Liberty as Episteme
When thousands of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol Building in January 2021 to contest the results of the presidential election, the assortment of symbols and slogans on display added to the confusion of those observing the spectacle. Among the various flags waved by the insurrectionists that day, there was the Gadsden flag. Bright yellow and depicting a coiled rattlesnake along with the phrase “don’t tread on me,” the Gadsden flag was designed during the American Revolution, but the symbolism has been resurrected by ‘libertarians’ in recent decades. However, self-labeled libertarians have been highly divided in their support for Donald Trump. In both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Libertarian Party received the most votes of any third party. This division over Trump may be explained by the lack of an explicit, consistent, and cohering ideology guiding libertarians’ politics. What they do agree on is typically packaged into just two words: small government. As scholars attempt to understand this event, breaking down the various causal factors leading up to it, I propose that it may be worthwhile to trace the American notion of liberty through a cultural-historical epistemic channel. I will discuss some of the significant historical developments — religious, political, and economic — which I believe are necessary for this philosophical project.
When the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he observed something he believed unique to American society. He wrote, “the Americans do not read the works of Descartes, because their social condition deters them from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims because this very social condition naturally disposes their understanding to adopt them” ([1835] 2003, 529). The Cartesian maxim which Tocqueville elaborates from this statement is that which says to accept nothing as true that is not self-evident. Tocqueville believed that ‘habits of mind’ were derived from the political laws and conditions of a society, and that the disposition to rely on one’s own judgment requires equality and democracy. He asks why, then, were Americans engaged in the extreme practice of denying that there is any veil between them and the truth when they had not had a democratic revolution? Tocqueville’s observation seems just as applicable to Americans today, and because the sociologist had identified Christianity as being integral to the American psyche, this exploration will begin with Christianity and its relationship to social thought through the Reformation and up to the colonization of North America.
As scholar Simon Goldhill (2004) explains, Christianity began as a small sect of Judaism that was dissatisfied with society in classical antiquity; a development on the heels of increasing antagonism directed at Jews by pagan emperors. Goldhill illuminates the contours of their dissatisfaction by pointing out that Christianity’s earliest exemplars were re-appropriating symbols and overturning social norms such that initially there was a ‘radical strangeness’ in the stories that caused the religion to spread (129). For example, punishment for the classical citizen usually meant exclusion from communal activity, while punishment for the non-citizen, or slave, involved humiliating and painful methods such as crucifixion. Sexual abstinence, vows of silence, and fasting in the desert were ways of refusing, or attempting to negate, the social bonds of the community (107), and this behavior was considered so problematic by the Roman authorities that early Christianity got its martyrs. One could not be excluded when they have willfully and pre-emptively removed themselves, and one could not be humiliated on a crucifix when it is now a symbol of transcendence over the painful weakness of the flesh. Indeed, asceticism was the most heavily borrowed virtue in these early stages, but for all its initial rejection of society, Christianity would continue to develop through a negotiation of Greco-Roman culture, reflecting various elements of Greek philosophical traditions such as stoicism and cynicism.
Tracing the embattled relationship that early Christianity had with Greek philosophy due to the similarity of their ideals, Goldhill states that “Christianity demanded an obsession with the inner life, and philosophy for generations of Greeks and Romans had provided the authoritative guide to spirituality and self-reflection” (137). With the story of Christ’s resurrection, the concept of a holy trinity was likely borrowed from Plato’s tripartite view of the soul and made to serve as a direct challenge to Plato’s focus on preparation for death as well as his concept of a ‘philosopher king,’ due to the more appealing notion of transcending death and material existence. Christians were also borrowing from the earlier Mesopotamian idea of God-kings, in which a Great Man could be equal to the Great God, regarding the historical ideas about the forces which shape society (Novack 1972, 24). But now, with the concept of the Holy Spirit, Christianity delivered such greatness to all who believed. This is established with the myth and mysticism of the Last Supper, wherein the ‘kingdom of God’ was said to be inviolably within the individual should they partake in this new sacrament and deny themselves the earthly, bodily desires and social bonds of pagan society. Goldhill points out that the word ‘monastery’ derives from the Greek monos, meaning ‘on one’s own’ (107), so as Christianity spread there was a paradoxical effect in which new social bonds were formed from this collective of individuals who were ‘on their own.’
