Have We Misunderstood The Meaning of Freedom During The Pandemic?

There’s more to freedom than the rights of the individual

Photo by Hanna Zhyhar on Unsplash

Since March 2020, most people around the world have experienced some form of limitations on their freedom. Before this date, this idea would have been unfathomable to most in the western world.

But the emergence of Covid-19, a deadly virus for which humans had no collective immunity, the choice was either limit freedoms or let a novel virus run riot and claim thousands, if not millions of lives.

Many of us saw the Wuhan lockdown in January 2020 and thought it could never happen here. I was one of them. Locking down a whole city is much easier in a country with an authoritarian government like China, but, in the end, their fate was ours too.

Countries around the world imposed lockdowns to halt the spread of Covid. A bargain was struck. The limiting of civil liberties to avoid mass deaths. For some countries such as New Zealand and Vietnam, it worked, for others such as my own country, the UK, the result was less successful.

One of the interesting things to come out of the pandemic, which is still raging, was the constant use of the word freedom. Indeed, the UK government framed the recent removal of all restrictions as ‘Freedom Day,’ hammering home how synonymous the word has become with the pandemic.

But amidst all the rhetoric, have we lost track of the meaning of freedom? Is freedom the ability to do whatever we want when we want? Or is the meaning more nuanced and reflective of the various, competing needs of society?

One person’s freedom is another’s tyranny after all and during the pandemic, this has been clearer than ever.

Freedom as a right

If you live in the western world, odds are you live in some form of an open and free society. One where the state doesn’t oppress its citizens, where you can go about your business and your civil liberties are respected.

While we all take this for granted, although perhaps not so much after the past year, it wasn’t always this way. The freedom we have today wasn’t pre-ordained, it was earned and fought for.

Democracy stretches back to Greek city-states such as Athens, but the stirrings of what we describe as free societies today began with the French Revolution in 1789. Aside from the United States — although the issue of slavery and segregation cast a shadow over America’s claim to be an early advocate of free societies — absolute monarchies were the dominant mode of government at the time.

What triggered the revolution in France was a desire for change after years of distress caused by a rising population, unemployment and bad harvests. Whether Louis XVI’s wife Marie Antoniette said of the peasant's predicament, ‘let them eat cake’ isn’t clear. But it highlighted the growing distance between the ruling classes and the rest of the population. A chasm that would have fatal consequences.

What followed was the execution of the King and his Queen and the declaration of the First French Republic in 1792. Despite the power of the monarchy being restricted, the anger didn’t subside and both would lose their heads to the guillotine a year later.

Despite being free of the monarchy, freedom was hard to acquire for the French. The revolution spilt over into the Reign of Terror with Robespierre, revolts from Royalists and Jacobins, the Directory, then the Consulate, then imperial rule of Napoleon, the restoration of the House of Bourbon with Louis XVIII, the overthrow of the House of Bourbon in favour of the House of Orleans, the French Second Republic which descended into the imperial rule of Napoleon III before his subsequent defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871. A defeat that brought a long tumultuous period to an end.

As you can see, despite the revolutionaries' desire for freedom in 1789, it was nearly 100 years before it could be argued the revolution was fulfilled. The Declaration of the Rights and Man and the revolutionary cry of liberty, equality, and fraternity took time to come to fruition.

Today, we live with the aftermath of this period of history regardless of whether you’re French or not. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, put together following the Second World War in 1948, was inspired by the one drafted in 1789. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s famous quote, ‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ held true when he wrote it before the Revolution.

Today, it’s a reflection of how much progress society has made. While we have had our freedom restricted for the past year, are we going to slip back into the chains Rousseau talks of? Is our freedom being eroded because we can’t do as we wish in a global health emergency?

To some, this is true. To others, the restrictions imposed are a form of collective action to protect the most vulnerable in society. When viewed through the lens of history, we see that our freedoms are hard-won and in today’s terms more concrete than those in pre-revolutionary France.

But freedom is a nuanced topic. Contrary to the protestations of libertarians, there’s more to freedom than the rights of the individual.

Freedom is greater than the individual

In our modern age, freedom has come to mean the ability of individuals to do whatever they desire. The genesis of this definition started in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan in America, and Margaret Thatcher a year earlier in the UK.

It was Thatcher who summed up the ethos of this shift, in perhaps, her most famous quote:

“There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.”

