Abstract
As noted in part I of this paper (published in the June 2021 issue of Pastoral Psychology), freedom is typically framed in terms of justice, equality, rights, reason, and agency. In this second part, I describe social and political freedom from the perspective of care and faith. I first discuss briefly what I mean by care and faith. Once this is accomplished, I begin with a description of the pre-political space or communicative space of the parent-child interaction. This is a necessary step in distinguishing between two related but distinct concepts, namely, social and political freedom. I contend that the parent’s social freedom is expressed in their care of the child, which includes the parent’s recognition of the infant as a person and, correspondingly, the parent’s decision to limit themself for the sake of addressing the needs of the child. Parental care or attunement fosters a communicative space of trust wherein the child obtains a sense of self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence and nascent agency in asserting their needs and desires—a proto-social freedom. Included here is a brief discussion of the process of bridging the proto-social freedom experienced in the pre-political, communicative space of a good-enough family to the capacity for and experiences of social-political freedom in the larger world. I conclude by addressing questions regarding the relation between the pre-political space of the family and the larger political-public spaces.
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Notes
Horkheimer commented that “the future of humanity depends on the existence today of the critical attitude” (as cited in Wolin, 2016, p. 231). This becomes crucial when cultural critics, such as Giroux (2012) and Dufour (2008), note that with the rise of neoliberal capitalism there has been an increase in the formation of subjects or citizens who are acritical of the systems that contribute to their suffering and the suffering of others.
Easterly’s (2013) work illustrates the problems that arise when personal recognition is abstract and removed from the concrete realities of persons’ lives. He documents how caring experts are determined to provide aid for people in need (e.g., in Ethiopia). They devise plans and programs to address needs without asking the recipients what they need or what they think about how to meet these needs. This is a kind of abstract, distant personal recognition that eschews the particular experiences and ideas of those who receive aid. As Easterly points out, although these experts are well-meaning and somewhat helpful, they often have less than the desired impact because they do not know the people whom they seek to serve.
Philosopher John Macmurray (1961/1993) argued that “person” is both a matter of fact and a matter of intention. On the one hand, being a person is an existential or ontological fact for Macmurray. Theologically, we would say an individual is created in the image and likeness of God, which grounds personhood in an ontological fact. On the other hand, Macmurray recognizes that human beings are free, which means we can intend to recognize (or not recognize) others as persons. Theologically, human beings are free to choose to participate in God’s creation of individuals as persons.
If we stick to the liberal perspective, we might argue that the parent’s self-interest is realized in caring for the infant at 3 a.m. because in the long term the child will grow up and help with caring for the parent in old age. Or, we could argue that there is an evolutionary self-interest in propagating the species. The idea of self-interested motivation becomes the hammer where everything is a nail. By this I mean that every action and motivation becomes seen as satisfying our self-interests, leaving aside the possibility of other motivations.
The notion of racism is complex and often contested. Given that, I offer a brief depiction of racism that relies on psychoanalytic authors. Some psychoanalysts have attempted to define and account for racism by relying on psychoanalytic theory and concepts (e.g., Altman, 2000, 2004; Kovel, 1970). Drawing on this literature, I briefly define White racism and identify some of its characteristics. Dalal (2006) wrote that “whatever racism is, it is essentially a dehumanizing process through which an other is transformed into The Other, from one of us into one of them. The racialized and dehumanized Other is positioned outside the moral universe, with all its attendant requirements and obligations to fellow human beings” (p. 158). From Dalal’s perspective, the Black Other is depersonalized and estranged by White individuals who construct and treat Black people as inferior and White people as superior. That is, this process of depersonalization or dehumanization is contingent on the forceful use of representations wherein Whiteness signifies superiority and Blackness inferiority (Aralepo, 2003). These representations are embedded in everyday social narratives and rituals as well as in government policies, laws, and programs (Alexander, 2010; West, 2001). Even in the purportedly postracial culture in which we now live (Wise 2010), representations of inferiority are hidden in laws, legal procedures, and housing practices that marginalize large numbers of African Americans (Alexander, 2010). White racism, then, is the social construction and the social-political-economic use of negative representations of Black people as inferior Others to marginalize, alienate, suppress, and oppress them (e.g., lynchings, Jim Crow laws, laws that result in high rates of incarceration, exclusion from job opportunities and equal pay, housing discrimination). In short, racism works to undermine or deny the social and political freedoms of Black persons. This social construction and use of negative representations are inseparable from the White racist’s use of positive or idealized self-representations (superiority) to secure social and economic privilege, prestige, power, and social-political freedoms.
Coates (2015) poignantly discusses how racism impacts embodiment. Racism, he writes, evokes “the sheer terror of disembodiment” (p. 12), which has its roots in the violent commodification of Black bodies—“they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (p. 71). Slavery’s violent exploitation of Black bodies (its nonrecognition of Blacks as persons) is the ultimate denial of social and political freedom. It is a complete negation of existential care and faith, which accompanies an absolute eclipse of the possibility of a space of appearances (nonrecognition and nonjustice) and, correspondingly, an absence of social and political freedoms. And yet, during slavery Black resilience and resistance were prevalent, which I argue were grounded in the care and faith among and within Black families (that were not separated) and communities—a care and faith that provided some degree of self-esteem, respect, and confidence that accompanied social freedom but not political freedom since the latter was completely denied.
This is an important point that I cannot pursue in depth. Honneth (2010) argues that Hegel’s view of freedom served as a corrective to Hobbes and Kant. Freedom or freewill develops intersubjectively. That is, communicative relations enable “the individual subject to be ‘with oneself in the other’” (p. 16). This can be further understood as subjects mutually seeing each other “as constituting a condition of their own freedom” (p. 50). To return to the pre-political space of the infant-parent relation, the parent is clearly the condition of the child’s nascent freedom and openness, though naturally the child is unable to recognize this. Ideally, as adults we acknowledge that mutual personal recognition is the necessary condition of freedom and self-realization.
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LaMothe, R. Social and Political Freedom: a Pastoral Theological Perspective—Part II. Pastoral Psychol 70, 487–505 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00969-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00969-y