F is for ... Freedom.

Freedom - liberty - is a fundamental ideal of the United States, and indeed of most modern democracies. Philosophically, this reflects the considerable influence of the 17th Century English political philosopher John Locke, whose natural law arguments stemmed from the axiomatic assertion that Man in Nature is free. The preamble of the U.S. Constitution explicitly references this “self-evident” truth, and many of us today would accept it readily enough. We know, of course, that people don’t enjoy perfect freedom in the real world; but - and this is important - most of us consider this to be the result of unfair practices: discrimination, oppression, and so forth. Most of us can also readily identify persons whose liberties we feel properly ought to be infringed upon; the concept of social justice spares us the burden of hypocrisy in doing so. Locke and later social contract theorists defined social justice variously, but in each case the function of social justice is to delineate the circumstances under which freedoms can be compromised and the nature of that compromise.

One of the major philosophical divisions regarding the proper limits of the social contract hinges on the definition of liberty. One camp focuses primarily on positive liberty - that is, the “freedom to” perform some action. Another emphasizes negative liberty - the “freedom from” restrictive influences. Both aspects were represented in the famous “Four Freedoms” enunciated by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, freedom from want.” It can be seen that the positive liberties thus identified are far more modest than the negative liberties. The positive freedoms are limited to what people can say and believe, liberties that prove in practice very difficult to infringe upon in any case - easier, perhaps, to criminalize and punish after the fact, although in practice such an approach generally only draws attention to its own inadequacy, as with the fatwa declared against Salman Rushdie for his authorship of The Satanic Verses. By contrast, the negative freedoms outstrip the scope of those freedoms guaranteed U.S. citizens under the Bill of Rights, and purport to promise the supply of every human need - an aim that could fairly be described “ambitious,” and one which led to the drafting of a far more sweeping assertion of rights: the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) that was Eleanor Roosevelt’s lasting contribution to global society. Whether the existence of UDHR makes the negative liberties invoked as rights more achievable or reasonable is, perhaps, a valid question. Regardless, the emphasis on negative liberty is a hallmark of modern liberal political philosophy - the focus on positive liberty, by contrast, is the cornerstone of libertarianism and associated with the minarchist tendencies of the political Right.

My own approach to the question is along libertarian lines, and takes a lead from Locke’s own emphasis on property rights - the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution slightly bowdlerizes Locke’s original triad of “life, liberty, and property,” perhaps unsurprisingly given the sensitivity of the slavery issue as evidenced by the abhorrent “three-fifths compromise.” I’m also much influenced, here as elsewhere, by the pragmaticism of Charles Peirce: in the context of personal freedom, this manifests as a requirement that any freedom I claim be a freedom I can actually meaningfully enjoy in the context of my everyday life. Along these lines, I define freedom to be, specifically, the freedom to dispose of property according to my own will. The implication of free will is another nod to Peirce: if everything I do is predetermined, then I have no freedom in practice; I can only do what I am ordained to do, and whatever property I have is an accident and no more mine than I am mine own. I find this a miserable as well as an unnecessary philosophy, and have besides several reasons for believing that I, as a rational actor, make praxeological choices with my life.

Freedom should not be something that is given to me by somebody else: if I am free on sufferance only, then I am not free at all. Therefore, freedom must start within me - within my own willed actions. The first thing I am able to influence by my own will is my own body: thus, the beginning of property is the physical self, and all other property is obtained and secured through that self. Everybody who has a physical self that they can subject to their will is thereby made free to that extent; insofar as there are variations in the amount and security of property in each individual’s possession, there are also degrees of freedom individuals can enjoy. The person who controls most property - by which I mean, a person whose willed interactions with the world influence the most material entities in that world - is, by this measure, the most free. I’ll explore the implications of that argument, particularly in the context of the conflicting views of property expressed by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx, in a future blog.

This conception of positive liberty sets the stage for a vision of society compatible with the one laid out by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan - bella omnium contra omnes, a “war of all against all,” in which each individual strives against his fellows for a greater share of finite resources in the pursuit of greater personal liberty. Hobbes’ gloomier perspective on the natural state of Man, compared with that of Locke, provides a different rationale for the social contract: rather than being a natural expression of freedoms that Man enjoys with or without that contract, for Hobbes the social contract is an essential tool for protecting the individual from his society. In this way, it can be seen how unchecked positive liberty creates a need for negative liberty; there is, in fact, a dynamic between the two. At one extreme, positive liberty is unfettered by any structural constraint: de facto anarchy obtains, and the strongest thrive - a scenario Darwinians should find familiar. At the other extreme, the totalitarian state protects the citizen so thoroughly from the expression of their neighbor’s willed desire to curtail her freedom that she is left with no freedom to curtail. Neither extreme is stable - the powerful establish order out of anarchy, and the totalitarian state destroys its own legitimacy as it disempowers its citizenry. Each state of affairs - each thesis - creates an opposing condition - an antithesis. The tension between positive and negative liberty thus constitutes a Hegelian dialectic, in which the embrace of one idea cultivates a contrarian embrace of the other.

