Today I gave a talk to the Alabama College Democrats on the subject of “freedom.” They were a delightful group with excellent questions and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. Below is the prepared text of the speech, though the actual delivered version had a number of improvised digressions.
I have been asked to talk about what freedom is, which is just about the most difficult possible question you could have asked me to answer. Several thousands years of political philosophy haven’t sorted it out so I doubt I am going to successfully answer it today in a few minutes. But I can give you a few thoughts on some ways that the contemporary left thinks about freedom and why they are useful.
In fact, the left perspective on freedom actually starts with the fact that freedom is a difficult concept rather than an easy one. If I was a free market libertarian, it would be quite easy for me to tell you what freedom is. Freedom is when nobody physically attacks you or touches your stuff. That freedom is secured through a minimal government: A government that devotes itself to making sure that violent crime is punished and that property rights are protected and that contracts are enforced. Often, this idea of freedom is credited to John Stuart Mill, with his principle that the only legitimate use of government power is to prevent people from doing harm to each other. If you accept this idea, then this question of what freedom is isn’t really interesting or complicated: Freedom means being left alone by the government. There. We’ve solved it.
The left, however, has always looked on this idea of freedom as somewhat ridiculous, because it leads to situations that seem distinctly un-free to be described as completely free. If I am a poor migrant who signs up for indentured servitude, and I have to work long hours for low pay or be sent back to my country of origin, and I am sexually harassed and bullied by my boss, and I spend each night in a crowded worker dormitory, miserable and desperate, it seems grotesque to say that I have freedom. And yet if we accept freedom from government coercion as the only important kind of freedom, then people who have almost no meaningful choices in their lives are still considered as free as you can possibly be, purely because they are not being threatened with jail by the government. (...)
Contractual arrangements may be voluntary, but if you are pressured into them by despair, then that voluntariness is a farce. If I offer to throw you a life preserver while you are drowning, on the condition that you give me 5 percent of your income for the rest of your life, it is difficult to call this “voluntary.” You did not have a real choice. If people don’t have any viable alternatives, then they are not really free.
This understanding has led leftists to develop a much richer idea of freedom, an idea that takes people’s life experiences as its starting point rather than a thin and theoretical kind of bare contractual freedom. So if you have to sell your house to pay a family member’s medical bills, yes, it’s true that you made the choice voluntarily, that you could have just said “sorry, kid” and let them die. But our choices are structured by our circumstances, and our circumstances are structured by the political and economic systems we live in, and those systems are in turn structured by decisions that are made by people with power. You face that choice to sell your house or let your parent/child suffer because you do not live in one of the many countries where this choice doesn’t exist. The diabetics who try to raise money for insulin on GoFundMe face a choice of whether to crowdfund or risk death because that is the choice that everyone else has chosen to offer them.
In criticizing the Supreme Court’s campaign financing cases, we on the left often say that “money isn’t speech,” that free speech doesn’t mean you can just spend as much as you like to speak. But I actually think we should frame it a little differently: In important ways, money confers freedom. Money gives you the capacity to actually act. The more money I have, the more things I can do. I can speak more if I have more money, because I can amplify my voice. I can be Rupert Murdoch and buy media outlet after media outlet and blast whatever message I choose into the homes of hundreds of millions of people. Money is speech, and how free your speech is always depends on the amount of money you have. If I am an ordinary person with a job, not only might I not be able to afford to blast my message out, but I might be fired if I say anything too controversial, even outside of work. I regularly edit people’s political writing for publication, and a lot of them have asked me to use pseudonyms, because they’re worried that even things they say off the clock when they’re outside of work could cause them to lose their jobs. In the United States, the law generally does not protect you from being retaliated against over your speech by employers. You are “free” to speak, in that it is legal, and they are “free” to fire you afterwards. Everyone has maximum freedom, which some people think is wonderful, but the end result is that since power and wealth are very unevenly distributed, some people have a lot more freedom than others.
One of the most important aspects of leftist thought is its insight that “power” is more than just the government putting people in jail. Power relationships are everywhere: an employer who harasses employees, but those employees can’t quit their jobs because they’re worried the employer will punish them by giving them a bad reference or retaliating against them. Abusive partners who make the other person afraid of losing love and support, and wield the power they have to withhold those things to coerce the other person into putting up with behavior they shouldn’t have to put up with. Bullies at school, telemarketers who take advantage of old people’s confusion and loneliness. These situations do not involve the use of physical force, they involve other kinds of manipulation and coercion. (...)
Inequality itself is a restriction on freedom. When some people have billions of dollars, and others have zero dollars, the ones with billions of dollars can control the lives of the others. My friend the economist Rob Larson has an excellent book called Capitalism vs. Freedom, and in it he shows how the accumulation of extreme wealth in some hands serves to destroy freedom. In fact, he says, it causes the whole negative liberty/positive liberty freedom-from/freedom-to distinction to kind of break down. For instance, when Martin Shkreli’s pharmaceutical company hiked the price of a life-saving drug from $13 to $750, people could be driven into poverty to pay to survive. They are certainly not free to act but they are also not free from the consequences of self-interested corporate decision-makers.