The Roman Empire eventually became Christian, but Christianity was always already inescapably Roman in the sense that these new social formations were dialectically shaped by what preceded them. Goldhill writes that “when Romans became Christian, they did not forget their education” (129), and the administration of the empire saw no significant change due to Christianity becoming the official religion. Some bishops, such as Synesius of Cyrene, believed Greek (pagan) philosophy to be too valuable to ban because it was intellectually foundational to Christianity. Goldhill suggests that this original embroilment between Christianity and philosophy set the stage for the Reformation.
During the Middle Ages, Roman Catholicism was the dominant power in Europe and all theological discussions, and laws, were in Latin. Scholar Benedict Anderson ([1983] 2006) explains that by 1500, book printing was proving to be capitalism’s first market, and for the small minority of Latin readers it had already been saturated. Anderson writes that “Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German translation, and within 15 days had been seen in every part of the country” (39). Print capitalism seized upon the moment of market demand and practically overnight Luther’s German translation of the Bible was in the hands of the masses of ordinary people. This was the Protestant Reformation: a return of the word of God to the people so that their religion could no longer be gate-kept by the governing Roman Catholic authorities. For the Protestants, an individual’s relationship with God required no formal training and need not go through anybody else; it was inviolable.
The battle between religious reformers and the Roman Catholic Church was hard fought throughout Western Europe, but the Reformation got its stronghold in England in 1534 when King Henry VIII was denied a divorce by the authorities of the Catholic Church which resulted in his declaring himself head of the Church of England and divorcing England from the Pope’s authority. According to Benedict Anderson, Protestantism and capitalism were effectively in a coalition, co-producing each other’s success (40). The adoption of Protestantism in England may explain why the capitalist mode of production found fertile soil there as well, as print-capitalism allowed for the administrative centralization of the monarchy. As scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002) explains, 16th century England rapidly centralized into a governing state, which removed the ‘extra-economic power’ that the landlord aristocracy had previously used to squeeze wealth from the peasant class. Instead, these agrarian landlords began to depend on their tenants being competitively productive: the more the tenant earned, the more the landlord could receive in rent. Then, as landlords only leased their land to the highest bidders, those farmers with market success became the middle class while those less successful lost access to land altogether (113).
At the same time, there were new developments in the English Reformation as some Protestants believed that the Church of England was still too Catholic. This position, stoked by the writing of John Calvin, would come to be called Puritanism, and some Puritans would become Separatists, also called Independents, who advocated breaking away from the Church of England. In his book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, historian R.H. Tawney wrote:
“No one can read the discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 on three burning issues — the rise in prices, capital and interest, and the land question in England — without being struck by constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the final authority” ([1926] 2015, 24).
The Puritans maintained that economic activity was a spiritual affair such that there should be no other authority over one’s prosperity than that of God’s providence. It became increasingly apparent that the state sided with the interests of the land-owning class against those of the laboring middle class, and it was this sense of immorality on the part of the governing authority which also fueled the position of the Separatists against the Church of England. Much like the first Christians in antiquity, separation from the social relations which hinder one’s spiritual work was of utmost importance to the Puritans, and similarly can be seen as resulting from dissatisfaction with the ruling authority, functioning ideologically to delegitimate that authority.
Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is that it was a religious movement which valued work ethic that coincidentally fostered capitalism. This publication was promoted in popular opposition to a Marxist thesis. Weber’s contemporary, R.H. Tawney, took a historical-materialist approach in his consideration of the same topic, writing:
“In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively economic standards to social relations evoked from Puritan writers and divines vigorous protests against usurious interest, extortionate prices, and the oppression of tenants by landlords” (244).
And…
“[The Puritan mind] which looked forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of economic enterprise something not uncongenial to its own temper and went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been a qualified concession to practical exigencies, appeared in some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of God and the training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of medieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation” (244).
