Obedience is Freedom

Jacob Phillips

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509549351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The virtue of obedience is seen as outdated today, if not downright toxic – and yet, are we any freer than our forebears?

In this provocative work, Jacob Phillips argues not. Many feel unable to speak freely, their opinions policed by the implicit or explicit threat of coercion. Impending ecological disaster is the ultimate threat to our freedoms and wellbeing, and living in a disenchanted cosmos leaves people enslaved to nihilistic whim. Phillips shows that the antiquated notion of obedience to the moral law contains forgotten dimensions, which can be a source of freedom from these contemporary fetters. These dimensions of obedience – such as loyalty, discipline and order – protect people from falling prey to the subtle forms of coercion, control and domination of twenty-first-century life.

Fusing literary insight with philosophical discussion and cultural critique, Phillips demonstrates that in obedience lies the path to true freedom.

1
Allegiance

An area of common land in West Berkshire lies near an intersection between the industrial cities of the Midlands to the north and the ports on the English Channel to the south. The same spot is intersected lengthways too, connecting west and east on the old horse-drawn carriage route between London and Bath. The common land is a few square miles of woodland, heath and scrub. For centuries it would hardly merit much attention. Being common land it has no explicit purpose as such; it is simply ‘there’. But this land is also itself the site of an intersection of a different type. This land has a distinct history as a place on the intersection of war and peace.

This is documented from the time of the English Civil War. In 1643, Parliamentarian troops paused there to ready themselves for what was to be a decisive battle of that conflict. There are traces of much older earthworks still perceptible beneath the soil too. Long, linear banks of earth dated to the fifth century may have served a purpose for Roman troops, as even the circular Bronze Age pits nearby could have been used by a tribe practising with their weaponry before setting off to defend their settlements. It is said this site was later an outpost for soldiers preparing to defend Anglo-Saxon Silchester from attack. A map from 1740 shows a military camp set up there and in 1746 this camp was the base for despatching troops for battle with Bonny Prince Charlie. By 1859 it was being used as a training camp to prepare for a French invasion. There were 16,000 troops stationed there in 1862; in 1872, it was 20,000. Later it was used for infantry training for those going to the Western Front and eventually it was taken over by the Ministry of Defence for use as an airbase for the Second World War in 1941.

The history of this common land is given over fully neither to peace nor war; it is where they meet. This is where peacetime prepares for war. The order and obedience required for battle are established here. Yet this is also where fighters return to recuperate in peace, free from the demands of the fray. This is then a place of rest and regeneration.

A decisive change came some decades after the Second World War. This could be when the history of this place reaches a crescendo, when the meeting point between war and peace is suddenly brought into focus. People will then see this as a place that discloses that which is held in common by war and peace. For even winners and losers belong together. Both sides play the game. Both enter the scene, take the risk, yearn for the prize. To attempt to win the battle is to consent to possibly losing the battle. To enter into war is to accept you might not have peace on your terms. There is common ground between sides, in that each side shares something fundamental with the other. This is something beneath the battle itself, functioning like the rules of a game, tacitly present – just ‘there’ – like common land itself.

War and peace require a specific place of meeting if they are to be differentiated from one another. If times of war cannot become times of peace, the battle will never cease. Then, even in peacetime, everyone is at war. Recreation is riven with contention, people mistake combat for contentment. Order and obedience no longer intersect with rest and regeneration, because there is no boundary where you pass from one into the other. With no common ground from whence to be despatched into the heat of battle, there is no common ground to which to return and rest in the cool shade. War becomes cold war. Peacetime becomes intensely heated. Those who would feel the rush of victory can only do so if others are to feel the sorrow of defeat. There must be commonality from which each side departs, but also to which each side can return. In this belonging, obedience meets freedom.

The decisive change in the destiny of the common land came with the Cold War. NATO announced they would deploy cruise missiles in Europe on 12 December 1979. In 1981, it was reported that these missiles would be housed on two sites in England, one of which was this common land. It would provide a base from which military trucks could depart carrying these missiles if or when they were launched at important cities in the Soviet Bloc. The missiles were to be kept in large concrete silos, six in number. These resemble ancient ziggurats or pyramids, with heavy shutters opening to vast chambers, where their precious cargo would be immersed in the deep darkness within. It is difficult for us fully to appreciate how sinister these seemingly sentient missiles seemed in an age less technological than our own. They were remotely controlled and could fly a thousand miles below the flight radars. Each one contained enough atomic power to detonate an explosion sixteen times the size of Hiroshima. The spark of Prometheus lay nascent within each silo, ready for the floods to break forth upon the Earth when the shutters opened.

In a pamphlet from the early 1980s, a mother in a nearby town describes the moment this new purpose for this local land was announced on the news:

I had seen a BBC TV programme about nuclear war … It came to the bit about putting dead bodies in plastic bags with labels on and leaving them in the road to be collected. I sat in front of the television, my one-year-old in my arms, my heart sinking with fear. Someone, somewhere, is actually accepting the fact that my children will die. Someone, somewhere, is quietly planning for the deaths of millions. This is not a dream, it is real.¹

This mother became one of many thousands of women who protested against the cruise missiles base in the years that followed. She had joined with others in organizing a march from a nuclear weapon’s facility in Cardiff to the common land and the scenes that followed are those with which this common land is now always associated: Greenham Common.

