REFLECTIONS ON LIBERTY IN SRI LANKA AT A GROUNDVIEWS MILESTONE

Groundviews, a Sri Lankan citadel of free thought and expression, marked its one thousandth post on Friday, 4^th November 2009, in a year which commemorates two other significant events in the story of human liberty and the history of ideas: the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one and a half centuries since the publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in 1859.

As Chou En Lai said of the French Revolution, in an era of crisis for global capitalism, many may feel that it might be too early to tell whether or not the fall of the Wall symbolised a triumph of liberal political and economic ideas over socialism. Resurgent leftists, smelling blood and for once forgetting their arcane schisms, have been sounding the death knell of capitalism with gleeful relish. But this schadenfreude is not only overoptimistic but also misplaced, because the essential moral and philosophical foundations of the free market as an indispensable element of individual liberty has nowhere been displaced.

The nub of the problem, as a careful re-reading of Adam Smith would make clear, is that capitalism allowed one of its basic principles to be subverted. That principle is the inseparable relationship between private property and the informed, rational, autonomous valuation and trading of that property. As the Indian liberal commentator Barun Mitra pointed out recently in an incisive article, the very notion of the financial derivatives based on the housing market of the United States that led to a global financial crisis is a negation of that fundamental principle. Thus the crisis has precipitated not so much a great discursive shift in the way we organise our economic life, as a need for a reassertion of the basic principles of private property and the free market without which capitalism loses its animating logic, and thereby its agency for the prosperity and good life for all. So the Roman holiday being had by the likes of my Marxist friend Professor Kumar David in the past few months would seem a bit premature.

One can perhaps be more certain of Mill’s legacy, although the numbers of those who subscribe to the civilised patrimony of his ideas appear to be decidedly dwindling in Sri Lanka, with what seems to be willing popular acquiescence in the institutionalisation of authoritarianism in government, and the subjection of individual autonomy and the freedom of society as a whole to the expansion of the State.

There is no doubt that Sri Lanka is governed now under a state ideology, unambiguously called a ‘chintanaya’, which draws on at least two older discourses: that of ethno-religious Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, and an anti-Western, culturally relativist, and leftish State-centric worldview redolent of and perhaps unconsciously nostalgic for the political, economic and foreign policy shibboleths of ‘Third World’ countries in the era of decolonisation. This is why liberal principles are seen to be representing foreign values, and worse, instruments of something called ‘neo-colonialism’. Both discourses are ineluctably antithetical to the liberal political principles of individual liberty and autonomy, tolerance and diversity, the freedom of choice, the rule of law, limited government, and the free market, and so both lead inexorably to tyranny.

A couple of recent examples from the news illustrate two important facets of this ascendant state ideology. The first was the disgraceful incident (see video on Daily Mirror Online at http://video.dailymirror.lk/videos/169/mob-storm-koswatta-prayer-hall%20) in which a mob led by the JHU monks and MPs Ellawala Medhananda and Athuraliye Rathana Theros stormed a Christian prayer centre in Koswatta. Monks and lay persons, in the presence of totally sedentary police officers (members of an institution recently in the dock for incidents such as the Angulana murders, the Nipuna Ramanayake case, and the Bambalapitiya drowning), proceeded to inflict property damage on the prayer centre, to smash windows and tear down boards and air conditioners. In short, it was a mini riot led and encouraged by Buddhist monks.

The casus belli, according to Rathana Thero’s vitriolic and wholly unbecoming speech at the demonstration, was the allegation that two persons had died at a prayer meeting conducted by the prayer centre, because of their refusal to seek medical attention and trust in divine healing powers. Now, one may question the intelligence quotient of people who place faith in divine healing in preference to medical treatment, but what business is that of the JHU? No doubt law enforcement authorities and the courts would have to deal with a situation in which people’s lives were negligently or recklessly placed in danger, but there is no place in a society governed by the rule of law for political mobs to take matters, and the law, into their own hands. For these turbulent priests, not only are individual liberty and the private sphere anathema, but society is the same thing as the State which they now control.

It should be remembered that a major justification put forward by the JHU for fielding monks as parliamentary candidates was to infuse decency and high moral standards into public life, and to the extent Buddhist doctrine contemplates a public/political role for the monkhood (which I firmly believe it does not), it is as exemplars of personal virtue and good conduct. The behaviour of these political monks has utterly demeaned not only the monkhood, but also the gentle and tolerant religious philosophy they so impertinently seek to represent.

JHU spokespersons are some of the leading exponents of the political arguments the present government uses in the entrenchment of its state ideology: a centralised, executive-dominated, unitary state legitimised by ethno-religious supremacism, and whose tasks include moral policing (e.g., Mathata Thitha) and intruding on fundamental freedoms (e.g., anti-conversion legislation). Should not those who are concerned about democracy, freedom and the rule of law be not only mortified, but also extremely worried by this? Regardless of religious persuasions and individual attitudes to religion, should not we be gravely concerned about the ranting, thuggish, lawless example set by these soi disant guardians of public virtue?

