Plowing the field

How much freedom can we afford? This is not a merely provocative question. Given the state of the planet and the estimates regarding the future that awaits us—if we do not act incisively and equitably—it is indeed a very urgent matter.

The fact that our political and moral concepts have passed unscathed through two world wars, to take an obvious example, invites laziness: why cannot they apply to the contemporary world as well? But global warming is a reality of a different order. It cannot leave our cognitive and social structures untouched because, by its very nature, by being precisely global and so dangerous, it requires an entirely different effort. Taken as it is, any past ideology is unsuited to the challenge. At most it can serve as a comfortable refuge, a temporary and self-indulgent oasis; but in the long run we end up with a series of names now empty of meaning, good for slogans, lacking empirical strength.

Meanwhile, however, climate change shrinks freedom along poverty lines: it forces entire masses to move for climatic reasons; it disrupts resources and prevents people from cultivating their life aspirations; it threatens the peoples most exposed to change with extreme events.

We need to plow the field again for a new conceptual sowing. Let us start then with freedom. Of course I do not even dream of exhausting even a very small part of the problem, but I would like to put it clearly on the table—and hopefully start a fruitful conversation.

The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Freedom is the first value named, and it will be reiterated several times later. It is a political decision—for millennia it was not at all obvious that human beings were born free and equal. Neither is it materially so today, but it is nonetheless a relevant statement. Here, however, I am not interested in the abstract definition of the concept, which is often prey to arbitrary restrictions. In the words of Isaiah Berlin, "Enough manipulation with the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes."

Instead, I am interested in a much more immediate and concrete sense of freedom—the material possibility for you and I of acting in the world without constraint and as responsible beings.

One can immediately object that this idea is limited to the West, which would make it unsuitable when placed in relation to planetary warming: how to reconcile different ideas on the subject? If someone preferred the safety or salvation of the biosphere in exchange for a huge shrinkage of individual action, what should we do—perhaps force him to be free, in Rousseau's disturbing formula?

This critique needs to be taken seriously; but I would not want cultural relativism to immediately paralyze us with its Gorgon head. Certainly freedom, like any other complex concept of human experience, has its own history and geography and must be placed in relation to other values: justice, equality, security... And different societies will give different answers.

That said, it seems reasonable to me to assume an extremely minimal version of freedom that applies to everyone, even to many nonhuman animals, if only because its limitation—for example, through prison confinement—is seen everywhere as a form of punishment. The freedom I have in mind has much to do with simply being able to cultivate one's own aspirations because, at the very least, I would not dismiss it so quickly as if it were an imperialist construct of the West.

Moreover, perhaps the most obvious "opposite" example, China, possesses a concept of freedom that is far more problematic than certain stereotypes. Aggrieved relativism easily becomes unconscious colonialism; instead we need to study more, and it does not seem to me that a confrontation between people from different places and cultures is always destined for eternal conflict. We can learn a great deal from certain traditional conceptions of African freedom, and vice versa.

If there are no mutual threats or real inequalities in the confrontation, it will get somewhere: it is the inequality of power at the source that is the real problem. It may sound like naïve optimism, but if we do not indulge in this initial vitamin boost, our body of theories will quickly be killed by the virus of catastrophism, whose healthy carriers are usually the privileged, for whom one choice or the other does not change much.

History also offers some support. For example, the structure of some medieval African states assumed that kings and chiefs ruled on the basis of free consent. In the 13th century, the Manden Charter defended individual right against sovereign power, promoting relationships of mutual solidarity between people and generations; it also outlawed slavery and affirmed personal freedom. Or to take another example among the many cited by Amartya Sen: while Giordano Bruno was being burned in the public square, Emperor Akbar spoke of pluralism and tolerance in Agra, in the Indian Mughal Empire.

And today?

Democracies and Leviathans

Today it seems that a tempered liberalism can secure the above freedom without major problems, but there are at least two reasons to doubt it.

