On Freedom, page 29
Whether people in the future are free will depend on how they can move within and between cities. Four out of five Americans now live in cities, and soon it will be nine out of ten. We should think not of smart cities but of enabling and empowering cities, designed to encourage movement, encounters, and protest. Americans should be using public transportation within and between cities, which is generally unavailable in the United States.
I grew up at the intersection of a road called “Centerville Station,” but the eponymous rail station itself no longer existed. A few miles north was “Feedwire Road,” which referred to an interurban railway network that had once served the Dayton area, including Centerville. Local rail had vanished by the time I was a boy, and travel by any means but the automobile was unthinkable. The last train departed Dayton in 1979; ten years later, as communism came to an end in Europe, Dayton’s beautiful Union Station was closed.
The United States must invest in rails. Not every line needs to be profitable for the system as a whole to energize the economy. Cars can help people to feel free, but people should not be forced to use them. Automobiles warm the atmosphere, but they also (in the present regulatory climate) reproduce inequality. Predatory lending prevents people from buying simple automobiles, and it leaves them in the end with no car and much debt. Making it harder for people to move makes it harder for them to live and indeed to work.
Workers
And yet we do work, and we will continue to do so. The robots had their chance to take all the jobs during the pandemic, and they did not. If young people in the twenty-first century are going to chase the American Dream, the labor market they enter will have to be designed around humans and their freedom. Rather than pronouncing the incantatory phrase “free market,” we should arrange the market in such a way as to enable mobility for people. Markets follow rules, and rules can be changed. Right now, for example, American companies get a tax break for buying robots but not for training people. This should be reversed.
Russia reveals the extreme of immobility and wealth inequality. The Tsar Bell is still on the ground. Markets fail when monopolies arise, and our markets are already hugely distorted. The failure ruins the lives of people seeking work. Young people should not be banished into a sticky matrix of economic monocultures. If the purpose of the market is freedom, then some American companies are just far too big. Despite some promising legislation in the early 2020s, the problems here are very deep.
Monopolies make a mockery of entrepreneurship, rewarding property owners and shareholders rather than people who start businesses and take risks. Friedrich Hayek rightly insisted that the government break up monopolies, which he said were no better than Soviet central planning. The United States has the appropriate laws on the books (the Clayton and Sherman acts). Federal agencies and judges need only enforce them as written. The Founders understood that monopolies were incompatible with democracy. That is a lesson not to be forgotten, lest we invite new kinds of empire over ourselves.
To arrange the market to enable freedom, we will have to restructure financial timekeeping. We treat a company’s quarterly returns as the measure of its success. This hinders good choices, gives robots advantages over people, and inflates inequality. The quarterly report is just an accounting convention. Changing the way companies report would encourage them to think more broadly about customers and workers.
Social mobility requires cooperative labor. Freedom includes the right to organize. Union membership girds solidarity. It also supports factuality, since dealing with unions keeps managers and companies (and reporters) honest. Labor unions exemplify civil society and defend civil rights. Without them, a labor market stagnates, and social mobility slows. Labor unions, historically, have been one of the few sites where interracial coalitions form. They can be relied upon to support democracy. And labor organizing, because it involves human contact, can weaken the myths that algorithms tend to spread.
Prisoners
If the purpose of the market is freedom, money should not be made by detaining human bodies. When the government pays companies to imprison, it creates a lobby for locking people up. Private prisons, private jails, private detention centers, and private concentration camps should all be banned. Private contractors should not be employed for any policy of coercion, including border enforcement, and certainly not for the control of demonstrations.
It is wrong to incentivize incarceration. More deeply, it is wrong to confuse punishment with freedom. When Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1990, his first impulse was to release prisoners who had been sentenced by the communist regime. He had reason to believe that there had been systemic injustice.
When communism came to an end in eastern Europe, roughly the same percentage of the Czechoslovak population was behind bars as the American. The American percentage kept increasing. Even as we proclaimed the inevitability of freedom, more and more Americans lost it, in a basic sense. Even as Americans deplored ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, few noticed the escalating racial imprisonment at home. A search of The New York Times in the 1990s reveals that the phrase “ethnic cleansing” appears 1,928 times, and “mass incarceration” only 132.
To be sure, Americans committed crimes. But that was not the cause of mass incarceration. Crime rates, violent crime rates, and murder rates all peaked in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. Then they began to decline. But there was no freedom dividend: The number of American prisoners almost doubled in the 1990s.
Rates of incarceration correlate not with local crime statistics but rather with poverty and with the population of African Americans. Mass incarceration affects Black people more than others, and we will not resolve the problem without confronting the larger question of how other Americans regard (or disregard) Black bodies. We need solidarity to get to mobility.
Granted, other countries are more repressive in other ways. But that is hardly the right standard for a land of the free. That relativizing habit of mind arises from negative freedom: things are less bad here than somewhere else; therefore, things are basically all right; therefore, we are free. We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions. A premise of a land of the free cannot be mass incarceration.
