Abstract
Philosopher
Choosing what to eat from a menu is hardly the highest expression of human freedom. Yet the restaurant Ognisko, in the affluent Kensington district of London, has a special role in Europe’s history of political liberty. It is part of the Polish Hearth Club, founded in 1940 as a centre for Poles exiled from their home country after the Nazi invasion. It continued this role throughout the Cold War and now remains a centre for the capital’s Polish community.
It was, therefore, a fitting venue for a discussion with a group of people who have all experienced a lack of political freedom. But it would not be at all suitable for most Anglophone philosophers who ponder freedom of the will, for whom that issue is entirely distinct. Political freedom concerns the structures of society that prevent us from, or enable us to, believe what we want, say what we want and do what we want. Free will is the capacity all humans may or may not have to make such choices freely in the first place. If, for example, you think that all our choices are determined by our genes, then you may conclude no one has free will, whether they live in North Korea or South Dakota.
It would seem therefore that political freedom and free will (“metaphysical freedom”) are just two different things, and that one sheds no light on the other. I’m not convinced this rigid separation is right, however, and my Polish lunch was an attempt to dig a little deeper and discover what, if anything, the insights of those who have experienced deprivations of political liberty could contribute to our understanding of free will.
Around the table were Andrei Aliaksandrau, a journalist from Belarus, which, as he says, is “known as the last true dictatorship in Europe”; the journalist Ismail Einashe, the son of a Somali anti-government activist during the time of his country’s dictatorship, who came as a refugee to Britain when he was ten years old; Rahela Sidiqi, a women’s and human rights’ activist who lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban; and Ma Jian, a Chinese novelist whose books have been banned in his home country. All are now based in Britain.
Listening to their stories, it seems to me that they all concern ways in which the structures of society erect obstacles to the exercise of free will. For instance, Sidiqi believes that we are here in this world to help humanity. But “God never puts you in chains if you don’t do it. He leaves it to yourself.’’ Her political ideal is that “human beings would be free in [a] way that God has created us,” and that certainly wasn’t the case in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Aliaksandrau also talks of restrictions on freedom in terms of blocks. Alexander Lukashenko has been president of Belarus for twenty years, and although his regime is not as brutal as some dictatorships, people have been kidnapped and killed, and there are political prisoners. “All political rights are quite restricted,” says Aliaksandrau. “Journalists and social activists are blocked from fulfilling their duties, working freely and speaking freely.’’
ABOVE: Cartoon of Jean-Paul Satre, French philosopher and free will theorist
Credit: Mary Evans/Jeffrey Morgan Collection/Reuters
This illustrates the most straightforward link between political and metaphysical freedom: free will involves the capacity to do certain things by our own volition, and the right political structures need to be in place in order for you to express those capacities. Political freedom is thus the external condition of fully expressing an internal capacity we all have.
However, if you push this idea a little further, I think you can see how those internal capacities are not just there, whether we are able to express them or not. Political structures can actually affect how much free will we have, since it is deeply tied up with our natures as social beings, embedded in particular cultures and times.
Free will involves the capacity to do certain things by our own volition, and the right political structures need to be in place in order for you to express those capacities
Take, for instance, the capacity to make political choices, expressed most obviously at the ballot box. “Back in 2010 when I was in Somaliland for the general election,” says Einashe, “a lot of people were queuing up the in villages, going to vote. You could say they were exercising their freedom there, but the majority of them were illiterate, so were they making an informed choice? If you don’t have equality and education, how can they possibly be informed? If people don’t have the education and the economic means, how can they ultimately determine things for themselves?” Similarly, Sadiqi believes that when women in rural Afghanistan choose to cover their faces they are not usually acting under a condition of freedom, because the alternative is not a “live” option in their communities. A person who is more informed and educated has more capacity to make choices for herself, and therefore has a more developed free will.
This idea of free will as being a matter of degree challenges the usual assumption that it is a capacity we do or do not have. Unlike say, cats, humans can not only do what they want, they can ponder their own wants, question their own preferences. But we can’t all do this to the same extent. If we have no access to education and rely on information passed on to us by those with more power, we do not have as much of this freedom as we might. So there is a sense here in which an absence of political freedom can limit our freedom of thought, deliberation and choice. The political limits the personal, and the public conditions the private.
The other side of this coin is that even if the political structures of society allow you to exercise your capacities of free will, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will. That’s why the table gave a collective sigh and a nod when I asked whether they thought people in Britain did not take full advantage of their opportunities to exercise their freedom. “They were born into democracy, they never had to fight for it, and they take it for granted and they just don’t value anything that is given to them for free which they don’t pay personally for,” says Aliaksandrau.
Jean-Paul Sartre made an even stronger claim when he wrote that the French were “never more free than during the German occupation”. How could this be so? “Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts,” he argued, “every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles.”
