Andrew Duff

More thoughts on freedom and the post 11 September world, so if you’re bored of it, stop reading now.

Isaiah Berlin, one of the great European liberal thinkers and philosophers of the 20th century was passionate about liberty, and fond of drawing a distinction between “freedom from…” (which he called negative liberty) and “freedom to…” (which he called postive liberty). His thought was notoriously eclectic and even sometimes contradictory, but he eventually came to believe that there was something fundamental about “Freedom from…”, whereas “freedom to…” was less of a necessity and more of a nice-to-have. His overall definition of liberty was summarised as “the right to freely shape one’s life… the only barrier is the need to protect others”.

Although Berlin’s thinking was philosophical and thus is hard to translate immediately into real situations, apply these two concepts of liberty in the context of the comments I posted on 11 November. Clearly we must have the “freedom from” terror and indiscriminate acts of criminal behaviour such as happened on New York, Bali and wherever the next attack will come. As such, pursuit of the criminals responsible under agreed international law is absolutely essential. But think about Bryan Appleyard’s comment – “Americans don’t want to be free to be anything, they want to be free to be Americans with all that that implies.” The issue with “freedom to…”s like this is that they easily trip over into impinging on the liberty of others. In the immediate post-9/11 aftermath, there seemed to be the beginings of a genuine reappraisal of how we all (as individuals) apply our “freedom to…”s, although this was quickly subsumed by the rhetoric of the “war on terrorism” and the “assault on Afghanistan”. The result was the beginnings of another set of new laws aimed at protecting the community at the expense of individual freedom. At some point, probably sooner rather than later, we will all need to think about these questions more deeply, particularly as the various anti-terrorism laws that have been passed in the US, the UK and elsewhere have started to call into question the idea of the “inalienable” rights (or “freedom to”s?) of the individual again.

Memepool has an interesting top story today about Tensegrity. I’m been fascinated by Tensegrity ever since I went to an exhibition of Buckminster Fulller’s work at London’s design museum. Tensegrity derives from the confluence of two words – Tension and Integrity – and can be used to create structures with integrity using tension. There’s a really cool toy that you can get hold of called a Tensegritoy. I’ve got one which I play around with when I’m at the cottage in Scotland. Cool. If you’re into toys, that is.

Listening to both Radio 5 and Radio 4 this morning, and hearing the panic-laden coverage of the latest “terrrorist warning” (issued by Tony Blair, Tom Ridge and whoever else), it really struck me how Al Qaeda are using our media-obsessed society to great effect. Blair can talk intelligently about the dilemna he has between alarming on the one hand and warning of possible threats on the other, but it’s pretty much a dead cert that the media will pick up on the alarm message and thrash it for all it’s worth. After all, isn’t that what we the punters want? Well, not this punter actually. I’d rather have terrorist warnings read out like weather forecasts, rationally and simply at the end of news broadcasts. After all, the likelihood is that we’re going to have to live with these threats for 10-20 years minimum, so why not just treat them like what they are – kind of storm warnings – and forget all the doom-and-gloom trappings round the side. Let’s not give the terrorists the disproportionate, fear-inducing coverage that they seek.

I read a really good review of Roger Scruton’s new book over the weekend – “The West and the rest (Globalisation and the terrorist threat)” – in which Scruton is quoted as saying “If all that Western Civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilisation bent on it’s own destruction. Moreover, freedom flaunted in the face of religious prohibitions is an act of aggression, inviting retribution from those whose piety it offends.” As the reviewer (Bryan Appleyard) points out, the emergence of the new global terror threat “has happened at the moment that the West has decided to reject it’s own culture. As a result, disaffected Islamic youth is confronted with the spectacle of Western wealth and power combined with abject Western decadence, a state of affairs that is ‘bound to provoke, in those who envy the one and despise the other, a seethig desire to punish’.” Soberingly, Appleyard points out that “Americans don’t want to be free to be anything, they want to be free to be Americans with all that that implies.”

Another article, which was in the TLS but I can’t find now, talked of the difference between free and fair trade. The general attitude of the West (and most obviously seen in aggressive American capitalism) is that “we should have the right to sell you our goods anywhere in the world, in return for which we’ll buy raw materials from you.” Unfortunately that kind of “free trade” perpetuates massive inequality and only exacerbates the “seething desire to punish” mentioned above.