The Three Dimensions of Freedom

by Billy Bragg

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. Liberty

  2. Equality

  3. Accountability

  References

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

  —Donald Trump

  If one meets a powerful person, ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’

  —Tony Benn

  Introduction

  Human beings have never had so much power. Technology has delivered into our hands the ability to talk across continents and see our contact as we do it, to summon myriad points of information at the touch of a screen. It has given us a platform from which to broadcast our opinions. The promise that the world can be tailored to your demands – providing you’re happy to surrender your personal details and preferences – is the new social contract.

  Freedom has been repackaged as the right to choose, but genuine choice – in housing, in the workplace, at the ballot box – is hard to come by. While capitalism has delivered a surfeit of connectivity, the past decades have seen a diminution of the individual’s ability to exercise control over their economic situation. This lack of agency has led to the wave of populist anger that is spreading across Western democracies. Voters who could once be relied upon to support moderate policies are fired up with the notion of ‘taking back control’.

  When progress is swift, the changes unleashed can be destructive as well as emancipatory. ‘Disruption’ may be a buzzword for tech start-ups, but for those in low-paid work it has a more threatening implication. While technology has liberated debate, taking the national conversation out of the hands of gatekeepers, it has also encouraged polarisation.

  Our liberty to express ourselves on social media 24/7 has given us a perception of freedom, but if we hope to escape from the partisan climate in which belligerence is never far from the surface, we must first recognise that liberty provides a one-dimensional notion of freedom.

  The ability to say whatever you think, to whomever you want, whenever you choose, without any regard for truth or accountability does not guarantee that an individual is free. If it did, Donald Trump would be freedom’s shining paragon. While many may use the terms interchangeably, the president’s Twitter feed is a daily reminder that liberty and freedom are not the same thing.

  Liberty is cherished because it empowers us to think, speak and act as we wish, providing the foundation of freedom. However, further dimensions are required to secure that right for the many and to protect it from the powerful. If your liberty is to be more than just a form of privilege, you must recognise and uphold the right of everyone else to think, speak and act as they wish. Without equal respect for the rights of others, liberty becomes nothing more than licence.

  Equality provides a second dimension to freedom by requiring the individual to reciprocate the rights that they claim for themselves.

  However, just as free speech alone is not sufficient to define freedom, neither does equality guarantee that an individual has agency over their situation. History has shown that emancipation can be followed by circumstances that declare communities to be equal but separate, the newly liberated falling victim to a campaign of deliberate marginalisation.

  If we are to be truly free, then liberty and equality need to be enhanced by the addition of a third dimension: accountability. Whereas liberty empowers the individual and equality requires reciprocity, accountability combines both characteristics to create an environment in which freedom is no longer divorced from responsibility.

  This third dimension is crucial if we are seeking to engender agency. Liberty gives freedom its focus, equality its scope, but accountability gives freedom its teeth. Morality, having proved an inadequate means of curbing avaricious bankers and dishonest presidents, no longer has the capacity to protect the weak from the strong. Shame has ceased to sting the powerful. Accountability provides us with a fulcrum with which to recalibrate the balance of power.

  Over the past five decades, the globalisation of the world economy has weakened the power of regulatory democracy. As a result, immense wealth has been showered on those individuals working in the financial sector, while many in the real economy have faced inequality and exclusion.

  Corporations have captured the democratic process, making it increasingly difficult for citizens to vote for reforms that will make the economy work for everyone. Electoral systems deliver results that do not reflect the popular vote; gerrymandering favours incumbent parties; big money twists opinion. And as artificial intelligence plays a greater role in our lives, decisions made by algorithms are raising the question of where accountability lies in the digital sphere.

  People are angry. Neoliberalism has proved unable to deliver the standard of living their parents enjoyed in the post-war years: the security of a decent wage; a job for life; an affordable home; and the sense of a bright future. Is it any surprise that, when offered more of the same free market solutions, voters opt for a guy who simply promises to make things great again?

  Authoritarianism is on the rise. Demagogues deploy the term ‘fake news’ to both create division and deflect criticism. In the febrile atmosphere that infects so much online discourse, opinion trumps fact and truth is little more than your perspective on any given day. As a result, freedom has become untethered from its function as a universal principle that protects the individual, and is instead claimed as a fig leaf by those seeking licence to dissemble and abuse.

  The key to tackling these problems is accountability: firstly, as a means of restoring agency to the individual; secondly, as the antidote to the power of authoritarians and algorithms.

