The Value of Values

IN THE AFTERMATH of January 6, 2021, historians’ historian Robert O Paxton, who had defined fascism for the post-war century, “removed” his objection to the application of the fascist label to Donald Trump. Paxton still thinks it does not make any helpful difference but Yale historian Timothy D Snyder was one of the ‘offending’ scholars loosely deploying the f-word for Trump. Snyder’s On Tyranny (2017) mined his extensive knowledge of real fascism to forewarn America, but the transplanted context was not convincing. Since then, Snyder has been vindicated for warning that Trump would attempt a coup. He has been doubly vindicated for claiming Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine long before February 24, 2022.

Snyder’s On Freedom is a companion volume to On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) where the author of the seminal Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) attempts to define freedom and reclaim it from the right (which thinks of liberty too much and never of structures) and guard it from the left (which is willing to sacrifice freedom for structure). The ghost lurking everywhere but named only once in the book is Isaiah Berlin whose conception of positive and negative liberty is Snyder’s starting point. Negative freedom is an absence, the removal of a barrier, but it is not enough. (Note that Ukrainians say “de-occupation” instead of “liberation”.) Positive freedom is a presence, which grants us agency to do something new and good. Individual rights are important but a healthy society calls for collective action. Such freedom has five forms, or determinants: sovereignty (to be able to take meaningful decisions and act on them), unpredictability (to think and act in ways beyond the control of algorithms and authorities), mobility (to be able to break the very structures that make us sovereign), factuality (to have a grip on reality so we can change it), and solidarity (to recognise that we cannot do all this alone nor merely for our own selves).

Snyder returns time and again to Ukraine, whose history and identity are being erased by Russia’s “hydrocarbon fascism”, mass murder and loot of museums. But his meditation is more about America. Václav Havel, Simone Weil, Leszek Kolakowski and Edith Stein are more heroic ghosts in the debate, as is the very living Adam Michnik. To succeed in the basic struggle of life against Weil’s “gravity” or Havel’s “entropy”, we need to make Stein’s distinction between Leib and Körper, two German words for ‘body’ with a world of difference between them, as between life and death. Leib allows us love, empathy and solidarity. It needs to be sanctified and secured against the entropy or gravity that machines (social media, AI, big tech at the service of Silicon Valley oligarchs) impose upon us by making us predictable and imprisoning us before the screen. Our world increasingly looks at the body as Körper, a corpse and alien. Late communism, as Havel experienced, was rather similar to our unfreedom today, where we react predictably to stimuli. The twist in the tale is that the algorithms “unthinking us” are incapable of thought.

“Freedom needs human thinkers, sovereign and unpredictable. Unfreedom needs yielding and predictable creatures, quaking from fear in self-built cages,” says Snyder. Freedom is the value that makes all others possible. Therefore, it cannot be entrusted to impersonal forces. We roam free in the space between “what is” and “what ought to be”, the fifth dimension all this aspires to, but we cannot attain the latter without understanding the former. We need to learn history: “Better than raging against the machine is reading against the machine.” The book is also rich in significant trivia, from the true history of the Liberty Bell to the thread connecting Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, Havel and Charter 77.

On Freedom is a reaffirmation of what one would like to keep believing, but as a manifesto it is often punctuated by wishful thinking: Government to resolve the problem of mechanisation by policy? Paper ballots to preclude electoral robbery? But then, who can fault Synder for having his heart in the right place? For instance, he says those who lie about the world ending (climate change) will keep lying till the world ends.

AmericabooksDonald TrumpgeopoliticsKamala HarrisOn FreedomTimothy Snyder