Without realizing it, for most people freedom is an incomprehensible concept - and a difficult one for the rest. It is precisely those who are more intensely concerned with freedom who perceive more limitations in all their aspects than those who think they live close to the optimum of personal freedom. The latter draw comparisons with other political and cultural regimes, so they feel relatively free, yet only navigate within the framework of social and legal norms and only rarely touch on them. They often argue that freedom can only be guaranteed through this framework. They want to protect freedom, to keep it on track so that the individual does not or cannot go down the wrong path. They find it difficult to tolerate – yet it seems they talk about tolerance all the time; they need the structures of controlled freedoms and want to impose them on the rest of society. They consider it an expression of individual self-determination when people voluntarily decide to wear religious coverings; abortions, however, should be dealt with in the penal code. The overlap between these attitudes is small, and yet their supporters both overlook the fact that they prolong the lack of freedom of those who are unable to exercise this self-determination. The example can be applied in the same manner to other forms of freedom of expression, surveillance, entrepreneurial freedoms and much more. The integration of oppression into their concept of freedom does not trigger any cognitive dissonance for them, but rather a calming steering effect.
Circa from Jersey to Pittsburgh
Traversing a the Unites States cross-country is a major challenge in the 21st century. If you want to avoid public roads, permanent interference with property is unavoidable; railroad tracks that could easily be followed are almost exclusively privately owned and may not be entered. In his essay "Freedom" (2021), the American writer Sebastian Junger describes his march through several north-eastern states.
Junger and his companions walk along railroad lines, sleep under bridges and in the open air, drink from rivers and streams and light fires under the cover of darkness that has become so ineffective. The romanticized image of a hiking day with the Junior Woodchucks is quickly supplanted by descriptions of scorching heat, nightly downpours and unpleasant encounters with other people. In Junger's essay, however, the description of the march only forms the framework for a reflection on the tension between individual and collective freedom, which are in irreconcilable conflict. His examples are based on the topology of his route. He tells of the way of life of American natives, Apaches, Iroquois, their freedoms, their conflicts with each other, with European migrants and their descendants. Junger traces an arc to the founding of the United States and the writing of a constitution that remains largely unparalleled worldwide in its standardization of individual freedoms. Even the best constitution can only ever be a compromise between the collective and the individual. Political power in a democracy is temporary. The votes aggregated in representation are only borrowed.
January 6, 2021
"If democratic power-sharing is a potent form of freedom, accepting an election loss may be the ultimate demonstration of how free you want to be. History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived."
Sebastian Junger does not use the term "fascist leaders" to describe either Venezuela's socialist president Nicolás Maduro or Donald Trump, but their determination to accept the reinterpretation of democratically achieved election results with fraud and coups d'état is not much inferior to this attribution.
"At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with-and may even hate. That is true for small-scale societies like the Apache and Iroquois as well as for large-scale democracies like the United States. When American legislators granted unions the right to bargain as equals with the heads of industry, they were effectively saying that the people who owned the machines would have to start sharing power with the people who ran them, and that values like fairness and human dignity were going to determine at least some of the rules of the game."
Junger's insight that politics is a permanent space for negotiation and not a temporary dictatorship may be banal. However, it is also hardly to be found in the supposedly politically interested public. Maintaining the greatest possible freedom in a socio-political system that sees the balancing of interests of equal individuals as a tool for this requires a willingness to compromise and tolerate - but not accept - dissenting or opposing opinions and a certain degree of restriction of personal freedom.
This basic attitude can also be considered part of a set of values that bears the unfortunate name of Leitkultur (German for guiding culture). At this point, I would like to take the liberty of bringing out the Böckenförde dilemma, which is usually used by Catholic politicians to explain in a fallacious manner why religion (always and exclusively Catholic religion) is necessary to constitute socially shared basic values.
“The liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself.”
As a rule, the quote is cut off here, which also makes it clear why the political-conservative view of the concept of Leitkultur is directed towards Christian values and tradition. The hypothesis is that Christianity creates and guarantees these values.
Democratic risk
But the quote actually continues:
“This is the great adventure it has undertaken for freedom's sake. As a liberal state it can endure only if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes some regulation from the interior, both from a moral substance of the individuals and a certain homogeneity of society at large. On the other hand, it cannot by itself procure these interior forces of regulation, that is not with its own means such as legal compulsion and authoritative decree. Doing so, it would surrender its liberal character (freiheitlichkeit) and fall back, in a secular manner, into the claim of totality it once led the way out of, back then in the confessional civil wars.”
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde thus stands in the tradition of the Enlightenment, which rejects any moral over-shaping of democracy and - thus closing the circle to Sebastian Junger - takes the risk of maximizing individual and political freedom to such an extent that freedom itself is endangered by placing power in hands that do not handle it with care. As long as this power can be voted out of office, freedom remains in the dry. The problem often lies more in the fact that even the sovereign (i. e. the voter) has little interest in defending his freedom.
PS: In May this year Sebastian Junger talked about his most recent book “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife“ on Sam Harris’ podcast: Episode 369: Escaping Death