The political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously identified two very different ways that people talk about freedom: for some people, “freedom” is the freedom from being told what to do; for others, “freedom” is the freedom to do things. Thus, for example, joining a union restricts your freedom from rules (you have to pay dues and go on strike if the union says) but increases your freedom to get better wages and working conditions.
For a long time, I thought Berlin was right, and I used his categories. But, having spent an equally long time (perhaps too long) crawling around the digital world arguing with assholes, I don’t think his division is right. I think, actually, that everyone uses the term “freedom” to mean the same thing.
Cicero, the brilliant Roman orator, said that if you have a controversial thesis, you should delay it, and so I will.
Let’s start with an old argument: from about 1644 to 1652, John Cotton (a 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony minister) and Roger Williams (generally considered the founder of the Baptist Church) got into a nasty and wordy argument about many things, but especially whether Williams’ eviction from the Massachusetts Bay Colony was just.
I happen to have read the whole long exchange, and what struck me as interesting is that they agreed on the stasis.
In rhetoric, it’s generally agreed that a good disagreement has people agreed on the stasis—the hinge of the argument. A good door has a hinge that connects it to the wall. If there is no hinge, then either there is no door, or the door just falls in. Most really bad disagreements are the consequence of not agreeing on the stasis. If you snoop and find that your partner is cheating on you, you will want the stasis to be their infidelity, but they will want the stasis to be which of you is the better person, and, they will then try to make the issue your snooping. (In rhetoric, this is called deflection.)
But Williams and Cotton agreed on the stasis: they agreed that a good government allows freedom of conscience. Williams argued that his freedom of conscience had been violated because he hadn’t been allowed to have the religious beliefs and practice his conscience told him were right.
Cotton agreed that “freedom of conscience” meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you was right, but, he insisted that Williams must have violated his conscience since he did something that Cotton thought was wrong. In other words, as Cotton said, “freedom of conscience” is the right to do what’s right. By that, he meant the freedom to do what he thought was right. Cotton believed that every action is either right or wrong, and that the right course of action and the right set of beliefs (his) is obvious to everyone. Thus, he said, Williams wasn’t just wrong, but knew he was wrong—there is, Cotton said (and sincerely believed) no real disagreement on issues of religion. This is one instance of what is called naïve realism.
Naïve realism is the belief that the truth is obvious to everyone of good will, that if you want to know if something is true, you just ask yourself if you’re really perceiving things correctly. It’s the notion that perception is accurate, and that bad judgment happens because you then deliberately distort those perceptions to justify actions you kind of always know are wrong, or because you’re blinded by your commitment to a group. This is all false. That isn’t how perception works at all, but let’s leave that aside and go back to Cotton and Williams.
Cotton’s notion about how people perceive things—that everyone really has the same beliefs he does, but they deny them, that he is the person whose beliefs are entirely right (his epistemology)—was what made his political stance (banishing Williams) seem not just reasonable, but a way of honoring the principle of freedom of conscience. Cotton believed everyone should be free to be just like him, and he should be free to force them to do so.
Cotton said that freedom of conscience meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you to do. And he sincerely believed that your conscience told you that you should do what he thought you should do. Because, of course, he sincerely believed he was right, and he couldn’t imagine that, given how certain he was about his being right, that anyone really believed anything different, let alone that he might be wrong. Cotton confused that sense of certainty with an unmediated perception of reality. A lot of people do. The problem with Cotton wasn’t what he believed, but what he believed about his beliefs.
That’s a weird sentence, but it’s everything about democracy. Democracy thrives not when people believe the same things, but when we know other people really believe other things, and we want them treated as we would like to be treated. Cotton didn’t really think anyone disagreed with him. Cotton believed that freedom meant the freedom for him to force others to do what he thought was right because he believed everyone really knew he was right. Our problem now is that our political world is filled with John Cottons.
Williams recognized that Cotton was sincere in his beliefs, and believed that Cotton was wrong, and that’s why the founder of the Baptists believed in the separation of church and state. Williams believed that people sincerely disagree. Williams believed that freedom meant the freedom to disagree with him.
I think the notion that our always deep, rich, and entangled pluralistic political world can be put into a binary of left v. right or a continuum is like saying that all motorized vehicles are either trucks or compacts, all pets are Siamese cats or Labradoodles, all fonts are comic sans or Calibri. Taking those false binaries and making them a continuum doesn’t make them more nuanced; it just reinforces the stupidity.
So, I’m not making a claim about both sides being flawed (a claim often made by the person who watches the trolley and hopes someone else makes a decision).
I’m making this claim: our political discourse has a very consistent use of the word “freedom”. and it’s the one Cotton used: “freedom” is the ability to do whatever you think is right, and the freedom to force everyone else to behave as you think they should.
Freedom and tolerance are both claims that come from our own perspective, our own sense (our Cotton sense) that our position is the position of truth. Williams wasn’t a relativist; he believed in truth. But he tried to work toward a world of fairness, a world in which we value disagreement.
We need to stop talking about “freedom” (or “tolerance” which is similarly vexed), not because those are bad values, but because the way we’ve been using that term is so muddled and entangled with in-group favoritism that we just need to walk away from the terms for a while.
Instead, we need to talk about fairness. We’ve got a good source in that Jesus (a prophet for Muslims), and so many ethical systems say that ethical behavior means reasoning past in-group preference.
“Fairness” does not mean being equally critical of “both sides” because the wonderful world of our policy options is neither a binary nor a continuum.
We are in a world of demagoguery, a world in which every issue is falsely framed as a zero-sum contest between us and them, a world in which we are free to do what’s right or they restrict our freedom.
What that really means is that we are in a very nasty moment when “freedom” means the freedom to force everyone else to do what we know to be right. That’s what Cotton sincerely believed. That’s also what Stalin sincerely believed. That’s what a lot of people believed who turned out to be totally wrong.
Freedom shouldn’t be seen as the right to be seen as right, but the freedom for all groups to be held to the same standards to which we hold ourselves. Freedom is only freedom if it’s grounded in fairness of standards, not niceness, and not in a binary.