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Readers picking up a book entitled Obedience is Freedom, with chapters entitled ‘Allegiance’, ‘Loyalty’ or ‘Obligation’ and so on, may be expecting an academic treatise. Perhaps they will expect this introduction to start by listing some examples of how obedience is today considered irredeemably toxic. Then, a discussion of freedom, suggesting today’s preference for interpreting this as individual self-fulfilment often leaves people frustrated, isolated and at times even enslaved. The ground would then be prepared to state the thesis of this book: a rediscovery of obedience (and subcategories like allegiance, loyalty and obligation) promises a more enduring and genuine freedom than that offered by today’s self-fulfilment paradigm. Indeed, many great thinkers have long since argued that an avoidance of restraint serves only to intensify the degree to which we are restrained, and that genuine and enduring freedom is to be found through obediently entering into the ways personal choice is ever limited by the networks of responsibility in which we live.

Having outlined the basic position in the Introduction, such readers might expect the chapters to outline, in prosaic terms, exactly how the themes under discussion contribute to that more authentic freedom lacking in today’s world. These would then begin with comments on the etymology of the chapter heading. These terms often combine elements of restraint or obedience with expressions of spontaneity or freedom. The word obligation, for example, derives from the past-participle stem of the verb obligare, meaning ‘to bind’, and yet also from the noun obligatio, which is connected with expressing gratitude; hence the old English phrase ‘much obliged’. From findings such as these, some discussion of ancient texts would be expected, particularly those of Greek and Roman philosophy. Then a critical discussion with more contemporary voices could follow, working towards the overarching conclusion that obedience is not only connected with freedom in ways we seem to have forgotten, but that these two are so mutually dependent they are indistinct: hence, obedience is freedom.

A reader expecting a book of this nature, however, will not find it in this volume. This is not a systematic or polemical text that seeks only to argue in explicit and straightforward terms. Rather, the book includes concrete histories describing specific events from the last three or four decades. It also engages not only with writers on obedience and freedom, but with literary interlocuters like Charles Dickens and Karl Ove Knausgaard, neither of whom would usually be expected to be found in a book of this nature. While there is philosophical discussion, there are biographical reminiscences too and much material that is taken from my own life, particularly in drawing on cultural phenomena that others of a similar age and background might recognize.

Discerning readers who want to understand the sources for the notion of freedom that underpins this book are recommended to read some St Augustine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (which is not to say I pretend either thinker would endorse this book). Those wanting to understand more recent discussions would be advised to read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and maybe The Cunning of Freedom by Ryszard Legutko. Readers of this book need to know why Obedience is Freedom has been written in an offbeat way.

This stems firstly from the intellectual fecundity of more offbeat realms of discourse in the UK and USA, particularly, since around 2016. As a young academic, I took great interest in witnessing freer, more engaging and often more genuinely insightful work emerge in obscure online publications than in peer-reviewed journals and the volumes of academic publishing houses. Rather than argue the now well-worn trope of ‘this thing you think is left-wing is actually conservative’ and vice versa, it seemed more effective to enter into such things with elements of narrative. Concrete stories and their atmospheres disclose things that contemporary presuppositions struggle to relate. A great many conceptual binaries beside obedience/freedom have been broken in recent years, but these binaries can be glimpsed in a restored state by observing how they interrelate in recent history.

If there is a method on display here, it is synaesthetic – an attempt to bring together things we cannot imagine being the same, like seeing smells or hearing the sensation of touch. These types of interrelations are often only lightly buried in the recent history of Western cultures, just under the surface, where obedience and freedom can still be seen as two sides to the same coin, each requiring the other.

Secondly, while it has become increasingly apparent that much interesting writing is happening ‘outside’ the authorized platforms and credential system, the content of this writing is often similarly ‘outside’ dominant ideological paradigms. These paradigms are most commonly associated with identity politics, although its roots go back much further, as I argue later on. A discourse that takes place ‘outside’ the dominant worldview reminded me of a time when alternative manners of living were being explored by those then ‘outside’ mainstream society, particularly in the 1990s. For me, the two forms of ‘outsideness’ can inform each other, just as the themes and concepts of this book were once subtly linked together. There is much to be learned, albeit often negatively, about how things like ‘allegiance’, ‘obligation’ or ‘respect’ were bound up with the alternative worldviews of peaceniks, squatters, travellers or road protestors. That is, with people thought to be archetypal seekers of freedom.

