Perestroika began in a supermarket. While in charge of Soviet agriculture, Mikhail Gorbachev made one of his first trips abroad to Canada, which was the western country most similar in climate and geography to the Soviet Union. On the way back from a visit to a farm, he made an unscheduled stop at a supermarket. The sight of the unimaginable abundance, the variety, the luxury, the piles of disposable nappies, canned soup, washing powder and ice cream persuaded him that something needed to be done in the Soviet Union. The result is that the Russian people are freer today than ever before.
The supermarket is not a bad symbol of freedom. It is better, at least, than the Statue of Liberty because the poor, the hungry and the huddled masses are no longer quite so welcome. And if they arrive it is more likely to be across the Rio Grande than via New York harbour. The supermarket, it is true, does not say much about struggles against oppression, nor about liberation from stifling ideologies of church and state. Nevertheless it does offer an astonishing amount of choice. And choice is what freedom is about.
Freedom, says Geoff Mulgan, may be our tragic flaw. It is the finest achievement of our society; but it may also be the cause of its downfall. Why? First there is the threat to ourselves. The abundance which freedom has brought is open to abuse, leading to obesity and drug-taking. (Formerly only the rich could be fat and idle; now it is the turn of the poor.)
More important is the threat to society. An excess of individual freedom can become selfishness: if too many of us become free riders, the state and the society that provide that freedom may cease to function. Our commitment to freedom may become disrespect for authority, weakening the structures on which freedom depends. The profit and loss equation may persuade people to have fewer children-indeed it seems to be doing just that. So either our society dies out or it needs a continual infusion of people from less successful societies. Another variant is the threat to the environment. Our freedom to consume could lead to the destruction of some of the physical basis of our society.
These routes to destruction rest on two apparent paradoxes. Although we are more free, we are also more dependent. For example, that powerful instrument of freedom, the motor car, depends for its usefulness on a road system, a network of petrol stations and a legal system. And although we seem more independent, we are more connected to people and places remote from us than ever before. You have a job, you think you are independent. You are not: a change of fashion in Taiwan can put you out of work. We live in a world in which individuals are simultaneously more independent and more connected. And the more connected they are, the more isolated they seem to be.
In fact this is not a paradox at all. Man is a social animal. But we have had the choice between two kinds of society: one dominated by authority, tradition, family and the other dependencies of the village. The other, the free society, offers a much greater range of connections, lower in intensity but wider in scope: the school, the city, the office, the telephone, the market, the internet. Freedom does not mean being alone; it means having a choice of company.
It seems inescapable that the freer we are, the more connected we must be; and vice versa. And the more relationships we have, the more superficial they are likely to be. It is this very superficiality that gives us a choice and keeps us free. What is liberating about city air is also what makes people lonely. The dating agency might be another symbol of our freedom.
According to Mulgan, we are in the middle of a three stage process leading from dependence, through independence, where we are now, towards interdependence. The wrongs of the past came from the absence of freedom; the wrongs of the present from its excesses.
The transition from dependence to independence, from the village to the city, has also been the transition from the military to the market. Although the military and the market can, and indeed must, coexist, they are based on opposite principles: the one on coercion, authority and command; the other on contract, reciprocity and free choice. The goods provided by the military (or other authoritarian) system are security and order-essentially collective goods. The goods provided by the market are for individual consumption. And yet there is no market without an authority-ultimately based on physical force-to ensure that the law is obeyed and that the contracts are respected.
These two systems, interdependent but separate, are at risk of confusion. Whenever anyone talks about the threat of domination by the US, German or Japanese economy they are forgetting that this "domination" consists of selling people things that they want to buy. A more serious form of confusion has been the invention of the command economy, the attempt to run economic systems on military lines, providing the benefits of industrialisation without the disturbances of liberty.
In the industrial democracies, instead of the militarisation of the economy we have the marketisation of the political system, symbolised by the social contract. This legitimises authority by basing it on choice. Democracy is the nearest one can get to applying free market principles to government.
And yet the difficulty is that while authority is still needed, the culture of the market has removed the values upon which authority depends: loyalty, respect, community spirit. These seem weak in comparison with the market virtues of enterprise, creativity, greed and iconoclasm. The logic of the market is to reward free riders: free riding can be done away with only by making participation compulsory. So the system that preserves freedom may in the end require coercion. Values such as loyalty and community spirit are a way of internalising coercion. But even Deng Xiaoping thought it was glorious to be rich. If market values triumph then what is to be feared is not the withering away of the state, but the withering away of society. What can be done about this?
Mulgan's answers are complicated and not always as convincing as his question. That is both proper and natural. Solutions in this intricate, networked world are unlikely to come ready made. They will have to evolve out of the connections rather than being imposed on them. Mulgan's first answer, that governments should have more authority and that they can obtain this by becoming more rather than less democratic, is surely right. He wants government, organisations and people to be more open, less hierarchical.
The difficult part, however, is to create values to replace the faith and fear on which traditional societies were grounded. A new society needs a new moral basis. But how can such a thing be developed?
In a changing world there is no time to evolve traditions, no time to discover by trial and error, as past generations have done, what virtues are required to sustain society. There is no time to create heroes. High culture seems addicted to despair, low culture to destruction; neither Beckett nor Schwarzenegger tells us much about how to live.
Technology offers us new moral dilemmas just when we have lost the solution to the puzzle. In a godless world we are not even sure of our own status (the animal rights movement is a result of the breakdown of a hierarchy which set god above man and man above the animals). Connectedness, as Mulgan points out, brings us into contact with a wider range of faiths than ever before. But what is the use of that if you believe none of them?
In spite of his plea for commitment and community, and his search for new values, Mulgan is in the last analysis still a liberal. He does not seek to replace liberty with fraternity (equality lost its way some while back). He does not think we should put life and liberty behind us and move on to the pursuit of happiness.
His concern is to preserve society because society preserves freedom. But his distinction between the second and third stages-independence and interdependence-is flawed. As he himself points out, independence requires interdependence. But the point is that we need to be more conscious of this or we risk losing both. What Mulgan is saying is that freedom does not come free.
This is a brilliant book, although somewhat unsatisfying. But who wants to be satisfied? It is enough to be dazzled and provoked.
Connexity: how to live in a connected world
Geoff Mulgan
Chatto & Windus 1997, ?17.99