This ‘qualified concession to practical exigencies’ of Calvin served to conceive of physical labor as a form of asceticism whereby one could access the necessary spiritual ‘work’ attendant to physical suffering, and so the doctrine which said one could be saved by faith alone was altered to include that one’s faith must be shown in their ‘work.’ Thus R.H. Tawney considered Puritanism ‘the schoolmaster’ of the laboring English middle class.
As the story is commonly told, the English Puritans fled religious persecution and migrated to the New World in the 1630s. What is not commonly acknowledged is how they were in some part a nascent capitalist class themselves; there was an implicit factor of discontentment with their material relations in England, obscured by and enveloped in notions of religious freedom. Authority was cleaved from the state contingent upon these material facts, but the religious and the political were still warp and weft as the Puritans set sea on a contradiction: colonial charters promising economic returns to both venture capitalists as well as the Crown.
As Historian Gerald Horne (2017) explains, there was a symbiotic relationship between the merchants in the mainland colonies and the planters using slave labor in the island colonies, and it was this relationship that allowed for the influx of Puritans to the mainland. From Providence Island to Provincetown, the Puritans had few moral qualms participating in a land grab that involved the violent removal of indigenous populations, as it was considered God’s providence that they establish a ‘model society.’ But for this laboring middle class, controlling the land was the upward mobility they could not achieve in England. Horne asserts that both England and New England agreed on the necessity of ramping up the slave trade. He explains that while the Crown controlled the lucrative African slave trade, the emergence of republicanism in opposition to the monarchy was driven by the rise of the merchant class in both London and in the colonies. Horne writes that “Protestant London was more and more in the grip of merchants who were willing to exercise any ploy, be it religious, republican, or religious republicanism, in order to gain a dominant market share” (74). And that “powerful colonists began to undermine a proper colonialism by seeking to break the bonds of “imperial preference” and trade with any they so chose, including London’s fiercest foes, thus setting the stage for 1776” (10).
At this point a pattern appears in which the thread of Christianity integral to the founding of America repeats the very process Christianity originated by in antiquity: dissatisfaction with social and material relations; identifying society, the church, or the state as the cause of constraint for the individual; and separating along newly (re)constructed ideological grounds, only to still contain a kernel of the very relations they were displeased with. As R.H. Tawney wrote:
“The transition from the idea of a moral code enforced by the Church, which had been characteristic of early Calvinism, to the economic individualism of the later Puritan movement took place, in fact, by way of the democratic agitation of the Independents. Abhorring the whole mechanism of ecclesiastical discipline and compulsory conformity, they endeavored to achieve the same social and ethical ends by political action” (225).
It is well within the American consciousness today that the American Revolution was a matter of unfair taxation. As the Crown wanted to impose new taxes on the colonies, the colonists protested that there should be “no taxation without representation” in parliament. This was the motto of the pre-revolutionary agitators known as the Sons of Liberty. When the colonies moved for independence from Britain, this separation from the existing bonds also came with a new ideological construction: the full realization of ‘liberty’ in republicanism. However, this popular and even virtuous myth of national origin is not the full story, as historians point out that abolitionism was gaining traction in London in 1772, sparking anti-London outrage among the colonies one year before the infamous Boston Tea Party (Horne 2014, 210).
What was once a notion of ‘religious liberty’ could now just be “liberty,” and where it once concerned spiritual enrichment it now concerned material entitlement. But the contradictions between self-interest and the various forms of perceived authority arising from social organization remained, such as the authority of intersubjectivity which subconsciously provokes and obliges the recognition of another human’s personhood. In this new republic of racialized capitalism, liberty for one was in a dialectic with the total absence of liberty for another. The rejection of social bonds was so extreme that the contradiction widened into the chasm of imperceptible relations that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized when he suggested that Cartesian precepts had been least studied but most applied by the Americans. The thread of Christianity integral to the American psyche appears to be that which carried forward the original disdain for philosophy, interwoven with the capitalist mode of production.
