The raw realities of war in Ukraine can encourage the rebirth of liberty that emphasizes our responsibilities to society and less our individual demands for rights.
In modern times, the western world has increasingly developed a type of liberalism that emphasizes the rights of the individual and the use of state power to assert those rights. Whilst recognizing and protecting individual rights is an important and triumphal accomplishment of freedom, free societies also depend on a powerful sense of personal responsibility to society. Ukraine can help us rediscover this more ancient sense of liberty.
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, once, perhaps bizarrely to modern ears, described human beings as zoon politikon or ‘a political animal.’ This slightly abstruse phrase referred to the idea that human beings are powerless except when embedded within the political structures of society. It sounds odd to us today because many of us in the western world lead highly individualized lives. Although we all depend on supermarkets, water processing plants, and a whole network of people to get what we need on a day-to-day basis, the sheer scale of modern society means that we are less aware of our dependence on others compared to people in Aristotle’s day. Emerging from this is a view of humans as atomized entities, people going about their lives, satisfying their particular wants, and realizing their expectations.
This modern liberal conception of society – a collection of individuals that in some sense exist outside of society and only come together in a rather reluctant social contract, has in its turn encouraged a culture where western freedoms are often interpreted as being about individual rights. The major purpose of the state from this outlook is to shore up and protect the rights demanded by individuals or groups of individuals against the rest of society.
It was not always this way. In ancient times, smaller cities and less intricate and complicated communities meant that people were very much more dependent on one other. It was not as easy to live a detached individualistic lifestyle in societies like ancient Athens with populations of thousands of people like it is today. You had to pull your weight. Pericles, philosopher, and politician, had this to say about people who concerned themselves only with their own desires: “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in public affairs is a man who minds his own business. We say he has no business being here at all.” This was not a callous demand for state power over the individual; Pericles could not have had stronger credentials for the defense of freedom. It was he, after all, who rallied ancient Greece around the very idea of defending private and public liberty at the height of the Peloponnesian War. But he was adamant that in the city-state, the polis, there was no room for disengaged solitude. The freedom for which they fought was not a demand for the citizens only to secure the rights they thought they deserved, but for the opportunity to build private lives and public laws embedded in a society to which everyone would contribute.
This difference between the liberty of the ancients – one built on social cohesion and shared common values, and the liberty of the moderns – one that places more emphasis on the rights of individuals to obtain an almost perfect sphere of self-recognition, was noticed by Benjamin Constant, the Swiss-French political philosopher, and writer. In 1819, he wrote a famous essay comparing the liberty of the ancients and the moderns. He had this to say: “The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures, and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.” But Constant also claimed that the sorts of institutions of the ancient world are impossible in the modern age because individuals can no longer have the influence they had in the past when smaller populations meant they could be more easily heard in the cry of the rabble. In some sense, the individualized lives of today are an inevitable consequence of the mass societies and representative democracies in which we live; furthermore, if we want liberty, it is easier to get it by pursuing and demanding the state’s support for our personalized lives rather than taking part in the community at large.
The war in Ukraine has in many ways refocused our minds on the liberty of the ancients. A spirit of freedom has emerged from the body politic in Ukraine that is collective in its scale and serious in its intent. It reminds us to focus less on our individual wants and our desire to extract concessions from the rest of society for isolated sets of rights and claims, but more to embrace each other in a more capacious social view of liberty. The horrors endured by Ukraine can only be suffered by a nation that understands that freedom is as much about one’s contribution and active involvement in the polity as it is about successfully achieving one’s personal set of social demands.
The liberty of the moderns, as Constant called it, is sometimes evident in the priorities and issues that tend to take center stage today in the western world. To emphasize again – the securing of many rights such as race equality and women’s suffrage, are not to be belittled. These were stupendous advances. But we witness today the phenomenon of how refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic to collect orange juice from a grocery store has become the heroic act of a freedom fighter. Many of our discontents are expressed in terms of ‘my rights.’ The underlying issues behind these matters, for example, the extent to which the state should be able to compel us to wear masks, are important for sure. Nevertheless, the ways in which we articulate these freedoms tend to reflect societies that can become absorbed by a ceaseless demand for personal self-realization in which freedom is interpreted to be the unyielding and uncompromising recognition of a never-ending specific set of issues claimed by individuals against society.
The problem with the liberty of the modern is that despite its focus on the individual, ironically it has the tendency to lend vast power to the state, which turns into a referee, adjudicating the various rights-demanding groups in society and protecting them from each other, whilst in the process accumulating vast powers over all of us. We forget that our freedom is often more reliably secured by egalitarian compassion, forbearance, and often compromise with one other, along with the pursuit of voluntary commercial and social bonds, rather than the employment of the state to act on our behalf to secure for us a perimeter of rights protected from others. The latter is paramount, but too much emphasis on that instead of the former is a sure road to state tyranny.
Constant saw the problem two centuries ago. He warned: “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily. The holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage us to do so.”
But Constant also saw that the perils did not just lurk in the ever-increasing individualized version of freedom, but that governments must also respond to these modern realities: “Governments have new duties; the progress of civilization, the changes brought by the centuries, require from the authorities greater respect for customs, for affections, for the independence of individuals. They must handle all these issues with a lighter and more prudent hand.”
What Constant was imploring us to do was to meet in the middle. The state must recognize the individualism of modern liberty, but individuals must also be less trenchant in their demands for rights and more willing and open to giving part of themselves, making compromises for the sake of liberty more focused on the commonweal.
Speaking of the liberty of the ancients and the moderns, Constant said: “…it is necessary, as I have shown, to learn to combine the two together.” Ukraine reminds us again about the good that lies in the liberty of the ancients. It offers us a twenty-first-century recalibration of our priorities and what we should find important in the defense of liberty. Perhaps, out of the Ukrainian war, western freedom has an opportunity to take stock of itself and take a sip of the liberty of the ancients.