The second example is the theory about democratic opposition expounded by the President and other UPFA bigwigs during the Southern Provincial Council election campaign, by way of answering serious public policy issues such as the extension of the GSP Plus concession, allegations of war crimes, the IDP crisis and so forth. According to this theory, there can be opposition to a government, but there can be no opposition to the country (i.e., the State) but the catch is the conflation of the concepts of government and State. The lack of guile of what ought to be a mature electorate to see through this cant and crude humbug from a sitting government aside, a proposition such as this is a direct threat to democracy. It seeks to de-legitimise not only the role of the opposition integral to the democratic form of government, but also to cast beyond the pale, public debate, discussion, dissent and criticism of government. On this logic, any and every criticism of government can be interpreted as sedition and treason. While this maybe most convenient for an authoritarian government, needless to say it completely debilitates the democratic way of life. And while all this may seem self-evident to most in the Groundviews community, the chilling fact is that it is not to the broader Sri Lankan electorate.

The only way that democracy defends itself against this kind of corrosive argument is by an attitude of informed scepticism about governments and politicians on the part of the citizenry. But as we have seen in the past, Sri Lankans regard politics as a kind of spectator sport in which their participation is restricted to the act of voting periodically, and again as we have seen in the past, this is one of the principal reasons – the absence of an informed, questioning culture of public participation – that has, as much or more than the Machiavellian machination of any politician, brought our democracy to the present pass. If this does not change, not only is the perpetuation of democracy-bashers assured, we also probably deserve it.

In the liberal worldview, an intellectual argument between opposing perspectives is to be welcomed, but the problem with the kind of state ideology we have is that such a debate can never be conducted according to a liberal – the only – set of rules that can serve a civilised, honest and rigorous argument. At best, what can be expected is a slanging match like many of the puerile political talk shows in the mainstream electronic media in which clinching arguments are either an accusation of treason or the threat or use of violence, not reasoned argument. The upshot is that public and political debate, devoid of ideas, critiques, and alternatives, become exercises in rhetorical posturing and exchange of insults. When the essential dialectic of informed democratic discussion is lost, there is no marketplace of ideas, and the notion of choice and change central to liberal democracy becomes entirely meaningless.

Should the recently formed opposition coalition choose General Fonseka to contest President Rajapakse next year, it will amply demonstrate the point made above, in which politics is not about the exchange of ideas and policies from which the electorate could make a choice, but simply a sordid, amoral snake pit of small men with smaller ideas engaging in an egotistic power struggle. My point is: what kind of electoral choice is it when one has to choose between one candidate who believes that politics is a kind of Schmittian ‘either/or’ binary choice between the State and its enemies, patriots and traitors; and the other believes that Sri Lanka belongs exclusively to the Sinhala Buddhists? In such a contest, what remains après le deluge?

It is in this context that we must celebrate what Groundviews – and it is appropriate at such an occasion as this to pay tribute to its editor – has achieved since 2006. It has become a forum in which crucial public debates between people holding fundamentally opposing views have sparred, feinted, engaged and agreed to disagree (and in the process become friends), and thereby come to exemplify what John Stuart Mill talked about one and half centuries ago. It is also time to forcefully reassert the emancipatory value of this vision on the broader plane of Sri Lankan politics.

The idea of liberty as expounded by Mill had several aspects, and which included its intellectual origins in Benthamite utilitarianism (Mill strove for the best part of his life to answer the futile question of how to reconcile his father James’s utilitarianism to which he owed so much of his precocious education, to the idea of liberty, with the change of heart under the influence of the Roman poets, that replaced his early utilitarian certainties with the essential sense of doubt that is at the heart of a true liberal).

Mill’s theory contained some historical and sociological theses as well as substantive principles. The latter included the theory of individuality per se, which also implied the value of diversity, the freedom of thought and expression, and the requisite of institutional protection for individual liberty.

The aspect of Mill’s political thinking that has the closest bearing to the issues canvassed in this essay relates to the freedom of thought and expression principle. Mill spoke of this freedom as good and never to be limited. Individuals given this freedom then engage in an adversarial process which is inherently well suited for discovering the truth. Freedom of thought and expression, however, is not seen as good as truth. Rather, it is good as a means of getting at the whole truth.

In testing this freedom for conceptual efficacy, Mill employed what he called the ‘four grounds of fallibility’. Firstly, an opinion should not be compelled to silence, for if it is left in silence, it can be perceived to be true. Secondly, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth can be discovered (i.e., through an adversarial process, be it in the Press, Parliament or the Courts). Thirdly, the received opinion establishes its truthfulness when it is suffered to be vigorously and earnestly contested. Otherwise, it will be held in prejudice by most of those who receive it. Fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost or enfeebled, devoid of any real or heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience, if it is not subjected to challenge.

Our parliamentary traditions in which Dudley Senanayake quoted from Voltaire to the same effect as Mill’s normative thesis about thought and expression may be lost forever, for myopic language and education policies have ensured that the nurseries of our political classes are tragically insulated from the unprecedented access to knowledge that the information age has brought about. But if citizens do not understand citizenship, and thereby have no interest in the preservation of the liberal democratic values and principles that necessarily underpin a decent, free and open society, and which have brought peace, order, good government and prosperity to other societies everywhere, then we are ourselves paving the road to serfdom. As John Stuart Mill observed: “Evil for evil, a good despotism, in a country at all advanced in civilisation, is more noxious than a bad one; for it is far more relaxing and enervating to the thoughts, feelings, and energies of the people. The despotism of Augustus prepared the Romans for Tiberius. If the whole tone of their character had not been prostrated by nearly two generations of that mild slavery, they would probably have had spirit enough left to rebel against the more odious one.”