Freedom, tolerance, and fairness

Image from here.

The political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously identified two very different ways that people talk about freedom: for some people, “freedom” is the freedom from being told what to do; for others, “freedom” is the freedom to do things. Thus, for example, joining a union restricts your freedom from rules (you have to pay dues and go on strike if the union says) but increases your freedom to get better wages and working conditions.  

For a long
time, I thought Berlin was right, and I used his categories. But, having spent
an equally long time (perhaps too long) crawling around the digital world
arguing with assholes, I don’t think his division is right. I think, actually,
that everyone uses the term “freedom” to mean the same thing.

Cicero, the
brilliant Roman orator, said that if you have a controversial thesis, you
should delay it, and so I will.

Let’s start with an old argument: from about 1644 to 1652, John Cotton (a 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony minister) and Roger Williams (generally considered the founder of the Baptist Church) got into a nasty and wordy argument about many things, but especially whether Williams’ eviction from the Massachusetts Bay Colony was just.

I happen to
have read the whole long exchange, and what struck me as interesting is that
they agreed on the stasis.

In rhetoric,
it’s generally agreed that a good disagreement has people agreed on the stasis—the
hinge of the argument. A good door has a hinge that connects it to the wall. If
there is no hinge, then either there is no door, or the door just falls in.
Most really bad disagreements are the consequence of not agreeing on the
stasis. If you snoop and find that your partner is cheating on you, you will want
the stasis to be their infidelity, but they will want the stasis to be which of
you is the better person, and, they will then try to make the issue your
snooping. (In rhetoric, this is called deflection.)

But Williams
and Cotton agreed on the stasis: they agreed that a good government allows
freedom of conscience. Williams argued that his freedom of conscience had been
violated because he hadn’t been allowed to have the religious beliefs and
practice his conscience told him were right.  

Cotton agreed that “freedom of conscience” meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you was right, but, he insisted that Williams must have violated his conscience since he did something that Cotton thought was wrong. In other words, as Cotton said, “freedom of conscience” is the right to do what’s right. By that, he meant the freedom to do what he thought was right. Cotton believed that every action is either right or wrong, and that the right course of action and the right set of beliefs (his) is obvious to everyone. Thus, he said, Williams wasn’t just wrong, but knew he was wrong—there is, Cotton said (and sincerely believed) no real disagreement on issues of religion. This is one instance of what is called naïve realism.

Naïve realism
is the belief that the truth is obvious to everyone of good will, that if you
want to know if something is true, you just ask yourself if you’re really
perceiving things correctly. It’s the notion that perception is accurate, and
that bad judgment happens because you then deliberately distort those
perceptions to justify actions you kind of always know are wrong, or because
you’re blinded by your commitment to a group. This is all false. That isn’t how
perception works at all, but let’s leave that aside and go back to Cotton and
Williams.

Cotton’s
notion about how people perceive things—that everyone really has the same
beliefs  he does, but they deny them,
that he is the person whose beliefs are entirely right (his epistemology)—was what
made his political stance (banishing Williams) seem not just reasonable, but a
way of honoring the principle of freedom of conscience. Cotton believed
everyone should be free to be just like him, and he should be free to force
them to do so.

Cotton said that
freedom of conscience meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you to
do. And he sincerely believed that your conscience told you that you should do
what he thought you should do. Because, of course, he sincerely believed he was
right, and he couldn’t imagine that, given how certain he was about his being
right, that anyone really believed anything different, let alone that he might
be wrong. Cotton confused that sense of certainty with an unmediated perception
of reality. A lot of people do. The problem with Cotton wasn’t what he
believed, but what he believed about his beliefs.

That’s a weird
sentence, but it’s everything about democracy. Democracy thrives not when
people believe the same things, but when we know other people really believe
other things, and we want them treated as we would like to be treated. Cotton didn’t
really think anyone disagreed with him. Cotton believed that freedom meant the
freedom for him to force others to do what he thought was right because he
believed everyone really knew he was right. Our problem now is that our
political world is filled with John Cottons.

Williams
recognized that Cotton was sincere in his beliefs, and believed that Cotton was
wrong, and that’s why the founder of the Baptists believed in the separation of
church and state. Williams believed that people sincerely disagree. Williams
believed that freedom meant the freedom to disagree with him.

I think the notion
that our always deep, rich, and entangled pluralistic political world can be
put into a binary of left v. right or a continuum is like saying that all motorized
vehicles are either trucks or compacts, all pets are Siamese cats or Labradoodles,
all fonts are comic sans or Calibri. Taking those false binaries and making
them a continuum doesn’t make them more nuanced; it just reinforces the
stupidity.

So, I’m not
making a claim about both sides being flawed (a claim often made by the person
who watches the trolley and hopes someone else makes a decision).

I’m making
this claim: our political discourse has a very consistent use of the word “freedom”.
and it’s the one Cotton used: “freedom” is the ability to do whatever you think
is right, and the freedom to force everyone else to behave as you think they
should.

Freedom and tolerance
are both claims that come from our own perspective, our own sense (our Cotton sense)
that our position is the position of truth. Williams wasn’t a relativist; he
believed in truth. But he tried to work toward a world of fairness, a world in
which we value disagreement.

We need to
stop talking about “freedom” (or “tolerance” which is similarly vexed), not
because those are bad values, but because the way we’ve been using that term is
so muddled and entangled with in-group favoritism that we just need to walk
away from the terms for a while.

Instead, we
need to talk about fairness. We’ve got a good source in that Jesus (a prophet
for Muslims), and so many ethical systems say that ethical behavior means
reasoning past in-group preference.

“Fairness”
does not mean being equally critical of “both sides” because the wonderful
world of our policy options is neither a binary nor a continuum.

We are in a
world of demagoguery, a world in which every issue is falsely framed as a
zero-sum contest between us and them, a world in which we are free to do what’s
right or they restrict our freedom.

What that
really means is that we are in a very nasty moment when “freedom” means the
freedom to force everyone else to do what we know to be right. That’s what
Cotton sincerely believed. That’s also what Stalin sincerely believed. That’s
what a lot of people believed who turned out to be totally wrong.

Freedom
shouldn’t be seen as the right to be seen as right, but the freedom for all
groups to be held to the same standards to which we hold ourselves. Freedom is
only freedom if it’s grounded in fairness of standards, not niceness, and not
in a binary.

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