The first is a classic from socialism. It is very easy to defend formal freedom and forget how much inequality affects material freedom of choice. As Ralf Dahrendorf puts it, a deep interpretation of value has as its highest end the extension of life chances; it is not a war between individual wills where those who are luckier can "crush" the subordinate classes at will.

The second reason, on the other hand, has only recently become clear. We are no longer dealing with models limited to one territory; the reality of global warming is of a quite different scale. We need to act on the level of collective climate justice, and this necessarily brings with it the argument about how much freedom we can afford. Shouldn't planetary survival, in the perpetually conflicting grid of values, be a top priority?

Three years ago Slavoj Žižek has attempted a response that I take as an example mainly for its frankness. Starting with the admission that so far our control strategies have failed, he believes that "the last exit before the final one will be some version of what was once called 'war communism'". Salvation will be achieved

only through strong and obligatory international cooperation, social control and regulation of agriculture and industry, changes in our basic eating habits (less beef), global health care, etc. Upon a closer look, it is clear that representative political democracy alone will not be sufficient for this task. A much stronger executive power capable of enforcing long-term commitments will have to be combined with local self-organizations of people, as well as with a strong international body capable of overriding the will of dissenting nations.

According to Žižek, it is not a matter of creating a world government (that "would give opportunity to immense corruption") or abolishing markets, but we will have to accept new models of control, even very restrictive ones. All, the philosopher adds, with "the active participation of ordinary people."

It is not quite clear to me what Žižek really has in mind, but the pars destruens is interesting. Is the idea of individual freedom that we have inherited from several decades of liberal, capitalist democracies suitable for the crisis we are going through? As it is, I do not think so. We can no longer afford to consider the limitless accumulation of money or the mindless exploitation of resources as freedom. However legalized, these are forms of liberty that harm the vast majority of other beings, human and nonhuman, endangering the entire survival of the biosphere.

Even a study by Daniel Lindvall for International IDEA, an organization that supports democracy around the world, admits this in part:

The performance of democracies on climate actions is mixed. On the one hand, most full democracies are industrialized and high-income countries, and for this reason they emit comparably high levels of greenhouse gases per capita. The three big democratic entities—the European Union, Japan and the United States—are accountable for about two-thirds of all historic carbon emissions.

[…] On the other hand, research shows that democracy can positively influence environment protection policies and climate action. There are several studies confirming the correlation between democracy and climate mitigation.

And more. Although liberal democracies are pursuing better climate policies, other studies indicate that

only democracies with a strong state capacity and a low level of corruption are performing better. Studies have also shown that countries with an influential fossil fuel industry are high emitters and are performing poorly on addressing climate change. Democracies such as Australia, Canada and the USA are ranked exceptionally low in the Climate Change Performance Index, scoring even poorer than several authoritarian states, such as China.

Let me be clear. All of which in no way implies that the authoritarian alternative is better or even desirable as such; especially since there are even more brutal forms of state capitalism. This is the main argument of Lindvall and many scholars of liberal democracy, and it is certainly well-founded. The fact that democratic systems do not fare well in the world for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons is not good news. It just means more pain and more exploitation. This is also why when Žižek speaks of "communism" he evokes a symbolic realm and not an actual political project as seen in the past.

Unfortunately, real democracies have proven incapable of addressing not only domestic social problems but also of ensuring a genuine bond of peace and a form of shared justice. They are subjected to ever-tightening debt blackmail and periodic austerity diets that hit hard the population's lower strata; they are heavily influenced by the fossil and finance lobbies and sometimes ruled by classes disconnected from real needs, when not openly corrupt or criminal; they are plagued by cuts on health care, education, and social reintegration measures. The current state may not touch the form of the democratic institution, but it certainly alters its deep substance.

In the face of all this, and given a climate crisis of the utmost urgency, it is instinctive to think that the only solution can be universal and authoritarian: how to reconcile the interests of the U.S. with those of the Maldives, or Tanzania's with Finland's? Those who are dying of heat and deprivation want to save themselves; and those who have air conditioning want to keep it on. An international elite of experts entrusted with the power (i.e., the monopoly of violence) to enforce emergency laws will decide.

