On Freedom, page 19
Politicians of inevitability are fake economists who lull us to sleep with the idea that larger forces will always bring us back to equilibrium. Politicians of eternity are real entertainers who assuage our sense of loss with an appealing tale about the past. They gain our confidence by circling us back to a mythical era when we as a nation were (supposedly) innocent. These time-looping con artists nudge us away from democracy and toward their own feeling that they should rule forever and never be sent to prison (a motive especially apparent in the case of Trump and also Benjamin Netanyahu). Deprived of historical knowledge and of the habit of ethical thinking by the politics of inevitability, we are easy marks. Rising authoritarians succeed in this century not by proposing futures but by making any conversation about them seem pointless or absurd.
Vladimir Putin was the most important politician of eternity. His Russia drew directly from Brezhnev’s 1970s, a time of nostalgia for the victory of 1945. Putin and his generation were raised with the idea that the supposed innocence of an older generation justified any action by a younger one. He looped back to Brezhnev’s 1970s, and from the 1970s to an imagined 1945, and then to a baptism a thousand years before that, which supposedly joined Russia with Ukraine forever and made Russians eternally innocent. Russia was always the victim and always the victor. Russians had the right to determine whether or not Ukraine and Ukrainians existed; anyone who denied that right was an enemy. A Russian fascist tradition that spoke in just this way was discovered and celebrated.
And so Ukraine could be invaded, cities leveled, millions of people forced into flight, hundreds of thousands killed, on the logic that this was somehow a replay of the Second World War or a restoration of the tenth century. Russia was innocent, all was permitted. The full-scale invasion of 2022 demonstrated how the atavistic whining of the wealthiest fossil oligarch, Putin himself, could direct the world’s attention away from the future—and draw resources away from where they were needed most. Putin’s genocidal undertaking was supported by the wealthiest digital oligarch, Elon Musk.
Americans, as this suggests, did not have to look to Russia for a politics of eternity. Our own materialists, the Silicon Valley ones, have followed the same trajectory as the Soviet and post-Soviet elite: they no longer promise a brighter future but instead tell us that the present is as good as it gets. Musk and others wax nostalgic for the racial purity of an imagined past. Donald Trump offered a time when America was “great.” Like Putin’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, Trump’s attempted coup of 2020–21 was an effort to stop time, to keep a democracy from moving forward.
Eternity politics comes down to the idea that some single person should rule forever, usually to preserve personal wealth and avoid responsibility for crimes.
Ecological War
When the future is lost, so are we. Political tomfoolery does not actually stop time. The fourth dimension still has rules, even if we ignore them. Time moves forward, even when we fail to keep pace, as in the 2010s. The law of necessity does not take pity on us when we abandon the law of freedom. On the contrary: as we choose to be less free, we also abandon our power to change the world around us. And then the future, a spurned lover, comes for us, breathing vengeance.
Both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity lack contact with the most basic elements of reality: physics, chemistry, biology; the earth, its atmosphere, life. The politics of inevitability molded inconvenient facts into a story of progress. The one true inevitability was overlooked: the more carbon dioxide we emit, the more sunlight is trapped, and the warmer Earth becomes. The science of global warming was well established by the 1980s. Dissidents warned about it, from Sakharov to Havel. Most of the human-made carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere has been emitted since communism came to an end in Europe in 1989.
Inevitability politicians and their cheerleaders rationalized this, and everything else. The climate may be warming, they said, but the problem will generate its own solution. It will all somehow turn out fine. Wealth inequality may be increasing, but that’s just a side effect of general prosperity. We may be leading shorter, sadder lives in front of screens, but somehow that just proves our laudable autonomy. The cheerleaders wrote books to spread rationalization memes: we are getting smarter (we’re not); it’s not as bad as the newspapers portray (it’s worse); in the end, maybe all this is just a simulation (it’s not), so we are not responsible (we are) and shouldn’t worry since we don’t really exist (we do).
After politicians of inevitability bent the facts, politicians of eternity broke them. Politicians of inevitability understated the problem of climate change. Today politicians of eternity deny that climate change matters, or they deny the underlying science or science as such—because, after all, there is no truth. The only true eternity they can bring is extinction.
The politics of eternity gives way to a politics of catastrophe. Oligarchs fiddle, the world burns. A Trump mocks science; a Putin invades Ukraine with an army funded by fossil fuels; a Musk opens Twitter to a flood of lies about both Russian fascism and global warming.
By turning away from the future and denying science, eternity politicians bring climate calamity closer to the present. Then when the droughts and the fires and the storms and the floods affect our daily lives, eternity politicians blame those who are harmed. They shift attention from the greenhouse effect, which they have caused, to climate refugees, their victims.
At that moment, the politics of eternity becomes the politics of catastrophe. The politics of inevitability proposes a single positive future; the politics of eternity does away with the future; the politics of catastrophe summons a negative future ever closer. It fills the ever-shorter remaining time with undifferentiated fear. We are not striding forward into multiple futures as free people; instead, the bleakness comes to embrace us.
