On Freedom, page 23
When I said this, the Russian ambassador had no response. He simply threatened to find some other way of dealing with me. That was a sign that I was speaking freely.
Free Speakers
Some Americans seem to think that defending freedom of speech just means saying the words free speech over and over, like an incantation. Too often, our free speech “debates” involve practiced provocateurs yelling “Free speech!” right after saying something they know to be untrue and obnoxious—and right before hustling back behind the tinted windows of limousines for the next gig paid for by the discreet oligarch. These everyday trivializations of an important idea demand that we think carefully about how we speak of this fundamental right. If it becomes one more cliché, losing its sense and meaning, the thing itself will wither.
The very phrase free speech, though we say it all the time, gets us on the wrong track. It suggests that speech is what is oppressed and what is to be liberated. That is incorrect. There is no speech without a Leib, without a person. Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so that they can speak. Freedom of speech means nothing without free speakers. Only people can take risks. Only people can be free.
Freedom of speech for people means safe circumstances in which to express oneself, and an opportunity to learn, so as to have something to say—which means access to journalism, access to science, access to education. The declaration of the First Amendment that the government shall “make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” is meaningless without the accommodations needed to create free speakers.
How then to establish the structures that produce free speakers? Affirming truth, though necessary, is not enough. Even generating facts, though indispensable, is not enough. We do not have the natural capacity to distinguish truth from lies, or even an inborn preference for facts over fiction. We need the forms of freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility—to become free speakers and good listeners. Getting at the truth requires determined and cooperative work. Factuality, in other words, depends on solidarity.
Solidarity
Just People
Freedom is the value of values, but it does not stand alone. Nor can a free person. The practical recognition of these philosophical truths is solidarity, the fifth form of freedom.
We need the salve of solidarity in the hard logic of life. Young people can become sovereign and unpredictable thanks to the care of others. The time needed to care for them can be organized only by common effort. As young people grow older, they need to be able to move: out of school, out of the house, into futures that they can imagine and shape. Even rebellion should be nurtured. Their mobility begins with their own initiative but also requires the work of previous generations.
Solidarity is not just a pleasant cloud of good intentions. It is a necessary component of a working project of social mobility. In the absence of solidarity, such a project will turn against itself and toward racism, sadopopulism, the politics of eternity, postimperial immobility. If the goal is not opportunity for all, some will be satisfied when others are still more immobile. The sad facts of American history bring this home.
Solidarity closes a circle. None of the things that we need to become free, including knowledge, can we produce by ourselves. The most fundamental truths, the ones about ourselves that allow us to see the world, we must owe to others—as both Stein and Weil argued. To be free, each of us needs the truth, but factuality requires institutions as well as risk-takers. If freedom is the value of life, one of its forms is the self-conscious labor of making freedom possible for others. Solidarity is the guiding light of a land of the free.
Solidarity is the mark of a just person. Our values differ, as they should and must. Freedom is the value of values, because it is what allows that difference to reside in us and in the world we make around us. Each of us has the right to a freedom that allows us to learn, choose, and combine values. We are not the same, but in the most essential sense, we are equal.
Testifying
Like freedom in general, freedom of speech requires declarations made by individuals and accommodations made by some people to others. These individual capacities to declare and accommodate are sovereignty; their application in society is solidarity. Without solidarity, without protection of free speakers and without the support of institutions that enable listening, freedom of speech (like freedom itself) becomes an empty slogan. Without solidarity, freedom of speech becomes a parody of itself, used by its oligarchical enemies as a slogan to enforce their own dominance and to undermine freedom as such.
One powerful image of a free speaker is that of the courageous witness to suffering. And this is quite right. In my experience, though, people who take courageous stands have friends in the background. Those who testify about atrocities have support. And for testimony to be recorded and archived, a surprisingly large number of people have to cooperate. The effectiveness of a historical witness depends on the quiet work of many others. This is true even when, or especially when, the witness is no longer alive. Victoria Amelina sought and found Volodymyr Vakulenko’s diary after he was murdered. When she was murdered in turn, she left behind a book about women researching war crimes. That testimony remains.
Making sense of even the most horrific events requires methods. Survivor testimony is now important to our understanding of the Holocaust, for example, but it was not so in the 1980s, when my grandmother reminded me of “all of those Jewish people.” Jewish voices were often dismissed as irrational or superfluous. Without an organized effort, these voices would never have entered into history. They persist and resonate thanks to the work of institutions. The people at the origins of those institutions—such as the Holocaust Survivors Film Project in New Haven (founded in 1978) and its successor the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale—were motivated by values. When Victoria Amelina investigated war crimes, she was working with a Ukrainian group called Truth Hounds. In writing her book about women investigating atrocities, she had support from a group called Documenting Ukraine.
