The Necessity of Liberty: An AWOT Essay

The war on terror has had one positive, though unintended, impact on American politics: it has reawakened a debate about liberty. It has presented us with a seemingly stark choice. Do we want liberty or security? Of course, for the most part, this has not been much of a debate. While critics gripe about the erosion of our liberties, those who actually wield power have taken the side of security. Even the very way the debate is often posed has been counterproductive. Some libertarians believe liberty and security are opposites, and reject any loss of liberty in the name of security. The defense of liberty is almost an existential position, in the name of which any risk is acceptable. Some securitarians accept the terms and flip their value. They prize life over liberty, as liberty has little point if we are struggling just to stay alive. On this view, the discussion of liberty is besides the point – it is a luxury good we consume in better times.

Then there are those who feel that it makes little sense to present liberty and security as if they were polar opposites. On this view, if we think hard enough, there is no conflict at all between the two – the debate has been one great misunderstanding. Isn’t security a precondition for enjoying liberties, or even a right in and of itself, as some defenders of the war on terror claim? Another version of this kind of argument is that the only path to security is by defending our liberties. Perhaps the ACLU is right that we can be Safe and Free, and there is no inherent conflict between security and liberty.

Yet we recognize that this, too, is unsatisfactory – the situation is clearly more complex. A whole series of policies, some of which infringe upon civil rights, are justified in the name of security. There is a kind of political choice at stake, and we cannot wave away the conflict between liberty and security as mere conceptual confusion. Indeed, politicians and opinion-makers probably introduce some of this confusion in a deliberate attempt to justify policies, distort public debate, and exercise power. Yet while conceptual confusion might reflect cynical manipulations, there is an even more troubling possibility: that we have, as a society, simply lost any strong sense of what liberty and security means as concepts and what their value is as ideals. The fuzzy nature of the debate therefore reflects a social condition, a lack of clarity about first principles, which politicians and opinion-makers semi-consciously exploit.

Our aim here is to try to cut through the liberty-security debate by presenting it as the current form of a long-standing political and philosophical debate about the relationship between freedom and necessity. This might seem abstract and disconnected from anything immediately relevant to politics, but it is in fact surprisingly easy to show just how immediately important a discussion like this is.

What is the relationship between liberty and security, then? We are not so foolish to think we can offer a definitive answer, once and for all, but it is still necessary to think through this issue as far as possible. It makes sense to start with the seemingly evident truth that security is a precondition for liberty. This seems to be the most common way of thinking about the problem. If our life is dominated by a struggle simply to survive, or meet basic needs, then we cannot truly exercise our freedom. We might say that choices made under these conditions are dictated by necessity, not made freely. This is a major justification of the war on terror – terrorism makes our freedom meaningless because we live in a constant state of insecurity.

Some on the left have picked up on this idea and tried to use it for their own purposes. Why not criticize the administration not for emphasizing security too much, but not enough? If we are only free when we don’t have to worry about basic necessities, then surely security from terrorism is not the only, and not even the most important, security issue? What about job security, health security, social security, food security, or to tie up the bundle of goods that everyone should enjoy – ‘human security’? This last notion, human security, was very popular in the 1990s amongst liberals and progressives, especially those involved in humanitarian affairs in one way or another. It was the way most people interpreted, and continue to interpret, the list of human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which include not just those civil and political rights, like freedom of speech, assembly and religion, but also rights to employment, health care, basic education, and social security – even cultural membership. It is a classic justification of the welfare state that, by providing these goods, and by presenting them in the form of rights, people are actually made more free. That is now one argument made to defend providing these rights not just nationally but internationally.

So what is wrong with this? Why not attack the war on terror for failing to attend to those whose lives are really insecure, like the 60 million Americans without health insurance, or the approximately 35 million Americans who live in poverty, or the more than 10 million who die annually from preventable disease worldwide? Are any of these people really free given how insecure their lives are? This kind of argument suggests the real problem is not the way our civil liberties are infringed in the name of security, but the way real security threats are ignored in the name of false ones. Our society is unfree because it does not make people truly secure.

Yet as intuitive as much of this seems, it is wrong on a number of levels. The first is that, even if in principle we accept that some degree of security is necessary to be free, it is a political question as to which security needs matter most. Needs can’t be a merely technical question for political elites to interpret all on their own. Freedom means determining our own needs. What counts as enough security to live freely is, our should be, a matter of debate and discussion. This is a question of freedom itself, for freedom is not just about having one’s needs met, but to meet them as much as possible through one’s own efforts. It is conceivable that a wealthy society could have a large bureaucracy administering to each and everyone’s wants, providing health care, social security, education, and generally high standard of living, yet everyone could be unfree if they were merely passive recipients of state assistance. That is to say, the citizens of the richest nation in the world would not be free if they lacked basic democratic oversight of the bureaucracy which ‘served’ them. The sheer existence of material security, alone, does not make one free. It matters that these goods be provided because they are demanded politically by society, and not just because they are deemed the ‘right needs’ by bureaucrats. If it’s true that many of the needs we have can only be satisfied by our cooperation with others, this only means that we collectively must decide how to allocate our resources, rather than passively allow others to interpret what our needs are. So one problem with the argument that security is a means to liberty, is that what security means is not self-evident, and once it is viewed as a precondition for liberty, it can lead to bureaucracy without democracy.

