The Pursuit of Freedom as an Ideal
The concept of freedom is hard to grasp. This might come as a surprise to most people. But it is especially the case for someone who grew up in another culture, where the word translated to Chinese won’t exactly make too much sense by itself when used out of any context. Using it out of context is frequently the case here in the United States recently.
Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? For me, this is always going to be the obvious question that I intuitively expect when someone raises the concept of freedom. Under a traditionally hierarchical culture, freedom can mean freedom from overbearing parents, from institutions, etc. In a Sino-centric historical perspective, freedom immediately reminds us of dreams of being free from foreign occupation and freedom for national self-determination.
In 20th Century America, the popularity of freedom as a buzz word was revived twice. Once against fascism during World War II, and once again during the Cold War. During both conflicts, U.S. emerged as victors, not only further entrenching a solidifying national identity among the general public around the concept of freedom, but also instilling a sort of subconscious presumptuousness, rendering it a simple, unproblematic concept with an obviously positive ‘sense’. It grew to increasingly anchor the American identity.
Freedom is simple for ordinary Americans not in the sense that it is taken for granted, but in the sense that the concept seems to be a fixed category. It can function for lots of people to be a debate stopper. Whoever stands on the side of it holds an incontestable moral high ground.
However, it may be surprising to realize that freedom as a concept is always a contested ground, in need of serious examinations. It is precisely because freedom occupies such a significant place in the United States, we need to be specific about exactly what freedom means, what it entails, who is excluded. It is sobering to remember that the birth of liberty in the founding ages of the United States rests on the contradiction of slavery. In the modern globalized economy, market freedom also produces extreme, dreading inequality. Freedom is far from unproblematic. As a broader meta-question, in a Nietzschean spirit, we might want to ask: What exactly is the value of freedom as an ideal?
Berlin’s Distinctions
Isaiah Berlin provides us a convenient ground in diving into the concept of freedom. He divides freedom into two analytical categories, and clarifies two types of entities that can be ascribed by “being free”. Entities can either be an individual or a group. For two analytical categories, Berlin defines:
- Negative freedom is realized when there is an absence of obstacles to some action performed by an individual or a group.
- Positive freedom is realized when an individual or a group becomes their own master.
The motivation to painstakingly provide such a distinction comes from Berlin’s belief that freedom has become such a bloated concept, incorporating not just what the concept of freedom should contain by itself, but also the conditions under which freedom can be achieved. The latter contributes to a confusion where concepts related to elements of general well-being, pursuit of happiness, and rationality creep in. When other values do creep into a bloated concept, people might not mean exactly the same thing, and misunderstandings occur very often.
Danger of Adopting Positive Freedom
But being a bloated concept is not bad in itself. Berlin’s critique lies in his belief that the danger of misunderstanding freedom lies in the positive sense, where advocating freedom can serve to mask authoritarian coercion. It comes back to Rousseau’s much debated idea, that it is possible to force people to be free. The concern for freedom to operate as a police-concept originates from Berlin’s definition of positive freedom applied to a group that seeks to become its own master and fights for national self-determination. Berlin suspects that positive freedom can mean to live and act a certain way.
On a level that transcends individuals, for a group to use freedom in this positive sense, it isn’t at all surprising then some might, either opinionated or with authority, believe that they have better knowledge on such a free way of life better than me, and force me to conform to what exactly freedom means for them (perhaps a simple democratic majority, or an elite vanguard party). Throughout history, and as well as in light of recent events, this unwanted situation certainly occurs in abundance. Berlin’s worry is not completely unfounded, and he believes only the negative sense of freedom truly belongs to the concept, where it is only defined as a lack of impediments or obstacles.
The problem with this proposal is that freedom understood only in the negative sense can’t and won’t function as an ideal anymore.
Perils of Adopting Negative Freedom
Freedom understood as negative freedom will certainly not help us structure/orient our lives in reference to. The reason for that is the pursuit of extreme negative freedom is related to a search for power. Under this perspective, I am free when there is less impediment in my way, irrespective of consideration of motivations or actions. Power in itself is amoral, and the pursuit of less obstacles is directly related to power. More power means less agents/natural barriers will oppose my actions, or threaten my goals.
If I just have a natural, unreflected desire to not wear a mask because it inconveniences my life, my life oriented around the pursuit of negative freedom will dispose me to go against any mask mandate ordered by the government. But through such a process, I may endanger the lives of people around me. It seems that my desire to remove the inconvenience of mask-wearing, compared to transmitting a virus and causing a certain person’s death, does not seem a worthwhile desire in juxtaposition. Such is the peril of restricting the ideal of freedom to its negative sense; I can use power in ways that violate agreed upon standards of morality.
The Answer is not Conceptual Abstemiousness
On the other hand, does the positive conception of freedom necessarily yield a police society? Clearly the answer to that problem is false. On top of that, we possess the conceptual repertoire to distinguish situations where there is coercion imposed to myself from outside me. In most of the cases, people know the difference between me as a citizen, and the state not as some entity that’s “really” me, but really distinct from me. It isn’t as though I wouldn’t be able to recognize my coerced self if only the society I inhabit is organized around authoritarianism and positive freedom. If most people are able to recognize that there is a difference between “freedom” as ideological propaganda, then there is no need to exclude the positive sense of freedom from the concept. We can define what the desired positive freedom entails, and we will inevitably bring in other fundamental values we like.
Again, a bloated concept is not bad in itself. It is only less desirable that the concept is used with different senses attached to it by people across the political spectrum. What is worse is that the concept itself can also unproblematically make the user of the word self-righteousness. Freedom shouldn’t be a debate stopper. Rather, it should prompt the start of the debate.
Out of curiosity, I opened Google Book’s Ngram Viewer, in which one can check for historical word usage across Google’s text database. There has been a noticeable increase in the usage of the word “freedom” since the 1980.
Freedom is a buzz word with an overwhelmingly positive connotation. Politically, both the left and the right attempts to utilize the word and shape its definition to their agenda. This is a concerning situation in itself. Freedom on the American right can be associated with extremism, especially White supremacism that promotes a “free”, “American” way of life that is implicitly in exclusion of people of different colors, for example. Indeed, relating back to Berlin’s worries, this does have an authoritarian bent, but the solution cannot be conceptual abstemiousness. We need to address the pandemic of blindly worshipping a concept.
Recently, the fact that free speech has been on the front pages is also demonstrative of freedom as a contested ground, where big tech can take actions to limit such a freedom to curb advocates of violence. This has sparked unease from the left as well the right, and unease is not at all unfounded. The fact is, that ideals conflict with each other all the time. In this case, peace and freedom don’t always align with each other, but such situations only also demonstrate the usefulness of other ideals, like that of democratic processes, civil debate, etc. Things are usually more complicated than falling for or against some ideal. It is not as though violating the ideal of freedom is always objectively wrong.
Is it preferable for a society to be organized around the ideal of freedom? I really believe that is an open question. I hope it has been demonstrated that freedom doesn’t contain an inherent bias in favor of or against conventional morality.
Obviously, it is hard for ordinary Americans to just give up such an important part of their identity. Then again, so many of America’s social problems are caused by freedom’s contested definitions, combined with its seemingly unproblematic interpretation by the general public. It just means different things to different people. The correct course to take is to realize differences and verbalizes the differences in more nuanced debates. We need to start out from other fundamental values to debate the definition of freedom and rationally examine the value of using freedom in public discourse, rather than start out with freedom to gain a moral high ground before the debate even begins.
