The Illusions & Delusions in Our Understanding of Freedom
One word or idea that is so important to understand in today’s world is freedom. The word and what it represents is at the heart of our national anthem; “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It reminds us of the sacrifices people made for freedom and for the survival of a nation, for resistance to an invader and the preservation of a freedom from external control over us.
But our understanding or misunderstanding of that word can cause us to lead a life that imprisons or liberates us; that hurts us and others or one that enriches us. And we see the hurtful way of understanding the word expressed daily by politicians and the news media in this country. Because the freedom from which the national anthem primarily expresses is what philosophers call negative freedom; this might be a necessary condition for us to have physical control over our lives but is not sufficient for us to feel liberated.
This was recently made so much clearer to me when I started reading a book by historian Timothy Snyder called On Freedom. The subject is one we have all probably thought about in different ways at different times in our lives.
Americans are told that freedom was given to us by the Founding Fathers. But freedom cannot be given, says Snyder. A country isn’t free; people are free. If we think of freedom as only freedom from outside sources of control or threat, then we can be convinced we need to sacrifice freedom for security. We can think the personal and political situation is always us separated from and against the world and we become habituated to always rating ourselves in opposition to others, instead of studying how we feel in ourselves. We reduce human beings, with inner lives not that different from our own, to things. Hitler called Jewish people “foreign bodies,” parasites, vermin infesting the German racial organism.
DT speaks in terms that are alarmingly like Hitler’s, dehumanizing immigrants of color, as well as Democrats and those who oppose him, calling them, us, “vermin.” Such thinking as DT illustrates makes us feel perpetually uneasy, insecure in ourselves and our world, isolated, suffering.
Such thinking leads us to feel that if we just remove obstacles, barriers, regulations, and, limit the reach of government we expand our freedom. That our freedom is opposed to that of others. That we know the truth, and that no other truth, no other facts, are real. And thus, opinions different from our own must be destroyed. Only leaders strong enough to assert their own truth with absolute conviction and power can save us. This misses the obvious; such an absolute leader negates our own power to lead⎼ or to have a meaningful vote. Negative freedom, says Snyder, is not a misunderstanding so much as a repressive idea.
He gives us examples from Ukraine and its struggle for life against Putin, an oppressive invader who wants to kill not only the Ukrainian nation but any of its people who would even consider opposing him. But Snyder reports that when Ukrainians remove Russian invaders from their villages, they don’t use the word freedom. They’re glad that “something terrible has been removed from their lives,” that the threat of imminent death or torture is ended. But the term they use for this is deoccupation. The occupier is gone.
They realize “freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good.” Children need places to play, to practice being themselves. We all need the ability to lead a meaningful life of our choosing⎼ one that affirms to us our very sense of ourselves as capable of intelligent choices, ones based on an awareness of our subjective existence as an individual dependent on other individuals who have inner lives as complex as our own.
We need healthy relationships, ones that collectively build political, social, and economic structures, ones that foster in us this inner awareness, which is a necessary element in a sense of freedom⎼ and security. We can’t feel secure in ourselves if we feel constantly threatened by others, particularly others who we think of as lacking the awareness of ourselves as equally feeling, thinking beings. No one becomes an individual alone, Snyder reminds us. Empathy for others is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world, and thus central to a politics of freedom. Good government, a government by and for all of us as mutually feeling-thinking-caring beings, is not in opposition to our liberation but advances it. Affirming freedom to, not freedom from, is a guide to good government.
Snyder’s book is built around exploring 5 forms of freedom that provide liberating values, not orders. These include: sovereignty, or the ability to make responsible choices; unpredictability or the ability to adapt; mobility or capability of moving through space and time to achieve our goals; factuality or knowing that only if we have a good grip on the world as it is can we change it; and solidarity, or the recognition that our freedom is tied to that of others. We liberate ourselves while working to liberate others.
Notice a similarity between Snyder’s analysis and other ways of speaking of freedom. Many might be called spiritual pathways. But we must be careful not to use the word/label of spiritual to dismiss these other viewpoints of the word/concept freedom. For example, in Buddhism, liberation is enacted through the Eight-Fold Path, which begins with right understanding. The emphasis is relieving suffering for oneself and others through understanding its causes⎼ and recognizing we can take action to relieve that suffering by mindfully seeing ourselves and the world as we truly are⎼ as interdependent. The eight-fold path shows how to develop awareness of compassion for the subjectivity, the suffering, of ourselves and others, as in Snyder’s discussion. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of inter-being ⎼we all inter-are. There’s no self separate from others and the infinite world and universe. And when we live in accord with this insight we can take action in accord with this insight.
Snyder also explains the viewpoint of Christian mystical philosopher and political activist Simone Weil, who reminds us the Golden Rule, is not just “Do onto others as you’d have them do onto you,” but loving one’s neighbor as oneself; seeing in another person’s body “the same combination of nature and the supernatural that we experience in ourselves.” She shows us that the Biblical prescription to “love a stranger as ourselves” means not only doing right with strangers, but seeing ourselves as a stranger might see us, and even noticing what is strange in ourselves.
We are often called upon to remember the sacrifices people made in the past for freedom. But too often the freedom spoken of is freedom from, not freedom to. DT and others talk about a freedom that closes us off from ourselves, our world, and others instead of one that wakes us up to our own subjectivity, our flaws and truths, and our empathy of the subjectivity of others. One that makes us feel like an object, sad, angry, resentful instead of one that helps us feel our interdependence; more alive, joyous, loving.
But we still must ask ourselves a crucial question: what are we willing to do or give, or give up, in order to create a society and government based on this positive view of freedom?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
