Freedom! How could anyone be opposed to it?
Freedom has always been an important part of America’s national self-image. Our founding fathers – inspired by the philosopher John Locke – asserted that freedom is an “unalienable right,” right up there with “life” and “the pursuit of happiness” (or property rights for Locke). Our Bill of Rights guarantees an explicit list of freedoms. We revere such symbols as the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty. We call ourselves the “land of the free,” and we purport to be a “free enterprise” economy. The Holy Grail for American capitalists – especially our large corporations – is “free markets.” Freeing the slaves was also a great moral turning point in our history. The Rev. Martin Luther King used the word as a battle-cry in his famous “I Have Dream” speech: “Free at last.” Former President George Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the claim that our nation has a responsibility to spread freedom around the globe. And freedom is a sacred value for our anarchists and libertarians, especially when it comes to limiting the reach and influence of government in our lives.
The problem is that the word “freedom” encompasses a world of complications – and contradictions. The root of the problem, in a nutshell, is that freedom is always about somebody’s self-interest, and there are very few cases that don’t also impact on other people’s self-interests. We live in a very complex organized society, so freedom almost always has a social context. Very few of us pause to think about the broader implications, and the consequences for others, when we become fixated on our own particular freedom issue.
Long ago the economic historian, Karl Polanyi, in his classic study of modern capitalism, The Great Transformation (1944), pointed out that there are both “good freedoms” and “bad freedoms.” Indeed, in many instances freedom may be viewed as either good or bad, depending on which side you’re on. For instance, when a manufacturer is free to dump its toxic wastes into a nearby river to save money, the downstream consequences may be that it fouls the drinking water, kills off local fish stock, and prevents the use of the river for recreation. Likewise, if our free enterprise system allows you to exploit vulnerable or needy people, or charge exorbitant prices because there is no competition, or pay poverty wages, or avoid paying your fair share of the tax burden (“free riding,” in the terminology of economics), your freedom may cause harm to my freedom.
Perhaps the most important example of a bad freedom relates to the so-called problem of the commons. When everyone is free to exploit a resource held as common property, like the free animal grazing pastures in Medieval times or the oceans and the atmosphere today, it is very likely to be over-used and ultimately destroyed. In his classic 1968 article on “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the biologist Garrett Hardin concluded: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
There is, in addition, a fundamental constraint on our freedom that is both universal and inescapable. We are biological organisms, complex living systems with an array of some 14 categories of “basic needs” that are imperatives for our survival and reproduction over time. We are never “free” of these ongoing needs and, moreover, they are prerequisites for being able to enjoy any other pursuits. And because we are dependent upon many others in our society (including public services) to satisfy these needs, our dependency imposes upon us many constraints on our freedom, and many reciprocal obligations. We are, in effect, partners in a many-faceted social contract that constrains our freedoms for the sake of meeting our basic needs. All the rest of our freedoms are derivatives – the dividends.
President Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1941 State of the Union address, outlined a vision for what he called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from “want” (economic security) and freedom from “fear” (physical harm), whether by individuals or state actors. From an evolutionary and biological perspective, the order of these freedoms should be changed. Under what I call the biosocial contract, the “First Freedom” is a universal “basic needs guarantee” that encompasses Roosevelt’s last two. Everything else depends on this.
The apologists for neo-liberal capitalism claim that free markets will be able to provide for our basic needs. But this is flatly wrong on two counts. First, there are several categories of basic needs, like physical safety, public health, and child nurturance, that go beyond what markets can provide. And second, “markets only work for people who have money,” to quote Bill Gates. If you do not have a job, or your job does not provide a “living wage,” the market must be augmented and supplemented to meet our basic needs. For the 5.3 million Americans living in absolute poverty, and the tens of millions or more working poor who are severely constrained economically, freedom for them would be a basic needs guarantee.
The famed English poet Matthew Arnold quipped that “Freedom is a very good horse to ride,” but what is the destination? The first destination is our basic needs. The rest can be negotiated.
