship of liberty” which he called the most arduous of all apprenticeships. It points to the core me aning – now lost to most educational institutions in A me rica – of public schooling in the “liberal arts.” The liberal arts are the arts of liberty necessary to the exercise of citizenship in a free republic. Jefferson and John Adams were political adversaries, but they agreed with Madison that in the absence of competent citizens bills of rights were but pieces of paper. If democracy was to live beyond the parch me nt of a written constitution, competent citizens had to be educated in common schools and public universities.

The logic of democracy may begin with the positing of rights and of a theoretical “natural condition” in which women and men are born free, but it depends for its implementation on civic learning, public participation and common consciousness. The new forms of soft tyranny we face today derive less from traditional modes of hard autocracy that enslave the body in the name of owning things than from new soft modes of merchandizing and entertaining aimed at manipulating consciousness in the name of selling things. Compulsive shopping speaks to new forms of market coercion that are difficult to discern, let alone contend with, because they allow us to “feel free” even as we yield gently to their subtle forms of bottom-up compulsion. The market does not tell us what to do, it gives us what we want – once it gets through “telling” us what it is that we want.

In thinking about modernity and modern capitalism, Max Weber talked about an iron cage. That was a century ago. For late consumer capitalism in crisis, I have a different cage in mind. There is a fiendishly simple method of trapping monkeys in Africa that suggests the paradoxes that confront liberty in this era of global consumerism. A small box containing a large nut is affixed to a well-anchored post. The nut can be accessed only through a single, small hole in the box designed to accommodate an outstretched monkey’s grasping paw. Easy to reach in, but when the monkey clasps the nut, impossible to get out. Because once the monkey’s paw forms a fist, it cannot be withdrawn and the monkey is trapped. Of course, it is immediately evident to everyone (except the monkey) that all the monkey must do to free itself is let go of its prize. Clever hunters have discovered, however, that they can secure their prey hours or even days later, because the monkey – driven by desire – will not release the nut, even unto death. Why work to catch the monkey when the monkey will catch itself for you? Is this coercion? Is the monkey free or not? How much more fiendish is this box than Weber’s iron cage?

In the modern global consumer society, as new graduates into consumer society, you are being invited to become compulsive monkeys. No producer or vendor will put a gun to your heads or force you to buy what they are selling. Indeed, whether talking about pornography, cars, drugs or fast food, producers will tell you “we just give YOU, the customers, what they want.” They will talk about consumer democracy and how the market “empowers” you, empowers even the smallest of children. So are the customers powerful? Are the monkeys free? Are you? In a sense, of course. But neither monkeys nor consumers are autonomous moral persons or free citizens, and only such persons and citizens can enjoy liberty and exercise the rights that define their autonomy. What more cynical and effective way to subvert freedom than to urge women and men to be private solitaries, lonely shoppers, personal choosers? This is the foundation for the new soft totalism that makes of free market societies invisible prisons whose structures of decision promise personal liberty and happiness while producing market servitude and civic frustration.

Why is private freedom so destructive? It is implicated in a disturbing paradox: it foments a kind of civic schizophrenia that divides the choosing self into opposing fragments and ultimately denies legitimacy to the fragment we understand to be ‘civic’ or ‘public’ – the self associated with our capacity to exercise public freedom. Privatization ideology treats choice as fundamentally private, a matter not of determining some deliberative “we should” (a kind of “general will” produced by citizens interacting democratically) but only of enumerating and aggregating all the “I want’s” we hold as private consumers and creatures of personal desire. Yet private choices do inevitably have social consequence and public outcomes. When these derive from purely personal preferences, the results are often “irrational” and unintended: at wide variance with the kind of society we might choose through collective deliberation and democratic decision-making. Such private choices, though technically “free,” are quite literally dysfunctional with respect to our values and norms.

Privatization turns the private, impulsive me lurking inside myself into an inadvertent enemy of the public, deliberative we that also is part of who I am. The private me screams “I want!” The privatization perspective legitimizes this scream, allowing it to trump the quiet “we need” that is the voice of the public me in which I participate and which is also an aspect of my interests as a human being. All the choices we make one by one thereby come to determine the social outcomes we must suffer together, but which we never directly choose in common.

This explains how a society without villains or conspirators, composed of goodwilled but self-seeking individuals like us, can produce a culture which many of us despise. Consumer capitalism does not operate by fielding self-conscious advocates of duplicity who render consciousness false by getting individuals to produce an unjust society they do not really want. Rather, it generates an ethos of schizophrenia that helps condition the attitudes and behavior it requires for its own survival. Hence, it fosters ‘me’ thinking on the model of the narcissistic child and discourages ‘we’ thinking of the kind deliberative grown-up citizens prefer. Its builds psychic monkey traps into its free-range marketplace. If the attitudes and behaviors that result turn out to undermine other cultural values extraneous to capitalism’s concerns -- however deeply relevant they may be to moral and spiritual frameworks and to the shape of an ideal public culture – too bad.

