What does 'Freedom' mean for you?

I am tempted to say “Freedom for me is continuing to sip my single malt and not having to think about writing this blog”. But I fear that would leave you, the reader, feeling a trifle cheated. You don’t buy a movie ticket just to hear the national anthem. You expect more. So, I am obliged to put aside my glass and dive straight into the topic.

I must admit that I am finding it difficult to clearly bring into words where I stand on the topic. I, therefore, take the help of some reading that I did on the topic a few weeks ago.1

Freedom is understood by most people as the absence of any external obstacles to options available to an individual to determine his/her actions. Such obstacles could be moral (“You should not show too much skin in public”), social (“You shall not offend others”), religious (“You shall wear the hijab”), political (“You shall not criticize the emperor”), gender-based (“Women shall not enter certain temples”), legal (“You shall not practice homosexuality”) and so on. Most people agree that there ought to be ‘some limits’ to such liberties but, despite constant argumentation, any consensus on the degree of the limits remains elusive. Because of this inability to arrive at any agreed limits, some people argue that the best way out is that there should be no limits. “Wear what you want, offend all you want, go where you want, do what you want” is their proposed resolution of the impasse. Extreme as this may sound, it is certainly one way to settle the matter.

There is another sense in which freedom is to be understood, but receives much less mindshare. Imagine a person who wants to emigrate and take up a foreign citizenship to have a better standard of living but a feeling of guilt that by doing so he is betraying his nation is preventing him from doing so. Is the freedom of this individual compromised? The only difference here from the earlier examples is that here the obstacle is internal to the individual. Before you completely switch your mind off from this type of freedom impairment (since the obstacles are internal you can argue that ‘a choice’ was made by the individual), consider the fact that it is politically or collectively possible (and indeed common) to influence, manipulate or coerce such feelings. People living in dictatorships or under authoritarian leaders often display an exaggerated view of national pride. Or take the case of an individual belonging to a minority community who has exercised his democratic rights of voting but the majority government which comes into power as a result of this process takes decisions inimical to the individual’s interests. Is he more ‘free’ now by virtue of having gone through the political process than he was without it? From the individual’s frame of reference, it certainly does not appear so. He may believe, with some justification, that living in a democracy has actually reduced his freedom. On the other side, the government may say that “We’ve been voted to power on the promise of these precise actions and therefore it’s only fair that we now go ahead with them”. How can one fault their logic either? In this example, the obstacle is internal to the system.

At this point in my write-up, it is necessary for me to pause and pick up my whisky glass and take a few more sips. This is to buy some time to mentally process this stuff and frame the response on where I stand on all this.

While I would lean clearly towards the concept of freedom being the absence of external obstacles to what you can do or what you can become, I would go further and say that such absence must be guaranteed. It is not good enough that obstacles don’t exist. The probability of the existence of such obstacles has to be very low. I should not only be free; I should also feel free. There has to be a reliable and credible mechanism, which works towards blocking the emergence of the obstacles. In constitutional terms, this could be a strong curtailment of the government’s powers through a judicial process. In social terms, it could be emancipation through education. In religious terms, it could be subjugation of religious rights to constitutional authority. In legal terms, it could be individual rights given higher status over social norms.

And in spousal terms, it could mean being allowed to have another glass of whisky before coming for dinner. ‘Just kidding, honey. I’m coming right away.’

1.(My examples in the write-up are illustrative of the concepts of “Negative liberty” and “Positive liberty” respectively propounded by Sir Isaiah Berlin, the renowned liberal political theorist in the1950s who has done seminal work in this area. Google him for more.)