A world or a country in which we are entirely alone with our experiences is not a place of freedom. This is true in all cases, not just the extreme ones. The farmer and the vet tech and the waiter all have a story, but that story has to be heard by someone else and brought together with other circumstances. Thousands of people can be poisoned by the water supply in Flint, Michigan, and say so; but if they are Black or poor, if they have few local reporters, or if their town is run by an unelected emergency manager, the basic truth of this most fundamental matter will not break through for more than a year. We cannot be free unless our truths can be greeted by others, which means that we and they must share a common human understanding that there is such a thing as truth, that someone else’s bodily experience has a dignity that I can understand even if the experience was not mine.
In Ukraine, one can feel overwhelmed by the sheer scope of Russian war crimes and the different kinds of evidence needed to understand and record them. One day, for example, I talked to farmers who had to rig tractors to clear their fields of mines. Then I visited a Ukrainian port that Russia had closed with missiles. From there I went to a café to write about it all, only to find that it had been destroyed by a Russian rocket. There is a pattern here, an attempt to crush a people by destroying agriculture and demoralizing cities, but it takes more than one person to bring that fact to life.
Taking a risk to be a witness for truth affirms the meaning of the freedom of speech, as Euripides understood, as John Lewis understood, as Victoria Amelina understood. The truth does not exist without the risk, and we will need examples that show us how to take risks for truth. We will also need the laws, institutions, and norms that keep those risks as low as possible. No individual can do everything that is necessary to make all of us free. To “organize the service of truth,” as Havel put it, requires solidarity.
Civil Rights
A vote records an important truth about an individual. The procedure of voting is applied solidarity.
It might seem that voting is a purely individual right. All I must do is enter the voting booth and express my preferences. If I think about the matter at all, I can imagine that every other citizen faces the same constraints and obligations that I do, and that they will be able to vote. But what if this is not the case? What if the voting booth is part of a larger landscape of discrimination?
The history of voting is one of inequality. And this inequality is not always so simple as some people having the vote and others not. Some votes can count for more than others. All citizens might have a formally equal right to vote, but some can nevertheless find it substantially harder to vote than others. An “emergency” can be invoked that deprives people of the right to elect leaders. All these problems apply to the United States today. Americans who do not live in this truth are consolidating an injustice.
Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1963, “We have waited more than 340 years” (since the arrival of the first slave ship) for rights. For an interval after the Civil War, African Americans did enjoy the right to vote in the American South. After the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, however, state governments disenfranchised Black people. So long as much of the South was run by authoritarian white supremacist regimes, the United States could hardly be considered a democracy.
The Freedom Riders of 1961 appealed to solidarity as well as to mobility. They spoke of rounding out the logic of freedom. John Lewis, who was one of them, helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Lewis called for protesting “until the revolution of 1776 is complete.” The recognition that all people were created equal had to be extended to every person.
The civil rights movement was about the vote. Its success was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which (until mutilated by the Supreme Court in 2013) forbade measures that impeded African Americans from voting. Its example of applied solidarity was important throughout the world.
Civil Society
The east European dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s spoke of “civil society.” In a one-party communist system in which voting had been a meaningless ritual for everyone for decades, they needed another vector of solidarity. By “civil society” they meant the freedom of people interested in the same things or committed to the same causes to meet and act together.
Late communism was supposed to be “rational,” in that people would get their consumer goods if they did not stand out and would be punished if they spoke of alternatives to the status quo. Life was only about how we seek pleasure and avoid pain, not about why we live and what we should do. It was on this logic that dissidents were sentenced to psychiatric prison: to have an ethical sense or a political imagination was supposedly a sign of irrationality and thus of illness.
Civil society opposed such an understanding of rationality. We are not objects to be schematically manipulated, but subjects with improbable, personal values who should be allowed to find one another to better fulfill those commitments. People’s authentic interests were understood to be unpredictable and therefore to lead to unpredictable relationships, like that of Havel and the rock musicians, or Michnik and the workers, or even Havel and Michnik themselves, meeting on that mountaintop.
Isolation is an essential part of the “rational” behaviorist program for politics. Communists stayed in power by keeping people apart. All relationships were about power, which was to flow downward from the politburo to the people. When late communism worked, citizens co-created a public atmosphere of lies and half-lies, not believing in the ideology but pretending to believe. Havel worried that such habitual, half-conscious mendacity would stifle the unpredictable zones of life where people’s authentic interests might intersect. It was hard for people to find spontaneous human connections when they felt that they had to demonstrate conformism to get through the day. What they cared about came to seem shameful and secret. For the dissidents, civil society meant horizontal relationships, established on the basis of what people happened to really love.