In our era of late consumer capitalism, then, privatization and the infantilizing ethos work to reverse the civilizational valence, in Freud’s language encouraging id to displace ego and in place of a civic commons establish an anarchic commercial playground. The ethos does not despise civilization, it is merely indifferent to it. It is rather single-mindedly devoted to consumer capitalism and so encourages id-driven individuals to indulge in behavior – however corrupting to civilization – that is useful to consumerism. Regression becomes a necessary tactic of the mandate to consume. No one is to blame. There is no “false consciousness.” The system cracks around fissures that have developed between the requirements of me and we, of id and ego, of its economic mandate and its civilizational value system. We are encouraged to withdraw from our public selves into the sanctuary of “I want,” to secede from the public sector and fence ourselves in behind “walled communities” in which we deploy private resources to acquire what were once “public” goods such as garbage collection, police protection and schooling by treating them as private commodities.. What we fail to see is that they are public not merely in how they are paid for in democratic governments, but in how they operate. When garbage collection, health care, police protection and education are privatized they actually are subverted. You cannot protect a few in the midst of general insecurity (ask those who fled to the suburbs to get away from urban crime and drugs); you cannot educate a few in the midst of societal ignorance (ask the corporations looking for “educated workers”).

The paradox of public and private that sets capitalism against civilization works to defeat common aspirations by empowering private wants. We lose the capacity to shape our lives together because we are persuaded by the prevailing ethos that freedom means expressing our desires in isolation. In the arena of education, for example, the defects of public schooling are thought to be remediable by the virtues of private choice. Through vouchers we are able, one by one, to leave our indelible marks on policy options that n serving private choice no longer reflect public goods. I want a school where my kid gets the very best; you want a school where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school where groups whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter learning; he (a person of color) wants a school where he has maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into to successful ones is not hindered by an attachment to common values. What do we get? The satisfaction (sometimes) of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individual secede from the public realm. And thus the undermining of a system to which we can subscribe in common. No one wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices. Certainly that is not what we opt for when we express our personal wants with respect to our own kids. Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat from the public sector. As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good “for me” the educational consumer turns out to be a disaster for us as citizens and civic educators and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it)..

What the convergence of privatization and infantlization does so effectively is to skew the contest between me and we, guaranteeing that the “me” will trump rival public goods, and that the consumer that dwells ever more schizophrenically within each of us will triumph over the would-be citizen dwelling nearby. For privatization argues not only that consumers are better defenders of liberty than citizens but that consumers are better citizens, that they do the work of citizens better than citizens do that work. This has been the well-intentioned by disastrous tactic of private sector do-gooders from the time of the National Consumers League earlier in the century to today’s advocates of the citizen consumer and the champions of corporate responsibility  Urge shoppers to lobby via their dollars and Euros and yen to somehow spend their way to the better world that government is supposedly no longer fit to seek; urge managers to “do well by doing good” by being responsible and giving time off for workers who do community service, and thinking about the needs of the communities in which they reside – right up to the moment the bottom line dictates that do-good companies are “forced” to abandon them.

Infantilization reinforces this preference for the private and the puerile, treating the impetuous, grasping child as the ideal shopper, and inculcating in adults an obligation to give free rein to the “I want!” and “gim me   that!” that constitute the infantile id. Puerility is not simply an option, it is a necessity of capitalism’s survival and hence a mandate of the zeitgeist – which is, of course, the ethos of infantilization.. As such, purility is endowed with a benevolent, even a sacred character, much as work and invest me nt once had Protestantism’s fervent blessings. There is much tut-tut ting at Hollywood’s celebration of comic book porn like Sin City  and a lot of oh-mying at the inanities of Howard Stern Talk Radio and gross-winner-takes-all Reality Television, but  there is no resistance and the quiet knowledge that what’s bad for us is good for the bottom line and just fine for the private me – for my stock portfolio and the long term value of my property.

So what’s this me an for you? That you are more likely to be free together than alone; that consu me rs cannot be free in their private choices unless there are citizens exercising public choices. In this era of irony, cynicism and privatism I know it’s much easier to be free alone than free in public. I know that the reward structure privileges the private and penalizes the public.  But as you graduate from one of A me rica ’s great public universities, I hope you will recall that you are creatures of the public.

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