Freedom.
Could there be a dirtier word?
In my last post I celebrated the liberal ideal of the sovereignty of the individual over themself. That post was inspired by John Stuart Mill’s famous quote,
“over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign.”
The reason to celebrate that lies in its powerful faith in the autonomy of the individual over their mind and their decisions. A two-fingered salute to the overly-authoritarian or judgemental controls of powerful entities over how we choose to think or what we choose to do in our private worlds.
But take that idea just a very, very little further and you end up somewhere different.
Individual sovereignty over our own mind, and our freedom over the choices that impact only (or mostly) us, seems worth fighting for. And as anyone supporting the assisted dying bill in the UK might say, worth dying for too.
It celebrates our right to be who we are, and in doing so, it encourages a wider community saturated with a diversity of ideas.
But there comes a risk with ideas like these too; that in our pursuit of our own individual liberty, we either see our friends and neighbours as competitors, or worse, we sacrifice the very idea of community, or society, in favour simply of our individual desires, wants and perceived needs.
That the rights of the individual usurp the needs of the wider whole.
We end up with individualism; the idea that the individual is all that really matters. That, I think, is not by necessity an end-result of liberal ideas, but it does feel like where we are headed.
It’s striking that Mill also said
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
And that could easily be interpreted as “each for themself” even if caveated by “so long as it doesn’t hurt others.” Where is the room for society in there? Where is the room for the protection, or celebration, of community?
There is something entirely wonderful in the freeing of the individual to be all that they can be, and to allow their individual uniqueness to express itself in its fullest sense. That, I think, is essential. But it is not enough to provide us apes with what we need. Far from it.
We apes are social animals. We depend on community.
Those of us that are older and that are also lonely, have a 26% higher risk of death, suffer more from cardiovascular disease and have much worse mental health. Those of us that are younger and that are also lonely, have an increased likelihood of smoking, of misusing drugs and of anxiety.
All of us, if we are lonely, have an increased chance of depression and suicide.
A world in which only the individual matters is one which forgets and disregards our animal needs. We need to not just be individuals. We need to be individuals within community, and that requires us to value, and champion community.
A world in which only the individual matters, is also a world in which we risk forgetting our empathy, and the needs of others. Where so long as our impacts on others is benign, that is enough.
In that world, we might leave others to wither, if withering is their doing, whilst we thrive, just so long as our thriving doesn’t cause them to wither more. A world in which the rich get richer and richer and richer, for example. A world in which the very idea of community is anathema. A world in which the individual is sovereign over not just his or her mind and body, but over everything.
In my last post, I also argued that liberal values require not just the sovereignty of the individual over themself, but the willingness to compromise within a diverse community of voices. A willingness not just to defend fiercely one’s individual rights, but to value and defend the views, and rights, of others.
To celebrate diversity.
We live in a time when the individual is indeed sovereign over much more than themself. We are encouraged to travel individually by car, to be entertained individually on screens, to shop individually online, to receive that shopping individually by drone, even to scan individually our own shopping when we do venture out.
Our libraries are closing at a rate of 50 a year, the same rate applies to our youth centres, whilst our pubs are closing at a rate of 1,000 a year. Our community-owned and locally-owned spaces for gathering together are disappearing, whilst the ways we can pay privately, to branded overseas corporations, to service our individual needs, to gather with ourselves alone, seem only to grow.
At some pace, we are being trained out of the social and into the individual. The individual, with its rights to freedom over itself, over all else, over us-ness.
I don’t think this is an end result that John Stuart Mill had in mind; the death of community at the hands of the individual. But is something to be watchful of, and to fight at every opportunity.
Two-hundred years earlier than John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, a different John steered us towards another principle that is critical to any meaningful, good version of a liberal world: the principle of connectedness, inter-dependency, the importance of collaboration and community. Only by finding ways to combine the importance of the liberal ideal of freedom of mind and body, with the importance of dependence on, and investment in, community, might we find a solution to now.
Or to put it as John Donne did, 400 years ago last year,
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Some references