Caught philosopher Roger Scruton's timely "A Petition to End Petitions" on Radio 4 this morning (A Point of View), in which he outlined Edmund Burke's distinction between political "delegates" and "representatives". It started a train of thought that ran through Isaiah Berlin eventually to provide logical justification to a nagging sensation I have had for some weeks now that this referendum is fatally flawed.
With a distinction between delegates and representatives, Burke argued that it was the role of elected representatives not simply to act as a mouthpiece for their constituents, but to apply judgment to what can often be ill-informed and reactionary opinion: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
With his distinction between positive and negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin sheds light on the origin of judgment:
Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you're addicted to cigarettes and you're desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you're perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you'll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing.
This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of freedom. On the one hand, one can think of freedom as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of freedom as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be unfree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realising what you recognise to be your true interests. One might say that while on the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.
Putting these two ideas together, one can sense more clearly not only the difficulty of becoming an enlightened political citizen in an age of mass media, but also the problem with popular referenda. In an age of mass communication and limited attention spans, media outlets abandon lengthy and cognitively expensive appeals to reason and instead seek to persuade us through emotional appeals. More specifically, fear, anger and resentment are the buttons inside us which they seek to press, stupefying our reason and short-circuiting our freedom. Thus affected, the arbiter of our better judgement is compromised at the precise moment that the representative that would arbitrate for us is taken out of the equation. In the absence of enlightened and liberated opinion, unmediated fear, anger and resentment are currently at the wheel of our democracy and stand a real chance of driving us over the edge.