The most memorized, oft-repeated line of the Declaration of Independence is this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Here the word “liberty” is curious because it must refer to something specific, otherwise it would seem tautological next to “life” and “the pursuit of happiness.” In his review of Capitalism and a New Social Order by Joyce Appleby, scholar Jack Greene (1985) explains that historically the word ‘liberty’ most likely referred to the right of free men to participate in civic affairs, and/or to the secure possession of property. In fact, this famous line from the Declaration of Independence loses its patina when we realize that the ‘men’ it refers to are exclusively white, property-owning men. Liberty is then wholly distinct from freedom. And it is this realization that locates the unexamined dualism of the Founding Fathers wherein operated ontological categories of human based on the pre-existing economic fact of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ men. Could generations of Americans have reproduced the epistemic channel of determining what is or is not liberty on an individual basis of self-evidence?
Cartesian dualism refers to the philosophy of Rene Descartes, who lived in the Dutch Republic in the early 17th century. Descartes jumpstarted the modern Western philosophical tradition in Europe largely due to the compatibility that his concept of mind-body substance dualism had with theology. Essentially, Cartesian dualism asserts that the spiritual soul and the physical body are ontologically distinct substances and that the former can exist without the latter but not vice versa. In effect, this idea promoted the spiritual realm above the physical realm, denying a relationship between the two. Historian Rick Kennedy (1990) points out that thanks to a scholar named William Brattle, the entire Cartesian compendium was integral to the Harvard student’s education from 1687–1735. Alexis de Tocqueville may not have been aware that Cartesian logic had made its way into the colonies and at least scholastically combined with Puritanism well before 1776, though the fact only further supports his claim as Kennedy also points out that the Puritans did come to feel insecure, even wary, about the introduction of philosophy after only five decades of engaging with it at Harvard.
The rich philosophical tradition that followed Descartes in Europe really grappled with his metaphysics through schools of idealism and materialism. This rigorous engagement was honed through critique after critique, and in response to political questions, when in the 19th century the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels determined the scientific answer to the problem of metaphysics was that there is a dialectical relationship between the material and the ideological. When it came to modern political economy, dialectical materialism would be the philosophical method of socialism, while capitalism preferred to keep to idealism and Cartesian dualism. Interestingly, recent studies in the field of cognitive science have shown that humans have a natural proclivity to mistake process for substance, and this is just one of many reasons why scientific knowledge is often counterintuitive. Cartesian dualism allows us to take capitalism for granted; to place ourselves above our material and social relations, as if what Husserl called our ‘life activity’ has no impact on our phenomenology. It is reasonable to suggest that the advancement of even a bourgeois science should eventually (if it lived up to it’s ideals) come up against and overturn such an underdeveloped and rigid epistemic ontology.
According to Gerald Horne, the Puritan settler capitalist class was willing to exercise any ploy, be it religious, republican, or religious republican. Similar activity is more recently evident in the instrumental use of the thought and legacy of Adam Smith, “The Father of Economics,” whose 18th century writing would be plucked from the line of philosophical critique by 20th century American economists such as Milton Friedman. Legal scholar Edward Kleinbard explained the problem pointedly:
“The real Adam Smith was a sophisticated thinker about moral virtues as well as efficient markets, not a cartoon spokesperson for laissez-faire economic policy. Smith never intended his metaphor of the invisible hand to become synonymous with an omniscient and efficient Mr. Marketplace. Specialists have known this all along, but the caricature version of Smith continues to distort our policy discourse” (2014).
Many Americans today are familiar with the notion of a ‘free market’ whether Adam Smith bears popular name recognition or not. Some populist proponents of a ‘free market’ may be surprised to learn that for Adam Smith the market was a providential matter, meaning the market was in the hands of God per the rhetoric of an “invisible hand.” Scholar Roland Boer (2014) points out that the interpretations of this have been so instrumentally abused because of Smith’s own ambivalent position. Boer states:
“By casually dropping in the phrase, he could both nod to the assumed understanding of the invisible hand as providential, as part of the greater plan of a rather distant deity, and he could join the increasingly secular trajectory of thought at the time. This ambiguity is what enables the diverging readings of the gargantuan ‘hand’ waving over the mundane self-interest of the little creatures below” (76).
