The Burden of Freedom

"Freedom" is one of those words like "justice" or "truth"; it's something that nearly every single being claims to honor, but which nearly every single human being also claims to hold their own uniquely precise definition. Nobody is against freedom, but nobody agrees on what it means, either.

The first act of human freedom as told in the Western and Middle Eastern creation story is the Adam and Eve story, in which man (or woman) chooses to disobey God. So the first story defines freedom as disobedience. And this is the truth. But it is not the whole truth.

Freedom is disobedience. My 3 year old niece could exercise her freedom by disobeying her mother's order not to touch the stove. But is that "freedom" a good thing? Not really. So, in order to be as good as we say it is, freedom must be more than just disobedience.

The key is understanding authority. Authority had a negative connotation, but it is just as good, or evil, as freedom is. In the example above with the infant and the stove, the mother's authority keeps the infant safer than the infant's freedom would.

When a doctor suggests a certain treatment for your illness, you are probably better off ceding to his or her authority than you would be exercising your freedom to invent your own medicine; authority is not just about oppression. It is at least equally about protection and guidance, and the more specialized authorities there are, such as doctors, teachers, roofers, and auto mechanics, the more free everyone else is to live their own lives.

The example of the infant and the stove speaks to the issue of negative freedom versus positive freedom. The freedom to do something versus the freedom from something. The freedom to drink after work versus the freedom from drunk drivers on your drive home from work.

In America, we have made a fetish and a cult out of the word "freedom". The beauty of our Constitution is manifest; it is the first document written by the powerful which spells out what the government they are conceiving is NOT free to do to the people.

The Constitution is an exercise in negative freedom. Positive freedom would say "Americans shall be free to say whatever they want". Negative freedom says "Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech".

The revolutionary import of this wording is profound. The Constitution doesn't need to tell people they can say what they want because God already gave every person that right. Instead, the Constitution informs would-be tyrants that they are denied the authority to abridge the freedom that God gave to humans.

But lately our culture is much more fixated on positive freedom, on what we can get away with rather than what we should guard against.

This is why the majority of the planet is suspicious of Western concepts of freedom. They understand, as we should remind ourselves, that total "freedom" is more precisely called "anarchy" or "barbarism".

The only perfect freedom for a person exists on a desert island with no other people. Since the primary need of humans is contact and belonging, billions of desert islands is not an option. People need other people for even the most remedial physical and emotional security and sustenance.

Since we MUST live in groups, what is the price of admission? It is sacrificing freedom to authority. These are not polar opposites, as explored above.

The balance between freedom and authority is the fulcrum of all politics for at least the last 500 years. This battle has produced oceans of blood, but these oceans were shed by and between people who recognized a need for laws; they just violently disagreed on the details.

There are no anarchist armies, because there never could be. The only competitors in the 3-way race between freedom, authority, and anarchy are the first two.

But freedom is not a ladder to be climbed; it is a see-saw, and its counterweight is authority. It must forever be balanced carefully, even as new elements of culture and society and technology are unceremoniously and inevitably dumped onto one end or the other, forcing a revision of all previous calculus.

In the 70's people could carry guns on planes and smoke and drink to their hearts' and lungs' content on those planes. Now they cant. And I'm okay with that.

Freedom is a good thing, but it means nothing without authority. We must learn to be wary of both. Every sailor loves coming home, but it is the ocean that keeps earth alive.