  We live in an age of rage. People feel their voices are ignored by distant elites no longer willing to answer for their actions. This hasn’t happened by accident. It is the culmination of a decades-long rearguard action to neuter democracy and marginalise those demanding the three dimensions of freedom: liberty, equality and accountability.

  1. LIBERTY

  I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.

  —Tony Blair

  What do life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have in common? The obvious answer is that they are all identified as inalienable rights in the United States Declaration of Independence. Yet it is also true that, despite being universally understood concepts, there is no single definition for what constitutes the condition of any one of them. Even more ironic, then, that the Founding Fathers yoked these ideas together as a means of evoking another notion for which we have never had a good definition: freedom.

  To the ancient Greeks, freedom meant escape from bondage; in the twentieth century, it was expressed through the right to vote; today, it is sold to us as the pleasure of driving a new-model car at high speed on a winding mountain road. Time has expanded its scope, as each new generation struggles against the axioms of its elders to establish an idea of being free that reflects its own values.

  At its most benign, freedom evokes emancipation; at its most dangerous, impunity. For freedom has myriad manifestations, each reliant on circumstance and perspective. In our attempts to capture the most perfect sense of being free, we are apt to use the metaphor ‘as free as a bird’, yet the freedom of the bird to feed is incompatible with that of the farmer to grow crops.

  The common thread that runs through these competing notions of freedom is the human desire for agency.
For much of history, agency was a manifestation of wealth. The contested liberties of first kings and courtiers, then Lords and Commons, led to the development of pluralist democracy, offering a degree of collective agency to all levels of society. For all its frustrations and failings, the democratic model offers us a paradigm of freedom to which many subscribe.

  However, democracy’s relationship to agency is paradoxical. It evolved both to enhance the right of the individual to control their own destiny and to place limits upon their ability to control that of others. The key to a cohesive society is the balance between agency and compulsion, and a consensus about where that balance lies.

  Over the past four decades, economic developments have made such a consensus much harder to achieve. Since the end of the Cold War, the ideology of neoliberalism – a belief that the free market is the best mechanism for distributing resources around society – has come to dominate Western polity. Governments of both left and right have accepted the neoliberal agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, privatisation and hostility to unions.

  Neoliberalism is the engine of globalisation, the creation of a single marketplace that recognises neither the borders nor the sovereignty of nations in its pursuit of profit. The ability of goods and services to move between countries without hindrance has lowered prices for the consumer. However, globalisation has also facilitated the movement of jobs, profits and people between states and continents, allowing corporations to circumvent government jurisdiction.

  As a result, the individual has little control over their predicament. The power of the unions to bargain for wages and conditions is restricted; the provision of free health care, affordable housing and decent education has been undermined by the profit motive; and the neoliberal determination to both cut taxes and balance the books has led to the imposition of austerity.

  The ability of democracy to reverse the policies that led to this situation is everywhere trumped by the power of the markets. Having traded their sovereignty for the abundance promised by globalisation, governments of all stripes have little choice but to bend to the neoliberal agenda. Since the financial crash of 2008, people have been desperate for change, yet the system just offers more of the same.

  This lack of agency has led to a wave of anger. In an attempt to regain some control over their lives, voters have turned to populist politicians who promise to stem the tide of globalisation by reinforcing national identity.

  Yet look beyond the rhetoric of populist leaders and you’ll find that they have no intention of challenging the neoliberal agenda. Instead, by reasserting the sovereignty of the nation state, they aim to make globalisation work on their own terms. For all that they seek to overturn the distant elite, they remain determined to keep intact the system that created it.

  If their hollow promise of taking back control is not to undermine their support, the populists need to provide some sense of agency to those for whom the pace of modernity has delivered little but economic insecurity. In the early 1990s, the term ‘culture war’ entered the vocabulary of politics, denoting a polarisation between those who hold traditional values and their fellow citizens who express progressive views.

  Many living outside of the major cities in Western democracies feel banished to the periphery of culture, their concerns no longer reflected in mainstream society. While they may not be on the breadline, they are concerned for their status in a swiftly changing world. As a result, their insecurities become less tangible – they worry about patriotism, gender roles, ethnicity, inclusivity. These issues become the front lines in the culture war.

  Supporters of corporate power will always be happy to champion cultural supremacy over economic security because it doesn’t cost them anything, keeps workers divided, and makes free market cheerleaders in the commentariat sound as if they’re on the side of the average joe. Citizens who no longer feel their voices are being heard are encouraged to believe that their vocal resistance to small increments of social change is proof of their agency.

