T.S Eliot, in ‘Choruses from the Rock’ laments on behalf of our creator:
“I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
between futile speculation, and unconsidered action”.
When I was at university studying philosophy, despite the enjoyment of the intellectual rigour of endlessly dissecting words such as ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’, I got frustrated that all this dedication to dissection never seemed to result in anything practical.
Endless analysis resulting in paralysis. Futile speculation. There must be a better way, I thought.
When I got into politics, I became equally frustrated that politicians seemed happy to bandy about these same words (words that ivory-tower-residents had spent lifetimes picking to ever-reducing pieces) with absolutely no consideration for what they might actually mean at all.
Careless word-flinging resulting in some really stupid policies. Unconsidered action. There must be a better way, I thought.
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Between these two extremes of compulsive analysis and careless proclamation there must be – whisper it – a middle way?
The perils of failing to unpack what we mean by such popularised words as ‘Freedom’ can be illustrated in our agonised debates over the ‘freedom’ of the press.
Unless we step back and consider what we want our press to be free ‘from’, and whether when we say freedom, we mean equally freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to...’, we end up in the pickle we find ourselves in today.
When a politician goes on about ‘a free press’, the accepted meaning is ‘free from State control’. But if we unpack what it is about state control of the press that we really object to, it is the control of a powerful, unaccountable, monopoly.
Once we realise that this is what we really mean by ‘free’, it becomes obvious that a state is not the only powerful, unaccountable monopoly.
Enormous private-sector empires such as Rupert Murdoch’s hold that position too. Perhaps they hold it even more than a state, since although they are not technically a ‘monopoly’, their size means it is impossible for many others to compete, and international finance has made their reach not just national, like a state, but trans-national. We clearly (and naturally) see the interests of the owners of our media expressed through their outlets.
But bizarrely we still labour under the absurdly anachronistic notion that these are in some way more of a ‘free’ press, because they are driven by an unaccountable quasi-monopoly with an agenda which happens to be a private entity, rather than a state entity.
Why? Because we have not bothered to unpack what we think ‘freedom’ means when we say, ‘A Free Press’.
If we have not accurately established our premise, we cannot be surprised when our conclusions are all over the place; riddled in inconsistencies which we then hysterically try to tackle at the point of the symptom, not at the root cause ( a failure to think through what we actually mean by ‘free’.)
If we go a step further, it actually becomes hard to see what a really ‘free’ press would really look like. Whoever was running it, however noble their intentions, would inevitably be running it from some kind of motive. The motive may be saintly, but it is still a motive, and the fact it is a good motive driving that particular press does not make it any more ‘free’. It just makes it ‘good’. We should not confuse ‘free’ with our personal notion of ‘good’. That will end up in tangles as well.
The conclusion we have to reach is that we need to consciously agree, for practical purposes, what we mean by ‘free’:
We may decide that for practical purposes we say all press is ‘free’, or we may decide that none of it is – even insurgent small websites. We will probably decide that ‘some’ of it is. Since we instinctively worry about the ‘freedom’ of a press outlet driven by a huge, unaccountable monopoly, we may well look for size and influence limits on owners in what we call ‘free’.
But whatever we decide is less important than the fact we have worked out what we actually mean, and that our society’s building blocks are concepts we have actually thought-through, rather than a shifting-sand approximation of an abstract noun that carries convenient emotional connotations.
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