SUNDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2024

In the modern world we are overwhelmed by choice. Much of this is trivial – which brand of toothpaste we should use, whether to drink Coke or Pepsi, or heaven forbid even water, which colour we want to decorate our bathroom – but much of it is also vital to the level of life-changing: whether to go to university and incur a lifetime of debt and, if so, which major to take; at what age to get married or whether to get married at all; whether to leave that steady job which bores us and to risk going back on the job market or moving into a completely new field. But even the trivial stuff has a real influence on our lives simply because it accumulates and we have to make literally thousands of these tiny decisions on a daily basis. Walk down the aisles of a modern supermarket and there are sometimes hundreds of variations on a basic product. We are drowning in this world of the drip drip drip of needless, vacuous decisions.

In theory this glut of options should be a wonderful thing. On the surface we have so much more freedom than the generations who preceded us, whose lives were usually far more circumscribed. It was a brave woman who chose to remain single when a man proposed to her and thereby risked being ‘left on the shelf’; there was usually little chance for someone to move up and out of their social class of birth, so, for instance, in the industrial, working-class area where I grew up, most boys were destined for a life in a factory while girls were supposed to become housewives; the majority of people until quite recently lived and died close to where they were born. In contrast, in today’s world, at least in the UK and many other western countries, many people are likely not to get married, or to have a patchwork career where they move from one field to another, often out of necessity. In addition, we are much more mobile than in the past and move not only for work but also in response to relationships or simply a desire for novelty.

Is this freedom genuine or is it just smoke and mirrors? Do we really have more freedom than in the past or are our horizons simply limited in a different way? And if we use Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom – freedom to do something and freedom from things such as want and oppression – are both equally available or unavailable to us in the modern world? Crucially, are we free not to choose, particularly in situations when the choice is insignificant? Do we even want all this choice and freedom?

Recent politics in both Europe and America suggests that perhaps we don’t, or at least that a significant number of us don’t, possibly even a majority. Less than one hundred years after the horrors of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, Stalinism in Russia, Pol Pot’s ‘socialism’ in Cambodia and neo-Fascism in Chile, to mention just a few, it seems there is now a fresh longing afoot for the strong leader, the man (and it is nearly always a man) who will tell us what to do and make us safe, at the cost of the removal of our freedoms, especially those freedoms from things like oppression, discrimination and injustice.

There seem to be two strands in all of us as human beings. The first is a desire for security, for the certainty of rules and limitations, even if they become onerous and no longer really serve to protect us. The second is a curiosity and an openness to difference and novelty and a longing for a world without restrictions. In evolutionary terms, this makes good sense because in order to survive, our species needs to find a balance between these two ways of thinking. But over the last twenty years or so, the pendulum has swung heavily towards the first desire, for security, and we seem almost blasé about endangering the democracy which nearly all of us in theory support.

When we remember all the terrible things that happened under Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism, surely we should fight harder to maintain the freedoms we have gained, so why aren’t we? I think the first reason is fear of the Other, something which I doubt we can ever eradicate as a species which evolved to work in tribes of around a hundred and fifty people, so it is always easy for provocateurs to stir up hatred to further their own agendas, especially since they are often supported by big business and the very rich, whose greed seems insatiable. Another possible reason is that people have become complacent in western democracies and view the right to vote as an eternal right which can never be taken away, but history and recent events in America suggest that this is far from true. To use the title of a song from the Freak Out album by Zappa and the Mothers, there is a sense that ‘it can’t happen here’. A different type of complacency leads us to assume that we will always be part of the in-group who won’t end up in a concentration camp: they’ll never come for us. Most of us surround ourselves with people who are similar to us in their background and thinking, so we tend to assume that the whole of society is very like our tiny bubble, so it is easy to place the blame for bad things that happen on a handful of miscreants and/or outsiders. We’ve seen this so often in history that it is very difficult to have any hope that it will ever change.

Another reason why people fear freedom is that it entails responsibility, which brings us back to the issue of choice. Being placed in jail sounds like a terrible thing to happen, but it takes away a lot of our need to make decisions since our whole life is reduced to following the set routine of the prison. Inmates become habituated to this rigid environment and often have problems adapting to the world outside once they are released. Less extreme than this, but still a potent reality in modern societies which are rapidly changing, we now have to make key decisions such as those I mentioned earlier (e.g. do I get married?) which we used to make on autopilot, doing something because almost everyone else did it and anyone who chose not to was seen as either rather suspicious or perverse or simply weird. Also, when we are free to make decisions, especially major ones but also even fairly trivial ones about purchases, there is no one else to blame if things go wrong. In my opinion, the mountain of self-help books that clutter our libraries and bookshops are destructive here because most of them preach freedom as an ultimate good and gloss over the fact that it comes with a price; we should all get in touch with our ‘inner selves’, they say, and follow our individual wishes and desires, and that will make us all happy.

Except perhaps it won’t. Because the research suggests that we are becoming less happy in developed countries, less satisfied, despite our relative freedom compared to the past. There is so much pressure on us to maximise our lives, and as someone who is now old, I can see huge differences between the world in which I grew up, a world where people often enjoyed really simple pleasures such as working in their gardens or even stamp collecting, and the world which young people now grow up in, an unstable world where everyone is treading on the hamster wheel and fearing falling off, so there is much less time for these pleasures. I notice, for example, that when I teach English and ask my foreign students what their hobbies are as a way of breaking the ice, often they have none. Their answer will be something very generic such as watching movies or listening to music, but when I probe further there is little depth of interest in these activities. Most damning of all, at least to me, is the fact that they often say shopping.

Finally, I’d like to explore the generally accepted belief, to the point of it being a truism, that we really have more freedom nowadays. But are these freedoms illusory, or at least meaningless? The freedom to choose among a hundred different types of shampoo is not in many ways a freedom: it becomes a burden. In contrast, radical freedoms such as the hippie dream of opting out of society, getting a place in the countryside and living a simple and natural life as depicted in the 1970s comedy series, The Good Life, recedes further and further into the distance and becomes a silly and comforting fantasy, one which is only available to the very rich who can afford to step off the hamster wheel. Of course, this was always largely true, as the failure of my hippie generation proves, but as the vice of consumer capitalism gets tighter and tighter, in many ways we have less freedom than we used to have, even as we are fed the lie that we have hugely more.

Ultimately the concept of freedom is a complex one which is riddled with paradox. In some senses, the slave has more freedom than the ‘free’ individual because he or she is released from the burden of choice, and people adapt to restrictions and grow to accept them, which ironically can lead to greater happiness, or at least complaisance. The dream of perfect freedom is simply that: a rather infantile fantasy in a world which will always limit us physically, psychologically and socially. I want to make it quite clear that I am not arguing for a ‘strong man’ or limitations on our democracy; as Churchill famously said, it is ‘the worst form of government, except for all the others’. But I do believe we need to be careful because the extreme right is twisting and abusing the concept of ‘freedom’ as a way of trying to remove it. As always, they use the distraction of bread and circuses and choices we don’t need so that we fail to notice as the rug is pulled from under us.