On Freedom, page 24
Under the politics of inevitability, we were not meant to notice that wealth was concentrating in very few hands; if we did, we were instructed that class war waged by the oligarchs against the rest was a necessary step on the path to a brighter future. (One billionaire, Warren Buffett, did try to clarify: “There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and winning.”) Under the politics of eternity, as the oligarchs emerge from the shadows, we are meant to think of a glorious past when we were innocent, while the very wealthy colonize the future with their deadly frivolities. In catastrophic times, oligarchs divert resources from the human struggle to live free and direct them toward the dumb delusion that a chosen few can flee.
Escapism is the absolutely predictable oligarchic posture during catastrophic times. The rest of us have to endure the oligarchs’ moronic fantasies—Ukraine is Russia, immortality is possible, space travel will save us, life might be a simulation—as time runs out on our hopes for dignity and survival as a species. A poignant element of our tragedy is its profound stupidity. There are things so idiotic that you need $10 billion to believe them.
Digital oligarchs distract us with promises of a high-tech future while pinning us with brain hacks to the untenable present. Elon Musk dreams of space while his company promotes lies about global warming, thereby weakening support for the technologies we would need for space travel. Fossil oligarchs summon climate extinction while preparing exits for themselves. Vladimir Putin’s narcissistic invasion of Ukraine offers a preview of the end of the world. The leading American fossil oligarch is Charles Koch, global warming’s best friend. His name means “man cook.” God has a revealing sense of humor.
Mortality
One form of oligarchical escape is from time: the dream of some that they will live forever. They won’t. God also has a sense of irony: the surname of a prominent death escapist, Ray Kurzweil, means “a little while.”
The fantasy of immortality is for the few. It is a rejection of solidarity. As such, it is not just selfish but dangerous for freedom. Forever is the wrong time scale. Freedom requires a sense of time that extends into the future, through one life and into the next generation or two. With that kind of range, we can think of values and of the world, of the why as well as the how. The finitude of our time on Earth gives shape to life. If we believe that we can live forever, we lose all contact with virtue and thus with freedom. On an infinite time scale, why transforms itself back into how: how to stay alive, minute after stressful minute.
An immortal being could not be free. No choice would be meaningful, because all could be deferred. Life itself would become the only value, sadistically affirmed by the background mortality of others. Anxiety about accidental death and assassination would fill the mind, dissolving any capacity to think of anything (or anyone) else. One notices this tendency in the company of people who are trying to live forever. Knowing that we are mortal is what allows us to take risks, even little ones such as leaving the house to get coffee or pick up a kid from school. If we really had everything to lose at every moment, we would curl up in a ball.
To be sure, life is good and life in liberty is better. Everyone has a right to life, though, not just the very wealthy. In the twenty-first century, the life expectancy of Americans has decreased relative to that of other prosperous countries. Men in the United States can expect lives that are eight years shorter than those of Japanese men. Eight years is a long time to be unnecessarily dead.
American millennials worry about climate change and biodiversity, and rightly so. But even absent an extinction event, it is possible that they will live shorter lives than their parents or even their grandparents. Much of the risk of early death comes from disadvantaged childhoods, and thus from the absence of social mobility and from the unequal distribution of wealth. These violations of the right to life are a result of oligarchy.
Wealthy Americans who want to lengthen life have options ready to hand. They can invest in hygiene and vaccinations (as the Gates Foundation does) or in small nonprofits that improve the quality of life (as MacKenzie Scott does). The simplest way for the wealthy to extend the lives of their fellow Americans would be to pay their fair share of taxes. Most don’t; a good government, one legitimated by freedom, would ensure that they did. Giving 330 million Americans five more years of freedom is a nicer prospect than giving three billionaires a million years of anxiety. It also has the virtue of being possible.
Venus
Another oligarchical escape is to outer space. A search is on for Earth-like planets in the galaxy. The study of exoplanets is fascinating and highly deserving of support. Yet it is not clear that any other planet, no matter how good it might look from a distance, could actually sustain us. Earth is our home not only because of the physical characteristics that we might detect on another planet from afar, but also thanks to its particular and intimate interaction with life. Earth provided the conditions for very simple life some four billion years ago, and ever since then, life has been remaking our planet. As the evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson has written, many of the aspects of nature that we take for granted, such as the composition of the atmosphere, the color of the sky, and the variety of minerals, depend, in fact, on life. Our existence on Earth is historical, and no other planet has Earth’s history.
Our private pioneers of space exploration are absolutely right that only ideas that seem crazily ambitious now will have a meaningful payoff later. But that triumph, when it comes, will not be the rescue of Homo sapiens. In order to get to outer space, we will have to thrive and prosper here for another several decades.
In our own solar system, the escapists favor Mars. There are excellent reasons to explore Mars, but the red planet will not rescue us from climate change or any other immediate threat. The time scale of human survival or extinction, roughly between now and 2040, is simply too short. In any event, the technical problems involved in settling Mars are far greater than those involved in resolving climate change.
