Define "Freedom"

First a twitter exchange:

SethMillstein: One in three human beings are not free http://ow.ly/5yYGA #freedom #humanrights #dictators #freespeech #northkorea

Me: @SethMillstein I'm revoking your philosophy degree. Without defining terms (and the implied definition sucks) that statistic is meaningless

SethMillstein: @Ecpyrosis I think it's more useful in providing some general perspective on the world than as a hard and fast statistic.

SethMillstein: @Ecpyrosis The report itself goes a bit more into the methodology used, but I agree it could be explicated more clearly.

Me: @SethMillstein methodology is less the issue than definition-the article's was implicitly defensive of Western "democracies" and imperialism

Me: @SethMillstein a better statistic in the same vein is that there more slaves in the US today than ever came over the Middle Passage.

SethMillstein: @Ecpyrosis In what way was the article defensive of imperialism?

Wasn't that fun? Who doesn't love reading other people's twitter exchanges? Not-not me, that's not for unsure.

Anyway, there is no human way to answer that last question in 140 characters, so I thought I'd cheat and answer it here, rather than making everyone who follows me on twitter have to read a thousand posts in a row.

(Let me just say from the outset that I am not going to go off on free will and related issues here, so don't worry. I'll go ahead and cede ground for the sake of argument at the outset and assume they mean political freedom, not true freedom as such.)

The problem here, for those who don't have a philosophy degree revoked or otherwise, is that you can't answer a question of "how many people in the world are free?" until you explain what you mean by "free" (and "people," and "world," and "how many," and "in the," and "are," but I'm only going to address the first one). This is the kind of thing that makes non-philosophers feel like philosophy is just so much intellectual wankery, but it's actually an important question. If it isn't addressed before we get started, then we're liable to just take an unexamined "common sense" kind of definition which may be deeply problematical logically, and which moreover will include the unexamined biases and assumptions in our cultural definition of the word.

Such is the case in this report's implicit definition of freedom, which is deeply informed by the Western (especially US) use of the term which takes Western (and especially US) democracies to be formally defined as the gold standard of "free". Countries are measured by "political rights" and "civil liberties". So Chad, for example, gets a low rating in "political rights" because of problems like low voter turnout (ahem), and the executive branch dominating the judicial and legislative (ahem). It is low on "civil liberties" because "Freedom of expression is severely restricted, and self-censorship is common." (ahem ahem) among other problems.

Not listed in this report are countries like Israel, which have far lower ranks in both these categories, or ought to (in Israel's case vis-à-vis Palestinians and Arab Israelis). And what of countries like the US which jail a truly frightening amount of people, especially African Americans, thereby eliminating them from civil discourse and participation? Or people who live in the US but have absolutely zero political rights because they don't have the correct travel documents? So the first implicit assumption we see here is that this study is only ranking countries on how they treat their own citizens, and indeed only those citizens with full citizenship rights, apparently. That's a much lower bar, since we only have to disenfranchise people in order to limit any freedoms we wish.

However this is only, as Seth said, methodology. More fundamentally we have to look at what they mean by the concept of freedom. Here again we see unquestioned assumptions which implicitly are defined by, and therefore favor, the Western countries the authors of the report grew up in. So a country is defined as free when people are able to vote in the manner of the US and other countries, and not free when they can't. They are free if they have the civil liberties already defined and granted by the US and similar countries, and not if they don't. That may sound to you as someone (I'm guessing) who also grew up in this culture, as a perfectly sensible, perhaps the only possible, definition of the term. So let's try a few questions to stretch out our intuition.

What about the right to not starve to death? Or to have housing? Or medical care? According to this definition, people in the US are free to die when they can't get a job, and they're free to watch their children die of cancer because the insurance company they've paid all their working lives has bribed enough politicians to write laws to let them not pay the incredibly rich doctors. We could imagine a very different report if the people who wrote it were from a country with a different definition of freedom, such as Cuba. Cuba would then be described as "more free" than the US because people are free to eat if the country has food, they are free to go to the doctor when they're sick, and they're free to have a place to live when they need one. Americans, under this slightly skewed version, don't have the freedom to quit their job because they need benefits, and don't have the freedom to not live in fear of bankruptcy and homelessness with one call from a doctor.

