Freedom from liberty

This is an idea I've been thinking about for a few days after listening to an NPR interview with MT Anderson, author of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. I have not read the book (and don't really plan on it), but there was an interesting, short bit of the interview where they were discussing the idea of "liberty." The basic idea, as I remember it (or as I have shifted it in my selective memory) was that there were at least two, competing conceptions of liberty in early American history, and especially during the period of the civil war. One conception of liberty was that argued for by abolitionists who believed in the fundamental liberty of man and used this to argue for slaves' right to freedom. On the other hand, secessionists also invoked liberty to justify their own political stance. Jefferson Davis, for example, argued for liberty against "the tyranny of an unbridled majority" (From wikipedia.)

Reflecting on how these contradictory political agendas could both be justified in the name of liberty, i began to appreciate the complications that arise from using this word. When we are speaking of universal liberty, are we talking about each individual's liberty? Or a territory or a state's liberty? The reality is, there is no set agenda on this. When people talk of liberty, they can be speaking on almost any level of analysis.

To add complication to this, "liberty" is used largely interchangeably with "freedom," which opens up another pandora's box of problems (i.e. the difference between positive and negative freedom, or the difference in definition between "freedom" in politics and in philosophy). It seems fundamental that liberty is constrained in a whole bunch of ways. A really interesting, and relevant, form of constraint on freedom in economic: We are all certainly constrained from certain actions for certain economic reasons, and the contours of these restraints depend on your income. I am restrained from buying a new car and lots of luxury items. Other people are restrained by their economic status from completing even more basic tasks, like buying food for their family. Wealthy individuals are constrained too just in a different way. Maybe they really want to buy a trip to space, but they just bought their 11th house, and so they can't quite afford it right now. This obviously sounds absurd when placed next to the other examples, but it is indeed on some level a constraint on action, however frivolous that action may be.

My goal here, though, is not to engage in the ongoing philosophical discussion on conceptions of freedom and liberty, on which subject many others have thought much longer and harder and have written much more eloquently.

Instead, when I was hearing about this historical complexity in the idea of liberty, I began to think about modern politics, and I realized that this complication has not disappeared at all. "Liberty" and "freedom" are invoked in almost any discussion or speech of American foreign (e.g. practically every Bush speech in the last eight years). There is part of me that thinks that the ideal of liberty has at least some good in itself, and we all have some instincts about it, even if we haven't engaged in deep philosophical thought about. We all have the general idea that liberty is good thing in the world. But the civil war example really begins home the fact that there may not be any inherent good in the idea of liberty at all. My thought then, is that if this is true, then "liberty" and "freedom" may have become very dangerous concepts in modern politics, because they subsume a huge variety of motives and policies under a word that has such strong historical weight behind it. Perhaps it would be better for us to stop using these words altogether...