Thirdly, I would say that the ‘conservatism’ on display in the pages of this book is of a broadly postmodern character. This does not mean surrendering to moral or cultural relativism, by any means, but involves a focus on how writers are implicated in their subject matter and vice versa. It means writing from the point of contact between self and world, because the juncture of subjectivity and objectivity discloses things that an exclusively subjective or objective approach does not. This sort of postmodernism is, paradoxically, exactly what those associated with ‘postmodern ideology’ today have entirely neglected, while claiming to celebrate it in abundance. Identity characteristics are frequently foregrounded in every discussion, but not fostering freedom of exploration and expression so much as closing everything down to a mere monologue. Those who would most explicitly celebrate the interrelation of subject and object are today those most likely to break the binary between the two, so only one remains, under the rubric of ‘lived experience’ (see Chapter 5). In any case, I lived through much of what is written in this book. It amused me no end when the editors of an online journal tagged an essay I’d written in this style as ‘fiction’. No word of this book is fiction.

The reasons just listed give some indication as to why I chose not to write this book using standard means of argumentation like those described at the outset. But before leading people into the countryside of West Berkshire in the early 1980s, the record shops of mid 1990s Hackney, or the exodus to Cornwall to watch the solar eclipse in 1999 – it is only fair that I at least offer some preliminary orientation to show how the chapters work towards the claim that obedience is freedom.

Chapter 1, ‘Allegiance’, highlights the obedience involved in child-bearing and child-rearing, entailed by the visceral attachment of mother and child. Changing attitudes to natality based on wanting a greater freedom, I contend, are symptomatic of one of the great challenges of our age, in which mutual allegiance one for another in a shared culture is perpetually at risk of fracturing and fragmentation, of warring cultures within one society. A culture that celebrates the commonality of mother and child is one set free to celebrate its own commonality on a societal scale. A culture that is hostile to the most visceral commonality is one that threatens to lose all sense of common ground whatsoever.

Chapter 2, ‘Loyalty’, focuses on a surreptitious slip in the understanding of the obedience associated with this term, whereby it is made secondary to personal choice: being loyal to those with whom you agree or towards whom it is advantageous to evince loyalty. The chapter enters into critical discussion with Jonathan Haidt, David Goodhart, Christopher Lasch and Peter Sloterdijk, who have each tried in different ways to interrelate the legitimacy of loyalty to one’s society or culture within an age of rapidly changing values and views among citizens. The chapter concludes that loyalty is the fruit of freedom, not its opposite; that cherishing the ways people share belonging enables them to let that belonging take precedence over optionality and preference without entailing anything abusive or toxic.

Chapter 3, ‘Deference’, is based on the position that many of the ills of today’s world are rooted in the dissociation of people from the networks of responsibility by which we live. Self-fulfilment, as social mobility, is presented as fostering a literal self-centredness, whereby one’s position in society is made the measure of personal worth, one’s centre. By contrast, and exemplified in the novels of Charles Dickens, I argue that moral and economic worth or dignity must never be confused, that one’s moral value, or centre, is bound up with the good of the whole to which one contributes. I also argue that separating moral and economic value can liberate people from the various narratives of affliction that pervade our culture, because those narratives serve to cover up the various issues with self-esteem and mental illness that attend aggressive meritocracy. The ability to defer is indicative of a society where moral and economic worth are disambiguated – for deferring to others is acutely painful if their perspective is deemed representative of some sort of greater dignity than one’s own. Deference just means accepting another’s viewpoint as better placed than one’s own.

Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Honour’ and turns to love, sex and desire in the internet age. The point here is that obediently accepting another’s standing as an ‘end in itself’ and never a means to one’s own ends, in a loving relationship, means honouring that person as someone who is not ensnared in one’s own schemes or objectified. To honour someone is to hold dear to the boundary between yourself and another. Yet this boundary liberates people to love each other genuinely, not chase after others as vehicles for self-satisfaction.