For those in our lunch party, this was putting it too strongly. “I don’t believe you become freer when you’re oppressed,” said Ma Jian. “Look at North Korea. When you say I don’t have the freedom to go back to China, you cannot invert that and say I have the freedom not to go to China.”
Aliaksandrau also takes issue with Sartre. “You don’t become freer when you are oppressed but you start really appreciating freedoms when they’re under threat or when you actually lose them. The declaration of human rights was adopted after the Second World War when the whole of humanity saw what it is like when you don’t have freedom and you don’t have rights and people were terrified with what happened. Unfortunately, human beings need tragedy to start thinking.”
I agree that Sartre is somewhat hyperbolic in his claim. But he is on to something, namely that to be truly free as a human being requires more than the absence of constraint. You have to use your own capacity to make choices, and accept responsibility for your own decisions. In that sense, it is indeed possible to become more acutely aware that you do have fundamental choices to make when restrictions are placed on them, and you can let your free will muscle entropy when things become easy.
But there is nothing about living under oppression which automatically makes one more aware of one’s freedom. People can take oppression as much for granted as they do freedom. “It’s like the rules of the game,” says Aliaksandrau. “It’s so naturally a part of your life that you can just go on with it.”
Where Sartre goes most fundamentally wrong is in thinking that real free will is in a sense entirely a matter of attitude, distinct from the situation in the world. Rather than separating political and metaphysical freedom, however, I think we should see true freedom as requiring both. The most free person both fully utilises his or her own capacities of choice and deliberation, and is not excessively constrained by society. When either of these conditions is absent, our freedom is diminished; if neither are fulfilled, we have none at all.
Ma Jian sees society sapping individuals’ free will when he looks at the work of writers who have remained in China and have, in sometimes subtle ways, altered their writing as a result. “I would become like them if I went back. That would be terrible.” This highlights one of the most sinister aspects of totalitarian societies: their capacities to mould our ways of thinking in ways we are not even aware of. “It’s like a shadow, like brainwashing, you don’t even see it,” he says.
They were born into democracy, they never had to fight for it, and they take it for granted.
There is another aspect of received opinion about free will that our discussion challenged. Paradigmatic examples of free will in the philosophical literature often centre around simple choices. You opt for barszcz, the famous beetroot soup, but you could have picked trzaski, crispy pork crackling, instead. The emphasis here is on the ability to do other than what you actually do. “Could have done otherwise” is pretty much the definition of a free choice.
And yet when you look at standing up for political freedom, it more often looks like a case of could not have done otherwise. Sidiqi, for example, stands up for women’s rights. But surely she does not feel that rejecting them is an option and she agrees there is a sense in which she feels she must stick by them. Similarly, Aliaksandrau says “For me, when we talk about political freedoms, it’s not even a choice, it’s the only natural thing. I can’t think, shall I go to thinking that freedom of expression is very bad? No! It’s not even an option.” The most meaningful choices are often the ones that we feel we must make, in order to retain our integrity. Free choices can thus be in one way compelled.
Freedom is not the ability to just choose anything. To be free is to able express one’s fundamental values, to live according to the identity one has. And yet these values and these identities are not things we choose in any straightforward way. “If I’m honest,” says Einashe, “most of my life has been spent living a life defined by culture and by faith that I didn’t choose.” Of course these things do not set our identities and values in stone. “Much of my own personal struggle has been choosing myself to have the choice to say that I could be secular, I could be humanist, I could be liberal,” he says. But such struggles do not start from a clean slate. We make our choices from within situations that we did not choose, asserting values we acquired and which we often feel force themselves upon us. “We cannot segregate free will from the wider context of the influence of others and the environment,” as Sadiqi put it.
Aliaksandrau summed it up well. “Pure free will does not exist because of all the influences we get throughout life, even because we’re born in this particular country, in this particular century, with these particular parents. There are things that we’re not really choosing.”
Indeed, it is because being able to express one’s unchosen identity is such an important freedom that the inability to live or work in your country of origin can be so painful. “In exile, free will cannot exist,” says Ma Jian. “Free will is impossible when one is denied the freedom to return to one’s homeland.” When your passport is taken, something of you is taken too. You are not complete, and cannot express yourself fully. “Being a national of a country or being part of a nation is such a part of your identity that living in exile restricts your identity in some way,” as Aliaksandrau puts it.
Our conversation bolstered my conviction that political and metaphysical freedom are parts of the same whole, not distinct capacities. If that’s right, then it also supports the view that free will is not something either present or absent, but something we have in degrees. You build your freedom step by step, and you may overcome one barrier to freedom – political, social, economic, educational, psychological, historical – only to encounter another one. As Aliaksandrau put it, “It’s not a state, it’s a process.”