Defining liberty and liberalism

Another provocative post from philosopher h.e., this time on liberty:

People who construe liberty [primarily in terms of political freedoms] are highly privileged: they don't realize the real constraints on most people's freedom--poverty and drudgery. In the most fundamental sense liberty is just the absence of physical constraint. Most people don't have that privilege: work for most means being physically constrained, being confined to a small space--at a desk, behind a counter, at a check-out stand, at best, in a room. You punch in in the morning and there you stay--every day like a long plane flight--until you punch out. Most people have little choice about the work they do. They're also mentally constrained, doing repetitious tasks that make it impossible to think about anything else--inputting data, dealing with customers, answering phones. [...]

The whole aim of liberalism is to see it that people have options--that no one is stuck doing the drudge work I did permanently because they don't come from rich families. The market won't make that happen--that is simply an empirical fact.

I encourage everyone to read the whole essay.

While I'm inclined to agree with h.e.'s central thesis, I also think she's being a little harsh towards Paul Waldman, whose American Prospect essay sparked her post.

In his Prospect piece Waldman observes that many voters balk at the connotations of the word "liberal," despite holding relatively liberal views on most policy issues. If Waldman is right, Democrats are unlikely to win a lot of votes by moving to the right on selected wedge issues because the median voter is already closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think Waldman's argument presupposes anything about the relative importance of classical liberal political freedoms vs. economic justic and opportunity.

Comments

[pdf23ds]

Could be she was just going off on a tangent, and holds nothing against Mr. Waldman. Sort of the way I read it.

[Gary Sugar]

'Liberal' didn't derive from 'libertas.' It derived from 'liberalis,' which meant generous or courteous. Of course, liberalis is surely related to 'liber,' which meant free. But how is it related? Were free-born aristocrats generous and courteous? Or was a generous person one who granted freedom? Or was it someone with a certain freedom of understanding? In any case, the Old French and Old English words in between 'liberalis' and 'liberal' also meant generous, at least every reference I can find says that.

Anyway, Waldman is arguing about how liberal politicians should sell themselves to voters. He thinks they should call themselves progressives instead of liberals because 'liberal' has acquired bad connotations. So how long before 'progressive' acquires the same connotations?

If I understand h.e., she thinks liberal politicians should tell voters that generous liberal policies will make them freer by giving them more opportunities. I guess Waldman's politicans would tell them that generous progressive policies will make them happier by giving them more opportunities. Well, I think it's pretty close, but there might be a few more votes in h.e.'s rhetoric. So liberal policies will make us free.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>she was just going off on a tangent

I agree, though an equally important tangent. Waldman's piece argues for a countermove in a simple war of propaganda, by which the word "liberal" has become an epithet. h.e. hardly treats that. The entire thrust of h.e.'s piece, I believe, is against what Noam Chomsky hates the most: the tyranny of wage slavery. This h.e. seems to view as the principal foe of liberty.

I see her point. It's a vile thought to imagine one person being at ease all their life, while others do backbreaking stoop labor, because they didn't have a trust fund. But: if h.e. or any peasant is raised from their stoop labor, who's gonna farm?

I also think that, completely apart from the economic question (though that always seems to lurk behind revolutions against "tyranny," and wage slavery is an apt term), the thing that often most rankles people and makes them feel deprived of liberty is the sneering, arrogant hatred of their masters; not the hard labor itself, as much as the idea that someone is hatefully driving them in it.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>what Noam Chomsky hates the most: the tyranny of wage slavery.

OK, not "hates the most," but hates.

I do hope the farmer above gets a good wage. But someone's gotta farm.

[pdf23ds]

"the thing that often most rankles people and makes them feel deprived of liberty is the sneering, arrogant hatred of their masters; not the hard labor itself"

I disagree. Any man can have enemies--they don't directly deprive him of liberty. But being chained to a menial job deprives you of both the time and energy necessary to extricate yourself or to enjoy the rest of your life as you'd like to. I think those two deprivations are central, and in any case I think the individual boss is less culpable than the system as a whole, and bosses are as often inoffensive or even mildly pleasant or apolegetic as they are egregiously fascistic. But the underlying tension of class differences between the boss and his laborers does ensure that the relationship in generaly tends to be unpleasant or at leasts uneasy.