Looking at the entry on Cuba shows a few more of the implicit assumptions made in the report on freedom. Cuba is not free because "Teaching materials for subjects including mathematics and literature must contain ideological content." Again, seems normal, but only because it's unexamined. Teaching materials in the US also must contain ideological content. Not only must US teaching materials all support patriotism and the state (Read Lies My Teacher Told Me. Read it now.), but they implicitly or explicitly support corporate capitalism. Even ignoring the egregious cases of companies buying textbooks for schools in exchange for putting in advertising ("If Jimmy wants to share his 12 oz. can of Coca Cola with his four friends..." etc.), more fundamentally math problems in textbooks involve purchasing and saving in our capitalist markets, compound interest, probabilities using insurance actuarial tables, etc. So Cuba is dinged here because it contains ideological content other than the ideological content that Western "democracies" all contain.

Let's keep going with Cuba, because it's open in my browser. We are told that another limitation to freedom is that, though the country allows seminaries and Catholic churches to exist in the country, the Church is severely curtailed. It is a tautology in bourgeois "liberal democracies" that something called "freedom of religion," which must perforce include the state taking its hands off (established and powerful) churches exists. But how would that bizarro report written with Cuba's common sense definition of freedom look at it? It might perhaps say that the Catholic Church is one of the least free institutions on the planet. How would the Church's "political rights" and "civil liberties" record look? It has not only been one of the preeminent boots on the necks of the people of South America and the Caribbean, but it has directly and indirectly altered and distorted democracy. Thus Cuba would be more free than Catholic-dominated countries like Italy or Ireland (where the Church's influence has illegalized abortion and made resolution with Northern Ireland a virtual impossibility). Interestingly neither of these two countries appear on this actual list though.

One more point about Cuba, though I could go on all night. We're told in the report that a bright spot in this country's sorry record is that "Cuba has performed well on gender equality issues; about 40 percent of all women work". Well. Again, the definition here is entirely unexamined. It says implicitly that we are more free the more we work (as everyone knows, arbeit macht frei.) So countries where people do not work as much, or tribal and indigenous cultures with divided work roles, are less free than the US, where the people by many measures are the most overworked in the world. Indeed, industrial capitalism and industrial agriculture have led our culture to have the most work ever in the millions of years humans and our immediate ancestors have been on the planet. So we're far less free to not go to work every day than, say, the Masai people in Africa.

I could go on in this vein, but you get the idea. All of this was not to say that Cuba is great; by many definitions of freedom it does really badly, and I agree with many of the criticisms of it in the report. The point is rather to show that the one definition used to make this report, which is not defended anywhere in it, contains a pre-built mechanism to register the culture we are from as the most free, and to discount and devalue any other culture's definition of the term.

Hopefully by now you're beginning to see how all this justifies imperialism and colonialism. If freedom is a good, and if our definition of freedom is uncritically accepted as an objective one, then it makes sense to say things like "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "we want to bring freedom to Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran/Libya/Vietnam/Nicaragua/Cuba/everywhere". "Civilized" countries are not named as unfree places, and indeed we define the term so that they cannot be. Only countries we may wish to invade at some point.

More fundamentally, silencing other voices and other ways of seeing and defining values is itself imperialistic and part of the colonial project. (Read Orientalism. Read it now. In fact, read it before the other thing I told you to read.) Imperialism and colonialism are not only about economic exploitation. Philosophically, they are also about imposing one way of being, one way of knowing, onto the world, whether that is God or capitalism or what-have-you. Putting ourselves as the arbiter of what freedom means is racist and culturally imperialistic; and looking at the problems of others through the lens of how they do not conform to our standards, without addressing the issues at home, is one of the fundamental acts of Othering inherent in colonialism.

So it took a bit longer than a tweet, but the central point I want to make here is that we have to be very, very careful about what we mean by value-laden words. This is a problem in many well-intentioned NGO's like this one, and their actions wittingly or unwittingly strengthen the hand of empire. This is why Arundhati Roy (I think it was her) said that NGO's are to modern cultural and economic empire what well-meaning Christian missionaries were to military empire in the past: the carrot to go with the stick, and the courtiers to provide the self-congratulatory justification for the rulers' actions.