It is not an exaggeration to say that today we have a crisis in the exercise of freedom. Not that freedom was never before in crisis. It is only now, however, that technology and mass communication tools have expanded the voices and the audiences on the subject of freedom as it is understood by the individual and not just the traditional gatekeepers of freedoms. That means the exercise of freedom is influenced by a multitude (some would say a cacophony) of voices.
The crisis of freedom is most salient in democratic societies because it is there where freedom can be debated widely and with least encumbrance. We have seen how contentiously democratic societies have responded to the containment of our freedoms in order to defend against the pandemic. In this post, I will not talk about freedoms in democracies versus autocracies. I will rather talk about some generic freedoms that we do not hear or talk about as much as their importance suggests. And yet, I believe they are critical and can help us understand part of our modern discontent.
The freedoms I have in mind are those D. Graeber and D. Wengrow call primordial freedoms in their book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which I have referenced in a past blogpost. They are: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey; and the freedom to reorganize social relations. The important message of the book is that in the course of human history, there have been times that human communities were able to organize themselves in ways that made enjoyment of these freedoms possible to a greater degree than it is possible to us.
Freedom to move means that if and when we feel our freedoms to be threatened, we vote with our feet and move away. That’s what humans used to do for millennia. That’s what Europeans did when they sailed to the New World to escape persecution in their native lands. That’s what migrants from war-torn and oppressive countries do today as they gather outside the borders of America and Europe. Actually, the freedom to move was widely exercised until the emergence of states and national borders some 400 years ago. The strict immigration and naturalization laws we now see around the globe are even a more recent phenomenon of the last century and have further hemmed in our freedom to move. And with the earth’s ecology and climate being damaged by our modern way of life, our freedom to escape natural degradation becomes more elusive by the day. On the other hand, modern technology has allowed millions of workers to decouple their employment from their domicile thus giving them the freedom to live in communities more suitable to their preferred life style and values.
Freedom to disobey is not the same as freedom of expression or peaceful protest. It is the freedom Antigone claimed when she gave her brother a proper burial against the commands of her King and for which she sacrificed her life. We now live in states that exercise sovereignty over a broader range of individual initiatives than ever before. Bureaucracies are the handmaids of state power spinning out proscriptions and prescriptions of how to live our daily lives. They draw legitimacy from the complexity of modern life. They purport to assist us in navigating a myriad of actions fraught with risks and unwelcome consequences that bureaucrats (i.e., the class of experts) wish to protect us from. But inherent in their power is the temptation to cross the line that separates them from encroaching our freedoms. How much respect and credibility state bureaucracies have with the public determines whether the arm of the state is seen as an enabler or a usurper of freedoms. In many countries, the policies to fight the covid pandemic were deemed by many people as overbearing and we saw wide-spread civil disobedience. As life becomes more complex, thus, fueling greater regulation of people’s lives, how we defend the freedom to disobey against the power of the state will increasingly test our understanding and exercise of freedom.
Freedom to reorganize social relations is I believe the ultimate and most precious freedom, one that has suffered the most as we have ossified and been brainwashed into patterns believed to be immutable. At the end of the cold war, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History, meaning liberal democracy had proven its mantle and there was no other path forward for the humankind. The present state of the world is anything but the triumph of liberal democracy. What history teaches and the Dawn of Everything makes abundantly clear is that human history is not linear so that we can extrapolate its future state from our present experience. Even more important is the fact that humans have tried a variety of social organizations with public welfare results that compare very well to those offered by the modern agricultural-industrial states. Therefore, the historical experience of humankind is such as to suggest there are always alternative paths that can lay a claim on its future.
We have reached a point of collective awareness about the big challenges we face as a species. We have been given many warning signs as to what the perils are if we continue down the same road. Climate change, threat of pandemics, overpopulation, and technological innovations with unmitigated unintended consequences will test our freedoms. And yet we seem to make little progress in standing up to the call of our times.
Regrettably this failure is not only one we can attach to authoritarian states. Liberal democracies around the world have also been captured and used by the winners not only for political influence but worse to control the information and knowledge that a responsible debate demands.
If there is any kind of freedom a liberal democracy ought to preserve is our capacity to re-imagine our future and shape it to serve the common good and our inescapably shared destiny.
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