[jami]

who would clean the toilets and empty the trash in this utopia of doing only what one pleases?

do you think enough people would be farmers?

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I agree with everything you just said, except that I'm not sure whether economic oppression is _always_ the main, or only, motivator to complain of lost liberty.

People's true concept of liberty is complicated by propaganda. The Southern states (or their slaveowners, at least) complained often of lost liberty before the Civil War, as did the colonies in the American revolution, and the French revolutionaries, in terms that barely hinted at the economic bite they were obviously feeling. Shall we say, though, that _all_ invocations of "liberty" are mostly economically motivated, and none by some good old "fuck you for telling me what to do"?

To take a non-revolutionary invocation of liberty, think about all the ads or, in the 50s, newsreel films, in the late 20th century that portrayed dreary Soviet oppression as a threat to our "liberty." That was propaganda (or an Apple Computer ad), but remember how many Americans threw their hats in with it. The ads often threw in references to a stagnant economy, but it was the idea of being deprived of freedom of movement, speech, dissent, that seemed to scare us. The idea of being driven by an implacable police or other bureaucracy.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Oh, well duh--how could I forget my handle. 1984. Guy had an apartment, a desktop publishing job, a computer, some furniture, and party chocolate. Not a bad little economy.

Scared the shit out of us.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

He even had a Poster or two.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>who would clean the toilets and empty the trash in this utopia of doing only what one pleases?

>do you think enough people would be farmers?

That was my point. Farming is frigging hard work, same with cleaning toilets and emptying trash. Not enough people want to do it all. I still don't think they have to be paid slave wages, but someone will have to do that grunt work. Also, the farmer is in my opinion doing the most important work of all. We all have to eat, but all we want to do is escape the world of farming (or similar hard manual labor).

[Njorl]

Farming techniques have improved so that farming is tremendously efficient. It is performed in relatively pleasant circumstances, and has varied tasks that are not too severely intellectually deadening. The popularity of gardening shows that making things grow is an inherently pleasant task. It is no stretch of the imagination that people will feel proud of raising food for society. In an arbitrarily wealthy society, pride in one's work would be of more contentment-value than any luxury item.

The same can not be said of sanitation. I know of no one who cleans up shit as a hobby. While Ed Norton of "The Honeymooners" was quite proud to be a "sanitation engineer" and had an enthusiastic appetite for the history of sewers, I think he will never be a typical example of the labor pool.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

There are some jobs that aren't intrinsically desirable, but most could be improved dramatically. The goal isn't to make sure that every single person loves their job for its own sake. The goal is to make sure that even the least-desirable jobs don't make people's entire lives miserable.

If the worst off among us only had to put up with eight hours of boredom, five days a week, we'd have achieved an economic paradise. What makes bad jobs so horrible is that the ramifications infect every area of a person's life--poverty, insecurity, long hours, endless commutes to affordable housing, etc., etc.

I think h.e. overstates her case for physical vs. political liberty. It's all very well to assert in the abstract that material liberty is more important, but the fact remains that material liberty can't last in societies were people don't have political liberty. If you don't have freedom of speech and freedom of association, who's going to organize the unions or prod to politicians to look after physical freedoms?

[Gary Sugar]

Though I'd agree that h.e.'s statements, that "the whole aim of liberalism is to see it that people have options" and "liberalism is about liberty," are exaggerations at best, I also think her general comment does represent the essence of liberalism, which is generosity towards the less fortunate. To the extent that I personally wouldn't "assert in the abstract that material liberty" for the less fortunate "is more important [than] political liberty" for everyone, it isn't just h.e. that I disagree with, it's more generally liberal ideology that I disagree with.