And they overlap. If we want to explore space, we will need fusion-powered rockets—which means that we would first have to master fusion power here on Earth. But if we had fusion power on Earth, we could supply ourselves with endless clean energy, reverse global warming, and remove any need to leave our planet. Regardless of whether we want to stay or go, it is fusion power that deserves our immediate attention.
In discussions of escaping to space, no one ever mentions Venus, our nearest neighbor, the planet most similar to Earth. Venus is a depressing exhibit of the greenhouse effect, the physical phenomenon that our escapist oligarchs are bringing about, directly if they are fossil oligarchs, indirectly if they are digital oligarchs. Venus’s atmosphere of carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat, making its surface unthinkably hot. Our activities in general, and those of our oligarchs in particular, are making Earth more like Venus. So we are supposed to look away.
It will be far easier to stop the greenhouse effect on Earth than to find and settle a suitable exoplanet, or to terraform Mars. Space exploration is a worthy goal, but it is far harder than, and no substitute for, keeping our own planet habitable. The logical sequence is simple: fusion reactors, renewable energy, freedom on Earth; then fusion rockets, exploration, and discovery in space.
Even if this sequence somehow did not hold, it is implausible that we could establish order in the universe if we cannot do so on our home planet.
Void
Incidentally, why is it that we, rather than someone else, seem to be doing all the searching for life beyond the home planet? Given that we inhabit a planet that is suitable for life, why has no one else found us? Why does no one even seem to be looking?
There must have been other civilizations in our galaxy. But to communicate with us, they would have had to reach the stage of digital technology. At that point, they were, we might surmise, undone by their own creations, their own social media, their own surveillance, their own artificial intelligence, their own nemesis.
It is our moment here on Earth that suggests such a hypothesis. Since 2010, when social media took over the internet, the hyped new technologies—think cryptocurrency, self-driving cars, the metaverse, the whole gig economy—have generally turned out to be scams. Social media are not high technology in any meaningful sense: they are mid-twentieth-century behaviorist manipulation done at scale. They hinder scientific thought. Elon Musk’s version of Twitter is anti-evidence and pro-conspiracy, proposing a new dark age of charismatic leadership and magical thinking. The idea of technology itself has to be rescued from the cycle of propaganda-driven investment scams.
To reach the stars, we will have to look away from our phones. We can get to other planets only with fusion rockets. We will develop fusion rockets only when we have fusion power. We will have fusion power only if we try to address climate change. We will address climate change only if people believe that it is happening. People will believe that it is happening only if social media are reformed. Musk owns a platform that instructs us that climate change is a hoax. That makes space travel much less likely.
Let us turn our technology upward and outward, away from the psychological exploitation of vulnerable minds and toward construction and exploration. Let us first build solar panels and windmills and fusion power plants and use them to save Earth from the greenhouse effect, then resolve the remaining technical problems of space exploration.
If we can survive on this planet, we might have the time and capacity to explore other planets. We should explore them only after we can ensure life and freedom on this one. We owe as much to ourselves—and to anyone else we might encounter along the way.
Subjects
Our least ambitious forays into space might have taught us the most. Thanks to satellites, we are now able to draw the contours of prehistoric cities that did not leave behind large temples or fortresses (for example, Nebelivka, in today’s Ukraine).
Because what remains for us from early Near Eastern civilizations are walls and idols of stone, we tend to imagine progress as ever lower barriers and ever less paganism. From a terrifying regime of exploitation and human sacrifice, humanity moves forward, the walls recede, and the gods are tamed. But those appearances might well be deceptive. Cities as old as those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were designed in concentric circles, like the rings of a tree, with no visible sign of organized worship or hierarchy. Although it would be a mistake to draw too firm conclusions, we should keep our minds open. Progress is more than the removal of some previous evil, and freedom is more than the reduction of repression. The notion of a horrifying past might just be nothing more than an excuse for an untenable present.
Positive freedom leads us back to one another. Were freedom just negative, the mere absence of barriers, I could think of you as just one more barrier. Since it is positive, a presence of virtues I affirm in a world I shape, I see you doing the same. Positive freedom leads us to treat one another as actors in history. If freedom is something we must build together, then each of us has a stake in the other. If virtues are real but clash, then we have to declare our own as well as accommodate those of others. If freedom is about the future, we must work together to keep it open.
Getting this wrong is not just a philosophical but an existential mistake. If we accept the erroneous tradition of negative freedom, we will end up turning against one another. We will have trouble seeing the other as a person, a Leib, an equal. Unable to see others, people who have fallen for negative freedom will have trouble seeing even themselves (and the harm they are doing to themselves). If we think of freedom only as a liberation from unwanted barriers, we will fail to create the right structures. If we start with the idea of freedom as “inside and outside,” we will end up with a fascism of “us and them.”