It is easy for bona fide progressives to cringe at such a scenario, but it needs to be analyzed with a clear mind. Certainly we know that yesterday's achievements in freedom are all the more fragile the more they are taken for granted. But democracy is not a panacea, and it would be better to stop evoking it in the abstract at every turn when it comes to concretely addressing our problems. "More democracy", sure, more democracy, if you mean "less totalitarianism"; but what are we really talking about? In the beautiful words of the Italian thinker Nicola Chiaromonte,

Democracy is not only the regime in which the private citizen is guaranteed by laws against the abuses of power and has more or less freedom to express himself. In fact, this may happen even in a somewhat enlightened autocratic regime. But democracy is properly that regime of coexistence in which the citizen is given reasonable hope of being able to influence the common destiny, of counting in the community as an active presence and not as a figure, thus of being able to assert his freedom against social necessities and inertia. [my translation]

After all, in our daily life there is not much real democracy. Instead there is a large dose of authoritarianism at work, at school, in prisons, in the military, in politics, in the family, in our own consciousness (self-censorship, fear of others). Hence—and from the urgency of the crisis—the current fascination with autocracies and "strong men," with blunt solutions and concentration of power.
However, totalitarian models offer no guarantees of success in combating the climate crisis. In Climate Leviathan Mann and Wainwright offered the best theoretical examination in this regard.

For the two scholars, the emergence of such a Hobbesian "Climate Leviathan" corresponds precisely to a system of planetary adaptation led by capitalist elites, who will thus be able to maintain their superiority. The biosphere will be preserved but leaving dominance relations intact, "monitoring the vital granular elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on." The 2015 Paris Agreement is a formal anticipation of this. The alternatives seem worse anyway. Mann and Wainwright speculate on a 'Climate Mao'—a non-capitalist sovereignty—or a reactionary, capitalist "Behemoth" that would plunge us into environmental disaster.

The point is that according to the two scholars, political theory dealing with climate instances still has a long way to go compared to sciences such as oceanography or physical chemistry; more, and in a decisive way in my opinion, there is an almost structural lack of imagination: "Our challenge is closer to a crisis of imagination and ideology insofar as people do not change their conception of the world just because they are presented with new data." So:

The basic questions which have tormented the Left for centuries—the relations between sovereignty, democracy, and liberty; the political possibilities of a mode of human life that produces not exchange value but social wealth and dignity for all—are still the ones that matter. The defining characteristic of their present intensity is that they have an ecological deadline. The urgency that global warming imposes does not cut us off from the past, but only reignites the past in the present.

Resolutely anti-capitalist, and with very good reason, Mann and Wainwright, however, fail to configure a truly convincing alternative. As is often the case in such cases, they excel at the critical part but are somewhat elusive when it comes to providing a viable alternative. The "climate X" they conjure up is at most a metaphor, and the attractive vagueness in which it is plunged—which leaves open various possibilities for action—can also be read as a failure of imagination. Very few peoples are ready to revolutionize their lives on the basis of an "X" based on the theoretical lines of the ultra-left, from Negri to Agamben via Klein and so on. Not that there are not valuable elements, but I would not want to reduce everything to a self-absorbed vocabulary for militants—a jargon that is hard to translate into the language of ordinary people.

Of course the problem is extraordinarily intricate and depends, unfortunately, still on Hobbesian coordinates. It is about understanding the ways in which power is exercised or resisted. The value of Hobbes lies precisely in his crude hyperrealism, even without accepting his anthropological premises or totalitarian solutions. He is right on one point. Ideas are not enough; we also need arms to put them into practice.

In short, critiquing the hegemony of capitalist democracy is necessary but it risks going in the wrongest direction. But in the meantime, the planet is burning. So what is to be done? And what freedom do we have left?