The next three chapters shift gear to more societal concerns, beginning in Chapter 5, ‘Obligation’, with a critique of what might be grandly termed the epistemology of identity politics. Drawing particularly on the hermeneutical philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, I argue that the distinctive intellectual activities of the humanities (most fundamentally, interpretation) are structurally different to the natural sciences because of an inherent twofold structure of obligation. That is, to interpret something requires taking heed of a mutual obligation to subjectivity and objectivity. Natural science as classically understood adheres only to the obligation of objectivity. Yet, much of today’s discourse on the humanities breaks the binary in the other direction, claiming all is subjectivity. Moreover, older approaches to the humanities argued that these disciplines just reflected the way people actually live. In life, we perpetually seek objective truth in a way that is properly integrated with subjectivity. Basic human cognition serves both masters.

Chapter 6, ‘Respect’, I wrote with great hesitation, as it entailed going into some of the most vexatious territory of contemporary society: race. The thesis here is that most discourse around race-relations, particularly since 2020, has drawn on American racial discourse, despite the fact that that discourse is often ill-fitted to a UK context. The effect of unconscious bias training sessions, for example, is to try to leverage respect between different ethnicities artificially and often in a way disconnected from the lived realities in which particular ethnicities have forged a particular shared culture in Britain for decades. This is not a pluralist multiculturalism I have in mind, but something much harder to achieve – mutual participation in a culture that is shared. I contrast the mutual, organic respect that is won by sharing a culture with the forced, artificial respect associated with terms like ‘allyship’, which are themselves often used by people who haven’t lived within a shared culture themselves.

Chapter 7, ‘Responsibility’, discusses ecological concerns as expressed in the 1990s compared to the present day. Between the two periods, another broken binary has emerged – between cultural and social conservation and environmental conservation. This break is intensifying rapidly, with the current vogue for language of crisis and emergency pushing towards a near-permanent state-of-exception, radically disconnected from the past. But we need not go too far back in history to see how nature and culture were much more closely related than they are today.

The book then shifts gear again for the final three chapters, turning to even broader questions about language, the cosmos and, finally, authority. Chapter 8, ‘Discipline’, finds the epitome of the interrelation of obedience and freedom in poetics. Poetry is held to be writing freed from even the normal strictures of language and yet the requirements of the form are traditionally much stricter than prose. The fact that language today so easily slips into a bureaucratic and managerial turn of phrase (or anti-poetics) is symptomatic of our inability to use discipline in service of freedom.

Chapter 9, ‘Duty’, continues in a literary vein, bringing the six-volume autofiction work My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard into dialogue with the differing cosmologies of the premodern, modern and postmodern periods. This chapter presents the view that premodern cosmology had a sense of duty ‘hardwired’ into it, not least due to its inherently God-centred structure, which was not entirely forsaken in the modern era. Knausgaard’s work gives voice to premodern and modern impulses, stubbornly resisting the collapse into cosmic nihilism associated with postmodernity – particularly when he is in everyday situations of duty, such as caring for the young.

The book closes in Chapter 10 with a theme that surely sums up all those covered thus far: ‘Authority’. This broken binary is perhaps the most important in showing how obedience perpetuates freedom, the degree to which it is indistinguishable from it, and vice versa. What many consider obedience today is just blind subjection, which is why there is some truth behind contemporary unease about the term. Similarly, what many people consider authority today is just an exertion of power, which supervenes over assent, again helping to explain why it has become a debased term. This chapter seeks to show that genuine obedience always involves a measure of assent and the genuine expression of authority has no need for the exertion of the power. However difficult it is for us to envisage this now, the interrelation of obedience and authority once stemmed from self-evidence, from the unquestioned conviction that those in authority were mandated to their position. Today’s various ‘contractual’ forms of obedience effectively undermine authority and tend to get ensnared in individual desires, as indeed authority founded on just brute force undermines obedience and tends to unleash chaos.

The final scene of the book describes the notorious eviction of an illegal party on the Isle of Dogs in 1992. In the heat of the moment, the battle scene was indistinguishable from a dance, just as in today’s world the culture wars are a form of recreation and entertainment, particularly on social media. Each set of opponents in that battle considered themselves sworn enemies. I argue that they were actually on the same side, unwittingly, just as those who want to resist all authority often end up in a grimly restrained manner of living and those who celebrate subjection slip into anarchic and antinomian lifestyles. In the small hours of the night, for a few short moments, the effects of this broken binary came together on the dancefloor in a field in a mysterious enclave of east London. From that moment we can glimpse what healing such binaries will entail. That is, that obedience is freedom.