No one likes being told what to do, but when you are in a burning building and the fire officer advises you to vacate immediately and forsake your belongings – however personally valuable – you know deep down that it is not in your best interest to ignore the ambient smoke or disregard the officer's stern direction.
Yet this is what John Freeman suggests we are doing in our civil society today. The “building” in question, our world – which includes our planetary ecosystem, our global capital markets and, above all, our political environment – is all on fire, and we are ignoring the virtually incontrovertible evidence.
We have allowed a startling combination of converging factors, not least the stratospheric rise of social media, the narcissistic cult of the digital self and the catastrophic demise of transparency and accountability in the political sphere, where language itself is daily abused and devalued by celebrity presidents to the point of gratuitous meaninglessness, to unravel the very fabric of our society.
Our democratic franchise is thereby undermined, fostering a widespread malaise of civic apathy that has sinister consequences for our personal liberty and political agency.
What’s more, Freeman asserts, if no reparative action is taken, and if the powers that be are permitted to consolidate upon the flagrant destruction of our common lexicon – a keystone of our civic community – this sorry state of affairs will remain the status quo, or worsen toward autocracy and fascism. And it will be our undoing.
As a quiet countermeasure to all this, Freeman has penned a “dictionary” of sorts, a collection of short interconnected essays really that makes a series of forays into the shared language of our civic life, with the noble intention of reinstating and expanding this lexicon’s significance, purpose and value.
In practice, Freeman’s “dictionary” serves as a gentle activist’s guide to seizing responsibility for the necessary amelioration of society, one decent gesture at a time; yet this utopian hope remains firmly grounded in complex and pertinent thought, incorporating perspicacious analysis of the select terms under debate, arranged from A to Z.
The volume thus aspires to stand as an ethical compass by which the reader may navigate the uncertain terrain of 21st-century citizenship, with language the precise needle set to find true north.
Among Freeman’s core claims is that the gross inequalities of our world, be they financial, political, racial or other, are neither sustainable nor human. Some 26 billionaires control over half the world’s wealth, while the vast majority of humanity suffers severe want.
A comparable disparity between the human monopoly on Earth’s natural resources and what remains for the other 8.7 billion species cohabiting “our” planet communicates its own grim irony.
In the digital realm the internet has become “a powerful cognitive-conditioning circuit” in which a new culture of narcissism giddily sanctions and normalises the rehearsal and entitlement of autocratic tyranny in the social world without.
The internet is not the real world but a hyper-real diversion from it, yet the extreme fantasies it condones and enables have ominous consequences for our civic and political fabric. Nowhere is this more evident than in the frontal assault on language and on moderate enlightened discourse waged by some of our foremost public representatives.
In the shadow of this dark turn, Freeman suggests that part of what it means to be a citizen today is “being vigilant to these abuses of language”; warning that societies need informed and educated citizens to function healthily, because an undereducated society is always more willing to overthrow facts and can be easily manipulated.
Freeman proposes that a citizen, then, is a person who is willing to keep asking questions of their government, and that learning to ask questions is essential to civic decency. Indeed, the author suggests that the activism his book encourages can be defined as “asking big questions that lead to practical questions”.
Resistance
Freeman’s diagnosis is worryingly persuasive, largely due to the intellectual and rhetorical integrity of its argument. On the other hand, his proposed solutions are readily achievable. The book surpasses the activist intimations of its alarm call and stands as its own artefact of resistance.
The author’s limpid prose underpins a refreshing clarity of moral purpose, and there exists a poetic charge in the metaphors that ushers these essays shimmering into the realm of the literary, all the while avoiding the obfuscating argot of theory, as here: “the eternal inner sense of equity –the one we recognise in the way we know when the moon is out before looking up”.
In keeping with his civic mission, Freeman unflinchingly poses salient and discomfiting questions throughout. The writing exerts great oratorical force upon the reader, but a force backed up by clear-sighted honesty, cogent thought and keen conscience: “You are the only way out. Only you can do something.”
At the last Freeman empowers the You, not the I (a radically alternative vision of the self-same social animal), placing the onus of civic duty to one’s fellow citizen upon one’s own shoulders. We must all act rightly, and swiftly. If we dally, we are undone. The question remains: will we seize the reins?