  Superficially, the notion of a culture war seems trivialised into arguments about whether or not Christians are allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas’ rather than the more inclusive ‘Happy Holidays’. While this may not be an issue of substance to the disinterested observer, the loudly expressed taking of offence over trivial matters is a key aspect of the campaign against political correctness. The inversion of virtue signalling, it is a performative prejudice that relies on inflating the meaning of minor incidents out of all proportion to their actual significance.

  For those unable to control the economic changes that are making their lives more insecure, a culture war provides an outlet for their rage. And for the politicians who exploit it, the campaign against political correctness ensures that rage is discharged against minorities rather than at the system that oppresses them.

  When, during the first Republican Party presidential debate in 2015, Donald Trump was challenged over disrespectful comments he had made about women, he brushed aside the question with a declaration of cultural warfare. ‘I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.’

  Trump’s ability to dismiss charges of impropriety with ease – and to shrug off all criticism for doing so – sent a message to everyone who felt that the advancement of women, people of colour and the young had been at their personal cost, and who was sick of being told that they had to be polite about it.

  Resistance to being coerced into accepting cultural change became the rallying cry of Trump’s campaign. Where other politicians took a dog-whistle approach to hot-button issues like race, gender, immigration and climate change, Trump used a bullhorn to dismiss his enemies, humiliate progressives and open old wounds in American society. The blows he landed were below the belt, but his crowd loved the spectacle. It was raucous, transgressive fun, mostly at the expense of the coastal elites. And, after years of being looked down upon by mainstream culture, it felt like winning.

  The people who put Trump into the White House are not losers, but they do feel under threat – from many of the things that he attacked in his campaign. But does that which he declared to be the biggest threat of all – political correctness – really exist? After all, it has no ideology, nor philosophical doctrine setting out its aims. No political party promises to implement it and no one marches in protest waving banners demanding it.

  Although political correctness seems very real to those citizens who are troubled by it, it is largely a projection of their own powerlessness. Like the monster lurking under the bed when Mummy turns out the light, political correctness is the sum of their insecurities. If we hope to challenge this knee-jerk hostility to progressive ideas, we first need to understand where those insecurities come from.

  In 1960, the economic theorist Friedrich Hayek published The Constitution of Liberty, in which he argued that the greatest threat to freedom was the regulation of markets. Its opening line reads: ‘We are concerned in this book with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society.’ For Hayek, the expectation that each individual should contribute to the collective provision of social services according to their means was a form of coercion.

  Born in Vienna in 1889, Hayek came to Britain in 1931 to teach at the London School of Economics. He was a supporter of the Austrian School of economic thought, which held that no action should be taken during times of economic crisis to prevent the collapse of companies no longer able to sustain their viability. Hayek saw freedom as an expression of the personal desires of individuals, as manifested by the workings of the market. Agency was achieved by the prices they accepted in their choices as consumers and sellers.

  Seemingly unconcerned about the accumulation of wealth, Hayek focused his criticism on government efforts to tackle inequality through the redistribution of resou
rces. His ideas had a huge influence on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, providing the philosophy that underpins neoliberalism. While at the LSE, Hayek was a colleague of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of his day, whose theories were challenging the wisdom of the market that had held sway since the eighteenth century.

  As a system driven by competition, the free market has no need of equality and, in place of accountability, it relies on an invisible hand. That was the metaphor used by Adam Smith to describe the way in which unintended economic benefits could arise from the self-interested decisions of individuals acting freely within a market. Smith articulated this theory in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, which provides the theological basis for those who believe that the free market offers the best method for distributing resources within society. If left to regulate itself, they argue, the market will naturally find an equilibrium which delivers benefits to all.

  However, Adam Smith was a moralist as well as an economist. In his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he warned against the dangers of untrammelled self-interest. Competition, rather than freedom from regulation, is the crucial element that makes the invisible hand function and, as Smith realised, wherever there is competition, there need to be rules and referees to ensure that cheats do not prosper at the expense of others.

  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, economists were made painfully aware that the free market economy had no automatic mechanism for recovery. The invisible hand had failed. In response to the economic crisis, John Maynard Keynes argued that, as consumers drove growth in the modern economy, governments needed to borrow during times of financial insecurity in order to fund the construction of public works. Such projects would put money in the pockets of ordinary workers, who would in turn spend their wages in the real economy, restoring confidence.