"Dostoevsky's utilitarian nightmare"

There is a famous passage in literature where the conflict emerges with beautiful, harsh clarity. It is Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov. During a giddy conversation with Aleksey, Ivan tells a terrible story: At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Christ suddenly returns to earth; he is never named, he acts cautiously, but everyone knows. At this point the Grand Inquisitor decides to imprison him in his dungeon. Shortly after sentencing him to death he goes to see him, and there begins one of the most extraordinary monologues in literature.

The Inquisitor is very hard on Christ. In particular, he accuses him of preaching and spreading freedom when the people do not know what to do with it.The idea is simple and recognizable. Why should the masses profit from such a valuable commodity if they are unable to use it, or if they use it only for selfish ends? In the Inquisitor's judgment we are not responsible enough for such a burden. All the better then an enlightened despotism, where freedom is quietly bartered for happiness, material goods and tranquility. For that matter, only obedience is asked in return. Is such a world not desirable? Is freedom really so important?

It is Satan's theory—the Inquisitor readily admits it, revealing the secret to Christ—who continues to remain motionless. "We are not with you, but with Him." In his splendid commentary on the Gospel of Mark, Eugen Drewermann said there is a dangerous temptation even for God—that of wanting a perfect creation, "which of necessity would lead to catastrophe"; and in this place the idea of Satan is generated, namely the purest angel who becomes a devil "in the effort to serve God better than he himself wants to be served."

The legend concludes; to the announcement of the Inquisitor's impending execution, Christ replies with a silent kiss on the old man's lips. The Inquisitor is disturbed, releases Jesus, but does not change his mind. The world of the legend remains in its illusion of order—devoid of evil because it is devoid of all the horrible things that can be done freely, but devoid also of freedom itself.

In short, we must get out of what Isaiah Berlin calls "Dostoevsky's utilitarian nightmare". First, because the Inquisitor—or a court of planetary technocrats, or a Leviathan—imposes a single vision of the good. It nips all freedom in the bud, and we are not suited to such extreme visions. We are too imperfect, our timber is not only crooked as Kant said but also capricious. In the long run any authoritarianism—even the best structured—suffocates us. Mary Midgley in Beast and Man asks "Why do people form families? Why do they take care of their homes and quarrel over boundaries? Why do they own property? Why do they talk so much, and dance, and sing? Why do children play, and for that matter adults too? Why is nobody living in the Republic of Plato?"

Yeah. Why?

Lexical freedom

Let us have a short break. There is much focus in the West today, and with good reason, on freedom of opinion. Cases of censorship and institutional violence show how quietly a democratic power can abuse itself. But there should be even more discussion about the forms and limits of freedom of action, not least to avoid falling into mere nominalism or lulling oneself into thinking that the real struggle passes only on the field of words. This is convenient, but it is puerile. The struggle passes above all on the decisions to be made to ensure that everyone has a say but first and foremost to live a good life.

In fact, we still have a very wide margin of freedom of expression, which many parts of the world envy us. Using it well also means experimenting with different metaphors.

I think, for example, of the fallacy of reasoning around climate change as if it were a great monster oppressing us and not the present reality of the planet—a reality subject to change, which can be slowed down or accelerated. Uniting against a greater enemy is a fiction classic from the War of the Worlds to Watchmen. When a threat involves the whole of humanity, humanity reacts by coalescing. Barriers and differences disappear, we are all in the same boat.

Unfortunately things are very different. First, there are so many financial and political interests at stake that planetary efficient collaboration seems complicated to achieve; the relative COPs' failure is there to prove it. Moreover, we are unable to conceive of global warming as such a threat. Evolution has driven us to react to warning signals limited to our surroundings, so we startle by hearing a sudden noise but remain emotionally inert in the face of a problem like global warming.
Of course we can grasp the problem with reason—mainly thanks to scientific research—and thus engage in combating it; but we should not underestimate the absence of such an emotional drive. I go further. Perhaps what is missing is a mythology in keeping with the times. A form of faith. I do not want to defend magical forms of thinking, let me be clear, yet the nihilism of recent times has wiped out also those great narratives that for millennia have helped human beings overcome difficulties and imagine beyond. From this point of view, even the war metaphor is trite and misplaced—as is the "war communism" invoked by Žižek—and testifies to a laziness of thought. There is no external enemy, this is not a fight to the death, there will be no "victory."

