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Aristotle, Ashleigh Brilliant, Ashley MacIsaac, chastened intellectualism, democracy, drugs, Janis Joplin, libertarianism, music, Xunzi
“Freedom” is among the most central concepts in our political vocabulary. I think it is deservedly so. But it’s also a concept with a notoriously large number of meanings. Libertarians identify freedom simply with the absence of state coercion; by contrast, the most widely used Sanskrit term with an equivalence to freedom is probably mokṣa, liberation from the suffering of worldly existence. And the most common use of “freedom” today is something different again: the ability to make unrestricted choices, to decide for oneself what one will do.
Freedom in this sense of choice played a fairly limited role in premodern political thought, and I think this is because the ancients understood its limitations. Human beings often do not make the best decisions for themselves. At a large scale, we get addicted to alcohol and other drugs; we fall into paralyzing depression and even suicide; we get misled by demagogues into murderous hatreds. At a smaller level, we lash out in anger at minor annoyances; we procrastinate the things we know it would be best for us to do; we get bitter and vain about matters of social status and material possessions. Given all this, the ability to make choices can be bad for us, since the choices themselves are so often bad.
All this is the view, shared by Xunzi, Augustine, and Freud, which I have referred to in the past as chastened intellectualism. (I have tempered my enthusiasm for chastened intellectualism on the grounds that the good elements to human nature should not be ignored, but the bad ones remain there as well.) It is well known that Xunzi also endorsed a political system which greatly restricted freedom (in the sense of choice). Looking at all the terrible things people do, how can you trust them to make decisions for themselves?
Now it seems to me that Xunzi’s position on human nature, while it might lead one to a suspicion of democracy, should also lead to a suspicion of fascism, absolute monarchy, or any other kind of tyranny that entrusts all power to a single leader. For if people are that bad, you can’t put it all in one person’s hands either. You need a system of checks and balances, so that the single ruler’s own bad tendencies do not cause even more damage than individuals on their own. But that system of checks and balances still should put significant restrictions on what the people can and can’t do, which from our liberal vantage point looks bad enough. And from what I know of Xunzi, it sounds like even this may not have been the position Xunzi actually took; he seems to have written about a strong single leader. (Because of Xunzi’s politics, many of those who endorse Confucianism in the contemporary age take pains to distance themselves from him.)
I do think we have reason to endorse the liberal view of freedom as maximum choice – not, however, because that freedom is a good in itself. People are often their own worst enemies; sometimes structure is exactly what they need, having someone tell them what to do. Fiddling With Disaster, the autobiography of Canadian Celtic-rock fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, tells the story of a great musician from a small Nova Scotia town who had the opportunity for stardom. His family and friends were afraid of his going to follow the opportunities presented when Philip Glass discovered his talent, precisely because he would have too much freedom, the ability to do whatever he wanted. And it turned out they were entirely right. After a few years on top of the Canadian charts, MacIsaac wound up literally as a penniless crackhead on the streets of New York, having sold nearly everything to feed his newly acquired addictions. Freedom was not kind to him; his freedom was exactly of the kind described by Janis Joplin.
The question is: what kind of restrictions on freedom are good? Different people screw themselves up in very different ways. Aristotle – not exactly a great friend of modern liberal freedom – thinks of the best politics in terms of allowing each person to fulfill a highest end or telos, all being the best they can be. Some thinkers would consider this teleology a higher and truer kind of freedom than choice alone. But it seems to me that the freedom of choice is a vital part of the freedom to be what you are. Who would know what you’re meant to be better than you yourself? That question is not entirely rhetorical. The chastened intellectualist critique shows us that people are frequently not the best judges of what’s best for them. But then who is? The deep problem with a politics like Xunzi’s – or for that matter Rick Santorum’s – is that it allows decisions about the best life to be made by the large, impersonal, bureaucratic institution that is the modern (or medieval Confucian) state. And I don’t see any reason to trust such an institution with knowing individual people’s lives better than those people do themselves. To the extent that there is a need for such authority is far better vested in the likes of therapists, parents, or superiors within a monastic institution – those who know a person well enough individually that they can make a decision for that person, not for a generalized society as a whole. In the words of Ashleigh Brilliant, freedom is not the goal — but you need freedom to figure out what the goal is.
The view I have just articulated has some affinities with political libertarianism, which is similarly suspicious of government attempts to make decisions in the name of people’s individual best interests. It is not the same, however. A critique of libertarianism could take its own post. Suffice it to say here that given the importance of money and property in creating possibilities for action, insofar as individual choice is a good, that good is not actually best realized by a social system that keeps many people in abject poverty.
