Freedom
“Give me liberty or give me death!” cries the revolutionary. This noble, if somewhat theatrical, sentiment conceals a rather unpalatable truth. Most people don’t value political freedom that highly. They feel it is all very well for young men with a passion for guns and nothing to lose. (After all, freedom usually seems to be about destroying someone or something.) Most people however are quite content with their inner freedom, and to seek happiness within the constraints of whatever society they find themselves in.
Yet even our inner freedom is heavily reliant on political freedom. Our modern, secular, pluralistic democracies give us the best possible opportunities to think and act independently. To be mentally free, we do need freedom of the press and of the judiciary, and to have legal protection from the arbitrary behaviour of the powerful. Living in modern times and in the West, we commonly forget how fortunate we are.
We owe an enormous debt to those hot-blooded revolutionaries of the past. We owe even more to the cool-headed statesmen who framed our democratic constitutions from ancient Greece through the Roman Republic to the American and French revolutions. The shining light in all of this is Britain, which has managed to contain the powerlust of its kings since 1215.
Democracies are structured so that no one person or group can have a monopoly on power or information. As history has repeatedly shown, dialogue and compromise between opposing groups leads to a much healthier society than top-down leadership, which is never as benign as it pretends to be. Some people will always try to seize as much power as they possibly can, whether it be within a family, a sports club, a business or a nation. Power nearly always corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This gives the legislators of any democracy an immense challenge: how can you prevent the emergence of tyrants?
The first defence is the ballot box. In ancient Greece, even the most powerful individual could be exiled, or ‘ostracised’, by a simple vote amongst his peers. Nowadays, any democratic leader has to please the mass of the population if he wants to stay in power. Winston Churchill ‘won the war’ but he was thrown out of office immediately after. The British people could see he had too much of a passion for war to be a good peacetime leader. In Russia, on the other hand, Stalin continued with his favorite pastime of murdering his countrymen.
Of course, the ballot box alone is not enough. After all, Hitler was democratically elected to office. American democracy is also protected by the division of power between the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court, all of which check each other and need each others support in order to function. America also has the wonderful law that no president can serve more than two terms. No matter how ghastly an American president might be, he is finished after eight years.
Voltaire famously said ‘I hate what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ An open, tolerant society depends on freedom of information, thought and expression. It also needs an education system and a culture that respects the rights of the individual. None of these can be taken for granted.
Because a democracy tolerates opposing viewpoints, it paradoxically provide the perfect breeding ground for those who would destroy it. History shows a constant bitter struggle between faith and reason, between religion and science, between people who claim to know and those who seek to know. Democracies are always under assault from within, even from those who claim to defend freedom. Us-against-them politicians, religions and all kinds of cranks and cults thrive in democracies. There was no Christianity in Stalin’s Russia. There were no suicide bombers in Saddam Hussein’s well-ordered Iraq.
Right now, millions of people in the democratic West, believe that their particular viewpoint or Big Idea is the Truth, and that all other viewpoints are false. The simplicity of this is very seductive. It relieves people from thought and carries its own self-evident morality. I’m right and you’re wrong. I’m good and you’re bad. And whose side are you on anyway? The language of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Truth’ and ‘Right’ makes great weapons for beating people down.
The ultimate defence against this kind of intellectual slavery is the Western tradition of sceptical enquiry. Science and philosophy assume that every theory should be exposed to criticism, and checked to see if it matches the evidence. Science may seem inferior to religion because it usually fails to produce absolute answers. However, would you prefer an impressive answer that is false, or a provisional answer that is closer to the truth and actually works?
Democracies work. Science works. Philosophic enquiry works. This is why Western civilisation, for all its faults, has boomed while the East has stagnated. Democracies grow because they liberate the ingenuity of the individual, and their problems frequently come from an excess of growth. Non-democratic societies, such as pre-modern China, can survive a long time but they rarely thrive. The price of suppressing free thought and the imagination of the individual is high.
Similarly religions, despite their appealing language of peace and spirituality, also tend to suppress free thought. After all, who needs to think about anything if the answers were already discovered centuries ago? If we look at the history of religions, we see they invariably lock into paralysis sooner or later.
Christianity trapped Europe in the Dark Ages for a thousand years. Traditional Islam wants to return to the eighth century. Buddhism once covered Asia from India to Japan, from Indonesia to Mongolia, and brought culture, art and philosophy wherever it went. It has now died out in most of those countries, and even in its few remaining enclaves it doesn’t look at all healthy.
We usually think of freedom as the liberty to choose our thoughts and actions, yet freedom is often hard to bear. One paradoxical way to express our freedom is to give it up. When the serfs were emancipated in 19th century Russia, many of them sold themselves back into slavery. Many American negros who were ‘freed’ after 1865 longed for the security of the bad old days.
The philosopher Kant said that a free man is one who can think for himself, based on the facts, without reliance on authorities or received wisdom. None of us can be perfectly free, but does your language express your own ideas or someone else’s? It is very sad to see intelligent people seeking freedom by parrotting the words of some authority, but you can see why they do it. We are freed from so many of our anxieties if we let others think for us.
The desire to follow slavishly mimic the leader can go far beyond mere words and ideas. When I was involved in a cult, I saw people so desparate to imitate the guru that they felt compelled to wear the same kind of shoes that He wore. This took great dedication and months of waiting, since in those days the shoes had to be ordered from Germany.
Most form of slavery are now mental: we police ourselves or voluntarily submit to authorities or fashions. Often without knowing why, we obey certain cultural mores or ideas, even if they greatly disadvantage us. We are trapped by the fear of shame or the disapproval of others. We compulsively consume far more of the world’s resources than we can afford because everyone around us does. If we want to be accepted by others, conformity pays much better than acting independently.
We all have enormous freedom to choose our lives and thoughts, but few people are willing to contemplate that possibility. The idea that you can only rely on your own fragile judgement in this dangerous and uncertain world is rather scary.
When we are young, it is natural to trust the judgements of older people and authorities. After all, they seem to know, and claim to know, what is going on. Only through a long, slow, healthy process of disillusionment, do you learn that they are bluffing.
Reality is too big and too weird for anyone to understand. And yet, you can know one important thing. As John Stuart Mill said, you can always know better than any authority what is right for you. This is where your freedom lies.
Freedom starts with critical thought and a healthy suspicion. You compare ideas and viewpoints, you acknowledge what you actually feel, and judge everything against your actual experience. It can take years to escape the influences of others, but the answers really can be found.
Finally freedom has to be expressed in action, or it is just a headtrip. In this very moment, I can choose to indulge an unpleasant thought or mood, or decide to free myself from it. In my ‘free’ time, I can drift at the mercy of the usual distractions, or I can do something that enchants and nourishes me. We all make thousands of tiny choices each day, and their sum total can lead us to Heaven or to Hell. This kind of freedom is always at our fingertips, and it this is quite enough for me.