|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
The Rape of Freedom
Written between 2003-11-1 and 2003-11-25
When a man rapes a woman, this man is called a rapist, and the woman is called a rape victim. If a man rapes several women, we would call him a serial rapist. Similarly, a person who is raped time after time by different people is a serial rape victim. Of course, most people would view the idea of serial rape victims as unfathomable—why would unrelated rapists all target the same person, people would reasonably ask. After all, which person is unlucky, daring, and attractive enough all at the same time to be raped by rapists who have no connection to one another?
And yet, such a serial rape victim exists. Fortunately, it is not a person, but a word, a concept that once meant something—freedom. Freedom, almost everyone would agree, is a positive thing; even the most brutal dictators of the world talk about how they support freedom and how they are going to free their people. Hitler noted about the Germans in the days of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, “The Germans have learned to cry for bread; maybe one day they will learn to cry for freedom,” without the slightest sense of irony, without the slightest sense of doubt that what he would do once in power would be almost universally defined as the epitome of tyranny. Iraq has been thrown into chaos, misery, and death, but this does not prevent Bush from talking of Iraq having been liberated and the Iraqis now being free from oppression.
Not only dictators and extremists rape freedom. Neither libertarians nor socialists have any problem talking about their philosophy supporting economic freedom and making people as free as possible, nor does each of the two groups see the irony in its bashing of the other as supporting an economic dictatorship. While liberalism can and should be expressed in terms of humanism and progress, which, unlike freedom, while raped many times over history still retain a basic meaning, liberalism is still considered to be “the philosophy of freedom” in some circles. Conservatism originally shunned the then-liberal notion of freedom, but now—indeed, in the last two hundred years or so—it has defined freedom in such a way that it would attach to concepts that are diametrically opposite to the concepts it used to imply before it was so hopelessly raped.
There are several questions that have to be asked here. What did freedom mean originally, before being raped? Who have been the main culprits in the destruction of the word? What has been causing everyone to rape it? Since some concept of freedom is still crucial in political theory, which concept can replace it, and how should this concept be defined in such a way that allows us to discover the truth the most easily and that will make the term used to describe it resistant to political rape? And finally, what is going to happen to the word freedom afterward, its centrality to many political questions having been neutralized with the advent of this new concept, and it still being raped by practically every person or group with some political or social agenda?
Many attribute the original use of freedom in a political context to John Locke. However, while Lockian liberalism as a branch of liberalism makes extensive use of the word freedom, the Second Treatise of Government talks mainly of “property,” which it defines as the “natural rights” to “life, liberty, and estate.” The use of freedom by Lockian liberals is concentrated mostly with the more liberal-minded founders of the United States, who appealed to the American colonists primarily with the notions of freedom and liberty, and to a lesser extent equality. Even here, we see freedom used as a rhetorical term; Locke’s terms in the Second Treatise are far better defined than those of more popular and less philosophical texts such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the slogans and symbols of the American Revolution.
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s famous phrase—“forced to be free”—predates the founders of the United States. However, even Rousseau is not the first political philosopher to use the word freedom in a political context. It seems that the use of freedom evolved with the rise of Lockian liberalism, even though Locke himself does not use it (he does use liberty, though, and he also attacks slavery and tyranny). In that time—the early eighteenth century—freedom meant more or less what Locke had meant by “property”: a person’s right to be free from external interference with his or her life, person, and property. The definition given here may look circular because of the use of the word free, but it is not, because in the definition it is used in a non-political context that means roughly “to be able to choose not to have” corresponding to “to be free from,” and “the ability to choose to have” corresponding to “freedom to” or “freedom of.” This is a non-political definition of freedom, which is not raped but is consequently unusable as a major concept in politics on a par with liberalism, conservatism, equality, or liberty.
Note that even at its very beginning as a political term, freedom was used by people of different and in some sense mutually contradictory ideas. Lockian liberalism and Rousseau’s moralistic liberalism are mutually contradictory insofar as Lockian liberalism is based on the concept of natural rights, whereas moralistic liberalism subjects all rights to a social contract. The rape of freedom thus started with Rousseau, who claimed that people could be forced to be free, contrary to the original political definition of freedom. One of Rousseau’s examples is banning alcohol so that people can make more informed decisions; this contradicts the original definition, which allows people to voluntarily give up life, liberty, or property, and which only gives people the right to have any or all of the three but does not require them to. Indeed, without making subtle and intricate distinctions as to what may be given away and what may not be, people will not have the right to donate money to charity.