Additionally, according to scholar Douglass Carmichael (2017), the economic theory of Adam Smith avoided philosophical engagement by ‘masquerading’ as a natural science. Where history concerned Adam Smith, his concept of ‘original accumulation’ presented the capitalist mode of production as arising naturally from a division of labor produced by some working harder than others. This theory ignores the violent enclosure of the commons, genocide of the indigenous, and enslavement of Africans. Smith was hardly a social Darwinist though, rather, he was a moralist who expected society to not let the poor starve, while also suggesting that a limited government would be necessary to protect private property from the masses so long as there is inequality. Arguably, the most instrumental idea that Milton Friedman derived from Smith was that people are rational, self-interested actors in the market.
In the same way that Christianity is best understood as originating within the social and material relations of Greco-Roman society, the Neoliberal era — characterized by deregulation, privatization, and austerity, in other words, a ‘minimizing’ of government– is best understood as emerging on the psychic landscape of the Cold War. Directly following WWII, the psychic trauma of this period in the West was two-fold regarding the existential threats stemming from the power of the state. First, there was the real possibility of nuclear annihilation, and with that the realization that the government could develop and use technology for nefarious purposes. Scholar Sarah Pike (2004) discusses the effects on the American imagination in the 50s and 60s, specifically how the space race channeled some of that fear of government in a positive direction, and also gave rise to cultural products such as the UFO craze and the genre of science fiction (72). Second, communism was portrayed as big government: ‘Godless’ and antithetical to America, liberty, and individuality. The revival in American Christianity in opposition to the threat of communism also sparked a counterculture of new religious movements. As Sarah Pike explains:
“Along with other new religions, the New Age movement and Neopaganism emerged during a radical turn in religion and morals that took place during the 1960s. One aspect of this turn was a cultural shift toward understanding the self as a commodity to be created and presented. Self-expression and personal autonomy were central to the 1960s counterculture and resulted in “a progressive democratization of personhood” and a search for individualized religion” (74).
Even apart from these new religious movements, this era re-asserted the authority of ‘the self’ over that of the family, church, or state.
The rejection of middle-class material aspirations meant commodity fetishism was traded for a fetishism of the consumer. Christopher Lasch referred to this phenomenon in his book The Culture of Narcissism ([1979] 2018) and distinguished it from the earlier American individualist observed by Tocqueville. According to Lasch, this modern narcissism is the result of the ceding of everyday life to the experts and bureaucrats. Lasch wrote:
“Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design” (41).
In this passage, Lasch is suggesting that capitalist social relations are more pervasive, and taken more for granted than ever before, resulting in ‘the self’ being found solely via reflection through the market. With ‘the self’ practically synonymous with the market, the psychoanalyst would consider the state to be ‘the other’ which threatens that identity. It is this psychic landscape on which neoliberalism took hold.
In his book The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber (2015) highlights the historical role the state has had in creating and maintaining markets, and how in neoliberal America the line between public and private sectors is so blurred it effectively obscures the role of the state such that it merely appears the market is being ‘freed’ through deregulation. Graeber presents a paradox of liberalism wherein government policies intending to reduce government interference in the economy actually result in more bureaucrats as well as more police. Neoliberalism meant that the increase in bureaucrats happened predominantly in the private sector, less visible to those looking to condemn a bloated government. As early as 1968, Republican politicians began using rhetoric to position ‘hard working’ Americans against the government bureaucrats, suggesting that the only reason the latter have jobs is to subsidize the ‘parasitical poor’ with other people’s money (10). But this was evidently a bipartisan effort by the nineties when such rhetoric to engineer public perception and manufacture consent for the neoliberal project was embraced by Democrats such as former president Bill Clinton and current president Joe Biden.
