They called themselves the Sanitary Spartacans. Outraged by San Francisco’s mask-wearing ordinance, they protested and assembled in large numbers, fighting the public health authorities for the freedom to walk around barefaced. On January 25, 1919, their newspaper ad appeared: “ANTI-MASK MEETING TONIGHT.” As the so-called Spanish flu continued to take its toll—it would prove the deadliest pandemic in modern history—thousands of indignant citizens showed up at San Francisco’s Dreamland skating rink.
“Large numbers of people have suddenly come to the conclusion that constitutional rights as to individual liberty are, in the domain of health matters, being rapidly supplanted by an intolerable autocracy,” one newspaper editorialist wrote, praising this brigade of upright citizens for taking on “an insidious and organized attempt to inaugurate a regime of medical domination.” Unfortunately, after the mask order was lifted a week later, the flu surged in San Francisco, with almost 45,000 new cases by the end of the winter.
It’s easy to scoff at this anti-mask league—or at the similar anti-mask protests that have recently taken place across the country. But at a time of lockdowns, mask rules, bans on large gatherings and various mandatory social-distancing measures, such protests pose a serious question about whether rational measures for the control of infectious diseases compromise liberty. Even if you’re not on the side of the Sanitary Spartacans, you might still think they were protecting one ideal at the expense of another. To grasp why this is a mistake, we’ll have to come to grips with a thorny old briar of a question: What do we mean by liberty?
Two centuries ago, the French statesman and political theorist Benjamin Constant distinguished between the “liberty of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns.” For the citizens of ancient city-states like Athens, he said, to be free was to participate in government; for modern citizens, living in much larger states, freedom was something you secured against government. The contrast can be marked by a pair of prepositional phrases: “freedom to” and “freedom from.”
Isaiah Berlin famously proposed two rival concepts of liberty.
Photo: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Getty ImagesIn the Cold War era, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously singled out “two concepts of liberty” among the many he found floating around. He wrote warily about the allure of “positive liberty,” which typically involved a political community that defined your “true interests” and encouraged or compelled you to pursue them—and which, he feared, could be used to support Soviet-style tyranny. (As a boy, born in Latvia, he had witnessed the Russian Revolution.) “Negative liberty,” on the other hand, was a simpler and more compact notion—it involved the mere absence of constraints imposed upon you by others. Here again was the basic contrast between “freedom to” and “freedom from.”
In the grand American tradition, freedom is about being unfettered, undominated: You’re not the boss of me. In truth, what Constant called the liberty of the moderns is also a very ancient idea. When people in classical times wrote about freedom, they were usually distinguishing the condition from involuntary servitude. As Constant pointedly observed, Athenians could gather in the public square for discussions each day because they had slaves doing most of the work. (He might have said the same of many in Independence Hall in 1787.) To be free was, as a matter of definition, not to be enslaved. Hence the Sanitary Spartacans—Spartacus, remember, having led a slave rebellion against his Roman overlords. The trouble is that we usually don’t think hard enough about all that’s actually required to live free.
“ Bluntly put: There’s precious little freedom in the sick ward and less still in the graveyard. ”
What’s the iconic image of American freedom? To judge by countless rock and country songs, it’s rolling down the highway, possibly with the wind in our hair. Sure, there were comforts back home, but also expectations and obligations, and now, rockin’ down the highway, you’re free from all that.
But what does it take to roll on down the highway? Well, a highway, for starters. The federal government built the interstate highway system, using its constitutional prerogative of eminent domain hundreds of thousands of times to keep it straight, while collecting taxes to pay for its construction and maintenance. And then you can only speed down your lane because you know that the other cars are moving in the same direction. Governmental power, exercised through a veritable trailer-load of law, is what makes it possible to keep truckin’ on.
Minimal-state libertarians tend to revile regulations while prizing private property and the free market. But property rights are meaningless without legal procedures to sort out ownership and mechanisms of enforcement to protect it. What does ownership amount to if anyone bigger and stronger could just come along and take what you’ve got? Free markets, too, depend upon an edifice of rules, regulations and mechanisms for their enforcement. Otherwise a contract would be worthless. If fraud runs rampant, markets are undermined. “Where there is no law,” as John Locke famously observed in 1689, “there is no freedom.” America’s founders agreed.
The ideal of freedom on the open road depends on many rules.
Photo: Getty ImagesWhat prevents one human being from forcing another into subservience is the exercise of legitimate state power and the rule of law. Equality, in this sense—the political equality that forbids one person from placing shackles on others or otherwise disregarding their basic rights—is a precondition of freedom. Yet emancipation doesn’t just happen; civil rights and civil liberties are meaningless without enforcement. Trying to separate “freedom from” and “freedom to” is like trying to peel a marble.