Equilibria can be envisaged, and indeed examples of such can be found in the real world, wherein either positive or negative liberty has the ascendancy. It is in the nature of a Hegelian dialectic that no equilibrium remains in perpetuity; the balance is constantly, if gradually, shifting. Giambattista Vico proposed a view of history as cyclical that is consistent with Hegel’s dialectical materialism, and consistent with a view of liberty as the product of competition between evenly-matched actors for finite resources.

Where exactly the equilibrium is now; where it is trending, and how fast; and what this might mean for us as citizens, are all questions worth considering.

E is for ... Eight Circuit Theory

The late Dr. Timothy Leary, currently orbiting this Earth in accordance with his last wishes, was a hero of the counterculture and remains a controversial figure in academic circles. The Harvard professor of psychology is infamous for encouraging his students to partake of psychedelic drugs - including psilocybin and LSD - in order to facilitate their creativity. He was inspired on this unorthodox pedagogical approach by his own experiences using so-called "magic mushrooms," from which psilocybin is obtained; he later opined that he'd learned more about his own mind and the discipline of psychology on his first trip than in fifteen years as a psychological researcher.

At the time Leary was embracing and encouraging the counterculture - his Harvard Psilocybin Project was actively supported by the beat poet Allan Ginsberg, for example - the drugs he was peddling to his students were quite legal, although they were eyed with increasing suspicion by the authorities. Marijuana, an altogether inoffensive substance by comparison, was illegal, thanks to the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937. This legislation, which marked the opening salvo of the U.S. government's long and fruitless War on Drugs, was remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, as the name implied, the legislation actually concerns imposing a tax on vendors of cannabis sativa - principally doctors and pharmacists. The letter of the law criminalizes possession of the weed only on the basis that the taxes levied under the Act haven't been paid. These taxes were designed deliberately to be unaffordable to that class of persons commonly to be found using cannabis for recreational purposes, therefore virtually guaranteeing that anybody regularly using the drug did so in contravention of the law. This may seem a roundabout way of outlawing the drug - it was not illegal to own it, to cultivate it, to smoke it, or even to sell it, only to avoid the excise tax upon it - but it should be borne in mind that, at that time, there was considerable doubt over the constitutionality of a law that forbade citizens from partaking in a form of commerce. In those innocent times before the New Deal, the Supreme Court placed considerable weight on the Tenth Amendment deference to state legislatures, and regularly thwarted federal efforts to regulate all manner of industries. Alcohol had been prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment, but the fact that a constitutional amendment had been required to accomplish this indicates that the path to outlawing drug use was not clear - not least because prohibition had subsequently been repealed by the same mechanism.

The regulation of a trumped-up tax provided a constitutional mechanism, but it was still necessary to sway popular opinion. To that end, Congressional hearings leading up to the Act relied heavily on sensational anecdotes from people who claimed the evil weed had driven them to acts of depraved enormity. An appropriately sensational term - "reefer madness" - found its way into tabloid headlines and thence into common parlance, even becoming the title of an unintentionally-hilarious 1936 movie (which you can actually go and watch here). Dr. William Woodward, counsel for the American Medical Association, rejected the claims of drastic personality alteration resulting from cannabis use, concluding the drug was essentially harmless and questioning the approach adopted by the committee in gathering evidence. The committee not only disregarded his objections, having very compelling - if hardly altruistic - reasons for doing so; it later reported to the house that the AMA was in full support of the bill, a blatant lie that went unchallenged. "Reefer madness" had no scientific basis whatsoever, but the Congressional imprimatur saw it cited in the defense of murderers and other violent criminals - sometimes successfully.

Leary's own "madness" in dosing his students with psychoactive drugs whose effects were still poorly understood hastened the hardening of the official line against all recreational drugs - the government did, in fairness, have a much better case to make regarding the dangers of LSD and psilocybin, and they'd done the top-secret research with Project MK-ULTRA to prove it, although that, alas, is a story for another time - but there was some method to it. That method, belatedly, harks back to the title of this post: Eight Circuit Theory.

Eight Circuit Theory is a classic piece of pseudoscience, cobbling together a lot of mystical ideas with a lot of valid observations into an overarching theory that is beguilingly untestable, and so unscientific. Despite this drawback, it has a certain appeal, which is why I'm choosing to talk about it here today. Essentially, Leary's model of cognition likens the brain to a radio - a tuned circuit, or more accurately, eight separate tuned circuits, each of which receives (and broadcasts) specific kinds of information. The eight circuits are hierarchically arranged, from the instinctive processing of the bio-survival circuit to the transcendental comprehension of the non-local circuit. Much of the theoretical scaffolding of Leary's model seems preposterous; but his assertion that, for most of us, the higher circuits are customarily closed seems reasonable enough within the terms of the model. The real controversy lies in his related belief that drugs such as LSD and psilocybin could "turn on" the circuits, and allow the user to "tune in" to information that otherwise passed them by: hence the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out." What were the participants in Leary's Psilocybin Project "dropping out" of? Robert Anton Wilson, currently percolating in the Pacific off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in accordance with his last wishes, had theories of his own about that; but they can wait.