In 1988, then senator Joe Biden wrote a column in a local paper suggesting that people are abusing welfare programs. His opinion was that such programs do little, other than hand out checks, and he promoted the idea that they should focus on helping the poor find productive jobs (Zeballos-Roig, 2019). This was a popular concern at the time, and the connotation that there are ‘parasites’ and there are ‘producers’ obscured the class conflict of union busting and corporate lobbying while simultaneously reinstating a sense of Puritan work ethic such that it would be a moral failure on the part of the individual if they could not secure stable employment. It is interesting then, that on the heels of austerity through welfare reform came several tough-on-crime measures which resulted in mass incarceration and disproportionately impacted Black Americans. Economist Geert Dhondt’s dissertation argues that while neoliberalism produced a segment of the working class excluded from the labor market and undermined the welfare systems that would have previously managed that particular social issue, mass incarceration became a mechanism of ‘disciplining’ the labor force (2012, 110). Considering the public institution of policing in combination with the privatization of prisons, this does prove David Graeber’s assertion that deregulation has only shifted our perception of the state’s activity, which is more bureaucratic than ever.
But if it is true that we perceive a diminished state after decades of neoliberal de-regulation and austerity, why would so many continue to blame ‘the state’ for their grievances, still insisting on ‘small’ government and a ‘free’ market? What is it that the libertarian is asserting their liberty against? Dhondt’s research showing crime is lower in areas with stronger welfare gives us a clue that this may also have some relation to austerity policies. If we consider that the cost of healthcare, education, and housing have continued to rise while wages stagnate, and Americans are expected to take on a lifetime of debt in order to finance those expenses, it is reasonable for them to question what their tax dollars are being used for. Unfortunately, this question is co-opted by the mainstream media which uses ‘taxpayer’ rhetoric to frame public money as the taxpayer’s money that the government mishandles by giving it to undeserving ‘freeloaders.’ In a survey of legal scholarship on the topic, scholar Raul Carrillo (2021) points to research showing that when it comes to universal rights, perceptions of costs and contributions have become operating sites of white supremacy. Carrillo writes that “neoliberalism reduces public finance to an analytically inaccurate but politically useful algebra. It takes a broad and deep social enterprise — budgeting — and shrinks it to a sacred site of sacrifice, for rationing public money by merit, penny by penny.” Rather than conceiving of taxes as the contribution of the upstanding citizen to society, the overall health of which they benefit from, many consider taxes to be theft, especially in view of their tax dollars possibly helping people they do not identify with.
Are people so easily manipulated by the rhetoric of talking heads? Scholar Mark Fisher (2009) employed the term capitalist realism in his argument that neoliberalism has resulted in a sort of market ontology such that capitalism has fully invaded every aspect of our lives. Fisher asserts that neoliberals surreptitiously excoriated bureaucracy to the private sector, “using think-tanks as the intellectual vanguard to create the ideological climate in which capitalist realism could flourish” (35). But Fisher’s main argument relies on Lacanian psychoanalysis applied to a myriad of popular films from the neoliberal era to prove the imagination has been colonized. Explaining Lacan’s concept of ‘les non-dupes errant,’ Fisher writes “a cynic who ‘believes only his eyes’ misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experiences of reality” (54). In other words, so called ‘free thinkers’ are not really free but held in a paradox. Patterns, synchronicity, and fantasy come easy, while significance and meaning are matters of reaching through muddy water. For Fisher, the age of capitalist realism we have entered means a “turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship” (11).
In the spirit of Mark Fisher, I present an example of the persistence of libertarian ideological fantasy in a recent item of fiction on the cultural landscape — the popular television series Sons of Anarchy. A 92-episode drama which aired on cable television from 2008 to 2014 and received high ratings, Sons of Anarchy is about a criminal motorcycle club set presently in a small California town. In an opening sequence of the pilot episode, five men clad in matching vests on motorcycles arrive on the scene of an arson already attended to by first responders. They are immediately greeted by a police officer who gives them privileged information, and they in turn give the officer instructions along with a bribe (Stutter 2008, 0:05:00). It is established for the viewer that not only does the motorcycle club run this town, but the local police are corrupt and happy to cooperate. Then, when they see the charred bodies of two young immigrant women, three of the Sons and the police officer demonstrate a total lack of concern for the lives lost while the youngest Son, Jackson Teller, shows only minimal grief (0:05:30); the first indication that he is the show’s protagonist. The story is crucially framed in a following scene where Jackson is in a garage going through his family’s storage. He picks up old toys presumably from his childhood and flips through black and white photos of grandparents before discovering a manuscript written in dedication to him by his deceased father, whom viewers learn was a founding member and leader of the Sons (0:11:00). Reading the manuscript, Jackson realizes that things are not how they were originally intended to be. This seems a clear parallel to the popular notion of America’s Founding Fathers having written the Declaration of Independence, followed by the Constitution, which still today must be interpreted by scholars to ensure Americans’ original rights are not infringed upon. As the series progresses, Jackson derives his own sense for how things should be, which looks a lot more like they currently are, and he becomes entitled to his own ethics as he steps into the role of presiding over the Sons. The show is filled with the Sons committing excessive violence with little regard for human life, especially concerning women, drug addicts, and non-white immigrants, as well as little loyalty between the Sons and their own family members. The most romanticized aspect is their regular evasion and outwitting of the Federal agents who have been made to appear professionally incompetent. Ultimately, Sons of Anarchy is an aesthetic spectacle implicating American mythos.
