Freedom is No Walk in the Park

Modernity has sold us a mirage of freedom as detachment from others, rather than collective action

Aug 06, 2024

What is it that keeps so many moderns from thinking clearly about technology? One of the biggest culprits, I’d argue, is our confused ideas about freedom. Or perhaps one might say that it is our relationship with technology that keeps us from thinking clearly about freedom. No doubt, as with so many such things, it is a feedback loop—but in any case, it is a feedback loop that fascinates me. I have a whole chapter on the subject in my forthcoming book, Called to Freedom, “Freedom and Technology: The Faustian Bargain of Modern Life,” and I’ll be giving some lectures on the subject this fall. In today’s Substack, I want to briefly make the argument of how a clearer and fuller concept of freedom can help us regain mastery over technologies that threaten to master us.

Many modern discussions of freedom or liberty (I’ll use the two words interchangeably) begin with Isaiah Berlin’s classic 1958 lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” where he proposed a basic distinction between “negative liberty” and “positive liberty.” The former is a “freedom from”—essentially, the freedom of being left alone. This is the libertarian ideal of “non-interference” or “non-coercion,” and during the later 20^th century was often associated with the political Right. The latter is a “freedom for” or a “freedom to”—the freedom to accomplish something, be something, or do something. Since accomplishing something often requires the assistance of others, this ideal was often associated with the political Left, which sought to provide everyone with the material means of such positive freedom—whether it was food stamps, state-sponsored childcare, or abortion access.

But of course, put this way, the two concepts seem prone to collapse into one another. After all, can’t my “freedom from” the interference of your humming be equally described as my “freedom to” enjoy silence? And can’t my “freedom to” express myself be parsed as a “freedom from” censorship? Free childcare and abortion access might give a poorer woman freedom to achieve prosperity and a career, but they also offer freedom from material want, or clinging children. Parsed in individual terms—as freedom almost always is these days—Berlin’s two concepts look like two sides of the same coin.

This also means that they tend to be zero-sum. Again, my freedom to enjoy a quiet walk in the park is always liable to clash with your freedom to skateboard through it with your portable Bluetooth speaker. My freedom from worrying about grocery costs comes at the expense of your freedom from burdensome taxation. My freedom to “express my opinions” is gained only by violating your freedom from slander. The list goes on and on, ad infinitum, constituting the basic paradox and continual frustration of liberal society.

The digital world promised us an escape route from this zero-sum trap. Why? Because, while Central Park comprises a finite 843 acres within which to walk your dog or skateboard, the worlds of Sim City or Minecraft were not so constrained. Within the virtual world, it seemed at last possible to truly do or be or say whatever one wanted, without infringing or impinging upon the freedom of others. The digital world could finally be the libertarian utopia, regulated only by the “harm principle,” and constructed so that almost no one would ever be harmed. (Virtual online child pornography, the Supreme Court opined in 2002, could not be banned since no actual child was harmed in the creation of it.)

Of course, it hasn’t quite worked out as dreamed. While the digital world may create almost infinite space within which to roam, we still, human beings that we are, tend to use it as a means of interacting with other human beings, which means that my freedom to leave despicable comments on your posts still clashes with your freedom to enjoy emotional well-being. We seem continually unsure how to resolve these conflicts, sometimes erring on the side of complete liberty for those engaging in abusive speech, sometimes capitulating to the politically-correct demands of the “triggered.” Our unspoken hope seems to be that, with the advent of AI, we can bypass the dilemma altogether—for with chatbots as your companions, you never need to worry about posting trigger warnings.

But what if the most important kind of freedom lay somewhere else entirely? What if freedom was a property of groups, and not just individuals—or rather, was experienced by individuals as and in groups? In fact, as soon as we stop to think about it, it is obvious that this is the case. There are plenty of things that I am only free to do with other people, and they turn out to be the things that make me most fully human: a conversation, for instance. We talk a lot today about the individualistic “freedom to express myself,” but in fact, I can only express myself if there is another human being to listen. And only a self-centered sociopath wants only ever to be listened to, and never to listen in return. What most of us crave, more than “expression,” is conversation, an activity that requires two or more of us acting and responding in turn. And this freedom, amazingly, turns out not to be zero-sum: to be sure, I must give up my freedom to speak while you are speaking, and vice versa, but if it is a good conversation, both of us will feel enhanced, rather than limited, by this minor sacrifice.

In larger groups, this collective freedom* requires the agency of an authority making decisions on behalf of the whole. My favorite example is that of congregational singing. If we treated church like the internet, we would all show up at worship and start belting out whatever tune came into our heads at the top of our lungs. That would be not just zero-sum, but negative sum. No one would be genuinely free to sing, because they would be inundated by a cacophony. The wonderful freedom to engage in congregational singing requires that we all agree to sing the same thing at the same time, even if, for most of us, it’s not our favorite. We experience an elevated liberty in submitting to the judgments of the music minister or organist.

Now, what does all this have to do with technology? Well, remember that the reason we’ve had such a hard time regulating digital technology is that it seems hard to justify such regulation within the framework of merely individual freedom. Most of the time, no one is harmed by vicious uses of technology, and if they are, we usually think it’s a small enough price to pay for the huge gains in freedom that the digital domain offers. And yet, we find ourselves feeling extremely unhappy and unfree—especially the youngest amongst us, who’ve been immersed in this world before ever learning to navigate the analog world. The biggest reason is that we have lost many of the much deeper benefits of interpersonal or collective liberty.

This is easy to see when you see a family of five sit down at a coffee shop together and each pull out their phones—or when your children try to show you some contraption they’ve built today and you’re too busy texting to notice. Attention is the prerequisite of truly human freedom, and attention fragmentation is the price we most often pay for technological “freedom.” To be sure, there is no question that such technologies can and do make possible real collective freedoms that would not otherwise be possible—the Zoom call, the collaborative Google doc, the Slack chat or Discord server. But even these are at constant danger of being undermined by our temptation to “multitask” as we use them.

