On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Our universe is a play of matter and energy, back and forth. Life is a special form of that play. We are a special form of life, capable of freedom because we are capable of seeing our own purposes and realizing them. In the Christian Gospels (Luke 17:21), the “kingdom of God” is within us. Eighteen hundred years after Luke, Enlightenment skeptics rightly said that virtues cannot be extracted from the world around us. The world of what ought to be, the fifth dimension, has its own rules. We can make them work for us, and for the world, but first we have to understand them.

We have encountered, but not quite yet listed, five rules of the geometry of the fifth dimension. The first rule is difference: the world of what is (the first four dimensions) and what ought to be (the fifth) are distinct. They can be brought together only through us, through our bodies. The second is plurality. In the realm of what should be are many virtues, not one. The third rule is intransitivity. The various goods are good for various reasons. The virtues are not reducible to one another. They cannot be ranked. It is not that honesty is better than loyalty; they are simply different. The fourth rule is tension. We cannot just pull all the virtues from the fifth dimension into our four of time and space. In practice, the virtues compete with one another. I might like to be punctual, but I should also be patient. I might wish to be a person of integrity, but sometimes I should compromise. We might value skepticism, yet we have faith. Love is blind, but it takes discernment to know what not to see. That leads us to the fifth rule: combinability. People can bring together virtues in creative ways and sometimes create new ones.

The space between what is and what ought to be is where we roam as free people, extending the borderland of the unpredictable. We decide which values to affirm, in what combination, for what reasons, and at what time. Then we try again. With practice, we attain our own human form of grace.

We cannot wish away the rules of the fifth dimension, any more than we can wish away gravity or entropy. It is when we accept the tensions and clashes, and navigate courageously among them, that we become free people and help others to become so. Simone Weil wrote that our task was to see the clash among virtues for what it is, and to make it as easy for one another to handle as we can.

We can all find settings where learning about others will help us to understand ourselves. Support a school. Help raise a child who is not yours. Volunteer. Read aloud at a library. Coach a team.

Better than raging against the machine is reading against the machine. Search engines make you more mechanical; library shelves make you less so. Staring at screens makes you easier to handle; listening to people makes you less so.

Do not vote for a party that denies climate change. People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.

Declare yourself free. Then accommodate yourself to tender virtues and bruising facts, to friends and neighbors, to fellow citizens, but not to expectations or algorithms. Life can be much better than it seems to us now, as individuals and as citizens. We can become free.

Americans on the Left make a different mistake: they fail to acknowledge freedom as the value of values, preferring equality. Recognition of our equal dignity is, to be sure, necessary for any discussion of freedom. But equality is a beginning rather than an end. There is no tragic choice between freedom and equality. They work together. The forms of freedom, all five of them, create the conditions for less inequality in practice. Without the virtues kept alive by free people, equality loses all substance in politics. Stripping it away from freedom makes it meaningless. We can all be equally miserable, equally zombified, or equally dead.

What seems to be a permanent clash between Left and Right reveals an unspoken (and as-yet-unspeakable) American consensus: freedom is indeed the value of values, as some on the Right claim; yet to live free, we need the structures that many on the Left support.

“We the people” will be sovereign in government only when individual persons are sovereign in their lives. Only the unpredictable voter (in the unrigged district in the unmonetized election) gets the attention of the candidate. A person who is socially mobile will believe that better futures are possible and will vote for the candidate who offers one. A person who expresses solidarity will care about the votes of others; a person who cares about factuality will count the ballots. Democracy remains the best available way to address differences in value commitments.

It is impossible to base a voting system on the principle of government getting out of the way. The closure of voting booths is a sign of an ailing democracy, not a healthy one. Only positive freedom makes sense: people apply their values in the world thanks to institutions justified by their capacity to help. Freedom is positive in the sense that it arises from us; it is positive in the sense that it affirms values; and it is positive in the sense that it informs politics. All that begins with knowledge of others, which leads to knowledge of ourselves. Only by taking a hard look at our history can we see the failures in American voting and make them right. Democracy is self-correction.