The numbers are shocking. About 1.7 million Americans are now in prison, roughly as many as live in West Virginia. It is as though we have an entire state imprisoned. No land that cages so many humans looks free from the outside, or feels free from the inside.
No more prisons should be built or planned. Planning prisons is planning incarceration and disenfranchisement. The goal should be to have fewer prisons over time, with fewer people in them. People should no longer be packed into cells meant for single occupants. Everything we know about the body tells us that this punishment is cruel and unusual. We should abandon any notion of a war on drugs. Sentences should be shorter. Prisons should be allowed to invest in programs that we know to be rehabilitative, such as trauma education, university coursework, library, theater, and art.
The creation of capabilities belongs to freedom, as Edith Stein said. Prehabilitation is much better than rehabilitation, for everyone. Young people should be given a chance at a life in freedom. Keeping people out of prison is a matter of giving them, as children, chances to develop the capacities for freedom, and the opportunity, as young adults, to enter the labor market. Freedom is better than crime, for all concerned, especially the (potential) victims. It is also far less expensive. Investing in young people costs far less than incarcerating them as teenagers and young adults.
Of course, people should take responsibility for their actions. Yet before we take that position, we have to check ourselves for self-righteousness. Sometimes the impulse can be racial: People like me take responsibility, people like them do not. Given that the business fraud and coup plotter Donald Trump is today’s poster child of American whiteness, white people should perhaps reflect upon his lifetime of utter irresponsibility when experiencing such “us and them” reactions. Impunity is the opposite of responsibility.
Only a free person can be responsible. And no one can become free by themselves. The structures that enable freedom are moral but also political. It follows that we are all responsible for creating the conditions that make it possible for others to become free. No doubt people will commit crimes and be sentenced to prison. But before we self-righteously speak of the responsibility of others for their actions, we must be sure we have done whatever we can to allow young people to grow up free.
The sign at the gates of Nazi concentration camps read Arbeit macht frei, “Work will make you free.” In other words, if you take responsibility for yourself, all will be well. In the Gulag, prisoners were subjected to a regime of individual responsibility. They had to obey exacting rules and meet demanding work quotas. When they failed, they were denied food rations or were placed in harsher confinement. We have no trouble seeing the sadism of such hypertrophic responsibility. The application of the principle of individual responsibility in conditions where the individual cannot take responsibility is tyrannical.
Obviously, U.S. prisons are not Nazi or Soviet camps. But these historical examples alert us to the attitude that we must avoid: sadistic responsibility talk that makes us complicit in tyranny. When we speak of responsibility without having created the conditions for freedom, we diminish both concepts. Americans do tend to leave people in impossible situations, categorize their failure as their individual responsibility, then punish them further. Babies are not responsible when their parents are poor; kids are not responsible when their schools are bad. The very existence of the carceral state becomes a silent excuse not to create a welfare state. To see the pain of others as confirmation of one’s own superiority is to be irresponsible—complicit in sadopopulism and tyranny.
Freedom has to begin with an attitude of recognition, of empathy for the Leib. Nothing can generate this attitude for us. We must cultivate it in ourselves.
Distributions
One of my incarcerated students, Justin, took his writing assignments to friends who were not in the class, then turned in their responses to me. One of his friends wrote that before his imprisonment, he had never been far from the housing project where he grew up. For him, the cell inside was an unsurprising continuation of the immobility that gripped everyone he knew on the outside. I wanted to reject this as literary hyperbole, but as I read on, I knew that I couldn’t.
Prison is an extreme case that reveals a larger reality. Social mobility will remain out of reach as long as wealth and income are so unevenly distributed. James Madison took for granted the “silent operation of laws” that would “reduce extreme wealth to mediocrity” and “raise extreme indigence towards comfort.” Thomas Jefferson dreamed of nothing less than economic equality: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”
The United States moved in that direction, during the decades of the American Dream, from the 1930s to the 1970s. But after four decades of normalizing oligarchy, we now face inequalities that are simply grotesque—inconsistent with a good government, with democracy, with a republic. Steady movement away from today’s absurd distribution of wealth would break deadlocks, create hope, and ease minds. Barbara Jordan was right that “the American dream need not forever be deferred.” (She was referring to “Harlem,” a poem by Langston Hughes.)
Law serves tyranny when it favors a minuscule minority of oligarchs. If America is to become a land of the free, it must apply law to its titanic inequalities of wealth and income. The enforcement of existing laws would be a very good start. Americans lose about $1 trillion every year to tax fraud and evasion by the very wealthy. Offshore tax evaders should be given a year to come onshore or be prosecuted. Known practices that serve oligarchical escapism should be banned. These include mirror trades, anonymous real estate transactions, and limited partnerships that hide true owners and beneficiaries.
