No idea in our political lexicon is as deeply mired in paradox as freedom. One is wholly alive, wholly human, we are often told, only when one is wholly free. Free to move, free from constraint, free from tyranny. And yet, also comes with this liberty from constraint—this thing the Latvian-British historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin almost 70 years ago famously called “negative liberty”—the dangerous license to violate others, to disparage and desecrate the lives of others, to be so drawn to cruelty as to become anti-human, pure and simple.
Freedom is a desire so molecular it might have started to run through our bloodstream at birth. But perhaps its truth, its ambiguities, and its power become discernible to us only in the moment of its loss. For 2000 years, not surprisingly, says @realaishwarykumar, “absolutely no tradition of political thought has been able to truly delimit and defend what freedom is, except those thinkers who had witnessed from close quarters and in their own lives its total disappearance.”
“That’s because where there is freedom, there is force. Where there is freedom to fabricate, there is also the freedom and the will to lie. Where there is freedom to move, there is also the freedom and the will to quarantine, to segregate, sequester, and incarcerate. Where there is freedom to live and breathe, there is also the freedom and the will to make life for others unlivable, unbreathable. The freedom to breathe is not equally given. The freedom to be forgiven, to be excused, is not equally given.”
“Some will always be punished, never forgiven. Others have never faced punishment, and thus, never sought forgiveness for their crimes."
To ask “what is freedom?” therefore requires a certain kind of moral imagination about inequality today. “An imagination that transcends the easy, lazy, all-too-quick demarcations of the world into left and right, even if one is decisively worse than the other,” says Aishwary. “A spectrum of thought that does not simply reduce freedom to the clash between two or more visions of power—which it always will be—but to a new conception and measure of life as such, to a new pursuit of happiness, indomitably claimed and equally shared.”
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