Denying incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people the vote is a moral hazard, since it tempts politicians to imprison people who might vote against them.

learn from the past if we identify with it. This does not mean feeling ashamed. Pride is part of patriotism, and Americans have very good reason to be proud. It does mean listening to people who have other attitudes to the past. Only by knowing others can we build the institutions that are right for everyone. It is incongruous, in any event, to take pride without taking responsibility. Schools must teach the hard parts of American history—those censored by cowards as “divisive concepts.” People who are taught to fear “divisive concepts” cannot be sovereign, since they will lack the terms of engagement needed to learn from others. A nation built on fear of conversation will be too fragile and porous for solidarity. The toughness needed to face the past is the same toughness needed to face the future.

If we worship oligarchs who identify with oligarchs abroad, we are in trouble. Republics die from wealth inequality. At the time when the United States was established, the most notable republic was the Polish-Lithuanian one, which had existed at that point for more than two hundred years. Thanks to enormous inequality of wealth, native oligarchs and then foreign empires captured its parliament. Like the Athenians before them, the wiser Poles then realized that oligarchs in one country have more in common with oligarchs in another country than with their own people. This history is forgotten today, but for the Founders, the partition of Poland was a process unfolding before their eyes. Some of its political refugees came to fight for the American Revolution, in the hopes that a sound republic could be established here. The American struggle against Britain might well have failed without them.

What must we provide to children born in the 2020s so that they will live in a land of the free in the 2070s? Three new rights would complement Jefferson’s traditional ones: the right to vote, the right to one’s mind, and the right to health care.

We live in only one direction in time, from birth to childhood to adulthood to old age. Children need families and caretakers, and those families and caretakers need time. This can be supplied only by sound policy: maternity leave, paternity leave, predictable work scheduling, paid sick days, public childcare, and vacations. I have lived with children in countries that have these policies, which lend the gentle hint of freedom to the roughness of the everyday. Families need calm to navigate life’s passages, and thus they need public school, health care, and retirement pensions. When such institutions are in place, social mobility replaces daily fear, and a land of the free can prosper and endure.

Four out of five Americans now live in cities, and soon it will be nine out of ten. We should think not of smart cities but of enabling and empowering cities, designed to encourage movement, encounters, and protest.

American companies get a tax break for buying robots but not for training people. This should be reversed.

We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions.

To see the pain of others as confirmation of one’s own superiority is to be irresponsible—complicit in sadopopulism and tyranny.

remember that not so very long ago no one had a smartphone, and people then were freer, more intelligent, and more physically fit. Keep in mind, as well, that the people who run Silicon Valley take drastic measures to prevent their own products from making addicts of their children. They set timers to cut the power on their routers, for example, and contractually oblige babysitters not to show screens to their children. They want the best for their families. Like drug dealers, they don’t push product in their own home.

Though freedom is a quality of a single life, it is the work of generations. The bell is an object of sentiment for me, but it is in my life and on these pages only because it was also an object of sentiment for my grandfather, and that was only true because it had called farmers to work and children to school. Only an individual can be free, but only a community can make individuals. And yet for a community to do this, generation upon generation, its practices must be examined in light of the demands of freedom.

We are born at a certain moment, which we neither control nor know in advance, and which we cannot even begin to grasp until much later in life. And yet we can, with experience, learn to place ourselves in longer histories, to think in time. We cannot be free until we have a certain sovereignty over ourselves, which requires us to understand that the present moment is not the only one, and that its impulse is not the only thing we have. We live freely in a moment insofar as we can get beyond it and see ourselves in it.

James Madison praised Americans for building their new republic without “blind veneration of antiquity.” That is the attitude we should apply to the Founders themselves. Emulating them means transcending them. They were historical actors, not memory pets. They took a risk in declaring independence. Seventy-six years later, Frederick Douglass reminded Americans of that. “There was a time,” he said, “when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men.” It is perverse to celebrate a past fight for freedom while accepting tyranny in the present. Each epoch demands a courage specific to its challenges. Speaking in 1852, Douglass was addressing slavery, into which he himself was born: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Two hundred years after the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, some cousins rang a bell on a farm in Clinton County, Ohio. My younger brother, who was five, was also in the line. My youngest brother, who was three, had to be helped to pull the rope. It is fine to celebrate prosperity and the American Dream. I love the recollection and the family and the farm, and I would not have become myself or written this book without them. But we will not ...