Obedience is Freedom. Jacob Phillips
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inform each other, just as the themes and concepts of this book were once subtly linked together. There is much to be learned, albeit often negatively, about how things like ‘allegiance’, ‘obligation’ or ‘respect’ were bound up with the alternative worldviews of peaceniks, squatters, travellers or road protestors. That is, with people thought to be archetypal seekers of freedom.
Thirdly, I would say that the ‘conservatism’ on display in the pages of this book is of a broadly postmodern character. This does not mean surrendering to moral or cultural relativism, by any means, but involves a focus on how writers are implicated in their subject matter and vice versa. It means writing from the point of contact between self and world, because the juncture of subjectivity and objectivity discloses things that an exclusively subjective or objective approach does not. This sort of postmodernism is, paradoxically, exactly what those associated with ‘postmodern ideology’ today have entirely neglected, while claiming to celebrate it in abundance. Identity characteristics are frequently foregrounded in every discussion, but not fostering freedom of exploration and expression so much as closing everything down to a mere monologue. Those who would most explicitly celebrate the interrelation of subject and object are today those most likely to break the binary between the two, so only one remains, under the rubric of ‘lived experience’ (see Chapter 5). In any case, I lived through much of what is written in this book. It amused me no end when the editors of an online journal tagged an essay I’d written in this style as ‘fiction’. No word of this book is fiction.
The reasons just listed give some indication as to why I chose not to write this book using standard means of argumentation like those described at the outset. But before leading people into the countryside of West Berkshire in the early 1980s, the record shops of mid 1990s Hackney, or the exodus to Cornwall to watch the solar eclipse in 1999 – it is only fair that I at least offer some preliminary orientation to show how the chapters work towards the claim that obedience is freedom.
Chapter 1, ‘Allegiance’, highlights the obedience involved in child-bearing and child-rearing, entailed by the visceral attachment of mother and child. Changing attitudes to natality based on wanting a greater freedom, I contend, are symptomatic of one of the great challenges of our age, in which mutual allegiance one for another in a shared culture is perpetually at risk of fracturing and fragmentation, of warring cultures within one society. A culture that celebrates the commonality of mother and child is one set free to celebrate its own commonality on a societal scale. A culture that is hostile to the most visceral commonality is one that threatens to lose all sense of common ground whatsoever.
Chapter 2, ‘Loyalty’, focuses on a surreptitious slip in the understanding of the obedience associated with this term, whereby it is made secondary to personal choice: being loyal to those with whom you agree or towards whom it is advantageous to evince loyalty. The chapter enters into critical discussion with Jonathan Haidt, David Goodhart, Christopher Lasch and Peter Sloterdijk, who have each tried in different ways to interrelate the legitimacy of loyalty to one’s society or culture within an age of rapidly changing values and views among citizens. The chapter concludes that loyalty is the fruit of freedom, not its opposite; that cherishing the ways people share belonging enables them to let that belonging take precedence over optionality and preference without entailing anything abusive or toxic.
Chapter 3, ‘Deference’, is based on the position that many of the ills of today’s world are rooted in the dissociation of people from the networks of responsibility by which we live. Self-fulfilment, as social mobility, is presented as fostering a literal self-centredness, whereby one’s position in society is made the measure of personal worth, one’s centre. By contrast, and exemplified in the novels of Charles Dickens, I argue that moral and economic worth or dignity must never be confused, that one’s moral value, or centre, is bound up with the good of the whole to which one contributes. I also argue that separating moral and economic value can liberate people from the various narratives of affliction that pervade our culture, because those narratives serve to cover up the various issues with self-esteem and mental illness that attend aggressive meritocracy. The ability to defer is indicative of a society where moral and economic worth are disambiguated – for deferring to others is acutely painful if their perspective is deemed representative of some sort of greater dignity than one’s own. Deference just means accepting another’s viewpoint as better placed than one’s own.
Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Honour’ and turns to love, sex and desire in the internet age. The point here is that obediently accepting another’s standing as an ‘end in itself’ and never a means to one’s own ends, in a loving relationship, means honouring that person as someone who is not ensnared in one’s own schemes or objectified. To honour someone is to hold dear to the boundary between yourself and another. Yet this boundary liberates people to love each other genuinely, not chase after others as vehicles for self-satisfaction.
The next three chapters shift gear to more societal concerns, beginning in Chapter 5, ‘Obligation’, with a critique of what might be grandly termed the epistemology of identity politics. Drawing particularly on the hermeneutical philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, I argue that the distinctive intellectual activities of the humanities (most fundamentally, interpretation) are structurally different to the natural sciences because of an inherent twofold structure of obligation. That is, to interpret something requires taking heed of a mutual obligation to subjectivity and objectivity. Natural science as classically understood adheres only to the obligation of objectivity. Yet, much of today’s discourse on the humanities breaks the binary in the other direction, claiming all is subjectivity. Moreover, older approaches to the humanities argued that these disciplines just reflected the way people actually live. In life, we perpetually seek objective truth in a way that is properly integrated with subjectivity. Basic human cognition serves both masters.
Chapter 6, ‘Respect’, I wrote with great hesitation, as it entailed going into some of the most vexatious territory of contemporary society: race. The thesis here is that most discourse around race-relations, particularly since 2020, has drawn on American racial discourse, despite the fact that that discourse is often ill-fitted to a UK context. The effect of unconscious bias training sessions, for example, is to try to leverage respect between different ethnicities artificially and often in a way disconnected from the lived realities in which particular ethnicities have forged a particular shared culture in Britain for decades. This is not a pluralist multiculturalism I have in mind, but something much harder to achieve – mutual participation in a culture that is shared. I contrast the mutual, organic respect that is won by sharing a culture with the forced, artificial respect associated with terms like ‘allyship’, which are themselves often used by people who haven’t lived within a shared culture themselves.
Chapter 7, ‘Responsibility’, discusses ecological concerns as expressed in the 1990s compared to the present day. Between the two periods, another broken binary has emerged – between cultural and social conservation and environmental conservation. This break is intensifying rapidly, with the current vogue for language of crisis and emergency pushing towards a near-permanent state-of-exception, radically disconnected from the past. But we need not go too far back in history to see how nature and culture were much more closely related than they are today.
The book then shifts gear again for the final three chapters, turning to even broader questions about language, the cosmos and, finally, authority. Chapter 8, ‘Discipline’, finds the epitome of the interrelation of obedience and freedom in poetics. Poetry is held to be writing freed from even the normal strictures of language and yet the requirements of the form are traditionally much stricter than prose. The fact that language today so easily slips