Vladimir Putin is a product of the politics of inevitability, in that Western leaders understand him as a technocrat tamed by money. An outstanding eternity politician, he leads the vanguard of catastrophe. He established a myth of Russian innocence. He worried about a future in which there would not be enough Russians. He then sent his armies to invade Ukraine and to deport to Russia women and children deemed assimilable, among a series of other genocidal policies. The horror of the war in Ukraine foreshadows the politics of catastrophe generally.
The fear of catastrophe takes two forms: for some, that of an ecological disaster that is indeed all around us but could be resolved by political and technical means; for others (such as Putin), that of a demographic crisis that can be solved only by insisting upon racial superiority. These are, so to speak, the objective and subjective catastrophes. When the objective catastrophe comes, those who have chosen the subjective one will be ready to blame, harm, and kill other people (as Russia under Putin is doing).
That is a familiar historical pattern. Our future, if we proceed through the politics of catastrophe, looks ever more like Hitler’s dark fantasy of ecological war. The fourth and fifth dimensions are abandoned, and so we struggle for space in a crowded third. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has this feel, with its kidnapped children, eugenic deportations, fascist propaganda, and atavistic racism. Time has run out, is the message. Land must be seized and colonized, and whoever says otherwise is just getting in the way of collective survival and must be eliminated.
We know the way back toward freedom: a reclamation of the future. We must restore social mobility and prevent the coming catastrophe. Both can be done, but only through the conscious activity of sovereign, unpredictable people. Fear is not enough. It will not get us where we need to go. From the most basic facts we can build a scaffolding of hope. We need to ground ourselves in history and science to take a turn toward a better future. It is all within our reach.
Responsibility Politics
In the time warps of inevitability, eternity, and catastrophe, we lose history. We lose knowledge of the past and the sense of time’s flow.
In the politics of inevitability, the facts about the past are just dispensable details since we see a general trend and a happy end. In the politics of eternity, the past is a morality play of innocence and guilt. In the politics of catastrophe, the approaching disaster enervates the present and occludes the past. Then the oligarchs appear, naked in their power, perfect in their petulance, fighting wars of racial competition and global famine.
History is a foundation of mobility and thus of freedom. We need history to slip free of the time warps and find our way to a more reassuring sense of time. When we think historically, we see structures inherited from the past, plausible choices in the present, and multiple possibilities for the future.
Mobility depends on a sense of the future, which depends on a sense of the past. The same holds for freedom itself. We draw values from the past, consider them in the present, and apply them toward some future that we wish to realize. The practice of considering and combining values is impossible without a sense of time past and time to come.
Nothing is entirely new. Everything has some instructive connection to past events. Nor is anything really eternal or inevitable. If we have the references, we remember that past catastrophes have been survived, overcome, and even exploited. Then the present seems less shocking, and the future more open. The possibilities are more numerous than they seem, and some of them are good. Indeed, some of them are wonderful. The future could be far better than we can presently imagine.
History defends us against the politics of inevitability by reminding us of the multitude of possibilities at every point. History undoes the politics of eternity by teaching us to learn responsibility from the past rather than resentment from the present. Confronting catastrophe, as we do today, we need to extend time, first backward and then forward, stretching our minds, extending ourselves. Indeed, to see our way forward, we will have to look back.
More than anything else, Václav Havel wrote of “the world” and “the earth” and of responsibility to it. “Living in truth” could make sense in politics only when it was an attitude toward nature and the universe, not just ourselves. As the future crashes in, we can panic and blame others. Those predictable reactions make us part of the mob and the catastrophe. Or we can, as free people, take responsibility, look deep into Earth’s past, and save our world.
Factuality
Living Truth
We get leverage on liberty when we understand the facts of our existence. If we know something about child development, we can raise children to be sovereign. If we understand social media, we can avoid being predictified. If we know the history of Nazism, we can recognize the politics of ecological collapse. If we have some grasp of natural history, we can imagine structures that would open the future. Confident about the big truths of science, we can resist the apostles of negative freedom and their bogus certainties.
Negative freedom is the fantasy that the problem is entirely beyond us, and that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle. We have confronted a few forms of negative freedom: just eliminate property (Marx); just eliminate the Jews (Hitler); just eliminate the imperialists (anti-colonialists); just eliminate government (Americans). Negative freedom presents itself as revolutionary, but the revolution it demands ignores the terrain that matters: the way we think about ourselves and the way we evaluate the world. Our contemporary American version of negative freedom is presented as the hard truth, but it fails entirely to deal with how the world actually works. It does not assimilate the most essential knowledge: biology, chemistry, and physics; birth, death, aging; the earth we live on; our place in the universe; our power to consider that place.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A right to life begins with knowledge: what life is; how life works; how life is possible on this earth. If we neglect that knowledge, we cease to be. We are vulnerable to nature and to those who wish to manipulate and harm us. Yet if we gain and apply knowledge about the energy of life, we can not only avoid the worst but ensure the best. Our universe neither makes us free nor prevents us from being free. It leaves open a realm of what should be, a law of freedom that allows us our endless combinations of virtues. Its constraints become our capacities if we understand them and apply our knowledge with a purpose.