Thus far, we’ve been unable to arrest this slow atrophy of effective freedom because we’ve been blinded by the myopic concept of freedom described above: sure, it might be nice if more people decided to create tech-free zones, but that’s a matter of individual (or parental) choice, so we have to wait for everyone to decide to do that. The reality is that such individual freedom has already been largely stripped from us by the hypnotic power of the algorithms or the suffocating network effects which make it almost impossible to opt out of digital space. The best antidote for this individualist unfreedom is a renewed exercise of collective freedom exercised ideally at the level of communities—schools, churches, and businesses—and if necessary through public policy to support these actions. We can, in fact, commit to take collective action together, and thus make possible the more elevated freedom for which God destined us.

* I don’t love the term “collective freedom” as it evokes ideas of “collectivism” to some hearers. But the alternatives I’ve tried, “communal freedom” and “corporate freedom,” are not great either—“communal” can also sound communistic, and “corporate” sounds to modern ears like a corporation. In any case, if you’re interested in more of my work on this front, see The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty, my forthcoming Called to Freedom, or my essay, “Individual and National Freedom.”

Newly Published

“Getting Phones out of Schools: A Policy Memo”: Very much related to the topic of the above reflections, I’m pleased to share that a new Ethics and Public Policy Center policy memo was released yesterday, addressing the recent groundswell of support for getting phones out of schools. The vast majority of the work was done by my colleague Clare Morell, but I was honored to have the opportunity to contribute. We argue that it’s important not just to keep phones out of classrooms, but out of the entire school day; my hope is that this memo will be taken up not just by public school administrators, but by private school headmasters as well, who should be taking the lead on this important issue.
“Is Porn the New Normal?”: My latest column at WORLD Opinions, uses the scandal created by porn star Amber Rose taking the stage at the RNC to reflect more broadly on how pervasively pornography has been normalized, and how conservatives have aided and abetted this trend with a myopic focus on “free speech” absolutism. (Witness, for instance, the fate of Twitter/X under Elon Musk.)

Coming down the Pipe

Review of American Covenant: Last week I wrote and submitted my review of Yuval Levin’s American Covenant to FusionAIER. Will be sure to share here when it publishes. Here’s an excerpt:
In the tragicomedy of our ailing republic, Yuval Levin has established himself as one of the wisest and most respected—and for that reason, one of the most studiously ignored—of the diagnosticians of our body politic. In this extended metaphor, he clearly represents the last class of physicians: those convinced that the diseased state of American politics is the product of too little activity, not too much, that the body politic retains the resources for its own renewal, and that we should beware of drastic remedies that seek to fix the problem all at once. Although this is objectively good news, this is often the doctor we least want to listen to when we are sick, and so it is here.
Politics and Faithful Citizenship mini-course: This summer, I’ve been working on putting together a mini-course for churches on how to think about politics, government, law, and citizenship through a theological lens. I’ll be teaching it at Holy Trinity Raleigh (ACNA), August 16-17; St. Andrews Anglican, Mt. Pleasant (ACNA), September 13-14; and City Church of Richmond (PCA), September 20-21. If you live near one of these churches, I’d love to see you, or, if you think your church might profit from a similar course, don’t hesitate to reach out!
“How to Be Pro-Life in a Pro-Choice World”: Following this, my next WORLD Opinions column considers how pro-life conservatives should respond to the new political reality: lacking national party commitment to their cause. “Depressing as this moment may seem,” I write, “we can at least be grateful for the clarity it provides: you cannot have a pro-life politics without a pro-life culture.”
“The Anti-Human Future of AI”: You know that maddening Olympics ad for Google’s Gemini? The one where the dad asks AI to write a fan letter from his young daughter to her favorite athlete? It tells us a lot about how AI’s boosters think about humanity and the role of technology. We must resist their anti-human future if we don’t want to end up like the slurpee-sipping humans in WALL-E, I argue in another upcoming WORLD Opinions column.
Natural Law and Scriptural Authority course: As I spotlighted last week, this fall I’ll be teaching an online course on how Protestants should think about natural law in relation to Scripture for Davenant Hall. Although designed as an introduction, the course features some deep dives into classic texts from the Christian tradition, as well as biblical exegesis and lots of class discussion. You can audit for just $225! Register here.
“The Irishman’s Two Stoves”: My friends at the Ridley Institute are launching a new quarterly journal for Anglican church leaders, and I’ve been asked to contribute a white paper on technology to the first issue. I’m not sure whether it will be posted online at some point or not, but I’ll be sure to highlight it here one way or another when it’s published.

On the Bookshelf

Andrew T. Walker, Faithful Reason (2024): I mentioned this in last week’s Substack as an example of the recent revival of Protestant natural law, and I’m now reading through it in preparation for an Ad Fontes review. Really good stuff thus far, and it resonates completely with what I said last week: that the most important use of natural law is in its ability to make sense of the Christian moral vision within the church, not without. Walker says, “My goal is to re-orient Protestants toward embracing the natural law as an approach to ethics that helps them understand the intelligibility and cogency of their own ethics for the sake of ethical catechesis.”
Patrick Deneen, Regime Change (2023): Still chipping away at this and finding both plenty to profit from and plenty to disagree with. I particularly appreciated his discussion of the contrast between the epistemologies of “common sense” and of “expertise,” and of all that we have lost by the sole enthronement of expertise among our governing classes. This resonates with a lot of my own reflections the past three years; see for instance my essay “In Search of Authority.”

Get Involved

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If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.