We need a new story to tell, but which one?

More freedom

In 2016 I went to Brussels for a writing residency. A few weeks earlier there had been the attacks in Zaventem and Maelbeek. The city was quite militarized, but after a few days I realized that life, as always, had resumed its course. Paranoia had almost dissolved, and yet certain speeches remained in the air. Sometimes they were restless talk, sometimes vindictive, sometimes they could take the form of decisive questions. Like the one a local girl addressed to me over a beer, "What freedom are we offering in turn? The one to drink and consume and work?".
At first it seemed to me to be a cliché generated by some typical white, Western guilt; at most, a blunt bar version—at the bar we were—of Frankfurt's critical theory. But I was wrong. That girl had reacted well to terror, and I was dismayed to see the extent to which suspicion toward such a setting had imprisoned my own thoughts. Asking what freedom we are offering does not imply that the opposite freedom to slaughter innocents is the right choice, to begin with. Far from it, it interrogates the foundation of our civilization in a way that has become so easy to ridicule as faux radicalism. Yet why should we not ask the question? And why should we not seek an answer?

The difficulty of promoting a positive freedom without incurring paternalism or oppression lies in the fact that freedom has become mainly instrumental, indifferent to ethics or ends as such. Here is the paradox: perhaps we have never been so free, but neither have we ever been so desperate and irrelevant—thus so prone to domination or the thirst to dominate.

But also never before have we needed more freedom, but used better: directing guilt and privilege toward more autonomy for others, without sticking our heads in the yoke of conservatives or religious extremism. Why should we claim as a founding element of the social body the freedom to own an SUV (thus being part of one of the most polluting "nations" in the world) or an entirely vacant mansion? If freedom does not create greater dignity then it is mere selfishness, and the fact that it is socially or legally legitimized does not make it more just. If we accept, with relativists, that the concept is subject to historical stresses and accept, with Berlin, that it is part of a larger value network, then it sounds offensive to absolutize it in such a way.

We need more freedom that does not see in the other a limitation but rather a resource. More freedom—and therefore care—toward the future and not just the present to which we seem condemned, the princely time of our lives. Already Hans Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility(1979) invited us to overcome such limitations of classical ethics. But the link between generations has already been common currency for centuries in many African traditions, which interpret the extended earth as a hereditary cycle. Something therefore to be preserved and nurtured. We need more freedom—and therefore care—for and toward nonhuman animals.

At this point some may argue that this is all nice and clever, but the ethical discourse quickly shows the rope when we widen our gaze. In fact, the seesaw on which the debate around climate swirls between individual choice and political engagement. We know that changing one's lifestyle is not enough, and those who wish to maintain the status quo have every interest in reducing action to personal choices—to shift responsibility and blame onto individuals. On the other hand, even downplaying the issue to a pure technical and political matter—particularly among privileged citizens, denizens of the Global North—risks producing a dangerous habit of moral delegation: "Let the decision-makers take care of it, so whether I sort or not changes nothing."

Instead, we need to get off the swing by working on both fronts. And exercising this freedom is energizing. It's good for you. Deciding, for example, to get involved in one's neighborhood, to volunteer, to give up buying something, to not give in to the cliché impulse of freedom as consumption improves us immediately. It draws a possible world in the here and now, which can be revived with even greater energy in political terms.

In short, I propose to change the rules of the game a little bit. For example by defecting, by striking, by giving up. By using one's freedom as a negative weapon and by prioritizing a few goals to fight over instead of scattering one's forces in a thousand rivulets. First, why still tolerate that the unlimited accumulation of capital—and thus power—is a democratically guaranteed and taken-for-granted freedom? How does the $200 billion owned by Jeff Bezos contribute to communal happiness (or that of Bezos himself) and not instead appear to be a monstrous abstraction?

