The Future Of Freedom

The broader freedom is not just American. In a new book, "Development as Freedom," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argues that "the expansion of freedom is both the primary end and... principal means of development" in poorer countries. But Sen's freedom eclipses the classic political and economic freedoms. It includes "social opportunities" (expanded education and health care) "transparency guarantees" (a lack of corruption) and more "entitlements" (to ensure basic decency and prevent "abject misery"). Indeed, it seems to include almost anything that might advance human well-being.

In some ways, freedom's explosion connects the century's two great constants: war and economic progress. Deaths in World War I and World War II are crudely reckoned at 10 million and as much as 60 million, respectively. But these vast tragedies ultimately paid some dividends, because they doomed colonial empires. Also, the nature of the wars emphasized freedom. They were too destructive to be mere contests of nations. They had to be about ideals. The cold war--an ideological conflict--conveyed the same message.

If war expanded freedom, prosperity embellished it. Since 1900 the world's population has roughly quadrupled, from almost 1.6 billion to 6 billion. Meanwhile, the global production of goods and services--from food and steel to air travel and health care--has risen 14 to 15 times, estimates economist Angus Maddison for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. As nations grew wealthier, traditional freedom wasn't enough. People ascended what psychologist Abraham Maslow called the human hierarchy of needs--from food and shelter to self-esteem and to spiritual needs, such as justice and beauty. People could not (it was said) be "free" without realizing these larger yearnings.

Freedom's fate in the next century is fragile, in part because the very notion is now so ill-defined. Classic freedom--coupling the opportunity for success with the danger of failure--hardly ensures personal fulfillment or social order. "On the one hand, you're told you're free," says Lipset. "But on the other, you're a potential loser. And if you lose, you don't feel free." The traditional freedoms of belief and lifestyle also require, if they are not to foster anarchy, tolerance and self-restraint. Even in the United States, these qualities are sometimes wanting. In societies unaccustomed to freedom, they are often depressingly scarce.

But at least traditional freedom is universal. Everyone can, in theory, enjoy the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and property. This sort of freedom promises the absence of coercion. By contrast, the new freedoms of individual "rights" and "entitlements" are increasingly exclusive, and may mean the coercion of one group by another--which weakens a sense of community. The "rights" of women, gays and the disabled cannot be directly enjoyed by men, straights or the nondisabled. Financing entitlements means taxes--a form of collective coercion--by which taxpayers subsidize beneficiaries.

Freedom, always a combustible concept, promises to become more so, because in a world of television and the Internet, ideas glide almost spontaneously across cultural and political boundaries. The eagerness of the West to export its ideals may increasingly collide with the willingness and capacity of others to abandon or modify their own. What we value, they may fear or mishandle. Freedom is a great blessing. But it has never been easy--and never will be.

© 1999