There is a curious paradox in the crisis ignited by the death of George Floyd and it cuts to the heart of how people view freedom.
This killing was an abuse of individual rights, which — as embodiments of the notion of freedom — are dear to conservative hearts. But when it comes to the individual rights of protesters and black victims of state violence, it depends on which individual.
Freedom is central to our society and culture, but can you have too much of a good thing?
The prominent US moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers deep insights into this question in The Righteous Mind, arguing that moral agreements bind societies. And we belong to moral tribes.
But differences between “right” and “left” mean people fail to comprehend the other side’s values. This divide underpins the tribal conflict of US and Australian politics.
Freedom is contested across this divide. Conservatives ensure we don’t ignore the centrality of freedom to the good life. Progressives may value freedom but are more willing to limit it to bolster fairness.
But freedom love can go too far. Haidt writes: “The psychology of sacredness helps binds individuals into moral communities.” Freedom plays this binding role for conservatives. Within conservative narratives freedom is sacralised, transformed into a totem to worship.
In the law of the jungle, all animals, including humans, are free. But there is no absolute freedom. If you are an antelope and you stray too close to a hungry lion, you get eaten. Freedom exists within constraints.
It’s a question of balance. The right argues individuals should determine those constraints upon themselves. The antelope should not be silly and stray from the herd. This view buttresses the interests of the rich and powerful who seek a world without constraints on them but are happy to constrain those who might take what is “theirs”.
The left argues lions should be constrained. When taken too far, the result is too much constraint. Animals (us) are imprisoned in cages speckled across the savannah.
Our contemporary written laws have supplanted jungle law. They limit our freedom based on our morals; agreements about how we live together, helping us co-operate. They limit the freedom to take selfish action, particularly if it causes harm.
The constraint on freedom during the pandemic is justified by the future benefit. But the risk of harm to livelihoods is also clear. Many conservatives, and all freedom worshippers, argue that individuals should be free to do their own risk assessments.
Why do freedom worshippers not become outraged when the freedom and rights of a black man are so clearly abused by state violence?
The impulses driving this are not simply resistance to systemic and structural change. Haidt identifies conservative core values as respect for authority, group loyalty and a sense of purity. They also value care and fairness, as they define it. The left favours its versions of fairness, while not respecting authority as deeply.
Conservatives are torn between freedom and authority. They are conflicted about police abuse of a black man; their values compete. With their strong respect for authority, they are reluctant to stand against the police. They may also see the black man as the problem. Their sense of purity can promote within them disgust for the other.
So confused conservatives must choose between freedom and authority. US President Donald Trump could have called for calm, change and fairness but chose to promote the tribal divide. He emphasised crime and violence, played down injustice, and pushed tribal loyalties.
These law-and-order and respect-for-authority narratives blind conservatives to the injustices — the many profound, structural and distressing injustices — and the injustice continues.
Fear and threat drive a lot of human behaviour: deep fears of the non-white other; fears of loss of white privilege and power in a changing world; fears about loss of living standards in a globalised economy; fears over God’s authority being insulted by atheist progressives; fears that the sacred notion of freedom will be constrained by someone other than themselves.
Freedom is not the freedom to violently clear a public square for a presidential photo opportunity. Freedom is not the freedom to kill civilians in custody. Individual rights belong to all, including black men and women — in the US, Australia and elsewhere — living too often under the repressive knee of the state.
Jock Cheetham is a senior lecturer in journalism at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, whose research has applied moral psychology to religious persecution in Indonesia.
Good day, Jock. I’m actually puzzled by this paragraph.
“Conservatives ensure we don’t ignore the centrality of freedom to the good life. Progressives may value freedom but are more willing to limit it to bolster fairness.”
In my experience, conservatives are uninterested in freedom in general. They may talk about ‘freedom’, but are pretty self-selective about what those freedoms are. In the US, gun-owners may associate freedom with owning a gun; in Australia, “freedom” may just be the freedom from paying certain taxes. There may be exceptions, but generally conservatives are uninterested in freedom for other people, unless they are folk like themselves. Tribalism reigns supreme over abstracts such as “freedom”.
Are progressives any better? Well in Australia, the Greens seem to be the best at civil liberties, but by default.
Definining people as “conservatives” or “progressives” is farcical anyway.
In political Party terms it is total nonsense, the ALP is stoutly conservative in its socialogical attachment to “jobs” as being their focus, and the right-wing Parties are bordering on authoritarianism and fascism – with very fine borders at that.
Well yes, any labels are essentialising and some of the distinctions I mention in my reply to Peter. I’m sure you could add a few more… But they can serve a purpose. I agree ALP is mostly conservative. They are torn between inner city greenies and “progressives” (oops) and working class regionals with coal dust glittering in their eyes.
G’day Peter,
I agree some conservatives are actually interested in controlling others (social control conservatives, as Bruce Shapiro called them on LNL on Tuesday night). Freedom as you say is talked about; it’s central to their rhetoric.
It’s actually difficult to generalise, of course. There are libertarians of the right, and they probably genuinely do believe the hype and would support maximum freedom for everyone. Social conservatives do want to control behaviour, but can quite possibly prefer free markets (John Howard described himself that way). I have a sense that there’s probably crazy conservatives who really don’t have consistent positions on anything, but mouth platitudes about the totems like freedom (plenty of them in the US, eh?). There are people who genuinely believe in freedom of speech, but maybe not other areas.