The idea that there is a sort of epistemic and ontological heritage replicated over and over in “new” ways is not so far-fetched when we trace the genealogy of stories, identifying how they change over time but always contain some original elements. We have many ‘landscapes’ from which to pull our ideas and re-shape them. The Gadsden flag is one example of symbolism which carries with it a combination of the original, historical and the mythologized, ideological meaning. Consider the image in Figure 1:
(Figure 1. photograph of street art)
The image in Figure 1 is a photograph that I took of artwork on a Seattle street in the Summer of 2020 during the height of protests for Black lives. The artwork depicts a Black baby posed with a rattlesnake winding around them, but the baby appears unaware of the danger they are in. For those familiar with the Gadsden flag, the bright yellow and black coloring of the rattlesnake in combination with the words “Born Free?” may be recognized immediately and interpreted as intentional. This artwork could be considered in the genre of Afro-pessimism, which explores the trauma of being in relation to ontological death. This recalls the dualism of free and unfree ontologies established by settlers and implicitly codified in the Declaration of Independence, wherein the unfree were ontologically negated as humans and taken merely as economic facts. Even if the artist did not intend to make a pointed critique at those libertarians waving the Gadsden flag, the words “Born Free?” could be considered commentary on race being the modality through which class is still most visible in America today.
Was Tocqueville correct, and could the ‘habits of mind’ he observed have anything to do with today’s libertarian? While my cultural-historical exploration of the American psyche is far from conclusive, I have traced a trajectory of ideas in which it seems possible that ‘libertarianism’ is appealing to Americans due to particular ‘habits of mind’ passed down ideologically, through the stories on our cultural landscape. Far from an indictment of Christianity, Descartes, or even Adam Smith, where we are today — our various crises of institutional authority — might be better understood in the operation of a structural-systemic epistemology, and while that subject remains highly theoretical, it is acceptable to suggest that ‘habits of mind’ can be enculturated and persist generationally. However, it is also possible that what is termed Cartesian dualism, and the practice of self-evident truth seeking, may be a universal, human cognitive proclivity. It may be fruitful to look to existing frameworks to better understand how our ideas are shaped. For example, John Dewey’s models of routine and reflexive thought and action lay a practical foundation, while critical theorists such as Paulo Freire help us to understand the constraints of ideology upon the instruction and practice of reflexive thought.
It remains a philosophical challenge to account for ontological relationships resulting from habits of mind which are ideologically reinforced. The consequences are implied in the assertions that capitalist relations are taken for granted as facts of nature, or put differently, that the imagination has been ‘colonized.’ Ideas are acquired and spread not only from the construction of language, images, stories, and origin myths, but from the organization of society itself. In its origins, Christianity was a dialectical belief system with the Holy Spirit being a resolution between God and ordinary men. However, ascetic virtues also served as a negation of the body and its social bonds. At some point the dialectical message was lost, and for the Puritan settler colonists a great deal of philosophical tradition was neglected. If ‘liberty’ for the libertarian means a free market predicated on a small, non-interfering government, and in the neoliberal era there is merely an optical illusion that the two are separate entities, then we might be correct to say that today’s aggrieved libertarian is operating with a dualist ‘habit of mind’ which locates the self in the market and the other in the state.
Bibliography
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