Initially they called themselves ‘Women for Life on Earth’. Leaving Cardiff on 27 August, they arrived on 5 September: ‘a long straggling line of women and children tramping through the dusty Berkshire lanes with leaves in their hair’.² The single-carriage roads that led up to the site were arched over by the boughs of ancient trees, under which far more orderly battalions had once marched in lockstep. The woodland on either side was birthing its September fruits. The leaves were still green and lush, just tinged by the encroaching autumn.

When nature called, the kids would run ahead and duck under these trees, clambering through the leaves into dusty enclosures enclosed by broad, low branches. Some would dare to run further into the woods, wanting to be first to glimpse the eight-foot wire fence recently erected around the Common. On the other side of this fence, the grass had that scorched yellowy colour that can make the English countryside in late August feel almost Mediterranean, if only for a few long days. Squinting in the summer sun after emerging from the trees, the kids saw freshly tarmacked roads and a few clusters of USAF buildings in the distance. The marchers emerged from the mysterious hollows and reaches of the English countryside to approach the main gate. Mowed grass verges appeared, with gorse between them and the woods, and neatly trimmed little privet hedges in front. Coming from the musty darkness of the trees into the brightly dazzling sun, the newly landscaped terrain seemed fuzzy and unreal.

There was a carnival atmosphere. The women had a folk band playing alongside them and ‘they all looked so beautiful with their scarves and ribbons and flowers … The colours, the beauty, the sun … and so many people’.³ Some had decided to chain themselves to the fences and maybe it was the joyful intensity of the occasion that led some of the others to decide they could not simply go back home and return to normal. Some set up a large campfire and slept out under the stars. Over the following days provisions arrived, makeshift structures were erected and, around the nucleus of the fire, some of the women decided to stay indefinitely. The encampment was later named Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Over the next three years it developed into what is now a well-known chapter in recent English history.

Within a few weeks it was decided it should be a women-only space. Some of the men present had been confrontational with the authorities, taken control of elements of the camp, or been overprotective of the women during skirmishes with bailiffs and police. These behaviours were not welcome. Numerous direct actions, court cases, imprisonments and campaigns took place in the next three years. The most well-known event is probably the ‘Embrace the Base’ event on 11 December 1983, when 30,000 women encircled and enclosed the entire base, linking arms around the nine-mile perimeter fence. There were marquees set up by the main gate for refreshments and childcare. The kids inside were kept amused with painting and makeshift puppet shows and their creations were later used to decorate the barbed wire. The event was on national television news. During the report, talking heads were interviewed in front of the main gate, voicing either approval or disapproval of the action. The kids’ brightly coloured paintings and puppets could be seen some way behind them but the wire fence was not visible at such a distance. Their creations thus seemed to be suspended in mid-air, hovering on the horizon. The women’s children, seeing their pictures on the TV, would be overcome with excitement and pride. Their triumphant cheers drowned out the droning commentary on the merits or demerits of the event itself.

Other direct actions were more volatile, taking place under cover of darkness. The project to house cruise missiles at USAF Greenham Common involved regular manoeuvres, when military trucks would take the missiles out of the silos and drive them around the surrounding countryside of Hampshire and Wiltshire, usually to a firing range on Salisbury Plain, five miles west of Stonehenge. To prepare and practise for a launch, the missiles would be edged out of the Greenham silos with great care, with much monitoring, pacing and controlled moments of focused pushing. Then the warheads left their dark place and were exposed for a moment to the night air and the stars, before being bundled hastily into the cribs built onto the military trucks waiting outside. These nuclei of awesome atomic power were then borne along the country lanes, passing through the high streets of small local towns, around the market squares and past the pubs, newsagents and grocery shops.

The women had phone networks on 24-hour alert all around the surrounding counties and would mount spontaneous blockades and sit-ins on the country lanes to stop these manoeuvres. These blockades developed into liturgies with regular features; sometimes the lighting of flares or the smearing of mud on the trucks’ windscreens while the convoy waited for police to clear the roads. Often, the operation would be aborted and the missiles sent back in retreat. Returning to the Common, the ancient role of Greenham would then recommence. This was always a site of both exit and return; a place from which people could depart into battle, but also come back to peace. The missiles went from ex utero to in utero. The shutters would be reopened, the cargo carefully laid back in the immersive darkness. As the soldiers trekked back to their lodgings shortly before dawn, they would hear the triumphant women drinking and singing in victory around the dots of flame they could make out coming from their fires all along the perimeter fence. With each battle’s end, there was a common place to which people returned.

The Women’s Peace Camp was a nexus of intersecting battlelines. There was the intersection of west and east. This was the making local in parochial England of the architectonic power blocks of the Cold War. This was where the opposition of the ‘free world’ to ‘communism’ was not rhetorical, it was real. It was also where the faultlines in domestic politics met, still then largely categorizable as Left and Right. The actual battles of the Cold War were never really between Americans and Russians, nor did the Greenham Women interact much with the American troops who worked in the compound. When there was combat, it was between fellow citizens, between the protestors and the police or bailiffs, or between others sympathetic to either one side or another. One woman described the locals of Greenham with contempt as exuding a ‘kind of deferential, cap-touching Toryism’.⁴ The villagers were angry about the encampment, as were many of their magistrates, councillors and judges. Stories were passed from woman to woman along the pathways encircling the base, of local men lurking in the brambles ready to pounce or gangs of lads pouring sacks of cement into their tanks of drinking water. Even among the women vario...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 Allegiance
• 2 Loyalty
• 3 Deference
• 4 Honour
• 5 Obligation
• 6 Respect
• 7 Responsibility
• 8 Discipline
• 9 Duty
• 10 Authority
• Index
• End User License Agreement