The United States should tax consumption as well as income. Income tax rates should be set to reflect how much a payment affects a person’s lifestyle: this is solidarity. During the Eisenhower years, the top income tax rate was 91 percent. A top rate of 75 percent would suit. In such a system, most Americans would likely pay less tax. The tax code of 1980, before policies of inequality torpedoed the American Dream, is a useful reference. Wealth taxes (on assets without deferral) would improve the lives of hundreds of millions without altering the lives of the few thousand who would pay them. If very wealthy Americans paid taxes, we could give ourselves the chance to become a land of the free. The people in question would notice no difference in their material lives. And everyone else would find life more vibrant and more secure.
For thousands of years, political thinkers have understood the consequences of extreme inequality. It is hard to find defenders of freedom who believe that a few people should dominate the economy. Lord Acton, the great conservative British thinker, believed that governments had to redistribute wealth. Extreme differences in economic power, he thought, would make people dependent, freedom of speech meaningless, and the very idea of liberty a mockery. Thomas Paine, the author of the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, was of a similar mind. A government that served freedom, he thought, would eliminate poverty. John Stuart Mill, the most important liberal in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, took for granted that state action would rectify durable inequalities. Mark Twain had a Black man make all the relevant points in his short story “Corn-Pone Opinions.” Isaiah Berlin, the outstanding liberal of the twentieth century, believed in the welfare state. Friedrich Hayek, an economist admired by conservatives, believed that everyone should have a secure minimum income. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the civil rights movement, was of the same view. He was organizing against poverty when he was assassinated.
Most of what is proposed in this chapter would cost little, or would even save money (smaller prisons, single-payer health insurance). Yet the argument about costs is, in an important sense, beside the point. The American budgetary problem is not that the government spends too much but that wealthy people do not pay their taxes. Allowing people to hoard wealth—and bend government to enable their hoarding—is not only wrong in the sense of contrary to freedom, it is also very inefficient.
Even were that not the case: freedom comes first. Budgets reflect choices, choices reflect values, and values are the domain of free people. We cannot get to freedom without breaking the bad mental habits and without attending to the basic physical needs.
Minds
A touchscreen is no prison wall, but we are surrounded and surveilled and nudged and controlled. We have consented to a grim behavioralist grid of stimulation. We are being predictified.
Social media have to be reformed by common action, through good government. Even so, good individual decisions about our bodies are a start. We should assert our own unpredictability against and beyond the digital world. This will help us to become the kinds of citizens who will choose the right policies.
Our minds are best served when our bodies can be in motion. We should give our Leib pride of place. Seven hours a day of screen time, the American average, is just too much. That is about as much as we sleep. It is almost half of our waking hours.
If you can, do some physical exercise every day before you reach for your phone. This alone can alter how free life seems, how unpredictably a day plays out, how the eye meets the pixel when the time comes. If you reside in a place with more than one room, avoid having screens on tables where people eat, or in rooms where people sleep. At night, charge your devices as far away from you as possible, in a place where you cannot see them, such as a drawer. The last thing you touch before you go to sleep should not have a microprocessor. When you are not at work, try to spend no more than an hour per day in front of a screen.
Try to write and post one paper letter each month to someone you care about. Don’t rage against the machine; page against the machine. Read books in physical form. Keep a couple by your bed and a list of those you have read.
If this sounds radical or strange, remember that not so very long ago no one had a smartphone, and people then were freer, more intelligent, and more physically fit. Keep in mind, as well, that the people who run Silicon Valley take drastic measures to prevent their own products from making addicts of their children. They set timers to cut the power on their routers, for example, and contractually oblige babysitters not to show screens to their children. They want the best for their families. Like drug dealers, they don’t push product in their own home.
“The system is based on lies,” thought Havel. “It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.” When you are online, live in truth. Make sure you know your own purposes before you open your computer and close the screen when you have fulfilled them. Resist the impulses you feel when your eyes are on pixels. They are not really yours; they are engineered through you. When you act on them, you leave a record of your predictability. Take a breath; be pleasant and reasonable. Try not to respond directly to stimuli; instead, try to change the game or direct people’s attention to their offline capacities. You cannot overcome the dreariness, but you can create an oasis that other humans will find. Lots of people do a beautiful job of this on X, Instagram, and Telegram; look for a good example. Our power to resist the fiction industrial complex is limited but real.
When you are in the real world, don’t forget to speak to people. Make small talk, find common subjects. Every moment of eye contact is two bodies that are safe from screens and available for the flicker of an unpredictable encounter. If you must be in the fake world, direct its symbols to energize others for action in the real world. The most productive examples of communication through social media involve people urging public action. We can see the significance of this in the reaction of tyrants. The Chinese government is most consistent in censoring people who use the internet to encourage their fellow citizens to demonstrate in public. As this confirms, the most dangerous truths are “discussion preparatory to action” (Pericles), the ones that get people off the couch.
