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| Image credit. Continued from The Place of Liberty among Other Values (1) - Politics Is Ordering Human Relationships |
The Span of Freedom I
In order to define the range spanned by freedom, i.e. the continuum between the least degree of freedom and her largest extension in human society, it is useful to discern between anthropocentric and sociogenic freedom.
Anthropocentric Freedom
Every human being has at least a limited ability to act in ways that are willed by him or her. The result are acts manifesting personal autonomy. Even a baby can do things its mother disapproves of, say, groping for a hot plate. A child is able to act out her intentions in defiance of her parents commands and prohibitions, jumping into a puddle, as I once did, protesting against not being bought the first TV set I had ever seen. Even a prisoner, handcuffed and on his way to the gallows, may decide to spit his jailor in the face.
Anthropocentric freedom designates the need and ability of every human being to take autonomous decisions and translate them into action, intended and endorsed by himself. Anthropocentric freedom may be very limited, as in a human baby or a prisoner or a highly disabled person, but it is present in the comportment of every human being. Also, anthropocentric freedom may give rise to detrimental and anti-social effects, as in the behaviour of a powerful bully.
Since anthropocentric freedom is always present in a human community, the span of freedom never reaches the point of a total absence of freedom.
At any rate, man is capable of autonomous action in considerably larger measure than
any other animal. This makes him an agent seeking to expand liberty. In
this propensity, man may subdue, oppress, and enslave other human
beings - and actually has done so for the longest period in human
history.
Sociogenic Freedom
Then there is a quantum leap. The age of sociogenic liberty sees an
entirely new form of human culture. Liberty is no longer chiefly a
matter of personal inclination, skill and luck; it is now the result of
the manner in which we all generally relate to one another by heeding certain rules and refraining from certain forms of conduct. Liberty becomes a social convention or set of practices, a network of rules that are being generally observed. Liberty advances from being a highly restricted personal option to being a social tool liberating (vast numbers of) an entire population.
The Span of Freedom II
The scope for anthropocentric freedom widens with the spread of sociogenic freedom, or in other words: personal freedom increases in a social framework designed to promote and defend unprecedented leeway for acts of personal autonomy. While greatly augmenting personal freedom, sociogenic freedom necessarily caps the extension of freedom.
In fact, due to sociogenic liberty there can never be
total freedom. Put differently, total freedom is conceptually impossible
- in a free society people are free to disagree, and disagree they
will. Not only will people have different ideas of freedom, there will
be people who challenge and violate what others may unanimously regard
as representing freedom.
Freedom is an ongoing process of finding out and enforcing and challenging and re-establishing what freedom means.
So, in an order of sociogenic freedom people will enforce checks on the widening of their personal freedom beyond certain tolerance levels and occasions for socially "unpoliced" individual discretion.
On the continuum of freedom there is a middle stretch, far away from "no freedom" and far away from "total freedom."
It is the range, within which robust (not all conceivable nor all
desirable) criteria of liberty are being fulfilled, so that we have an
open access society (civil society), which in turn is characterised by
considerable independence of individuals and their (private)
organisations from arbitrary transgression by other citizens and
especially by specialists in violence and governance.
Understanding the span of freedom is necessary in order to appreciate that freedom is best thought of as being nested within other values and conditions. In the face of this insight, it is compelling to ask what exactly is the place of freedom among other values. Is she the highest value? If so, in what sense? Or is she subordinate or on a par with other values? And so on.
Order with and without Freedom
We can now argue that there is (social) order without sociogenic freedom, which is the type of freedom we have in mind in investigating freedom as a characteristic of modern society.
This will help us iidentify values and conditions that accompany freedom as she emerges in sociogenic form. In other words, our presumption is that freedom is likely to have to fit into some sort of order with attributes that exist prior or next to the attributes of sociogenic freedom. If so, this requires us to determine the relationship of the attributes of freedom to other, distinct attributes of the overall social order, part of which freedom becomes.
Joseph Spengler gives the outline of an order that allows us to rank freedom among other pillars of society. The Spenglerian pillars are autonomy ( = freedom), coordination ( = control), continuity, change, hierarchy and equality.
How freedom may be relating to these pillars, we shall look into in the next post: The Place of Liberty among Other Values (3) - Freedom and Order
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