There is another problem with expanding the use of the term security to take in the whole range of needs that people have. This further problem is that security has gone from a means to an end in itself. There is a way in which, now, all the talk of social security, health security, food security, and so on reflects a kind of numbing of the political imagination. Politicians see that it is rhetorically effective and so they use it. This is not so much an explicitly cynical move, but simply that it is a kind of lowest common denominator. Everyone can agree that security is good, so it absolves politicians of having to make more profound or inspiring appeals. Focusing on the most basic needs becomes a way of avoiding any discussion of more utopian possibilities. It is a way of accommodating political life to the lack of demand for liberty.

This lack of demand for freedom is the most troubling feature of our own society. Unlike food security, health security, social security, and job security, freedom is the one thing that cannot be provided by any external agency. It must be desired, needed, in the sense that the individual possesses the will to be free. Freedom must be experienced as a necessity, as a fundamental need without which the individual is not really alive in a full human sense. This is the way freedom and necessity, or liberty and security, meet in a surprising way. If what distinguishes human beings from all other entities is that we have the capacity for self-development, for being a determining factor in our own lives, then to be alive in more than just a physical sense, requires being free. Security is not, in this sense, a precondition for liberty but the other way around. Freedom is a condition for being secure because it defines what security, in the sense of knowing what needs securing, means. But it also means that there are limits on what the state or any external agent can do in keeping us ‘safe’. In fact, this suggests that the emphasis on security, especially when it comes to be about ‘making sure people are alive’, can turn into an ideological project of trying to define what a human life entails. Once security is reduced to a long (human rights) or short (freedom from fear) list of human needs that the state can provide us, then security has lost its connection to liberty and become an ideological concept. If anything, security becomes a way in which the lack of demand for freedom is reproduced, or existing demands for freedom and self-determination are transformed into their opposite – needs that the state actively protects or provides for.

If this is true, then the greatest threat to liberty may not be what it commonly is thought to be. Most are concerned about the formal erosion of our civil liberties, but there is something much more fundamental. It is that we don’t think of freedom as a necessity. It is something extra or external to our lives, something to be traded off for a bit of security, or something we only get after we are secure. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of the actual situation.

In other words, security is not a precondition for liberty, liberty is a precondition for security. That is so for at least two reasons. The first reason is that we are not alive if we are not free – any threat to our freedom is in this sense a source of insecurity. It’s not that liberty is functional to security, in the sense that protecting civil liberties is the best way to combat terrorism or realize a prosperous society, but that any threat to liberty is in and of itself a threat to our security as free beings. The second, perhaps more important, reason that liberty is a precondition for security is that we cannot even interpret what security means without first having a sense of what living a free life is. Security, in the sense of being free from fear, or being free from want, or even having a prosperous standard of living, is a means to being free. Liberty is the external standard by which we measure what security we want and how we want to achieve those kinds of security. It is only when we realize that security is a means for being free that we can judge when certain policies are no longer rationally connected to their purpose – otherwise, security just ends up becoming an end in itself, and the mere perception of threat can become a justification for action, regardless of any higher ends a policy is supposed to serve.

As we have discussed before, one of the problems with the war on terror is precisely the way fear and security have been entirely separated from rational assessment, and linked instead to unverifiable feelings, perceptions, and suspicions. ‘Unknown unknowns’, in Rumsfeld’s immortal words, become the legitimate basis for invading a country. And the measure of an act’s success becomes not necessarily its real effect on some object or enemy, but its effect on the public’s feelings – the reassurance of public fear becomes the objective, rather than a rational assessment of different risks. Indeed, the political game becomes a symbolic contest over who most successfully manages public fear, rather than who formulates policy in a rational way. So the administration cooks up orange alerts, terrorist warning systems, and periodic announcements about ‘terrorism-related convictions’, while its immediate opponents cynically trump up port security and the various other ways in which we have been left unsafe. This is not a question of mere manipulation, but related to a broader climate in which the relationship between security and liberty is completely scrambled, leaving us with woefully inadequate terms by which to scrutinize and criticize political action.

This abstract discussion has political consequences. If the greatest threat to our liberties is not their formal erosion but that we no longer think of liberty as a necessity, then that suggests we have to widen and deepen our criticism from what it is now. The Bush administration alone is not the only problem. We have to take aim not just at formal erosions of liberty – they may not even be the most central issue. We have, instead, to criticize all attempts to ‘securitize’ politics, or turn life into a question of mere survival. The greatest threat to liberty is a kind of political culture in which various aspects of our life are organized around the suppression or displacement of demands for liberty. We hope to discuss more, in subsequent posts, why people are more willing to see themselves as passive, vulnerable beings, and therefore susceptible to a culture of fear. The issue here, however, is simply to suggest that there are serious ideological stakes in the liberty and security debate. It is not clear to us how to expand the desire for self-determination, the desire to be more than merely alive, but to be the agent in shaping one’s own life. But creating a need for liberty is what we see as one of the most important functions of social criticism today. This cannot be done by shying away from first principles or abstract argumentation and simply demanding immediate action. Nor is it a question that can be addressed at the level of individual attitudes or preferences; it requires social and cultural change. Uncompromising, public criticism of all policies and arguments that undermine the demand for liberty is a more promising place to start.