Erroneously Informed, Unnecessarily Dead
I have a hard time resisting bookstore employee suggestions. Thank you, Heather of Bolen Books.
On Freedom is Timothy Snyder’s (On Tyranny) meditation on the nature of people, especially Americans, and the meaning of freedom. Historian Snyder argues that freedom is a concept in need of rescuing from “overuse and abuse.” Americans, he says, have erroneously come to imagine that freedom means no more than a lack of barriers. It ought to mean more, and he sets out to tell us how.
I badly needed a way to think of the news cycle without screaming, and oddly, this book helped. Here are the dimensions Snyder opens up through personal narrative, conversations, and his reflections on the work of thinkers both historical and contemporary.
Sovereignty: The chapter begins with the German philosopher Edith Stein, who volunteered as a nurse during the First World War, and with her concept of body, or Lieb, a deeper, more humane word than the other German word for body, which is Körper.
Hitler took a view of the human body utterly opposed to Stein's. In Mein Kampf, he wrote of Fremdkörper, “foreign bodies,” infecting the Volkskörper, the German racial organism.
“ In our lives social media reduce our vocabulary (and thus our references) at terrifying speed. Colonized on our couches, we accept a pidgin of English.”
The headlines today are drenched with the treatment of human beings as Körper, a valueless physical body, rather than Lieb. Snyder returns to this distinction often throughout the book. It’s a brilliant way to characterize the workings of laws and policies but also the attitudes and actions of corporations, governments—and us.
Unpredictability. I was a little thrown by this one, but I was trusting the writer by this time and when he invoked George Orwell, I knew I’d hang on for the ride:
George Orwell saw vocabulary as enabling what we are calling sovereignty and unpredictability. The plurality of virtues is real, but in his novel 1984, people lack the words to name them. People are unfree not simply because their bodies are always observed but because their language is famished. In 1984, the reduction of the number of English words is a cumbersome affair, drudge work carried out by people in offices. In our lives social media reduce our vocabulary (and thus our references) at terrifying speed. Colonized on our couches, we accept a pidgin of English.
I’m reminded of Landmarks and The Lost Words, both by Robert Macfarlane.
Mobility, where the state isn’t constantly demanding that you have the right papers to travel or move—or remain free. Consider this account of Subu, a South Asian man who spent four decades in prison, only to be found innocent. Then, instead of being released to his family, he’s deemed deportable to India, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was 9 months old. Here is the government treating a human being like an object that it can move around at will. No longer incarcerated, Subu is yet hardly free.
Factuality: Imagine being able to assume that the people in charge mean to tell you the truth. Imagine a country with a mutual societal acceptance of what is true. Snyder lays it all out, the space we exist in if we are American citizens. Negative freedom, he says, is “enmeshed in lying.”
When I returned to the United States in 2014 after a year away, I was struck (as were my Ukrainian and Russian friends) by how well Russian social media function in American politics. That Americans have been fooled by Russia about Ukraine was bad enough. But in 2015 and 2016 Americans were fooled by Russians about other Americans. In 2016 the oligarchical American presidential candidate won, with Russian assistance.
Donald Trump, Putin's submissive client, is a hero of negative freedom, wealthy through undertaxed inheritance and comfortable denying everything.
Solidarity. The relentless ambition of the individual isn’t going to lead to this better future but people have a countervailing superpower, and that’s solidarity with others. We employ it all the time. Our young only become sovereign and have agency because we care for them. The opposite of solidarity is escapism, fleeing with your pockets full or using your wealth to pursue dreams of settling on Mars or finding immortality.
Elon Musk dreams of space while his company promotes lies about global warming, thereby weakening support for the technologies we would need for space travel. Fossil oligarchs summon climate extinction while preparing exits for themselves.
As for what happens when solidarity is ignored:
To be sure, life is good and life in liberty is better. Everyone has a right to life, though, not just the very wealthy. In the 21st century the life expectancy of Americans has decreased relative to that of other prosperous countries. Men in the United States can expect lives that are eight years shorter than those of Japanese men. Eight years is a long time to be unnecessarily dead.
I loved the wide reach of this book, its mingling of personal with political, of history with the urgent, demanding present. Even in the midst of pondering this scream-worthy world we’ve made, it helps to see a well-turned phrase driving its point home.