What “inside and outside” and “us and them” have in common is the starting point that we are the good, or that the good is within us. Good and evil are divided peremptorily and perfectly. Good is us; we are good. No need, then, to consider what the good things might be, or seek the help of others in finding them.
American defenders of negative freedom are in the habit of arguing that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were results of positive freedom. Any attempt to “intervene in the economy,” goes the argument, must lead to totalitarianism. This view has been repeated incessantly since the 1940s, and it is familiar to the point of being common sense. But it is the purest propaganda, entirely contrary to history. Hitler and Stalin, leaders of revolutionary parties bent on violence, would have been baffled to learn that they came to power as a result of kindergarten or pensions. They did not.
Positive freedom saves not only freedom but also the market from the free marketeers. Stalinism and Nazism had a chance precisely because defenders of negative freedom had no challengers in the 1920s, and capitalism collapsed into the Great Depression as a result. Negative freedom in our American sense—the demolition of government services—generates fear and anxiety, making extreme politics more likely. The welfare state reduces the human anxiety and political risks inherent in the boom-and-bust cycle of markets. It thereby makes extreme politics of the Nazi and Soviet variety less likely, by depriving them of their undergirding of loneliness and anxiety.
Objects
In the twenty-first century, which we share with the algorithms, the idea of negative freedom can lead us to still more profound perversity. When we settle for negative freedom today, we end up siding with the nonhuman against the human. This may sound strange, but it is where this American misunderstanding of freedom has led us. When we think of freedom as negative, we think only of the barrier, not of the person. And then we begin to think of people themselves as the barrier.
There is, after all, nothing especially human about avoiding barriers. Pathogens are good at it, and so is malware. If we think of freedom as negative, we wake up one day as the champions of both kinds of viruses, of alien bits of DNA and unknown computer code. They must be allowed to penetrate our mouths, invade our retinas, go everywhere. In practice, among the most unquestioned American rights are those of photons to flow from computer displays to optic nerves to deliver targeted advertising, of electrons to move among banks to allow tax evasion, and of carbon dioxide molecules to heat the air and doom the species.
The problem is one not of technology but of worldview. Following the logic of negative freedom, we concern ourselves with an abstraction (the economy) rather than the bodies of people. Instead of free people, we find ourselves speaking of a “free market.” The people become the barriers, to be removed—or penetrated. The myth of the free market instructs us that things should be free to circulate without hindrance.
When the word freedom is conceded to the economy, it follows that the market has rights. Such rights will be enforced against people, who are expected to experience the market’s rights as duties. On this logic, people have a duty not to concern themselves with how things are bought and sold, or with how money is moved, or with monopolies, or wage slavery, or pollution, or carbon dioxide emissions.
The ideology of the free market demands that we extend the law of necessity deep into our lives and minds. It is bad enough to submit to the law of necessity, to the world as it is. It is much worse when we choose to extend the law of necessity by inventing new laws to which we then submit.
Hand
Markets are indispensable, and they help us do many things well. But it is up to people to decide which things those are and under which parameters markets best serve freedom. In important areas, such as health care, the market provides a poor service. If the body is a site of profit, it is not a site of health. We need to understand our bodies, and treating them as commodities makes this much harder to do. The leading source of health information in the United States now is direct-to-consumer drug advertising.
Birth is the most important moment of our lives, but obstetrics is hard to make profitable, and so mothers and babies die who ought to have lived. Infant and maternal mortality is higher in the United States than in any other rich country—and the trend is in the wrong direction. Prevention is the most important part of health care, but it is hard to make money from keeping people well, so we let it go. We are an aging population, and preventive therapies—geroscience—can aid well-being and freedom. It is not clear, though, whether they will make money. Certain kinds of illnesses are more profitable than others. Death is profitable when efficiently managed, when families are drained of wealth during the last days of a loved one’s life. Commercial medicine profits first by depriving our lives of years, and then by adding to them a few days.
And so Americans live shorter, sicker lives while spending far more money on health care than others in comparably rich countries. Without a positive idea of freedom, without some concept of the Leib, we do not see how strange this is. Being unable to see a doctor or afford medication when we are sick is not a mark of freedom. Nor is being dead.
When Americans enter a hospital, their first encounter is often with a financial officer. This verification of insurance reminds the sick that money comes before the body. It suggests that there is no Leib, only a Körper, an object from which money might be made.
After the patient is admitted, nurses visit the patient, their bodies blocked by a large computer caddy on wheels. During the interaction, the machine is interposed physically between the patient and the nurse, making actual communication problematic. If and when a physician appears, that interaction too will likely be hindered by a machine. Doctors are constrained by their digital masters to describe their encounters with patients in a standard matrix of billable categories. Their eyes and fingers search for the right window on the screen. Whole visits pass without any eye contact between doctor and patient.
