On Being Free

1

Opening the Question

I

OUR CULTURE HAS a schizophrenic view of freedom. Two schools of thought concerning liberty are simultaneously alive in it. These schools proceed from utterly different, almost contradictory assumptions to equally different and opposed conclusions—yet they do not argue with each other. The conflict is not brought out into the open. There is no exchange; not much communication. The two go their own separate ways as if there were a gentlemen’s agreement to keep quiet.

For the first school it is axiomatic that freedom is wonderful: freedom separates man from the beasts, and raises him above nature; it is the sine qua non of his distinguished position. Liberty gives a man a unique and incommensurate status which is lost to him when it is forfeited. His claim to it is indisputable for it constitutes and defines his being; it is the essence of his manhood. To gain it is more mandatory than all other conquests; to lose it is final defeat.

This is the more official tradition. It views freedom as satisfying, as the natural and obvious object of every man’s longing. People, according to it, want freedom as spontaneously and directly as babies want milk. All political faiths, no matter how sharply they may disagree on other matters, subscribe to this view—though in very different fashions. All sides fight for freedom. Every conquest is a liberation. Even the Nazis declared that they were for it.

The divergences between the various political canons seem no greater on this score than those between the sectarian creeds of one religion. All invoke the same ancient text: that freedom is desirable. If politics occupies in the modern age the place that religion held in the Middle Ages—if it now furnishes the basic framework of orientation, the instruments of salvation, and the only ideas that match the power then possessed by their more theological antecedents—then freedom holds now in this new framework the place that was formerly occupied by Grace. Only by entering into the Kingdom of Freedom will the new man be born from the old Adam.

This view of freedom helps to paint the general picture of history, which still orders the world for us in a drama of progress. We think mankind is attaining ever greater freedom. It was Hegel who first developed this hope into a system. He depicted history as mankind’s difficult advance towards its own liberation and he placed an immense and radiant value upon freedom. He did not see in history a gratifying, steady climb but rather thought it addicted to the exploration of blind alleys and the paying of monstrous prices. He thought it, in his own famous phrase, the slaughterbench on which whole nations are sacrificed. Yet he believed that it was, in spite of the carnage and the waste, somehow justified and redeemed. Why? Because it did lead to freedom. Freedom sufficed. It merited the cost.

From this school also, we learned to make freedom the final standard of adjudication for the superiority of our way of life, and of our institutions, even our superiority as human beings. We are free, that is why we are better. This is rock bottom. It ends the debate. And the origin as well as the rationalization of many foreign and domestic policies follow the same pattern. The last resort to which one takes recourse is that this or that stratagem promotes freedom. Everyone knows that this invocation is often hypocritical. But the fact that one acts the devotee of freedom when one is not, shows only how unquestioned and sacrosanct the value of freedom has become. Give me liberty or give me death! might be the emblem of this first tradition.

If one had to choose a single motto for the second tradition, one might pick the phrase escape from freedom. In that school Sartre and Kierkegaard are prominent, but Dostoyevsky wrote the formulation which has become classical for modern writers. It is The Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov and we shall look at it more closely.

In this chapter Ivan tells Alyosha a parable which is set in the sixteenth century in Spain at the height of the Inquisition: Jesus returns for one day to this earth, the day after the Grand Inquisitor presided over a large-scale execution of heretics, a splendid, spectacular auto-da-fe in which almost a hundred misbelievers were burnt at the stake. The crowd recognizes Jesus, and has already burst into Hosannahs, when the Grand Inquisitor, knowing that it is Jesus, orders his guards to arrest him. That night the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in the inquisitorial prison, and by far the largest part of the story records the conversation that occurs between them, in which the Grand Inquisitor justifies himself and his Inquisition and even his arrest of Jesus to Jesus himself. The heart of his argument is that Jesus tried to set mankind free, but mankind does not want and cannot bear freedom. He, the Grand Inquisitor, therefore took this terrible gift from them out of compassion and out of mercy. The freedom that Jesus bestowed upon man was an affliction and a scourge. Man suffers from it and cannot sustain it. It makes demands upon him that he cannot meet. He does not possess the dimensions, the stature and the strength to endure it. What mankind really wants, what it craves is mystery and authority. Man strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

In essence the Grand Inquisitor poses a dilemma: One can either grant to mankind what it wants, although that dispensation will be degrading, or one can offer noble values, but then one has to be cruel. One has only a choice between a compassion that concedes to mankind the vulgarities for which it hankers—and a will to raise and lift it, which is ultimately brutal. It is impossible to give both happiness and dignity at the same time. Faced with this either/or, the Grand Inquisitor elects to be gentle, and grant all mankind the mystery, the authority, the object of worship, the servitude it wants. He knows that what he does and gives is revolting, but the fact that he renders himself repulsive is a gauge of his compassion. To give only what is still consistent with one’s own immaculateness is too sparing. The Grand Inquisitor makes a more strenuous sacrifice and Jesus stands accused, charged with lukewarmness.

