UPDATE: Sunday, Oct 8, 2023 · 6:14:28 PM +00:00
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xaxnar
I should mention one reason I wrote this is I have gotten a little tired of the Right Wing Fascist wanna-be’s who have appropriated “Freedom” as though it’s their own exclusive property. They’ve inverted the whole ideal — “Moms for Liberty” want the liberty to dictate what others can read. They want the freedom to protect their world view from anything that might contradict it or expand it.
3. Conventionality. Right-wing authoritarian followers prefer to see the world in stark black-and-white. They conform closely with the rules defined for them by their authorities, and do not stray far from their own communities. This extreme, unquestioning conformity makes them insular, fearful, hostile to new information, uncritical of received wisdom, and able to accept vast contradictions without perceiving the inherent hypocrisy.
Freedom and Liberty — America is supposed to be all about the two. But freedom for whom? Freedom from what. Liberty — or license? Freedom — or privilege? Where does someone’s freedom end and another’s begin? What is freedom, without freedom to experience the consequences? Freedom isn’t free — so who sets the price, and who pays? Does it come from God or Man? Does it flow from the operation of Free Markets?
Deciding how to answer those questions, how to define freedom/liberty, is a never-ending struggle.
Freedom is not a natural condition. The laws of nature are not subject to legislative override, judicial fiat or executive decree. Gravity, entropy, the inexorable passage of time will not give anyone a pass. There is the freedom to starve without sufficient food, the freedom to die of exposure without access to shelter, the freedom to die of thirst without sufficient drinkable water, the freedom to choke on air that has been rendered unbreathable.
The classical observation opines that too often, freedom comes down to the choice between slavery and starvation.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness may be inalienable rights — but only if humans make them so. (And being able to pursue happiness is not a guarantee of success.)
We have a Constitution in America which sets up a framework for the rule of law, the boundary conditions of freedom — but we also have a Bill of Rights and subsequent Amendments from the struggle to adapt to evolving conceptions what freedom is and how far it extends. The American Revolution took a while to bring the freedom of full citizenship to people of color who had been slaves, and women.
FDR gave us these Four Freedoms.
The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of worship
- Freedom from want
- Freedom from fear
The Republican view of those four is, to put it mildly, that those things are something they think should only apply to people like them. Their ever-mutating list of ‘others’ is all about people who — in their view — don’t deserve them. It’s a zero-sum world view that believes if those freedoms are extended to others, it can only be done at their expense.
They're not entirely wrong. The paradox of freedom is that it becomes unworkable if there are not limits, tradeoffs, and compromises. Freedom is not a solo act; it has to include respect for the rights of others. As noted above, the laws of nature cannot be waved away either. When someone’s freedom is the freedom to enjoy privilege withheld from others, extending those others freedom from that burden feels like a loss.
“Free” markets unregulated quickly descend into monopoly, externalized costs, and other inequities. Freedom of Speech becomes corrupted when that speech manipulates others with lies intended to cause harm, enable fraud, or worse. (The classic example is falsely yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. “Only I can fix it” is right up there too.)
Freedom without responsibility is anarchy. (Libertarianism is anarchy for rich people, as the semi-joke goes.) At the most basic level, responsibility begins with a simple premise: first, do no harm. Exercising freedom requires awareness of how it affects others, how it accords with the limits of the natural world, and so on. (Freedom to drive anywhere anytime, if based on burning fossil fuels, is something that is taking away the freedom to have a livable planet.)
We’re in a situation where Freedom is being used to justify turning America into an armed camp with guns everywhere. Freedom of Religion is being interpreted as the God-given right to tell others how to live. There’s Freedom — and there’s a related concept: Justice. Finding a balance between those two concepts is a can of worms, a never-ending struggle in America and elsewhere — but you can’t really have one without the other.
I am offering up these musings because from time to time it’s essential to take a close look at what we as a country believe freedom really is, how we practice it, and what it costs to have it. Once upon a time our schools included classes in a thing called Civics:
the study of the rights and duties of citizens and of how government works
— often used before another noun
What is the state of education in civics these days? It’s not good.
Civic knowledge and public engagement are at an all-time low. A 2016 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, which was a significant decline from previous years.1 Not surprisingly, public trust in government is at only 18 percent2 and voter participation has reached its lowest point since 1996.3 Without an understanding of the structure of government, our rights and responsibilities, and the different methods of public engagement, civic literacy and voter apathy will continue to plague American democracy. Educators and schools have a unique opportunity and responsibility to ensure that young people become engaged and knowledgeable citizens.
The easiest way to limit freedom and take it away is ignorance. People who do not understand how rights and duties are intertwined and are not willing or able to allow others to share that gift and burden cannot be truly free.
I don’t pretend to have the last word on freedom here. Every day we face choices on how to exercise our rights and duties that are constrained by events not in our control, the actions of others, the limits of our own understanding, the limits of our imagination, and the limits of the real world in which we live.
I’m going to close this with a vision from the Biden campaign of how freedom can be exercised in ways that lift us up and bring us together. It’s a lesson in danger of being lost in the cacophony of what passes for politics and news these days.