Here’s another example. If we take platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there is an argument to be made that they make us more free. Look at all the things you can post! The magazine I work for, Current Affairs, has built an audience in large part because of Facebook and Twitter. We post our articles there, people share them, people read them. Complete freedom. Voluntary transactions. Wonderful. But it’s also the case that as almost all information starts flowing through these monopolistic corporate platforms that are the only game in town, you become dependent on them and they serve as completely unaccountable decision-makers about which speech is acceptable. If Mark Zuckerberg were to wake up one morning and decided that he didn’t like what was printed in Current Affairs, that he wanted to bump us down the algorithm, it could destroy our business, because we’re dependent on people finding out about us through these platforms.
Conservatives often complain that their free speech is being restricted by this or that social media platform. And on the one hand, it’s ironic, because they’re the ones who believe corporations should be able to do whatever they please in a free market. But on the other hand, they’re not wrong that this is what you get when corporations become gatekeepers. You get “private tyrannies”—institutions whose decisions have major consequences in the world, but that ordinary people do not get a vote in. You can choose whether or not to use Facebook, but you don’t get to vote on who you think should be in charge of Facebook. And in a situation where everyone is using Facebook, and your business depends on it, the binary choice of whether or not to participate doesn’t mean very much. (...)
This is one reason that it’s very important to talk about democracy and freedom together. Democracy is when ordinary people get to participate in government decision-making, it’s not done by unelected autocrats. And one definition of freedom that has been proposed is that “freedom is participation in power,” that is that freedom and democracy should be considered either the same thing or closely tied. And we can see what this would mean when we think about the company town versus the democratic town. In the company town, the rules are made from above, in the democratic town they’re made from below. And the difference between those two places is that one is free and the other is not. You are free when you help make the rules that bind you. Wikipedia, for instance, is a far freer platform than the others in a certain way, because the users actually deliberate together over decisions. There are still rules, but those rules are discussed and enforced through democratic processes. There are appeals. It’s all completely transparent. Because people are part of a community decision-making process, they are freer.
Saying that participation is freedom raises a number of problems still. If the group makes a bad decision, over your objections, are you free because you participated? The fear with democracy is always “tyranny of the majority,” though I think for the most part this can be mitigated by robust procedural impediments to trampling on dissidents. (With a Bill of Rights, for instance.) There is no such thing as perfect freedom, but the ability to control your circumstances and be part of the political and economic decisions that affect you seems an important precondition of liberty.
I have been asked to talk about what freedom is, which is just about the most difficult possible question you could have asked me to answer. Several thousands years of political philosophy haven’t sorted it out so I doubt I am going to successfully answer it today in a few minutes. But I can give you a few thoughts on some ways that the contemporary left thinks about freedom and why they are useful.
In fact, the left perspective on freedom actually starts with the fact that freedom is a difficult concept rather than an easy one. If I was a free market libertarian, it would be quite easy for me to tell you what freedom is. Freedom is when nobody physically attacks you or touches your stuff. That freedom is secured through a minimal government: A government that devotes itself to making sure that violent crime is punished and that property rights are protected and that contracts are enforced. Often, this idea of freedom is credited to John Stuart Mill, with his principle that the only legitimate use of government power is to prevent people from doing harm to each other. If you accept this idea, then this question of what freedom is isn’t really interesting or complicated: Freedom means being left alone by the government. There. We’ve solved it.
The left, however, has always looked on this idea of freedom as somewhat ridiculous, because it leads to situations that seem distinctly un-free to be described as completely free. If I am a poor migrant who signs up for indentured servitude, and I have to work long hours for low pay or be sent back to my country of origin, and I am sexually harassed and bullied by my boss, and I spend each night in a crowded worker dormitory, miserable and desperate, it seems grotesque to say that I have freedom. And yet if we accept freedom from government coercion as the only important kind of freedom, then people who have almost no meaningful choices in their lives are still considered as free as you can possibly be, purely because they are not being threatened with jail by the government. (...)Contractual arrangements may be voluntary, but if you are pressured into them by despair, then that voluntariness is a farce. If I offer to throw you a life preserver while you are drowning, on the condition that you give me 5 percent of your income for the rest of your life, it is difficult to call this “voluntary.” You did not have a real choice. If people don’t have any viable alternatives, then they are not really free.
This understanding has led leftists to develop a much richer idea of freedom, an idea that takes people’s life experiences as its starting point rather than a thin and theoretical kind of bare contractual freedom. So if you have to sell your house to pay a family member’s medical bills, yes, it’s true that you made the choice voluntarily, that you could have just said “sorry, kid” and let them die. But our choices are structured by our circumstances, and our circumstances are structured by the political and economic systems we live in, and those systems are in turn structured by decisions that are made by people with power. You face that choice to sell your house or let your parent/child suffer because you do not live in one of the many countries where this choice doesn’t exist. The diabetics who try to raise money for insulin on GoFundMe face a choice of whether to crowdfund or risk death because that is the choice that everyone else has chosen to offer them.