For this tradition the first basic ground rule is that the options open to us are split. The terms are: one or the other—but not both. In the novel Ivan’s outrage against this basic premise renders him incapable of action. He is too noble to give mankind what it wants, but too sensitive to afflict it with high values. His refusal of this choice holds him in the stocks in which he is tortured. And this same dilemma was faced by a whole line of thinkers, all the way from Plato down to Sartre (Dirty Hands).

From the point of this bifurcation, Liberalism looks like an impossible insistence on having both; it links happiness and freedom, satisfaction and nobility so that there need be no choice. It is amazing that Liberalism usually treats this as completely obvious, that it talks as if there never had been any question. But there is, at the very least, a problem which has to be faced.

The choice which Ivan poses runs directly counter to a structural thought-pattern that had dominant importance during the Enlightenment and that still governs much of our thinking: in essence it holds that the defects of societies and men are in the last accounting due to man’s repression, to one or the other of the ways in which man is held down. Liberation, therefore, is the answer, and the political question reduces simply to the question of how a maximum of freedom can be won. One operates on the assumption that there is no upper limit to the amount of freedom that each individual wants (and that is good for him), and one believes that the need for limits is entirely external. This means that society should impose only that minimum of restraints required to safeguard other people, and it also means that other people and society are primarily perceived as something that sets limits.

To attack this thought-pattern challenges not just the foundations on which Liberalism rests. It threatens the whole spectrum of political discussion, and crosses sharply even the main hope that underpins most revolutions. Take the famous closing lines of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution. Once the revolution has been won,

Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

Why did man not attain these peaks before? Because something actively prevented it. Once he is free of hindrances the ascent will happen almost by itself. The capacities were in man all along; they only needed room in which they could unfold.

This view of man sees him mainly thwarted. It believes that his nobility only has to be released. In Dostoyevsky’s parable we confront a very different vision: one which sees in man both more fragility and more evil.

II

To bring these two traditions into contact with each other settles nothing and our reason for doing so is precisely the reverse: to unsettle a few dogmas about freedom. But the notion that servitude may be granted from compassion may still strike us as a mere hyperbole. We shrug it off. We know that people basically do want freedom.

But do they?

Dostoyevsky obviously did not mean trivial choices. The Grand Inquisitor says that it is the need for miracles, for mystery and authority that concerns him; it was the hunger for an object of worship that he sought to relieve. But is this hunger so great? One measure of its intensity is the fast rise of the psychoanalytic movement. Even if we set aside the issue of the scientific merit of Freud’s ideas (and disregard the fact that many have used them to abrogate responsibility in favor of the mysteries of their own unconscious); even if we consider nothing but the popularity of psychoanalytic treatment, we still get some indication of that appetite. The sheer fact that so many people find it necessary to submit their lives to an inspection, that so many are impelled to display their intimacies for an appraisal, and precisely that they do this in spite of their doubts and reservations is evidence enough of the reality of that need.

Or take totalitarianism: We repeat phrases like people need an identity and people want a definition of themselves in an absent-minded way. Yet the desires are as palpable as those for sex and food. To get some sense of their reality and power one must remember what people are prepared to do—the kind of hunger, suffering and denials they accept for an insignia, for a name, a title (for a button to pin on their lapel), and also how the whole tone and rhythm of someone’s life is changed, how he no longer walks in the same way, because now there is a phrase, or an image, that applies to him.

Once one has thought concretely about the need for an identity, one’s picture of how totalitarianism grows may be reversed. Customarily we imagine that two forces pull in opposite directions: the desire for freedom, and the fear of going hungry. We think that these conflict and that freedom sometimes loses out. But often this is not what actually occurs. When someone joins a severely regimented group, he does not usually do so by a cautiously conducted barter. Two things are not weighed against each other. The urgency is all in one direction. There is a feeling of relief, almost of exultation. Independence was not wanted, freedom was feared.

