How 'freedom' has been distorted: American historian Timothy Snyder
'Freedom is a state in which we can make our own choices about what is good,' says author
The concept of freedom has been distorted to make us all less free, argues Timothy Snyder.
He is the rarest of historians: a prolific author whose publications garner academic honours, and which also become bestsellers — as his 2017 book, On Tyranny, still is.
Snyder is one of three prominent Yale scholars who've publicly criticized Donald Trump and moved to teach at the University of Toronto, the other two being Marci Shore, a specialist in intellectual history (and who is married to Snyder) and philosopher Jason Stanley, who has written about fascism.
His most recent book is entitled On Freedom, and in it he draws a crucial distinction between freedom "from" and freedom "to."
Freedom "to" is active, entails community, responsibility, fidelity to reason.
Freedom "from" is now the dominant definition of freedom, a definition that he believes is undermining the very notion of freedom itself.
Timothy Snyder joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed at the Toronto Public Library to talk about why he says the concept of "freedom from" is misguided, and ultimately dangerous.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
When your book [On Freedom] was published last fall, you wrote the following words: "By no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest people in the world." That was before Donald Trump became president, and it was before he declared Liberation Day. How would you describe the state of freedom in the land of the free today?
"I first have to say something about what I mean by freedom because Americans immediately begin talking about freedom and we generally mean nothing by it, or we mean something that I think doesn't actually make sense.
"My notion of freedom is a positive one. Freedom is about flourishing, developing, becoming the kind of person that you want to be. That freedom is about affirming values in the world in the sense of believing in them, affirming them to yourself, but also affirming in the sense of making them real in the world. So freedom is a state in which we can make our own choices about what is good and have some amount of power to realize those things.
"And then freedom is also positive in the sense to become free in that way. We need other people's help. You can't become free on your own. The things that help us to become free people are legion and complex and require cooperation and generational cooperation.
"So in the passage that you cited from the book, the irony is that the Freedom House judges freedom in a pretty narrow way. It judges it in a very American way, political freedoms, civic freedoms. It's not about the welfare state or the quality of roads, or health insurance or things that I also think count towards freedom.
"And nevertheless, we scored about 50 [out of 100]. And the reason for that, in my view, is that if you want to get to negative freedom, our view of just the government staying away and people having dignity, you have to have positive freedom first rather than the other way around. So that's the thing that Americans basically tend to get wrong."
So how would you characterize the state of [the U.S.] now that you've defined freedom?
"Well, coming from that, the people who are in charge in the U.S. now, Musk and Trump, are heroes of negative freedom. They are people who tell you that freedom is about being against things. And it starts by being against the government. And this is a trap, of course, because if you think freedom is being you against the government, then you help make the government smaller, and then the government becomes so tiny it's dysfunctional. and then the government can't do the basic things it needs to do to allow you to have a free life.
"For example, make sure there's no pollution in the water, or make sure that there aren't measles outbreaks, the kinds of things that are now starting to happen in the United States. So there is actually an intellectual mistake at the beginning of Musk and Trump. The reason why Musk can say this is about efficiency, and Americans for the first six or seven weeks nod their heads and say, 'Oh yes, this might be about efficiency. We deeply believe that freedom is about making government smaller.' And so if somebody comes and says, 'I'm gonna make government smaller,' we think, 'Oh yes, that's probably acceptable in its own right."
"But if you get rid of the government, the oligarchs are still there. And they're relatively much more powerful than they were before. And that's where we're going. Trump is a hero of negative freedom, too. He says you don't need government, but then he uses government to oppress you, or he uses his government to oppress other countries. And we go for it. So obviously, we're much less free. I mean the universities are under attack. They're staging these spectacular kidnappings of people on the street to terrify the rest of us. They're sending people to a foreign gulag on the basis of tattoos that they have, including autism awareness tattoos or "I love my mother" tattoos. And people are self-censoring in a very large way. "
So can I just back up and ask you about this idea of negative freedom or freedom from? At the face of it or on the face of it, it appears to be a great thing. Freedom from oppression, freedom from danger, freedom from tyranny all seem like positive things. What's the problem with negative freedom?
"The problem is that it's question-begging because freedom – and I agree with you, it sounds good, and of course it also is good – you don't want to be oppressed, you don't want to be subject to a tyrant. But the important part of the equation is the 'you' part. So to make it really simple: barbed wire isn't bad if there are no people around it. It's just barbed wire. A wall isn't bad if it's not holding people back, right: the essential thing is the person and not the barrier."
"The problem with negative freedom is that it puts all the emotional and moral and psychological attention onto the barrier. And so you think freedom is just a matter of liberating us from this bad thing. But if you think about freedom that way, you end up being caught in a moral trap. Because if freedom is about liberating yourself from some bad thing, you've never really asked what the good thing is. You've never really asked what you are. You've never asked what it means for you to be free.
"And then if you think the bad thing's gone away, let's say you succeed in liberating yourself, all those questions are still open, and you look around for the next thing to oppose… And once you're against one thing, your next will be to be against something else. That's the problem with negative freedoms. You get caught in this loop."
I'm curious whether given all that's happened in the U.S., let's say in the last 75 or 80 days, do you still feel at home in the U.S.?
"Of course, I feel at home in the US. Of course. And I would assume that, no matter how bad things got in Canada, you would feel at home in Canada.
"At the end of On Tyranny, I try to make a distinction between patriotism and nationalism, as different ways of loving. So if you love your country, regardless of what it does, and you feel compelled to love everything the government does, you're a nationalist. But if you love your country because you want to live up to its values, then you're a patriot.
"I think of myself as a patriot. So I feel all of these things in terms of what I understand to be violations of our best selves, or eliminations of American futures that might have been. And that touches me very deeply as an American. So I don't feel alienated from the United States. I feel sad for Americans who are being hurt... and I feel very worried that the trajectory of our present government involves a self-destructiveness, in the end a destructiveness of the United States. I'm very concerned that the people who run my country don't care at all about its people, or its interests, and I care about that in a special way because I am American."
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly, with extra production help by Lisa Godfrey.