However, moralistic liberalism’s rape of freedom is very subtle and only slightly modifies the meaning of the term. This is far from enough to justify the claim that the word has lost its meaning. Most philosophical acts of rape against freedom were committed throughout the nineteenth century, as a result of the success of liberalism in America and in Europe. First, liberals used the term to mean increasingly more distinct concepts; a Lockian liberal such as Thomas Paine would oppose the appropriation of the term by nationalist liberals who used it to mean the rights of a state and of a nation and not only of individuals, and worse, this divergence among types of liberalism would continue increasing. Second, the nineteenth century saw the first organized attempts in Asia to overthrow European colonialism; the organizers of those attempts used the word freedom with the same meaning of Spring of Nations liberalism, meaning a nation’s rights, but without the accompanying individual freedoms that the eighteen forty-eight revolutions supported. Third, in the United States both liberals and conservatives used freedom to justify opposite positions; slaveholders even used the term as implying their right to own slaves, again a rape of the word by all means. And fourth, and most importantly, the nineteenth century saw the rise of two new political philosophies—socialism and libertarianism—both of which have raped freedom.
Socialism and libertarianism, as far as economics and mode of thinking are concerned, are each other’s diametric opposites. Libertarianism supports minimal government spending and regulation of the economy; socialism supports almost complete government ownership of the economy. However, as opposite as those philosophies are, both make excessive use of the term “economic freedom,” which originally meant something like “a person’s right to make economic choices as an entrepreneur, consumer, and worker, bounded only by protection of others’ rights.” Socialism rapes the term to refer only to means of production and to freedom from capitalist exploitation; libertarianism rapes economic freedom to be unbound by anything, including protection from market failures such as monopoly and externalities.
The nineteenth century also saw the birth of anarchism, which like all other political philosophies makes excessive use of political buzzwords. The anarchist claim that property is theft contradicts itself, because after all theft means the illegal taking of someone else’s property; a better way to formulate that proposition would be to claim that property rights are inherently bad because they are based on denying others the use of that property. Anarchism rapes not only theft but also freedom, because of the anarchist refusal to accept that individual acts such as murder can infringe on others’ rights just like governmental acts, so in other words it defines freedom to be only from structures such as government and the market.
While freedom was raped by almost everyone with an agenda throughout the nineteenth century, the twentieth century dwarfed it in terms of the strength and the amount of rape freedom suffered. The twentieth century, unlike the nineteenth, did not see the birth of any new political philosophies; it did see important political philosophers such as John Rawls, but unlike Locke, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx, they did not create political philosophies. It also saw the creation of several ideologies such as fascism, Stalinism, and Nazism, but these lack the coherence and internal consistency that are required for the status of a philosophy.
However, these ideologies’ rape of freedom was stronger than this of the established political philosophies. Hitler always promised he would make Germany free; Mao talked of freedom in an anti-Western and anti-Confucian context; and so on. These rapes are what stripped freedom of its meaning completely; even socialists and moralistic liberals, arguably the groups most inclined to rape freedom, retained its basic meaning but made exceptions, or narrowed or expanded its meaning by a little, or used it in different contexts from what it had originally meant. The Nazis, however, had nothing to do with freedom the way it had been first defined, and shunned the notion that there existed any private space that the government should not touch, as did Maoists, Stalinists, and fascists. If it is possible to place freedom’s loss of meaning at a small interval in time, it would probably be the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, in which the rape of freedom by groups that would eventually create totalitarian regimes was at its highest.
Furthermore, in the twentieth century Western conservatives started raping freedom to mean nationalism, governmental enforcement of personal morals, patriarchy, and so on (Eastern conservatives have rarely if ever given freedom a positive connotation). Conservatives in Europe clothe racism and nationalism in freedom; for instance, Austria’s Freedom Party is anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. American conservatives during the New Deal equated freedom with laissez faire economics after the Great Depression had discredited it, and since the fifties have equated freedom with religious fundamentalism and censorship in the name of national security. Here, as always in the twentieth century, the individual rapists were politicians more than political philosophers; however, conservatism was an exception to this rule, as the late twentieth century saw the rise of neo-conservatism influenced mostly by Leo Strauss, but even here, the neo-conservatives who have raped freedom are the pundits and the military experts more than the philosophers.