In some contexts we accept this as a platitudinous fact. When suburbia or fraternities are the topic, no one needs to be reminded that people in general want to fit in, want to be part of the group, want to be accepted, that there is a herd for every lone wolf. And yet these banalities are barred from other contexts. Virtually every political, philosophical or moral discussion of freedom in the abstract assumes the very opposite: that men demand individuality and freedom, that only measures such as repression and brainwashing can begin to curtail these desires, and that men will rebel if freedom is not granted. We have again the same schizophrenic segregation, and here it is reinforced with semantics. Instead of saying bluntly that people do not want freedom, we say that people need a sense of solidarity and of communion, or at worst that they need to conform. Desires contrary to freedom are given other designations, thus preserving the illusion that the appetite for freedom is unqualified and absolute. This compartmentalization is carried to such extremes that even the theoretical and historical explanations of modern totalitarianism rigidly adhere to it. In the analysis of totalitarian movements the major question usually is: What constrained a people at this point to yield up their freedom and to submit to a more dictatorial rule? But this question is probably malposed. It assumes that there is a natural tendency towards freedom and the explanation of totalitarianism becomes in effect a list of the pressures that overrode this tendency. This may be the wrong way round; if men in general do not desire freedom then the important question would be, What at this point weakened the imposition of individuality and freedom and what allowed the natural drive towards conformity to go unchecked?

There is no reason why a man who dreads retirement cannot be said to fear a kind of freedom, or why a middle-aged mother who clings to her children cannot be said to hold on to a kind of servitude. Part of what makes these crises painful is the discovery that the exigencies of a job or of raising children, which so far were experienced as confinements, in fact provided one’s life with structure and coherence. The sense of futility, the exasperation at not having anything outside oneself that demands one’s service, the whole experience of having to live for oneself—for nothing but the prolongation of one’s own existence—these are all the effects of a kind of freedom. Even the most hyperbolic-seeming dicta suddenly sound straightforward once they are placed into such circumstances. Sartre has said that we are condemned to be free, and in one of his plays Orestes says that freedom crashed down upon him. If this were said by a man whose life’s work has just been taken from him, we would understand it right away.

One last example. Consider how we invoke for our actions the support and the endorsement of abstractions. We have a penchant for acting in the name of something. If nothing plausible is close to hand, we reach out for airy, dubious notions; we become the shield-bearers of Progress, of Enlightenment, of Order, of Good Judgment. It is as if we need something, even if it has to be a half-discarded fancy, to which our act can be subordinated; something that will give it the guise of an instrument that performs a service. It is possible to look at morality in this perspective and to imagine it as a kind of last recourse: if all else fails, we still invoke its blank and stony categories and act at least in the name of Goodness. This whole phenomenon constitutes still a different stratagem with which we avoid freedom. That we become so cunning, and palliate the threat of an autonomous bare action with such disguises, shows how deep our fear of freedom really is.

III

The recognition that freedom in any of its definitions is not unequivocally desired moves us only one step closer to the possibility of a genuine rethinking. Our next and also still preliminary step must be the shedding of some further preconceptions.

We posit freedom and slavery as opposites. We imagine a polarity and think that liberty represents the one extreme and slavery the other. That makes the case for freedom categorical and simple. Who wants to be a slave? But is the difference between the master and his slave simply that one has freedom which the other lacks? Doesn’t the master live in a mansion, and the slave in quarters? Doesn’t the slave toil while the master drinks mint julep? Doesn’t the master wield the whip that cuts the other’s back? A preference for the master’s life proves therefore very little about freedom.

It is the requirement of any scientific method to isolate the property that one is testing. This means that one at least should not compare a life that is unfree, but is also dreadful in other ways, to one that includes freedom yet is also greatly advantaged on other scores. Even the ABC of fairness and of rationality requires that the two lives should be on other counts at least approximately equal. So we should compare to the master someone with an easy life, with similar other benefits and then ask, how much better this life would become if we still added freedom, and how much worse if the rest were the same and only freedom were subtracted.

Or we could make the comparison to monks. In certain very rigorous orders the rules require not only chastity, but abstinence from most foods, nearly unbroken silence, complete submission to superiors, and a strict disciplining even of one’s private thoughts. There is, without question, far less freedom in such a life than there is even in the lives of slaves, and yet the lives of monks are at least sometimes impressive.

