It was sometime two years ago during an interview on a European podcast when the host asked me what one word I would suggest to sum up an agenda to reform policies in Europe. I gave the obvious answer: freedom.
That’s the alternative to the despotism now on the march throughout the world.
He and his co-hosts immediately pushed back. They said that the word freedom has been thoroughly discredited in Europe. It means being unvaccinated and not complying with disease-mitigation measures. Freedom sounds like the spreading of infection and death, so using it to sum up an agenda will certainly fail.
Did I have any other suggestions? I did not.
My own sense of things is that if we can’t save the word “freedom,” we are completely sunk. Freedom is the basis of all progress, all human dignity, all human achievement. To favor freedom is not to say that individuals and society are perfect, only that permitting people to live their lives in peace is going to yield vastly better results than any plan pushed by the ruling class whether national or transnational, government or corporate, nonprofit or for profit. A world without freedom is a world mired in endless economic and cultural stagnation.
To be fair, this problem not only affected Europe. It was true in the United States itself. There was a moment back in those days when Dr. Anthony Fauci and then President Joe Biden and then everyone in their ranks trashed the very idea of freedom. On social media, the partisans began spelling the word “freedumb.” That truly broke my heart, since freedom is the core of the American idea. Without it, we too are sunk.
If your goal is to promote some version of servitude under the wise guidance of an elite, freedom is indeed anathema. Anyone who attacks the concept is playing with fire. They are plotting the destruction of the good life for regular people while scheming to pillage resources and power from the rest of society. It can happen under any excuse—national security, disease, climate change, stamping out sedition, or whatever—but the goal is always the same.
There are many ways to come to appreciate why freedom matters in history and in our time. Some are perhaps less obvious, such as the history of art, architecture, and music in the late Middle Ages and leading to the Renaissance. The shifts and advances parallel each other throughout the European experience.
Compare the music of the 15th century and 16th century and you hear not so much a shift in the skill of the composer, though there is that, but mainly a shift in focus from transcendent-only attitudes to more humanistic ones. There is a new optimism about the prospects for life on earth based on the view that God has blessed the human experience and willed it to be good. This new confidence worked its way through the centuries to grant us longer and better lives, with rising prosperity for the masses of people and an intensified commitment to human rights and dignity.
And this change gave us ever more surprises as time went onward. One of my favorite musical comparisons concerns the shift from 16th- to 17th-century music based on two pieces separated by only 20 years.
He seemed to know that in releasing it, he was saying goodbye not only for himself but for an entire genre of art that had dominated a tumultuous century of dramatic change. You might spend a few moments listening. There’s nothing else like this.
What followed this of course was the Baroque with Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, and all the more familiar names. The changes we hear in the music mirror the same in architecture and painting as it all becomes more vivid, celebratory, humane, and life-affirming. And in the world of economics, we observe similar transitions out of the Middle Ages toward ever greater fortunes privately earned in merchant craft, banking, and factory-style settings with large-scale production. With that, there were great changes in technology, including printing, milling, and textiles, plus ever more distribution of products from around the world.
The evils of the Black Death now centuries past, and with roads ever more passable with more efficient means of transport, more and more people could experience prosperity and choice, and even look forward to generation-by-generation material advances, leading ultimately to the Industrial Revolution and the final end of slavery, the triumph of religious liberty, free speech, peace among nations, and constitutionally restrained states.
Freedom is the one idea that made all of this possible. It was about granting the power of self-government to the people and away from the elites. The more authority was vested with people in their own communities, the better and healthier lives became. The growing awareness that elites are not all they are cracked up to be gave the human experience a forward motion to build a better world with confidence and hope. It lifted up the human spirit.
All the sufferings of the world today trace to a loss of faith in freedom. It’s the reason for ill-health, decaying economies, the push for war, declining hope, and mass public distrust. Curbing freedom unleashes ancient social and cultural ills that we thought were conquered long ago. The elites who have taken away our rights in economics, education, religion, and politics are playing with fire, attacking institutions of well-being that took a thousand years to come to fruition.
Read the writings of the masters of the universe today. Do you find any genuine affection for freedom in them? An understanding of what it means and why it matters? I do not. What we find are celebrations of their own expertise in managing us.
We are surrounded by the blessings of an idea that the current generation of leaders has done nothing to earn and much to crush. At the same time, we are surrounded by evidence of their failure. The carnage all around us has both a cause and a solution. To understand it requires recommitting ourselves to this one idea.