Negative freedom is enmeshed in lying. That we need no government is a false account of us and the world, defended by people who falsify the world. Because burning fossil fuels will make life impossible, those who thereby profit spread lies that lead us all toward death. Conversely, the sources of energy that will also allow us to live will allow us to do so freely and more honestly. Alternatives such as solar energy and fusion are hard to centralize and therefore do not favor oligarchy. They are consonant with what we understand about life on Earth and so do not require a deadly net of propaganda. If we can break the oligarchical lying now, a better future awaits.
Suns
The right to life comes before the right to liberty on Jefferson’s list, and for good reason. We must understand life in order to enjoy liberty. When we know where the regularities of the universe halt, and where our own inspiration begins, we can navigate the borderland in between. We have to respect what is, peel away from it, transform it, and create something we think should be.
The more we know about the facts of the universe, the better equipped we are to change it by realizing values. And we know an extraordinary amount. For some ancient thinkers, Earth was the universe’s center. In the Iliad, Achilles returns to battle with a shield newly forged for him by Hephaestus, the god of the smithy. The shield is embossed with the doings of the whole human world. People are at the center, with moon and sun off to the side.
The Founders of the United States knew better. Living more than two millennia after the Iliad was set down, they were children of modern astronomy and physics. They understood that Earth orbits the sun. In ancient Greece, Aristarchus had rightly proposed heliocentrism, but Aristotle rejected his view. The geocentrism then canonized by Ptolemy prevailed for more than fifteen hundred years. Copernicus revived Aristarchus’s hypothesis and began the overthrow of the Ptolemaic (geocentric) view in 1543. Kepler defended the Copernican heliocentric view in 1596, Galileo a bit later. In 1687, about half a century before the Founders were born, about a century before the revolution they made, Newton explained the orbits of the planets via gravity. Jefferson was interested in the discovery of the planet Uranus and observed an eclipse.
We are not at the center of everything. We are special thanks not to location but to vocation. It is not where we are, but what we do, that counts. And to do, we have to know. The Founders knew more about the universe than the ancients; we know more than the Founders. The Founders had an idea of gravity but did not know that the sun is made of plasma. They owned farms (and often slaves) but did not know how plants mediate solar energy for us. Jefferson was an acknowledged authority on fossils, which he called “bones,” but he mistook the claws of extinct ground sloths for those of living lions, and he thought Earth was only six thousand years old.
It is not reasonable to expect those who came before us to be ideal. Only tyrants present their predecessors as icons, inert and perfect. The best that free people can hope for is a legacy of self-correction. The Founders were wise enough to expect us to know more than they did. They inscribed into the Constitution an institution (a patent office) to promote the “Progress of Science and useful arts.” They believed that scientific advances could improve political life. John Adams applied an analogy from physical equilibrium to defend the political checks and balances of the Constitution. Jefferson delighted in “the tranquil pursuit of science” and half jested in letters that he preferred agronomy to politics. Benjamin Franklin tried to understand electricity.
We know, as the Founders and the ancients did not, that humans are not the culmination of creation on a young Earth. If the history of life on Earth were a book of five thousand pages, we would appear on the last one. The giant ground sloths that Jefferson mistook for lions had inhabited the Americas for tens of millions of years, a time span unimaginable to the Founders. Yet that too is only a small fraction of the history of life on Earth. They and other giant mammals—such as mammoths, mastodons, and giant rhinoceroses—followed the dinosaurs; and even the dinosaurs, in the grand scheme of things, are quite young, having gone extinct only sixty-six million years ago. Trilobites, the prize fossil of Clinton County in my youth, were around for a quarter-billion years before going extinct about a quarter-billion years ago. This gets us back half a billion years—which is only about an eighth of the way to the beginning.
Fossil fuels are evidence of comparably ancient organisms. We say “fossil fuels” all the time without ever quite hearing the connection between our daily burn and the ancient past. Coal, natural gas, and oil are chemically transformed remnants of life from hundreds of millions of years ago. Since about the time of the American Revolution, humans have dug up fossil fuels and consumed the energy left by past life. We have thereby generated and mastered electricity but also changed the climate. As we physically consume the remnants of former life, we put in doubt life’s future.
We are a species that extinguishes others. Most of the larger mammals of the Americas, including the mastodons and the ground sloths, came to an end after humans crossed over from Asia about twenty thousand years ago. The more recent arrival of humans from Europe about five hundred years ago has coincided with about five hundred further extinctions. Humans can also create the conditions of our own extinction.
