This comment was posted by regular commentator Andrew on the blog in response to my comment on freedom this morning. I thought it worth sharing more widely.
Freedom is an analogue quantity: you can have more or less of it. It is also not a zero-sum game, and there is no limited supply, but one person's freedom can impinge on the freedom of another. Which is where balancing rights and responsibilities comes in.
Like “leveling up”, “freedom” is ambiguous until you say exactly what kind of freedom you mean. The OED starts with freedom from slavery or imprisonment, or from spiritual or contractual bondage, through liberty and independence from despotic or autocratic control, to liberty of action without encumbrance, hindrance or restraint, and self-determination, and then lists the following freedoms: freedom of will, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of association. You could add freedom of the market — itself an illusion, because there is no market at all without common rules.
As a minimum, we could start with the Roosevelt's “four freedoms”:
1. Freedom of speech
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
So how are we doing on freedom from fear, and freedom from want? For millions of vulnerable people, “freedom day” is a cause for fear as the outside world is no longer safe for them. Millions will be looking at their precarious benefits or employment and facing imminent want.
These freedoms nudge up against Beveridge's “five giants”: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness — which you could analyze as poverty, health, education, housing, and employment. Again, how are we doing at tackling these?
It seems to me the present government is entirely happy to create want (threatening to remove the £20 universal credit uplift, for example), disease (threatening the collapse and dismantlement of the NHS), ignorance (the atrocious way teachers and students have been treated in the last two years), squalor (you could start with Grenfell, and then the dark and airless hutches being created out of converted offices), and idleness (unemployment is bound to shoot up as furlough is withdrawn).
There is the horrible narrative that there is no alternative. Well, dammit, there are many alternatives. But how do we get there? Where is the opposition?
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Exactly.
Sign me up to all of that.
It should be sent to the Labour Party as a letter of help.
Where is the opposition?
Owned.
‘Keir Starmer expected to back purge of far-left Labour factions
NEC to be asked to proscribe Resist, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Socialist Appeal and Labour In Exile Network
Starmer is expected to support a proposal before the party’s governing body on Tuesday to proscribe four named groups.’
Next question. We are in a fascist state.
Where is the opposition?
They are doing a fine job, repeatedly calling for democracy and justice. Consider Jo Maugham, Make Votes Matter, Caroline Lucas, Led by Donkeys, Byline Times & TV and many, many others. They plough a rich field in the demand for democracy and justice, as the weeds strangle both.
Unfortunately these are also the Labour Party’s weakest areas, so they are not present in calling for either.
It sounds to me as though Labour are still after swing voters.
Please can you put this in a letter to the editor at The Times, The Scotsman, The Herald?
You can….
The average reading age in the UK is 9 years. Whilst this persists complex concepts like freedom will continue to be hostage to an illogical, irrational electorate. These people are not stupid they have been failed by decades of under investment in education, failed by the political football being played with their futures by cynical governments. They are however wilfully ignorant. They see things in terms of a paragraph on facebook or a post on twitter. They don’t want to think, they are prepared to accept any ‘policy’ that ‘promises’ immediate results.
I conducted an experiment on facebook and posted the following two quotes relating to the role of the individual within society asking for views. The responses were were disappointing.
“All the members of human society stand in need of each others assistance and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759.
“The unity of the universal end and aim of the state and the particular interest of individuals must consist in this, that the duties of individuals to the state and their rights against it are identical (thus, for example, the duty to respect property coincides with the right to property).” Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 1843
The two quotes demonstrate both the harmony of analysis and the dichotomy of policy based on that analysis by Adam Smith, and its greatest critic, Karl Marx. Smith relies on abstraction. Smith’s ‘wise and virtuous man’ is, by implication, deemed to represent the moral norm which will naturally be followed by the majority of capitalists. Marx relies on a more jaundiced perception of reality, drawing on events and consequences to provide an empirical base on which to base policy. As the dichotomy has not been resolved it falls to the individual to decide which ideological approach most closely matches their own moral and ideological codes. Not many in the UK do and it can be argued that not many are capable of doing so. The vitriolic responses I received would have been amusing had the subject not been so important. It was obvious few were even capable of comprehending either text let alone forming a rational response.
Thanks
For some reason those two sentences are not quoted by the Adam Smith Institute. https://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes I wonder why.
Far too few adherents of Adam Smith’s free market and his “invisible hand” realise that he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments seven years before The Wealth of Nations. Here they are in context. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Smith/tms223.html http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Smith/tms623.html
You could throw in “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” And indeed “Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices.”
Interesting points and I note the similarity of the Smith text with that in Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy. I wonder if illness played a part in the hardening of both men’s attitudes in later works.