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From International Socialism (1st series), No.52, July-September 1972, p.43.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Superman and Common Men
by B. Barber
Pelican, 30p
Freedom in a Rocking Boat
by Sir Geoffrey Vickers
Pelican, 40p
Every age has its prophets. In the 1950s and early 1960s they announced that we had arrived in the Promised Land, a land without classes and gifted with endless prosperity. When student revolt flashed round the world, the prophets pointed out that some people simply got bored with endless prosperity, (which students, as opposed to company directors or peers of the realm, obviously were). But what with economic crisis, strikes and pollution, it became obvious that a new set of prophets were needed, or at least that the old prophets would have to dream up a new set of prophecies if they wanted to stay in business. These prophets, as opposed to their former selves, are prophets of doom, and these two volumes contain a goodly portion of their dark wisdom.
Sir Geoffrey kicks off in fine style (his title and record as a member of the National Coal Board for manpower and health and welfare would lead one to expect nothing less). ‘The over-riding problem’ is how Sir Geoffrey and his friends can achieve ‘a governable world of governable men.’ The recent action of those rather less exalted employees of the NCB, the miners, underlines this crucial point. Sir Geoffrey then goes on to restate – in a highly original way of course – a few home truths, of which I feel obliged to reproduce the three most essential to his case: One, a.small minority of ‘self-selected’ men are born to rule. Two, they do this through the state which is the supreme regulator of society. Three, is summed up by the immortal line, ‘Any fool can be a revolutionary’.
Benjamin R. Barber, an American professor, seems rather to the left of Sir Geoffrey but his mental level is surprisingly similar. The Pilgrim Fathers have a lot to answer for. His central concern is the nature of freedom, of which, he writes, there are two theoretical models. One, the ‘Abstract Physical-Mechanistic Model’ defines freedom simply as the absence of coercion. Mr Barber says that this takes no account of modern techniques of persuasion which can make us ‘unfree’ without a crude ‘ display of force. It is not enough to demonstrate what freedom is not. What it is, however, can only be shown by use of (you’ve guessed it) another model, the ‘Concrete Psychological-Intentionalist Model’. This model, though equally unpronouncable, can be explained by a simple example. Two men kick a passer-by. One man kicks because he feels like it. The other kicks as a result of serious reflection. The first man is unfree, he is a slave to his aggressive instincts, the second is inwardly free because of his use of reason. Freedom, according to Mr Barber, is simply awareness, even though this awareness may not be apparent from its results, as we have seen. It follows, I suspect, that men are most free when they are just thinking or telling other people their thoughts. That is particularly convenient for Mr Barber, who gets paid for doing just that.
It seems almost rude to demand practical conclusions after such heroic flights of fancy, but both our authors are forthcoming even on this point. Benjamin R. Barber, for all his vicarious flirtations with radical language – ’revolution can only be the work of common men who speak for the majority’ – concludes that it is precisely American ‘democracy’ that stands in the way of change: ‘The people has become a tyrant from which there is no recourse.’ And all his claims to theoretical novelty dissolve into a rather quaint appeal for a change of heart (’awareness’) which will initiate the age of freedom without any of us having to do anything for it.
Sir Geoffrey faces a similar dilemma, would also like to see a change of heart but is more brutally realistic on how to bring it about. The crisis, he says, is one of ‘mutual threats’ (one class against another, one nation against another, it’s all the same to him), and of ‘the waning self-confidence of established authority’. The solution, ‘a sense of common humanity’ (only a sense) rather like the Dunkirk spirit, which, he adds, could well be stimulated by the series of dramatic disasters towards which the system is now lurching. What a stroke of luck! (Trade unionists should ponder this well: Sir Geoffrey considers you to be ‘the only clearly new human type to be evolved in the last 100 years.’)
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