Liberals have raped freedom in the last hundred and three years just like the members of any other political philosophy or ideology of the same size. Roosevelt raped freedom by defining the four freedoms, which included the disputed freedoms from want and from fear. Many will argue that this was not rape because the four freedoms—of speech, of religion, from fear, and from want—are a manifestation of the original conception of freedom; however, by nineteen thirty-three, freedom had completely lost its meaning due to the continued acts of rape over the past one hundred and fifty years or so, so even defining freedom exactly the way the Lockian liberals defined it would be rape. After all, if a married woman is raped by several different men, then if her husband forces himself on her then it is still rape; and the relation between liberalism and freedom had ceased to be as close as between a husband and a wife by the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century. The liberal rape of freedom continued after the New Deal, with the Liberal Manifesto of nineteen forty-seven talking of “economic freedom” without defining it, and then again with the Manifesto of nineteen ninety-seven declaring “freedom” a “central value of liberalism.” It is important to note that even if there were a clear definition here that was favorable to liberalism, it would amount to rape.
However, pointing fingers at somebody or everybody would not solve the problem. If we are to ensure that as many other political terms are saved from meaninglessness, then it is imperative that we find out why this has been happening, meaning why everyone has been raping freedom. The answer, apparently, is the success of the classical forms of liberalism that led to the acceptance of words such as freedom and individualism as positive; this is because before the rise of liberalism, freedom was commonly used with a neutral or even negative connotation. However, as the ideas of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau became commonly accepted, the terms they used, such as freedom, democracy, liberty, and equality, started getting a very positive connotation that forced people who were not liberals to use and hence rape these terms; it weakened those people’s position, needless to say, but it gave them better rhetorical ground. The opposite is happening now when many liberals hopelessly try to appropriate conservative terms such as order, national sovereignty (whose liberal version makes exceptions for human rights abuses unlike its conservative version), patriotism, and “our way of life.” In other words, people rape freedom because liberalism ensured that its connotation was positive, and connotations change much more slowly than the people’s opinions.
Now, note that freedom is far from the only word to have been systematically raped. Equality, liberty, progress, and individualism are also serial rape victims, though each is raped only by most rather than all groups. The rape of justice dates at least as far back as to Socrates and Plato—in other words, people have raped justice for ten times as long as they have freedom. However, the intensity of those rapes is extremely lower than the intensity of the rape of freedom. Justice has generally had only two general meanings: a historical one based primarily on property, which is used in the endless property based arguments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an ethical one based primarily on what is good, which is the one that Plato uses in The Republic’s just state. And the other words mentioned in this paragraph can and should be salvaged from further rape attempts, as they all still retain a core meaning, and moreover, not everyone claims to support all four, though most claim to support at least two, so they can be used to distinguish among philosophies.
The rape of freedom has robbed the word not only of its meaning but also of its centrality to political theory; after all, any attempt to define it would be the same as inventing a word, say, “Quarpie,” and giving it a definition; and the centrality of its original definition has diminished because of both the word’s demise as a usable, well-defined term and the change of circumstances since the early Enlightenment. There still is a concept, “a person’s right to be free from external interference with his or her life, person, and property”; however, there is no single or compound word in English, or indeed in any other human language, that accurately describes it, and moreover, the definition does not bear much relevance in the modern world, a natural situation considering that it has not evolved for two hundred and fifty years because all attempts to redefine it have raped it.
Therefore, I suggest that political theorists refrain from talking of freedom and only mention liberty. It is of utmost importance to notice that liberty is not identical to what freedom once meant, nor would the modern definition of freedom have been identical to liberty had freedom not been raped so much and so intensely. Liberty refers exclusively to such civil liberties and human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom from religion, the right to privacy, even due process rights, and so on, and thus does not include the right to life or the right to materially prosper and enjoy a high quality of life. Liberty, or more precisely what it meant at that time, is part of the original concept of freedom, but not vice versa (liberty has evolved but still retained a meaning; for example, it did not include a right to privacy until technology that enabled easy eavesdropping was developed, which is probably why the United States Constitution does not include an explicit right to privacy).
The main task, now, as far as the rape of freedom and its consequences are involved, is to define liberty in such a way that it will be strong enough to resist rape and yet flexible enough to change when circumstances change. The problem here is that liberty is not even close to being a unified concept, so the best I can do is divide it into types, explain the liberties that each implies, and show how these types both support one another and are the results of the same thinking, which can then be called liberty. The word liberty here refers to two distinct notions: the general concept of liberty, which is to be defined, and the individual liberties it implies, each of which is straightforward and proven to be beneficial solely from historical evidence rather than prior principles.