In criticizing the Supreme Court’s campaign financing cases, we on the left often say that “money isn’t speech,” that free speech doesn’t mean you can just spend as much as you like to speak. But I actually think we should frame it a little differently: In important ways, money confers freedom. Money gives you the capacity to actually act. The more money I have, the more things I can do. I can speak more if I have more money, because I can amplify my voice. I can be Rupert Murdoch and buy media outlet after media outlet and blast whatever message I choose into the homes of hundreds of millions of people. Money is speech, and how free your speech is always depends on the amount of money you have. If I am an ordinary person with a job, not only might I not be able to afford to blast my message out, but I might be fired if I say anything too controversial, even outside of work. I regularly edit people’s political writing for publication, and a lot of them have asked me to use pseudonyms, because they’re worried that even things they say off the clock when they’re outside of work could cause them to lose their jobs. In the United States, the law generally does not protect you from being retaliated against over your speech by employers. You are “free” to speak, in that it is legal, and they are “free” to fire you afterwards. Everyone has maximum freedom, which some people think is wonderful, but the end result is that since power and wealth are very unevenly distributed, some people have a lot more freedom than others.
One of the most important aspects of leftist thought is its insight that “power” is more than just the government putting people in jail. Power relationships are everywhere: an employer who harasses employees, but those employees can’t quit their jobs because they’re worried the employer will punish them by giving them a bad reference or retaliating against them. Abusive partners who make the other person afraid of losing love and support, and wield the power they have to withhold those things to coerce the other person into putting up with behavior they shouldn’t have to put up with. Bullies at school, telemarketers who take advantage of old people’s confusion and loneliness. These situations do not involve the use of physical force, they involve other kinds of manipulation and coercion. (...)
Inequality itself is a restriction on freedom. When some people have billions of dollars, and others have zero dollars, the ones with billions of dollars can control the lives of the others. My friend the economist Rob Larson has an excellent book called Capitalism vs. Freedom, and in it he shows how the accumulation of extreme wealth in some hands serves to destroy freedom. In fact, he says, it causes the whole negative liberty/positive liberty freedom-from/freedom-to distinction to kind of break down. For instance, when Martin Shkreli’s pharmaceutical company hiked the price of a life-saving drug from $13 to $750, people could be driven into poverty to pay to survive. They are certainly not free to act but they are also not free from the consequences of self-interested corporate decision-makers.
Here’s another example. If we take platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there is an argument to be made that they make us more free. Look at all the things you can post! The magazine I work for, Current Affairs, has built an audience in large part because of Facebook and Twitter. We post our articles there, people share them, people read them. Complete freedom. Voluntary transactions. Wonderful. But it’s also the case that as almost all information starts flowing through these monopolistic corporate platforms that are the only game in town, you become dependent on them and they serve as completely unaccountable decision-makers about which speech is acceptable. If Mark Zuckerberg were to wake up one morning and decided that he didn’t like what was printed in Current Affairs, that he wanted to bump us down the algorithm, it could destroy our business, because we’re dependent on people finding out about us through these platforms.
Conservatives often complain that their free speech is being restricted by this or that social media platform. And on the one hand, it’s ironic, because they’re the ones who believe corporations should be able to do whatever they please in a free market. But on the other hand, they’re not wrong that this is what you get when corporations become gatekeepers. You get “private tyrannies”—institutions whose decisions have major consequences in the world, but that ordinary people do not get a vote in. You can choose whether or not to use Facebook, but you don’t get to vote on who you think should be in charge of Facebook. And in a situation where everyone is using Facebook, and your business depends on it, the binary choice of whether or not to participate doesn’t mean very much. (...)
This is one reason that it’s very important to talk about democracy and freedom together. Democracy is when ordinary people get to participate in government decision-making, it’s not done by unelected autocrats. And one definition of freedom that has been proposed is that “freedom is participation in power,” that is that freedom and democracy should be considered either the same thing or closely tied. And we can see what this would mean when we think about the company town versus the democratic town. In the company town, the rules are made from above, in the democratic town they’re made from below. And the difference between those two places is that one is free and the other is not. You are free when you help make the rules that bind you. Wikipedia, for instance, is a far freer platform than the others in a certain way, because the users actually deliberate together over decisions. There are still rules, but those rules are discussed and enforced through democratic processes. There are appeals. It’s all completely transparent. Because people are part of a community decision-making process, they are freer.
Saying that participation is freedom raises a number of problems still. If the group makes a bad decision, over your objections, are you free because you participated? The fear with democracy is always “tyranny of the majority,” though I think for the most part this can be mitigated by robust procedural impediments to trampling on dissidents. (With a Bill of Rights, for instance.) There is no such thing as perfect freedom, but the ability to control your circumstances and be part of the political and economic decisions that affect you seems an important precondition of liberty.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
