P&C review a Baltic Porter and discuss freedom

What is freedom, and why should we value it?

The hippies grooved on freedom, but Janis Joplin called it merely “another word for nothing left to lose.”

Casting off restraints can cause very potent, positive emotions. Like the first time you could drive your own car.

But unrestrained freedom is not a good thing. We love freedom, but we put clear limits on it. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, you can’t commit treason, and you can’t incite violence. Also, there’s a tension between freedom and safety, and between freedom and order. We’re okay with seatbelt laws, for example, and rules in the courthouse. So “free” in the context of human society can’t mean completely unconstrained.

What is it then? What are the limits? And why is it a good thing?

3 thoughts on “P&C review a Baltic Porter and discuss freedom”

  1. Did you mean Irving Kristol when you said Irving Berlin, talking about different kinds of rights?

  2. Did I say Irving? I meant Isaiah.

    In 1958, Isaiah Berlin had delivered a lecture in which he famously discerned “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In 1969, that lecture was published as one chapter of a book that brought the contrast between Berlin’s two liberties—positive and negative—to wider attention. Readers discomfited by the events of the previous year could read this text as prophecy: It was the seductive allure of positive liberty that had led the younger generation astray.

    To simplify Berlin’s arguments brutally, negative liberty was “freedom from,” or the enjoyment of a zone of noninterference, of guaranteed exemption from coercion, while positive liberty was “freedom to”—the freedom to be (or, more sinisterly perhaps, the freedom to choose) one’s own master.

  3. You did, and I laughed when I heard it. I knew it was a slip of the tongue and I guessed wrong about what you’d meant to say.

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