I think it's obvious that the most fundamental liberty is freedom of belief, followed by its corollaries, freedom of speech and freedom of association. But again, h.e. is talking about liberalism, not civil libertarianism. Why don't we bring some conservatives into this discussion and ask them if they think freedoms of belief, speech, and association belong to liberalism?

[Gary Sugar]

Anticipating obvious objections to what I just said, I'll add that someone like me who disagrees with h.e.'s argument can still be a liberal - but not as liberal as h.e.

[Julian Elson]

The "framing" theory that I've had for the past few years is that liberals care about utility (broadly defined), conservatives care about desert, and libertarians care about deontology/process. (utility mightn't mean orthodox Benthamism, but it's notable that even the "deontological" John Rawls slipped in the requirement for Pareto Optimality as a requirement of rationality, which is essentially minimal utilitarianism)

Conservatives' ethic of desert-fulfillment makes more sense of their views on a lot of things: their harsh vindictiveness to wrongdoers needn't satisfy some utilitarian rationale of deterrence or character-reformation: the suffering of immoral people is an end in itself. Nor need the rising tide of rich people lift any boats but their own: if they earned it, then they deserve it, regardless of incentives or trickle-down to the rest of society or any other such utilitarian considerations.

The interesting thing is that desert-fulfillment ethics can logically collapse into jingoistic nationalism: the moral worth of an agent's actions determine what she deserves, but the moral worth of her actions themselves are determined by other people's actions. For example, if she helps good people, then she's done a good thing in doing so, but if she helps bad people, then she's done a bad thing. As a result, whole communities which live together and interact can become evil through that interaction, because they necessarily help each other through the interdepedence of social life, because of some original sin, or possibly even an original desert unattached to a moral violation. So my postdictions (like a prediction, but much easier to make, because you predict things that you already know are true) of conservatism come out fairly well. At least, that's how I see it.

In some Crooked Timber and Alas, A Blog threads a while ago, I said that if you gave a liberal an all-powerful magic wand, he would turn the world into a wonderful, happy place without suffering. If you gave a conservative an all-powerful magic wand, he would turn the world into a wonderful, happy place without suffering for good, moral people, and a burning hell of misery and torment for evil, immoral people.

[Julian Elson]

In other news, Respectful of Otters' latest post has some thoughts on conservatism that resonated with me.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

A couple of other examples of cases where the economics behind the urge for liberty seemed to take a back seat to the rejection of another's rule:

The hippie movement's ideas of pastoral commune life, which seemed to be a rejection of regimented and compulsive work, even at the expense of (sorry) their expenses. The abusive and coercive nature of the "establishment" and the insane insistence on conformity in the 50s seem to have been what drove these to break with the career track.

Rosa Parks. The rest of the civil rights movement certainly spoke to wage slavery and other issues of deprivation, but Rosa Parks was just standing up -- sitting down -- for her dignity.

The interesting thing to note about the above examples, as with the earlier examples of 1984 and post-WWII anti-communist imagery (briefly, the idea that the western world seemed to respond primarily to the civil liberties issues other than economic fulfillment in these cases): none of the non-economic fears or controversies resulted in a war.

A moment of respect for Rosa Parks.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

A couple of other examples of cases where the economics behind the urge for liberty seemed to take a back seat to the rejection of another's rule:

The hippie movement's ideas of pastoral commune life, which seemed to be a rejection of regimented and compulsive work, even at the expense of (sorry) their expenses. The abusive and coercive nature of the "establishment" and the insane insistence on conformity in the 50s seem to have been what drove these to break with the career track.

Rosa Parks. The rest of the civil rights movement certainly spoke to wage slavery and other issues of deprivation, but Rosa Parks was just standing up -- sitting down -- for her dignity.

The interesting thing to note about the above examples, as with the earlier examples of 1984 and post-WWII anti-communist imagery (briefly, the idea that the western world seemed in these cases to respond primarily to the civil liberties issues other than economic fulfillment in these cases): none of the non-economic fears or controversies resulted in a war.

A moment of respect for Rosa Parks.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Sorry, double-post. Ignore the first one.