The good news is that no huge sacrifice is required, as apocalyptic scenarios project (often very dear to the coal lobbies to shrug off political responsibility). The freedom of ordinary people will not be much altered by serious equitable energy transition policies. We will have to heat ourselves differently, eat a lot less meat, greatly reduce private vehicle travel (but also commuting), consume less. But this will also be an extraordinary opportunity to claim as essential freedoms activities that fill our existence without generating profit or goods, like spending time with friends, playing games, playing sports, listening to music, contemplating a landscape. A slower, lazier life. Why should this seem like a utopia or a ridiculous hippie dream?

The task is to defend these freedoms, to make them accessible and palatable: perhaps the key is not to keep waving the bogeyman of how much we might suffer, but to show how happy we might be otherwise.

In short, freedom in a warmer world will have to be richer and more varied. But let me be understood, I am not offering wonder medicines or rose-colored lenses with which to look into the future. The experience of evil quickly wakes us up from any naive dreams of appeasement between wills. In short, there are no easy solutions, and the first thing to do is to recognize this in place of stubbornly continuing to believe in the twentieth century. Our concepts must be revised, which implies not only a deep dose of humility and a curb on commonplace rhetoric, but also the deployment of vast creative resources.

For example, forever moving away from the idea of driven individualism. From early childhood we are dependent on others, we need care and are educated to give it back; we are born into the groove of reciprocity, not absolute selfishness. The homo oeconomicus model is also debasing because it makes opaque such a community context that naturally belongs to us, and to do with emotional issues no less than rational ones.

Our current idea of freedom is based on a strange combination of a Hobbesian anthropology—we are all potential threats to others, which justifies state control—and an economic reductionism, whereby once some basic possibilities are guaranteed it seems obvious to direct choices toward certain goods and not others. Simply put, we are perfect consumers.

When Garreth Hardin spoke in 1968 of the "tragedy of the commons," he had something akin in mind. "Freedom in a common good leads to ruin for all," because our innate individualism will drive us to grab as much as possible from a shared resource, destroying it.

But this tragedy is not an irreversible norm. I don't want to underestimate our destructive capacity; I just want to avoid naturalizing it. Everyone, in everyday life, administers many common goods cooperatively and fairly; and no free personal choice is geared only toward profit maximization. We are not the monads that current ideology suggests, and perhaps bellum omnium contra omnes is best represented by the subtle compulsion to see the other as an enemy or competitor. We are so steeped in victimhood and resentment that even doing the right thing—helping someone in need, dedicating ourselves to an ideal—is perceived as the result of privilege. How many times have I heard, talking about my experience as a volunteer for homeless people, "I don't have the time, the way or the money to take care of these things!" Except in situations of genuine impossibility, when the excuse is just an excuse, we could translate it like this: "My freedom is not worthy of these things!" Hence an unconscious theory of freedom as a mere defense of the self.

While this is undoubtedly what we have been educated to, we can certainly educate ourselves in other ways.

For instance we could take our cue from the prevailing childishness—politicians who behave like little kids, whine and don't know how to take responsibility—to infuse the debate with something truly childish that is instead lacking: the unbridled imagination, a joyful exaggeration. What was considered insane before certain major political changes suddenly shifted. The French Revolution is just one example among many. In The Democracy Project David Graeber said that what we really need is to "unleash political desires", and I couldn't agree more.

Whether this is the right path, as is obvious, I have no certainty. I am, however, quite convinced that the collective direction in which we are going is wrong: it is encroaching on the freedom of too many people, and will restrict the freedom of even more. If we can agree on this, we can look together—freely—for better solutions.

---

Giorgio Fontana is an award-winning Italian writer and essayist. He has published nine books, which have been translated into eight languages, and has contributed to magazines such as The European Review of Books, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Politico and Asymptote. His novel Morte di un uomo felice (Death of a Happy Man) won the Premio Campiello in 2014, one of Italy's most prestigious literary awards.

---