AmerCon : Linguistics : Freedom

Linguistics / Freedom

"Freedom" is an integral part of the American story and it is woven throughout the national
narrative. Yet it is an impossible treasure to define.

Freedom is as numinous for the American culture as a religious value. Consequently it is as
easy for Americans to imagine a crusade in the name of "freedom" as for armies in the middle
ages to gather beneath the banner of "Christianity." But because freedom is a secular value,
the fact that it is as invisible as any religious value is easily obscured. And this is its danger.

Ideologues are people who think that ideas are more important than people. When
your nation assumes for itself the right to imprison people without charge (or the
right of legal assistance) and hold them indefinitely and torture them -- in the name
of freedom -- you know that it is ideology that is rampant, not freedom.

International opprobrium on this issue should give America pause. The fact that our own
Senators voted unanimously that this should not be the case (but were overridden by the
White House) should give us serious pause.

There is no worse error a working democracy can make than placing an ideologue in charge of
peoples' hopes and dreams -- with the possible exception of compounding the error by
granting him imperial prerogatives and authority over a secret army and a nuclear arsenal.

America is no longer a moral light in the world -- she is now an active contributor to the pooling
darkness.

Jesus was able to forgive his tormentors because they knew not what they did.

Because we know this is morally wrong, there will be a large price for this.

ehj2

Financial Times
2003.08.06

American freedom is a divisive concept

Author: Anatol Lieven

Educated Americans often say rather mournfully that Tony Blair expresses American
values and goals better than the current US president. Whether this is what a British prime
minister is elected for is, however, questionable. For while many US values may be
virtuous in themselves, they can also be terrifying in their naivete.

This is above all true of "freedom". Mr Blair stressed this theme in his speech to the
US Congress last month: "Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of
the human spirit and anywhere, any time, ordinary people are given the chance to choose,
the choice is the same. Freedom not tyranny. Democracy not dictatorship."

He then went on, like most Americans, to identify these values specifically with the US:
"Don't ever apologise for your values. Tell the world why you're proud of America . . . What
you can bequeath to this anxious world is the light of liberty." In a speech punctuated by an
embarrassing number of standing ovations, no lines were more enthusiastically applauded.
For this is the basic, boilerplate stuff of American political rhetoric.

But this vision of a simple, eternal, universal and universally accepted version of
"freedom" is not true and never has been true, not only internationally but within
the US as well. Far from being straightforward and self-evident, the meaning of
freedom has always been and remains ambiguous and contested.

As Eric Foner, the US historian, reminds us*, American definitions of freedom have
meant very different things during different historical epochs, and still mean very
different things to different Americans. Thus certain ways of thinking about
freedom that are widespread on the American right are alien to ideas of freedom
in most of the world's developed democracies.

This American tendency combines two apparently contradictory elements. On the one
hand, there is a radical, libertarian insistence on particular forms of what Isaiah Berlin, the
political philosopher, called "negative liberty". This means absolute freedom from
government control or inspection, not only in the areas of gun ownership and use of land,
but also radical laisser faire economics in general. Very few of Mr Blair's British compatriots
think of freedom in quite this way.

On the other hand, there is a strong emphasis on "positive liberty": in other words, on the
duty to exercise freedom in accordance with certain fundamental moral laws. These are
seen by US conservatives as laid down by God, but historically speaking they are derived
from traditional communal mores. Thus many American rightists demand unconstrained
freedom to smoke tobacco and savage punishments for the consumption of marijuana.

The authoritarian rigidity with which American conservatives demand adherence
to moral laws, and indeed seek to extend them beyond America's frontiers, is far
in excess of anything to be found in Britain or Europe today - except for
fundamentalist Muslim circles. They also clash radically with the version of freedom
believed in by progressive liberals in the US itself.

In fact, one of the few times US rightists and progressives agree fully on the subject of
freedom is in preaching it to the rest of the world.

The combination of unconstrained freedom for certain kinds of (chiefly male) personal
behaviour with extreme cultural and moral conformism has been a very common
phenomenon in many heavily armed traditional societies, whether in the Balkans,
Afghanistan or the American south and west.

It is, though, unusual from the perspective of the developed world at the start of the 21st
century. Historically speaking, the pattern was closely linked in the US with the exclusion
from the national community and its freedoms of a whole range of racial minorities -
something that has been corrected only in recent decades.

For most of their history, white Americans placed the safety and dominance of their racial
community above any universal right to freedom; and unfortunately they were anything but
unique in this.

Time and again, people have been willing to sacrifice political freedom for the
sake of real or perceived greater order and safety, either for themselves and
their families or for their ethnic group as a whole.

People have also been willing to forgo personal freedom in the cause of what they regard
as freedom from outside domination for their ethnic group or nation. At the same time, they
have tended to be very suspicious of other countries promising to bring freedom by force
of arms - a lesson America is learning in Iraq. As even Robespierre admitted, "No one likes
armed missionaries".

Americans need to profess absolute belief in their contradictory creed in part because a
shared allegiance to it is one of the things holding their disparate society together. They
are also relatively new to the business of empire and can be excused a certain naivete
when it comes to the extension of their values. British public servants, with 200 years of
imperial history, conquests and revolts behind their country, have no excuse for
encouraging such illusions or such national messianism.

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* Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, W.W.Norton, New York, 1998

The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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