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Guest Essay
Freedom Is Not What We Think It Is
Dr. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of “On Freedom.”
I know a town in southern Ukraine where every single house has been destroyed by shelling or bombing. Even the ruins are riddled by bullet holes. Posad-Pokrovske, in the Kherson region, was occupied by Russians for most of 2022, before they were driven out by the Ukrainian army.
I visited there a year ago and met Mariia. She was living in a corrugated-metal hut behind the rubble of her house, her possessions arranged neatly, water bottles in a line, extension cords from the generator well hidden. She was proud of her Ukrainian government and cried in sympathy with her president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He seemed so young to her. Mariia is 86.
When we spoke, in Ukrainian, she used the word “de-occupation” rather than the expected “liberation.” I had a draft of a book about freedom in my backpack. I got it out and made a note.
We like to think that people are free when the correct army arrives: a liberation. But removing evil is not enough. Mariia would be less free without her temporary dwelling, provided by an international organization. She will be more free when the lane through the rubble is wide enough for her walker, and when the buses are running again.
The Ukrainians don’t expect us to bring them freedom. One soldier told me to remind Americans that they don’t need our troops. They do need our weapons, as one tool of many to keep their futures open. No one can bring anyone else freedom. But freedom can arise from cooperation.
Ukrainians have to keep fighting because they know what Russian occupation means. They have every reason to think of freedom as negative, as just the removal of what is wrong. But in the hundreds of conversations I have now had with Ukrainians about freedom, including soldiers on the front this month, I have never heard anyone say that. Freedom is about moral commitments and multiple possibilities. The Ukrainians driving vans to the front and rebuilding houses also speak of their actions in terms of freedom.
In the ruins of the Kharkiv suburbs recently, and in the rubble of the Kherson region last year, I was reminded of a nurse who arrived at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 after “liberation.” She wrote in her diary that this was not the correct word. Inmates could not be regarded as free, she thought, until they had been restored to health and their trauma was addressed.
To be sure, it matters when Russian power is removed from Ukraine. And of course it mattered when the SS fled the camps. No one is free behind barbed wire or under bombing, whether we are talking about the past or the present, about Xinjiang or Gaza or anywhere else.
But freedom is not just an absence of evil. Freedom is a presence of good. It is the value of values, the condition in which we choose and combine the good things, bringing them into the world, leaving our own unique trace. It is positive.
So long as Americans imagine freedom as negative, as a matter of getting rid of power, we will have no land of the free. We will have to listen to one another about how power can create the conditions of freedom. As conservatives say, virtue is real. As liberals believe, there are many virtues, which we have to consider and combine. And as social democrats maintain, we need to work together to create structures that allow us to do that work.
Freedom helps us know how to govern. Freedom, in my view, takes five forms, connecting philosophy to politics. The first, sovereignty, means the capacity of children to understand themselves and the world. We think of states as sovereign, but a politics that begins with freedom requires a government that helps make people so. The second, unpredictability, makes us unruly and lively. The third, mobility, is the multiplicity of paths across space and time that opens before us. The fourth, factuality, is the grip on the world that allows us to change it. And the fifth, solidarity, is the recognition that freedom must be for us all.
And the home of the brave? It is cowardly to believe that freedom is just negative, just an absence. When we think of freedom that way, we leave all the hard questions open: Who are we? What do we care about? For what will we take a risk? What we are really saying is that someone or something else will fill the void and do the work for us. A leader will tell us what to think. Or a market or a machine will do the thinking for us. Or it will be the founders who somehow did all the thinking long ago.
We need government to solve certain problems so that we can be free. Only a government will stop an invader or break up a monopoly. But that is just the beginning. When people have health care, they are less worried about the future and free to change jobs. When children have access to school, adults are more free to organize life. Children who learn can defend themselves against the lies of aspiring tyrants.
Freedom is national work. It takes a cooperative nation to create free individuals. That cooperation is called government. And freedom is generational work. For children to grow up free, the necessary institutions and policies must already be in place. Infants cannot create the conditions of their own upbringing. No young person can build the roads and the universities needed for the American dream. We have to always be looking ahead. It is this prospect, this sense of a better future enabled by present decisions, that makes a land of the free.
When we believe freedom is negative, we believe that we are always right. We separate ourselves from the outside world, believing that this is liberation. We end up in a safe space with other Americans who think the same way. Some outside force is supposed to make us free, and when it does not, we call our condition freedom anyway. We have an answer for everything: Whatever happens, the government is to blame. And so we live inside a story.
A free person knows that there is no one answer to everything and no single story for everybody. As I finished my book about freedom, I tried to listen to people whose predicaments were different from mine. Mariia was one of them. She got me thinking about de-occupation, about how we get from the negative to the positive. She smiled when she spoke to me, and offered me the one beautiful object she had rescued from her ruined house as a gift. I looked at her walker and thought about what more she needed to be free.
To be free, we have to see other people, not least to be able to see ourselves. If we understand freedom correctly, if we draw the right lessons from extreme situations, we can connect freedom to government. Then that better future awaits us: a beautiful range of possibilities for unpredictable, unruly people.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. His most recent book is “On Freedom.”
Source photographs by aguadeluna, Claudiad and banabana-san/Getty Images.
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