Freedom or Unity
Some more from The Ethics of Identity. Appiah cites on page 124 a term (via Kymlicka via Margalit and Raz) ‘decayed cultures’:
If what we have is a troubled period of cultural transition, though, it isn’t obvious that such conditions diminish our liberty or autonomy – our ability to choose among a wider range of options. Indeed, as John Tomasi suggests, a greater degree of personal autonomy may be afforded by a less rigid “choosing context,” where there are fewer constraints on what counts as an acceptable life plan than there would be in a more stable cultural community.
That’s pretty much what drives my interest in this whole subject, I think – the idea (and the possibility, the possible fact) that the more stable and rooted and unchanging a culture or identity is, the less liberty and autonomy there is, and the more constraints there are on what counts as an acceptable life plan. Now…I can certainly see that the value of liberty and autonomy and a wider range of options does not automatically or self-evidently trump the value of stability and rootedness, of security and familiarity. But then neither does the value of stability and rootedness self-evidently trump the value of liberty and autonomy. The rhetoric of community and identity too often seems to assume that it does.
And even if the value of liberty doesn’t automatically trump the value of stability, it does seem to be an empirical fact that once people get a taste of freedom and choice and the possibility of a range of options, they tend to like them, and to be upset when they are taken away. Literature and history are full of stories of people escaping from tyrannical parents, masters, owners, bosses, small towns; there are relatively few stories of people escaping from freedom to go back to tyranny. I don’t think that’s just some random fact; I think it reflects human desires and longings.
I think the deeply obscured, masked, disguised fact about the longing for community and stability that communitarians and communalists urge on us is that what is longed for is the confinement and limitation of other people – but not of the self. In other words, it may be that community and tradition and stable cultural communities appeal a great deal more to people who are in a position of power over other people in such communities than they do to the underlings. Brahmins like the old ways better than dalits do. It was slaveowners who were nostalgic for The Old South, it wasn’t slaves. I think that’s worth at least keeping in mind when we muse on community and identity.
Liberals tend to be sympathetic to a Millian notion of experimentation and social progress; the prospect of freezing existing prejudices and inequities and bigotries – the edict that “whatever is, is right” – is hardly a palatable one.
Page 125, we’re on now.
Raz, in a 1994 essay on multiculturalism, seems to be upholding something unexceptionable when he states, “It is in the interest of every person to be fully integrated in a cultural group.”…Much depends on how you construe this requirement. Was Rimbaud – scandalizing tout le monde before he went hopscotching through Africa – fully integrated into a cultural group? What about the Sudanese Islamic scholar Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed for heresy in 1985 because of his opposition to traditional sharia? Some people, it appears, actively resist being fully integrated into a group, so that they may gain some measure of distance from its reflexive assumptions; to them, “integration” can sound like regulation, even restraint – especially to liberals who, by tradition, favor Freiheit over Einheit.
Exactly. I’m one of those – I favor Freiheit over Einheit. And the thing about that is, freedom leaves you free to choose unity (though only for yourself, not for your slaves), but unity doesn’t necessarily leave you free to choose freedom. So if there is a forced choice between the two, it seems considerably fairer to go with Huck and Jim than to try to find our way back to Tara.
I think you have drawn the issue very nicely here. It seems to me one of those eternal dichotomies of human life. Freedom interferes with unity and unity interferes with freedom, and we need both.
I guess different people need different amounts of each and perhaps at different times in their lives. At least that’s my experience. If you leave a small town or a close family you leave something very valuable. If you are feeling suffocated by a small town or by a close family you’ve got to get out. But that doesn’t mean you don’t miss it.
Many people live long happy lives in close families and small towns without ever considering doing something else, certainly without ever considering it as a positive option.
Once we get away from these situations where we are known we then try to recreate something like them, circles of friends and more where we can again be known. It seems to me that it is being known, both in amount and in quality, which characterises the need for unity. It can also drive you out, and you can be pulled out by other fascinations.
Increased communications makes it easier to be known and in different but still useful ways.
OB, I agree with your preference for Freedom over Unity. However, I think this is a little exaggerated:
“And even if the value of liberty doesn’t automatically trump the value of stability, it does seem to be an empirical fact that once people get a taste of freedom and choice and the possibility of a range of options, they tend to like them, and to be upset when they are taken away. Literature and history are full of stories of people escaping from tyrannical parents, masters, owners, bosses, small towns; there are relatively few stories of people escaping from freedom to go back to tyranny. I don’t think that’s just some random fact; I think it reflects human desires and longings.”
I’d say, on the contrary, that there are abundant stories about Republics turning into Empires, Greek philosophers being given the hemlock to the applause of the polis, and poor white southerners bizarrely getting nostalgic for a slaveholding past in which their own ancestors participated as poor, non slaveholding, ill used tenant farmers — simply because they were of a status superior to blacks. Stability is too restricted a word to encompass all of the elements that go into unity. There is also the much reinforced status structure. There is the desire for safety, and the fear of risk. There is even the desire for discipline, something, in fact, that the U.S., at least, depends on – the volunteer army wouldn’t function without it.
This is important simply because it is important to coldly regard the social place of those two dialectically matched impulses, freedom and unity, in order to understand how to advance one’s own preference. There’s been way too much windy rhetoric, in the last three or four years, about the desire of the “people” for freedom, which is bad history and makes for bad policy.
I would add to Roger’s list what seems to me the most obvious move to escape from freedom to tyranny – religious conversion. Especially in the case of “high social-control groups” (that’s group psychology speak for “cults”), the desire to BELONG can and frequently does overwhelm the desire for and substance of self-determination. But if you actually examine the psychology of such conversions on a case-by-case basis, the individuals never felt positively free/empowered to try their own experiment in living (to borrow Mill’s phrase) in the first place, but rather felt lost.
What I think is missing here is the distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom. The lack of formal constraints does not constitute substantive freedom. The actual knowledge and confidence to determine one’s life for oneself is very much more than the abstract availability of multiple options. I suspect that Raz knows the difference, as do Ophelia and Amartya Sen and almost everyone who reads and comments here at B&W. But it seems as if the distinction isn’t made over and over, it keeps becoming invisible. Or at least, I think it bears repeating. And it speaks to the apparent disagreement between what Roger and Ophelia are talking about.
“Once we get away from these situations where we are known we then try to recreate something like them, circles of friends and more where we can again be known.”
I think that’s true, but also that there’s more and that there’s a difference. Meaning: the kinds of circles we recreate may be quite similar to the ones we left, but that our place in them will be different. We may leave because the place in that circle into which we were born is one with too little control or power and one of the things that can change if we leave it and create a new one is our position in it. In a similar sense to that in which if one founds a new family, one is no longer the child, but the parent, except that that’s more of a biological imperative than the difference between being a non-familial group’s hanger-on or its leader.
…the kinds of circles we recreate may be quite similar to the ones we left, but that our place in them will be different. We may leave because the place in that circle into which we were born is one with too little control or power and one of the things that can change if we leave it and create a new one is our position in it.
Yes, I think so. That’s certainly one way it can happen. In general it seems like any change by an individual requires to some extent the cooperation of some others. If the group is not large or flexible enough for those others to be found, or if the change requires not just “some” others to cooperate but some particular people to cooperate, and that’s not forthcoming, then the prospects for change are not good. And more freedom is needed!
“… fled with all due speed”
Right, before they can sharpen their knives…
“Right, before they can sharpen their knives…”
while burbling happily about how their in-group is oh so “peaceful” and tolerant, if one will only obey.