Timothy Snyder dedicates “On Freedom” (Crown New York, 2024) “to those who wish to be free.” He attempts to define “freedom” –– positive freedom –– as not destruction and absence of things, but creation and presence of values, including the right kind of moral and political values.
“Virtue,” he writes, “is an inseparable part of freedom.”
So, too, is accountability, honesty, humility, and rule of law.
Snyder takes us along as he travels to and through Ukraine and contemplates the birth of the idea of freedom and democracy in ancient Greece. His writing is beautiful, poignant, and painful –– especially in light of the current state of affairs in the United States and the world where storm clouds seem to be gathering.
He condemns the rise of autocracy, oligarchy, inequality, and what he calls “sadopopulism.” And he offers prescriptions for standing up to greed, grift, and the abuse of power.
“As the future crashes in, we can panic and blame others. Those predictable reactions make us part of the mob and the catastrophe. Or we can, as free people, take responsibility, look deep into Earth’s past, and save the world.”
Freedom must be fought for. It is not a birthright, and it is not preordained. “The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone,” he warns.
A recurring theme in “On Freedom” is the need to confront racism in a free country. The military, up till now, has made a concerted effort to increase diversity and reject racism.
World War II was a watershed event: defeating fascism and creating democracies in Japan and Germany while also confronting bigotry, prejudice and discrimination on the home front. Snyder cites examples of veterans of the Second World War who returned to face hate and segregation. He discusses the Freedom Fighters of 1961 and the role of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis in the peaceful fight for freedom, equality, and voting rights.
We must engage, he asserts, writing on a train ride within Ukraine.
And we must reject complacency, supplication to authority, leaders' hypocrisy, and our own lazy thinking, including confirmation bias (treating information as evidence only when it confirms what we already believe).Snyder
It is also important to recognize “the false tragedy of choice” presented by social media algorithms — between entrepreneurship and social justice, for example.
“On Freedom” includes an appendix that compares positive and negative freedom. The positive view: Government must be made for freedom; the negative view: Government must be dismantled for freedom. Science is either (positive) how we engage with the world or (negative) “one opinion among others.” Racism is either a historical fact requiring reflection or strictly “personal, irrelevant to freedom.”
Extrapolating from the appendix, security and prosperity are achieved through rule of law and accountability (positive freedom) or strictly imposed through strong-arm policing (negative).
We cannot sacrifice liberty for safety, Snyder advises.
“We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.” A government of, by, and for the people should not be shunned or belittled.
Snyder writes, “We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government.”
He describes “five forms of freedom” as the “logical, moral, and political links between common action and the formation of free individuals.”
“The five forms are sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
Sometimes the best way to see oneself is through the eyes of others. That applies to people specifically and nations generally. Snyder says his book is for the United States, but, as a historian, he draws comparisons with western Europe, eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.
This vital book answers some of the questions brought up in Snyder’s “On Tyranny.”
In this follow-up, he shows how to fight oligarchy (reject disinformation) and confront climate change (embrace to search for fusion power).
He champions actual infrastructure initiatives, real freedom of speech, and a commitment to civil rights.
We discover hidden unintentional “found haiku” in Snyder’s writing. Seventeen syllables, 5-7-5, displayed in three lines, that capture and focus an insight or truth like a laser. Here are a few:
Freedom is not just
an absence of evil but
A presence of good
Empathy is a
precondition for certain
knowledge of the world
Overconfidence
makes us vulnerable to
the propaganda (of tyrants)
A free person sees
the world in color, as through
a kaleidoscope
Synder’s prose travels effortlessly through countries, eras, and moods, both light and stormy. One moment he writes of oppression in the former Soviet Union and hope in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia; the next moment he expounds on the roots of rock and roll, the Velvet Underground, Louie Louie, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. “On Freedom” is a fun, enlightened, but ultimately serious ride on Snyder’s train of thought.
(Top photo of Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains courtesy of Pixabay)