I will be taking a break from posting next Sunday for the American Thanksgiving weekend.
EDIT, 2 January 2015: it says above that “Xunzi’s position on human nature, while it might lead one to a suspicion of democracy, should also lead to a suspicion of fascism…” The post originally left out the “a suspicion of” and merely said “should also lead to fascism…” Which is of course exactly the opposite point from the one I intended to make.
I think to understand “freedom” — especially in way that spans cultures and time periods — requires an understanding of how an individual fits within the society.
Premodern societies are structured based on status. In a feudal society, for example, even a high ranking individual is not “free” in a modern sense but is bound by duties of loyalty and fealty to family and king.
In the past two hundred years, Western society has moved progressively from relationships based on status toward relationships based on contract. The chief quality of a contract relationship is that it is defined by the parties and limited to the terms of the contract. When the contract is fully performed, the relationship is over and the parties go their separate ways.
Modern society has increasingly emphasized contract over status or relationship — even, astonishingly, elevating contracts to status as entities with the same rights as “natural persons” (“corporations are people, too”). In my own legal career, I have seen my 150 year old law firm morph from a general partnership (where partners owe duties to each other based, as Judge Cardozo once said — not limited to honesty, but based on “the punctilio of honor the most sensitive”) to a limited liability partnership — the professional equivalent of a corporation.
Now, status relationships in Western society are limited to narrow areas of law — family law, U.S. securities laws, corporate law fiduciary duties, tort law, and extraordinary contract situations where a contract party’s behavior is so egregious as to violate a duty of “good faith and fair dealing”. And even in each of these areas, contract law has begun to encroach and limited the scope of duties owed (prenuptual agreements are one example).
Money can serve as catalyst for a contract relationship — inserting payment into a status relationship has a tendency to sever the relationship. This can be understood even on a familiar level — when a family decides to start charging their 22 year old son rent at the end of the summer he returns from college, it is a not so subtle hint that the family relationship has shifted to a contract relationship and it is time for the son to be independent. Money can also work to strengthen status relationships when it is offered as a gift. In this way, contributions to politicians are problematic because they create obligations and bonds between a politician (who should act dispassionately and for the good of all) and lobbyists or wealthy contributors.
All of this has an effect on how we conceive of ourselves — because self is never separated from relationship to other — rather, it is defined by our relationship to other. Much of the modern experience of existential isolation of individuals, I think, can be traced to the rise of contract relationships and the severing of traditional family and tribal allegiances.
In a Buddhist view, both of these frameworks for grounding self (as an independent and autonomous individual separate from others or as a social being defined by relationship to others) are based on concepts and have no inherent truth. Either can be horrific. Slavery is a system based on status. Modern contract rights granting individuals the ability to “own” and to pollute and destroy the Commons (air, water and the environment) threaten the survival of humanity.
From this point of view, freedom is understanding these concepts and being able to step out of the habitual patterns that these concepts create. This is easier said than done — since society is not primarily a structure imposed from outside — it is our karmic legacy.
Interestingly, the view of monarchy expressed above — that it is flawed because it entrusts all power in a single leader — is, I think, a product of the modern view that individuals are autonomous and not bound by status or relationships. The modern American view of monarchy is that the governed cede freedom to the monarch, that the monarch is the only one in the society who is free in the modern sense, and that this is dangerous because man is essentially flawed and evil.
A view of monarchy in a status oriented society would likely be more positive. In that society, the monarch would be understood to owe at least equal duties to the governed and, in addition, would be subject to training in leadership and the ways of ruling. Monarchy, in this view, arises from a natural hierarchy in the same way that a family has a hierarchy from parents to children to servants or that the human body has a hierarchy from the head to the feet. The result would, ideally, be an enlightened monarch who takes on burdens and obligations for the good of the society.
Good point, Jim. It’s no coincidence that Hobbes’s theoretical justification of absolute monarchy comes in at the rise of modernity and capitalism. On the other hand, it strikes me that Xunzi’s skepticism about human nature remains a good premise for checks and balances: even in a society bound by community, which imposes communal sanctions on those who act poorly, the poor actions can still happen and often will.
Very interesting paradox… it seems to lead to the idea that the ideal society would be a monastery or an autarchic large family… Although, even in these cases, I would not trust completely one’s own elders, who might priviledge the interests of the society over the ones of each of its members (and might on top of that also be wrong).
Yes, that is an important point. Even if the family elders know what’s best for their young, it does not mean they will actually act accordingly!
What will I read if you take a break?
You could try my blogroll below, although I realize I haven’t updated it in a while. I am quite fond of Speculum Criticum Traditionis.
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