The division of liberty into types will have to be more specific than the usual division of liberty into positive and negative liberty, because there are two ways to distinguish positive liberty from negative liberty, neither of which is adequate. One defines negative liberty as those rights that require no interference from the government, such as the civil liberties everybody knows, and positive liberty as the rights that do require interference, such as the rights to health care and education; this division is useful in distinguishing the right to liberty, which includes only negative rights, and the right to prosperity, which includes positive ones, but does not help in classifying liberty. The other defines negative liberty as freedom from and positive liberty as freedom of, and is not helpful at all because not only is the distinction grammatical rather than conceptual in many cases but also most liberties can be classified as both, such as freedom of speech versus freedom from censorship.
Rather, my classification will be based on the activity or action that the specific liberty involves. The freedoms of speech, artistic expression, and conscience, for example, all involve thought and its transmission to others, so they fall under one type. The right to privacy and its corollaries exist solely in the private space, and hence they should fall under one, separate type. In total there are six types of liberty to consider, of which one is debatable: the five clear types are intellectual liberty, private space liberty, public space or civil society liberty (for example, liberties relating to the market as well as the rights to assemble and associate), the right to vote, and legal or due process liberty; the debatable type is equality, by which I mean not economic equality but rather equality of rights and non-discrimination.
Intellectual liberties are on the one hand the most abstract liberties but on the other the most obvious ones, considering that all rapes and definitions of freedom but the most totalitarian ones have included them. They include the freedoms of thought, expression, conscience, and religion, and the freedoms from religion, censorship, and forced morality. While often the only intellectual liberties listed on bills of rights are the freedoms of expression and religion, they almost always include the other five intellectual liberties. After all, freedom of religion is meaningless without freedom from religion, meaning firm separation of religion and state, except for the adherents of the state religion; the freedom of conscience is almost always included with the freedom of religion; and it is still impossible to infringe on someone’s thoughts. The freedoms from forced morality and censorship are almost always included in bills of rights in theory, explicitly or implicitly, but all states infringe on them to some degree, on the former by forcing people to be patriotic through public education and national symbols and on the latter in the name of national security, or sometimes morality. Academic freedom is a corollary of freedom of expression, but one that is of supreme importance because it helps not only the individual but also the people in general. One important thing about the seven intellectual liberties is that they can and should be unregulated, except for specific crimes committed in the name of religion (such as bombing abortion clinics) or free speech (such as desecrating private property). Their importance is paramount not only to a state of liberty, but also to all other types of liberty; for example, what use does the right to vote has if the government can control thoughts?
Private space liberties, like intellectual liberties, can and should be completely unregulated; the case for having no regulation of the private space is even stronger than the case for unfettered expression and protection from forced morality, since the private space concerns only the individual and at times other consenting individuals whereas expression also concerns the audience. The definition of the private space in political science is often circular in the sense that it is defined as the marked area that the government may not infringe on, but since the private space in all liberal democracies clearly includes a person’s private life, meaning that which concerns only himself or herself, it is possible to use this circular definition. All private space liberties can be grouped under privacy, which includes the right to secrecy and the freedom from eavesdropping and harassment on the one hand, and the supreme right over one’s own body, freedom of behavior as long as no one is harmed against his or her will, and the right to consent on the other. While privacy can in theory be violated without violating any intellectual liberty, in reality it is the only guarantee for freedoms of thought and from religion, and also it is invaluable for developing one’s own opinions.
Public space liberties are blurrier than private space and intellectual liberties. They include market liberties, which themselves include freedom of enterprise and freedom of occupation; the freedom of association, which also includes the right to unionize and strike; and the freedoms of assembly, protest, and petition. Liberals and anarchists easily accept all; socialists and libertarians usually make exceptions for freedom of enterprise and for the right to unionize and strike, respectively; modern conservatives usually accept only the freedoms of enterprise and occupation; and, needless to say, totalitarians accept none. The problem is that those liberties involve people who may or may not want to participate in the activities they are about, and that hence a person or group of people using a public space liberty can do so only by denying others other public space rights or even the same right. Monopoly is an obvious example of the freedom of enterprise eating itself, and states in which unions are too powerful often deny workers the right to join a union, or not join. Freedoms of assembly, protest, and petition, are very close to intellectual liberties, but involve actions and not only thoughts and are thus considered public space. The government can only protect public space liberties by regulating them, so to this extent those liberties resemble public goods that need to be kept public.