(The objection that monks choose to forfeit their freedom meets first the counter-question, Do they indeed? How many entered monasteries because their parents took a vow? What of the threats posed by this and the other world? But in any case, even if there were a choice, and even if a Trappist monk were in some sense free to cast off his habit (and on the same terms one could also argue that a slave has the freedom to rebel), this would only reinforce the point: for precisely that someone might choose such a life, and might choose to forfeit his freedom shows that the loss of freedom alone does not reduce life to a horror.)

This has several implications: for one, it means that slavery is not equivalent to the absence of freedom. The two concepts do not stand at polar opposites, and slavery does not represent the end-point on a continuum of decreasing liberties. It is possible to have less freedom than is possessed by a slave. One example of this is the monk. Another illustration of it would be your tying me like a dog to a post in your backyard. That again would take more freedom from me than is taken from most slaves—and yet it would not make me your slave. It is only the deprivation of other things, less equivocal and more debilitating than the diminishment of freedom, that reduces a man to that condition.

The other side of this is very plain: if taking someone’s freedom does not make him a slave, then merely giving him his freedom back is also not sufficient to terminate that degradation. Setting him free may in fact be the easiest and smallest part of what has to be done to restore a man from that position.

The habit of juxtaposing Master and Slave on the individual level has its counterpart on the level of societies. We pit the worst examples of totalitarianism (especially Hitler’s and Stalin’s) against the best representatives of free societies, and freedom wins again without a fight. The point is once more the same: the difference between Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia on the one side and Switzerland or Sweden on the other is not simply that people in the former were unfree, whereas those in the latter are free. Regardless of how freedom is understood there are other and very major differences. Hitler’s Germany was racist, jingoistic, murderous, militaristic, anti-intellectual and bent on destruction. These qualities may have had more to do with its horrors than did the absence of freedom alone, and may have been what made that society totalitarian. The totalitarian therefore is not simply the opposite of the free. There have been societies that offered little freedom without practicing these other vices. Why not compare the free societies to those—e.g., to most primitive societies, to Sparta or Medieval China?

Another tacit sleight-of-hand, partial to freedom and performed just as routinely, has to do with causes and effects. In general everyone agrees that ideologies and institutions must be assessed in a historical and social setting. When we appraise religions, say Buddhism or Islam, this is often done with subtlety and brilliance. But when it comes to freedom we often drag one foot—on the side of the benefits we move with confidence but on the disadvantages we put very little weight. How far we lean to one side will become graphic if for once, just for an exercise, we bend the other way and rehearse some of the negative effects that the faith in freedom may have had.

The framework for this would of course have to be very large. To do it at all justly one might have to take a panoramic look at the whole development of Western culture and sketch something like the following picture:

Western, or the white man’s civilization was not clearly dominant during Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was essentially confined to the small peninsula of Europe and was not, all in all, more advanced than the Indian or the Chinese or some South American civilizations. It also did not exercise a political hegemony over these others. In fact for centuries it held its own only with great difficulty, and sometimes it fell short even of that, as when it failed to defend its own territory against extensive Slavic and Mohammedan advances. The fabulous and unparalleled rise of the West to supreme power obviously cannot be neatly dated, but in a general way it did coincide with the evolution and the progressive institutionalization of the ideals of individual independence, and with the genesis of the superior technology and of the economic system that were fostered by these ideals and that in turn reinforced them.

Hence one might have to count this technology and this economic system with both their positive and their negative sides among the more distant consequences of the belief in individual freedom. The same would be true of the diverse phenomena that are now subsumed under the idea of alienation. They, if anything, are more immediately connected, being nearly the other side of the same coin: if individuality is extolled and one insists on the prerogatives of one’s privacy and of one’s individual inclinations—if each person conceives himself as ringed round by a fence of rights—then one is bound to feel isolated. Alienation may be a completely inevitable by-product of freedom, and discussions of the modern loss of community will be mawkish as long as they do not acknowledge that individuality and community do tend to exclude each other, that the space occupied by one will be taken from the other.