As for US gun-owners, I suspect that those who associate freedom with owning a gun also have a range of other things that freedom should be, a worldview that glorifies a range of freedoms (from government, etc). I think the tax and freedom narrative in strong in Australia (buttressed by News Corp) but that it’s part of a global movement to diminish or villainise tax because it threatens rich people who don’t need the social support and protections as much.
It’s this sense of freedom, and the way the US uses the notion of freedom to justify its foreign adventurism (if you will), that I find problematic. But I’m committed to not dismissing the benefits of acknowledging that freedom actually is crucial. And the link from freedom through to individual rights is an important one that has been such a key part of moving from the “rule of man” to the “rule of law” in the liberal era of the past few centuries.
But the freedom to do whatever you want in business is a different matter, in my opinion, and we should be wary of sacralising freedom, if that means that freedom can justify anything, including huge injustices.
You say “generally conservatives are uninterested in freedom for other people, unless they are folk like themselves”. I agree that is the case with tribal conservatives, which they aren’t all. There are open-minded conservatives… It’s problematic, I admit, to lump a range of people into “conservative”, but it serves a purpose to discuss this topic, I felt.
And I agree with you that “Tribalism reigns supreme over abstracts such as ‘freedom’…”
Are progressives any better? Well, I do think progressives run the risk of being “too progressive” and losing sight of the values of freedom…
Thanks for responding.
Jock
“Do unto others as you would wish that they do unto you.”
A simple maxim from the fabulous (as in essentially ‘fables’ ) gospel according to St. Matthew [7:12]
Underlying most of grpup behaviour in Humans is simple “otherism” – “If you are not like us, then we do not like you being here.” or even simply “We do not like, trust, accept your right to existence, want to know about you, don’t care about your wellbeing etc.”
My neighbours don’t like the fact that I do not belong to their Church of choice, and being essentially atheistic in my views alienates me to a large portion of my community.
I don’t enjoy watching sport and that places me firmly on ‘the outer’ even more, and not drinking in pubs nor clubs invalidates any opinion which I might hold 😉
Rolly,
Personally I’m not as pessimistic as your statement here suggests you might be.
I’m convinced people balance altruism and selfishness, and they have a lot of both!
They find it easiest to be altruistic towards the in-group, but they are capable of changing their group or tribal identities, too, to be more inclusive. Not everyone, but it’s possible.
And group loyalties and in-group favouritism are a kind of suspended selfishness, I becomes we, and individual selfishness becomes group selfishness. Tribalism. Love it. Fascinating. Inherent.
Jock
There must be a lot of us out there then!
Are all our opinions invalidated or just yours because you haven’t found your tribe.
The right tends to define freedom more in the sense of ‘freedom to’: freedom to go where you will when you want to, to say whatever you want, to accrue as much property and wealth as you can, to believe any religion you want, to exploit any of nature’s resources in the way that suits you best.
The left tends to define freedom more in terms of ‘freedom from’: freedom from oppression, freedom from exploitation; freedom from hunger; freedom from violence.
Not a watertight divide, certainly, but I think it contributes to their divergent world views.
I agree, Graeski. Well put.
Yes, that is neat and useful to consider, David and Graeski.
But the right likes to be free from government.
In a sense, the left wants to be “free from” the right having untrammelled power, and the injustices unleashed when too much freedom allows powerful people to hurt less powerful people. And the right wants to be “free from” the left limiting their freedom and power.
Jock
It’s good to see Haidt’s thesis being applied to the real world. Taking into account the use (and abuse) of moral language in our discourse can only help us better understand his it is people can disagree so vehemently on what seemed trivially true.
The major difficulty I see with the application of freedom in society is that “freedom to” and “freedom from” are so contingent on what other beliefs one has. Does a religious person’s freedom to practice their religion Trump another’s freedom from being persecuted, for example? It’s not so clear cut that there’s any such agreement on what freedom means. The various foundations of our moral thought do explain how different conceptions of freedom exist in the political divide, but the moral foundations themselves aren’t sufficient to say which conceptions of freedom are correct. You aren’t gonna get people saying they hate freedom even while they try to censor or censure parts of society they don’t like.
Thanks Kel, for your comment.
I applied Haidt’s theory to religious persecution in Indonesia in my master’s research thesis. It’s here: https://csu-au.academia.edu/JockCheetham.
One of the things I ended up thinking after that research and writing, and it’s relevant to your second paragraph, is that morality was entirely in relation to the group that the morality operates within (and for). So the purpose of morality is to bind the group together in common cause to aid co-operation and survival via the suspension of many selfish individual impulses in favour of the group’s interests.
And it can work fine until that group, that moral community, comes into conflict with or competition with, another group. Then all those morals that made people behave better to in-group members is not necessarily extended to the outgroup. That was never its purposes. Its purposes was even partially to protect against such outgroups. That’s to my mind how wars can be justified as moral. Peaceful people leave their peaceful society to go off and wage war with a group they don’t have that agreement with, with those who aren’t within their moral community, in a sense.
So people can sometimes only feel obliged to apply their moral community’s code within their moral community. One of the core problems of tribalism. And one of the strengths of tribalism.
And reconstituting the tribe to be bigger and more inclusive is the only way to completely supersede that problem. Being an internationalist overcomes certain shortcomings of nationalism. Shelby Spong argued this Jesus (as he saw Jesus) was a radical inclusivist who redefined the group to include all humanity. I’m interested in, along with many others, in redefining us to include animals, but I have trouble extending that to flies.
Cheers,
Jock
SOPHISTRY
😉