The right to vote is an essential liberty in a liberal democracy, as it is only at the ballot box that the ordinary citizen, who is not a member of any interest group or lobby, can influence the government. This right, is by itself weak to meaningless unless other rights defend it, namely intellectual liberties and further government liberties: the right to form political parties and run in elections and an electoral system that gives voters sufficient choice. A one party system clearly has no mechanism for citizens to peacefully change the government, and a two party system results in both parties running to the center and ignoring all but perhaps the twenty percent of the people who are swing voters; hence, the electoral system should be one that gives voters more choice in the form of a multiparty system. As with public space liberties, there should be some regulations here, mainly to prevent buying votes, intimidating voters, and so on, although those regulations apply to state actions and perhaps public space liberties rather than to the actual right to vote.
Legal liberty involves due process, fair trial, and what they imply. Due process and fair trial exist mainly to protect a right that is not part of liberty but is still of utmost importance, namely the right to be innocent. The other liberties that due process and fair trial imply are the right to an attorney, which is imperative in a time when the law is obscure and long-winded enough so that only an expert can prepare an adequate defense; the right to remain silent and the freedom from torture; the right to call forth witnesses; and so on. While many people who live in states with British legal heritage consider trial by jury to be inseparable from fair trial, this is not necessarily so, especially considering the fact that a judge’s verdict is likely to be more rational and informed than a jury’s. Legal liberties are the only way to secure an effective rule of law and strong intellectual and public space liberties at the same time, because without them people are either too afraid to exercise their rights or do not follow the law because they cannot know what is enforced and what is not, and what is legal and what is not.
Finally, equality of rights is important in letting all people fulfill their potentials the furthest; it is also possible at a state when everyone has maximal liberty and is so desirable because it is a win-win situation. It is not exactly a liberty in the sense that it is relative, so a government can have equality of rights at any level, from the most liberal possible to completely totalitarian. However, whatever rights are given should be given to everybody; the concept behind this is fairness, as well as the notion that giving someone more liberty need not come at the expense of denying it to someone else. While governments should strive to increase economic equality if and only if it helps the poor without hurting the rich and the middle classes by much, economic equality and equality of liberties are different concepts, even though the former requires the latter to a very large degree. Equality of liberties merely means fair elections, equality under the law, equal guarantee of the other liberties, and non-discrimination, governmental or otherwise, on the basis of sex, race, creed, and so on.
Those six types of liberty embody the same idea, namely that people should be restricted as little as possible, and that letting people express themselves in fullest—whether it refers to speech, art, consensual sex, association, or any similar activity—is basically a good idea. While it is tempting to refer to this conception of liberty as freedom and capitalize on freedom’s positive connotation, we must resist the temptation to participate in the orgy of raping freedom for several reasons. For one, as similar as this may look to the pre-rape definition of freedom, it is far from identical. For two, it appears that as freedom had never been well defined even before its rape, perhaps it was intended to be raped from the beginning, whereas I designed the classification of liberty above specifically to resist rape. For three, using the concept of freedom is bound to carry the baggage of two hundred years of shifting definitions and rampant rape, and will thus relate the well-defined concept of liberty to all of the rhetorical definitions people have used for freedom. No; it is best to restrict freedom to non-political usage, with liberty and other rights such as prosperity, life, and property replacing it in the political arena, in order to avoid the baggage of empty rhetoric.
At the beginning of this essay, I posed five questions that would guide my discussion about freedom and its rape: what did freedom mean originally? Who have been the main rapists? Why has everyone raped it? Since freedom is, or at least used to be, vital in political theory, which concept should replace it? What will happen to freedom after we replace it with this other concept? The answer to the first question is, “The Lockian conception of the rights to life, liberty, and property.” The answer to the second is, regrettably, “Everyone.” The answer to the third is, “Because of the success of liberalism to which it was central at the time, and also because apparently it has always been defined relatively poorly.” The answer to the fourth is, “Liberty, defined mostly but not only according to the rights granted in most modern bills of rights.” The answer to the fifth, which I believe I touched upon the least, is, “It is going to become non-political.”
My only fear as far as the rape of freedom is concerned is that being a serial rape victim is contagious in the sense that every successful word is bound to be raped and the most successful word is always raped till meaninglessness. Being successful is obviously a necessary condition for being raped; people do not rape words that have little political significance, and they will never rape them against the common connotation (nobody twists the whole language to be able to claim ownership to a word like totalitarianism). I can only hope that being successful is not a sufficient condition, and that even if it is, a clear, precise definition can serve as vaccination.
This site has gotten
hits since 2003-12-25.