The great success of civil society in eastern Europe was the Polish labor movement Solidarity. In 1980, Polish workers struck not only for economic goals but for human rights under the wise motto “No freedom without solidarity!” The workers forced the communist regime to accept their demands, and their union soon had ten million members. So long as Solidarity was legal in communist Poland, rates of alcohol consumption and rates of suicide were low. Though Solidarity was suppressed in 1981, its veterans formed eastern Europe’s first post-communist government in 1989.
In 1989, thanks to civil society, Poland led the way from communism. Freedom, after all, would require more than just the absence of Soviet violence. It would also require a positive sense of a new political order. Adam Michnik, freed from prison, put the union slogan on the masthead of a newspaper: “No freedom without solidarity!” A few months later, Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. In “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel recognized the practical need for solidarity as a step toward liberation. If unfreedom was a collective project, wrote Havel, then freedom was as well. He evoked “the powerful realization that freedom is indivisible.”
The philosopher Charles Taylor, a friend of the Solidarity movement, made the case about solidarity and freedom this way: “The free individual who affirms himself as such already has an obligation to complete, restore, or sustain the society within which this identity is possible.” If freedom is a right, maintained the philosopher Joseph Raz, then it is also a duty. Freedom cannot be selfish. To declare oneself free is to promise to act such that others can be free. We must imagine a society of free people and try to build it. Morally, logically, and politically, there is no freedom without solidarity.
Freedom requires its forms: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, and factuality. If I claim them for myself, then I must do so for everyone. They can only be brought to life as a common project. It is logically incoherent, morally obtuse, and politically ineffective to claim freedom only for oneself. That is choosing the isolation that tyrants would have chosen for us. They use the word freedom quite often; without solidarity, we will be fooled, and we will fool ourselves. Solidarity is a high and vital form of freedom. It makes of freedom justice.
Practical Politics
In late communist eastern Europe, civil society was understood not as politics but as “anti-politics.” It was not seen in the 1970s and 1980s as the program for government that is advocated here, for the simple reason that the dissidents had given up on influencing communist regimes directly. They knew that they could not begin from freedom from, since the aspiration to make the state smaller or remove barriers was senseless. They had to begin from freedom to, in the sense of affirming values.
Philosophically, though, the notion of civil society can be extracted from that historical limitation. It legitimates a certain kind of government, one that would create the conditions for us to become free and to acknowledge and engage with the commitments of others. For civil society to work, it has to be seen not as anti-politics but as politics: as a politics of freedom. Rather than ignoring government, it informs government.
That is not, however, how matters looked in eastern Europe after 1989. Negative freedom prevailed. The advocates of a “free market” mocked solidarity and confidently proclaimed that capitalism would do the work of freedom. The wealth and prestige of the United States and Great Britain were more decisive at the time than any argument. But the job of liberating people cannot be delegated to the market, contrary to what many of us believed in 1989. The market did raise average living standards in eastern Europe (though not in the United States), but it did not create civil society or solidarity.
The politics of inevitability pushed the dissidents to the margin, often with their own connivance, and made their ideas seem naïve. All the discussions were suddenly about how to get to a single possible future after a “transition.” All the why of the 1970s and 1980s seemed embarrassing. I remember some of the best thinkers of the communist period, such as Martin Šimečka, confessing that their previous commitments now seemed senseless. They were persuaded that their historical role had been played out: now the politics of inevitability would take over. Such judgments were mistaken: the rhetorics of responsibility, solidarity, and factuality that were developed to analyze and resist late communism also applied to early capitalism. In democratic conditions, they are not less but more relevant. They can be used for critique but also for creation.
In the twenty-first century, the new democracies of eastern Europe began to drift into the politics of eternity, and some of them began to fail. Russia was the early and dramatic example of a regime that discredited its own tradition of civil society and reasserted the traditional “vertical” of power. Russia’s regime survives in the 2020s thanks to the extraction and export of fossil fuels and the spectacle created by wars in Syria and Ukraine. Its propaganda mocks all values, telling people that they are on their own. Its elites escape as best they can, sending their assets and their children to Europe.
Bubble Men
The opposite of solidarity is escapism: I flee the scene with stuffed pockets while everyone else suffers from my selfish choices. On a negative account of freedom, escapism will seem acceptable or even laudable. In negative freedom, the cowards—the Putins, the Trumps, the Musks—are the heroes.
Escapism makes freedom impossible. When the very privileged believe that they and their families can elude the tragedy unfolding around them, they will obstruct the national work needed to create the forms of freedom. Having chosen escape, they will deride those who work in solidarity for freedom. Their money will draw others into the snide chorus. Wealth preservation distorts politics for everyone who is not wealthy—in the demanding circumstances of the twenty-first century, fatally and finally. The attempt by the monied few to monopolize the future closes it down for everyone else.