One could argue further that the stress on individuality in the modern technological society starves certain fundamental appetites, which then progressively accumulate till they break the gates that dammed them in. Once out of control they glut themselves in an orgy of social coherence and interpersonal integration. An untrammeled sense of communion overcompensates for the exasperation of a hedged-in private life. So totalitarianism, too, might have to be included in this accounting—not, of course, simply on the con side of the ledger, but in a way that represents the more extended causative connections. And from totalitarianism it is only a step to the disastrous wars that began as factional conflicts inside the West before they embroiled most of the world. They, too, could appear in this calculation, and the First World War no less than the Second. For, as many writers have shown, the First World War was actively desired by precisely that large class of people that had been most influenced by the ideals of individual freedom. Much of the European middle class was exultant when that war broke out. As with totalitarianism later, they saw in it a chance to escape from their confined, cautious, individual existences; their impatience had mounted slowly till it finally vented itself with unexpected force.

And with these wars we still have not mentioned the one fact that stands out like a tower for all those who judge this from the outside: the fact that the idea of individual freedom was an organic part of the culture that developed such capacities and such needs for expansion that it destroyed all other civilizations—some by annihilation, the rest by making them Western.

To see in these qualities of the West only temporary aberrations, accidents, corrigible imperfections is precisely the main device with which we slant this whole adjudication. What entitles us to the faith that the dark sides can somehow be omitted, that eventually nothing but what one hoped from freedom, and what one intended with that idea can be realized—without side-effects, and with no compensating losses? Why assume that the terrifying and daemonic features of the West are only incidental, temporary flaws? Their roots may be as deep as those of its magnificent achievements. Both, the splendid and the appalling, may be tied with equal strength to the idea of freedom.

In the end this could be one of the arch-reasons for the reluctance of other people to receive this gift from us—they are not apt to see in freedom an unalloyed, pure value, but rather, in our version of it, an organic arm of the West. And they are right. If it has made its contribution to our glories, then it also shares the responsibility for our crimes. It is not innocent. It lent a hand when the West made lepers of two-thirds of mankind.

Maybe a kind of story will give a first, approximate idea of the whys and wheretos of what is to follow:

Imagine a very isolated, meticulously cared for village. Everything is at right angles, not a stick is out of place. The people that inhabit it are much more civilized than ordinary peasants. Hundreds of years ago they spoke with very quiet and melodious voices, and now they have reached a point of delicacy that imposes almost complete silence. They do most of their communicating through exquisitely subtle ritual gestures. There are, let us say, at least a hundred different ways of shielding one’s eyes from the sun and each one of them has its own meaning.

In the center of this village stands an ancient straw-thatched temple, and in that temple hangs an enormous gong of polished brass, large as the surface of a pond. When anything of concern to the whole village happens, if the river floods, or an enemy has crossed the border, or a cloud of grasshoppers casts a shadow, then someone runs to the temple, and after months and sometimes years of dignified severity and silence there rises then the booming of that gong. After the long quiet this noise produces a great shock. Some—admittedly, the most refined—fall to the ground, their arms vined round their heads. The rest tremble too much to be able still to execute their deaf-mute language gestures, and whispering in that noise is of course in vain. That makes it very difficult for anyone to find out why the gong is being sounded, and every threat, or enemy, or danger finds the village an easy half-lame prey.

The point is that the sound of freedom deafens us, as does that gong those peasants. If we want a general denominator, something that gathers up the multiple deficiencies of our own society, then to declare that we are oppressed has the same effect that the gong noise has in this story: it fills our ears till our minds go blank. Though our better knowledge may still tell us that this is somehow the wrong verdict, that it is at any rate not central, or not the diagnosis that we need, the force of it already ends the possibility of any genuine thinking. And it is the same if we want to know what we should aim for now, in what direction we should move. Then, too, the answer towards greater freedom does not tell us. Again that sound merely rises. Everyone joins in and, deafened, we still mouth that word, yet we all mean different things, and no intelligence or information is communicated.

It should be understood that it is not the intention of this writing to put a few grains of salt on the idea of freedom, nor is it to pull out of the hat yet another definition of what freedom really means. Rather, it is motivated by a strong suspicion that the concept of freedom is not a fit instrument for thought. The effort to come to a workable understanding of social matters is snared in the tangles of this notion. A guiding theory of society or of the state cannot be built upon the base of that idea. The point is therefore not to argue for or against the value of freedom. Instead we want to lead up to the recognition that this intellectual contest is badly posed, that it is a futile and tiresome rope-pulling. The goal, in short, is just the opposite from that of taking sides in the disputes involving freedom. It is rather to prepare for a way of thinking that does not stretch itself between the opposites that it marks out.

This does not mean that many of the things advocated,