This belief permeated the western world and is what a lot of people fall back on today when they reference freedom. The freedom of the individual to do as they please. The concerns of wider society are secondary to the concerns of the individual.

This is the basis of Libertarianism, which is a political ideology popular in the United States. It’s a belief in personal autonomy and liberty with a serving of scepticism towards authority and state power. In essence, the philosophy could be summed up in a single sentence: leave me alone.

While very few of us want to live under the yoke of an oppressive regime such as the Nazis or Soviets, there are limits to how far individual freedom can extend without impacting wider society.

This has been highlighted during the pandemic. The freedom to associate with others is also the potential to spread a virus that’s highly contagious and deadly. Reasoning, which led almost every country to temporarily curtail personal freedoms to protect the vulnerable in society.

You don’t exist in a vacuum. Your actions don’t just impact yourself, they impact others too. This is the fundamental flaw with the individualistic outlook on freedom. Freedom for the individual extends only so far. When do one person’s individual rights impinge on collective freedom, or another individual’s? The debate around freedom is more nuanced than simply letting people do as they wish.

The irony of the upsurge in demands for freedom is it seems to be a theme throughout history in a health emergency. Riots broke out in Liverpool and other cities in England during a cholera epidemic in 1832. People rebelled at the attempt to move patients from their homes to hospitals. Rumours circulated the patients would be killed and their bodies would be dissected for medical use.

Similar dissent occurred in Nottingham in 1890 when 16,000 people signed a petition objected to mandatory hospitalization for those with infectious diseases. The grounds for the health authorities desire to impose mandatory hospitalisation? Ironically, it came from the great champion of individual liberty, the philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In On Liberty, Mill set out his idea of the ‘harm principle.’ It states individual liberty is sacrosanct until it harms others, then it should be limited. This is one reason we have laws mandating seatbelts and regulating what eat and drink.

Mill set out his position as follows:

“The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty and action of any of their number, is self-protection.”

It was this application of the harm principle which led to rates of infectious disease in Europe and America falling off a cliff. Cholera, diphtheria and scarlet fever were endemic in the 19th century, as was smallpox. Now, they’re either remnants of another era or, in the case of smallpox, eradicated.

Would this have been possible without the adaptation of the harm principle? It’s hard to say, but it would have been more difficult. As much as we all have the right to go about our business as we please, we also have the right to another freedom.

Freedom from disease.

Are we free?

Individual freedoms have been restricted during the pandemic. This isn’t disputed. Whatever way you look at it, our civil liberties have been restricted.

While this has caused concern in some quarters, does it mean we have no freedom? Are we trapped under the boot of oppressive regimes like the peasants in pre-revolutionary France?

No. That too is clear.

In the UK, where I live, most restrictions were lifted on July 19, in what was dubbed ‘Freedom Day.’ Did this result in a wave of euphoria from those who had decried that their freedoms were being impinged? For some yes, but others were still not happy. Even after the restrictions were lifted, there were still protests, about vaccination of all things.

The irony of protesting against vaccination, which is the clearest route out of the pandemic and the restoration of freedom for all of us, is not lost on this writer.

The question at the top of this section asks ‘are we free?’ If you live in the west, it’s hard to see how you’re not. Concerns around vaccine passports are valid, I’m not enamoured with the idea of them. But if there’s still hesitancy around taking the vaccine, I can see the reasoning behind them.

The debate around freedom during the pandemic has been interesting. In some ways, it cuts across the political spectrum. Those on the right are more likely to invoke personal liberty, while those on the left share concerns about the good of collective society.

What these positions miss is that freedom is a flexible concept. It’s not binary, nor is it simply defined. Freedom doesn’t just mean you have the right to do as you please. While the rights of the individual are important, so are the rights of everyone else in society.

Spurning masks, neglecting to get vaccinated are all personal choices, but they also infringe upon the freedom of thousands of others too. Our actions have implications for others, something we have to consider during a health crisis.

The idea we can just go and do as we please is a childish approach to freedom. Freedumb if you will. As you realise through childhood, you can’t just do what you want, you need to take into account those around you too.

This is what many are misunderstanding during the pandemic. As important as individual liberty is, this liberty also includes the right to reduce the collective risk of catching and dying from the virus.

The greatest danger to freedom during a pandemic isn’t masks or vaccines, it’s the virus itself. Freedom is no good if you’re not alive to exercise it.

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