Once you recognize the fretwork of rules that makes freedom possible, you see how so many liberals and conservatives have wrongly framed the situation we find ourselves in today. Liberals, for their part, routinely speak about the common good outweighing individual freedoms. Many libertarians, amid the pandemic, echo the sentiment. In the words of David Boaz of the Cato Institute, “We believe in the presumption of liberty. But that presumption can be overcome in particular circumstances.” Once you posit a trade-off between liberty and rational public-health strictures, of course, you invite disagreement about when the sacrifice of liberty is justified; maybe our Sanitary Spartacans simply value liberty more than others do.
This is why it’s important to recognize that the very opposition is misconceived. The right rules are a condition of liberty. Just as the blissful freedom of the road requires measures to pave those roads, and well-drafted antifraud statutes only fortify the free market, sensible public-health policies—like mask-wearing rules, which protect both the individual and the commonweal—don’t compromise liberty; they advance it. The uncontrolled spread of infectious diseases gets in the way of managing your life without interference and fulfilling your goals. Bluntly put: There’s precious little freedom in the sick ward and less still in the graveyard.
Consider the use of state authority to encourage vaccination. Today’s antivaxers, who have joined protests against masks and stay-at-home orders, speak like the Sanitary Spartacans. But measles once sickened millions of Americans each year, sending tens of thousands to the hospital and not a few to the morgue; parents once lived in fear that polio would kill or paralyze their children. Given that vaccinations aren’t 100% effective, the success of the antivaccination movement increases the risks to those outside it. It makes us all less free.
“ The right analogy is with laws requiring your car to have functioning brakes, so you don’t barrel into or over other people. ”
“Everyone is responsible for their own health-care decisions,” one anti-mask protester in Florida told a reporter in July. “We want our choices respected as well.” Yet when freedom involves collective action—whether we’re making an exchange in a marketplace or driving down a road—such language doesn’t make sense. It certainly doesn’t make sense when it comes to curbing a contagion. The masks are not a personal health care decision. Their point is largely to protect others, not to protect the wearer.
There are people who decry seat-belt and motorcycle-helmet laws as acts of a nanny state, protecting them from dangers they may not fear. And when you comply with these laws the main benefits to strangers may come in lowered insurance fees and the like, not in saved lives. But the right analogy in today’s debate over masks isn’t with laws like those; it’s with laws requiring your car to have functioning brakes, so you don’t barrel into or over other people. Most sane people don’t think this requirement is a denial of a right. There may be something uplifting in “Give me liberty or give me death” as a slogan. “Give me liberty and give them death,” not so much.
Those who recklessly spread disease, similarly, have long posed a challenge to liberal democracies. In the early years of the 20th century, Mary Mallon, a chronic, asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella typhi, ignored repeated warnings not to take work as a cook, and time and again left a trail of typhoid-related suffering and death. “Typhoid Mary” was remanded to a cottage on an island in New York’s East River. Just five years ago, California gave a jail sentence to Thomas Miguel Guerra, who, prosecutors said, declined to take medication for his HIV, lied to partners about his status and knowingly infected others.
We can debate the proper measures to be taken when it comes to such people, but we can’t say that the government advances our liberty by leaving them alone. Ask someone tethered to a ventilator how free she is.
Pandemics don’t just imperil our health, then; they impede our freedom. Imagine one country that, as the coronavirus cast its global shadow, largely held off from official prohibitions to curb its spread, and another country that imposed such measures aggressively. Several months later, the first country has the higher death toll and disease prevalence; people there, on their own accord, tend to shelter at home because they don’t feel safe in public places. In the second country, now carefully reopening, the rate of infection is very low; you can meet friends at a restaurant without feeling you’ve taken your life into your hands. Daily life in the second country is simply going to feel a lot freer.
What our latter-day Sanitary Spartacans have failed to grasp is that someone can constrict your freedom by making you deathly ill; and barefaced scofflaws can hinder our broader liberties by entrenching a contagion that inevitably restricts the normal conduct of business and social intercourse. Perpetuating the pandemic limits the scope of everyone’s individual autonomy. That’s why, in many places today, the true face of freedom wears a mask.
—Mr. Appiah is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University. His most recent book is “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.”
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Does wearing a face mask enhance our liberties or restrict them? Join the conversation below.
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"freedom" - Google News
August 06, 2020 at 10:24PM
https://ift.tt/31uoqaR
The True Face of Freedom Wears a Mask - The Wall Street Journal
"freedom" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2VUAlgg
https://ift.tt/2VYSiKW
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The True Face of Freedom Wears a Mask - The Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment