New Threats To Freedom

Always the purveyor of sugar free pessimism, David Brooks once lamented that we’ve become a culture that prizes aggregation above creation. Instead of embracing single creators, Brooks said we now pile the long tail of cultural debris on a pedestal and call it king.

But there’s an artistry and philosophy to aggregation that Brooks overlooks. Not only can collections possess a strange beauty (for example, WALL*E’s collection of knickknacks or T.S. Eliot’s heaps of broken images) but they also can be useful.  I have here a new book edited by Adam Bellow. It’s called New Threats to Freedom: From Banning Ice Cream Trucks in Brooklyn to Abandoning Democracy Around the World. Bellow has put together a remarkable collection of essays by an eclectic group of professors, journalists, intellectuals, and other wordsmiths, all on the topic of what’s corroding the mainstays of liberty in America. I mention the artistry of the aggregator because Bellow’s collection would not be mine. Instead of a disquisition on democratically induced sclerosis, it at times reflects different, more conservative concerns, but of course that is why I find the book so useful. I suppose a handful of chapters in this book will irritate “libraltarians.”   But Bellow can draw me in with essays from our own sometime contributor, Max Borders, or Richard Epstein on excessive and oppressive regulation, and by doing so, get me to stick around to read about ingratitude (Mark T. Mitchell) or self-absorbed single women who vote for progressive policies (Jessica Gavora). These last two aren’t what I would consider to be dire threats to freedom, but it’s interesting to me that there are people who do.

The essays are arranged alphabetically but this leads to some interesting pairings and felicitous contrasts. Right after reading Mark Helprin’s essay on the intolerance of the new atheists, you can follow that up with new atheist Christopher Hitchens’ musings on the thought police of multiculturalism. Or again, after reading Katherine Mangu-Ward’s nicely drawn survey of democratically supported paternalism, you can read Tara McKelvey’s misgivings about America’s reluctance to promote democracy abroad. For a book of this kind, these kinds of philosophical tensions are a good thing on the whole, I suppose. Freedom is a nebulous concept and its friends are a diverse bunch.

Bellow by no means suggests that his collection is exhaustive. But I can’t help but raise a few points about threats left off the discussion table–democratic sclerosis and the decline of nations, increasing centralization of power, democratic fundamentalism, the church of unlimited government and its psychology, xenophobia, and so on. The main criticism I have is that it doesn’t examine the tensions between democracy and liberty. As in many other books, the words democracy and freedom are treated as near synonyms when they ought to be treated as potentially conflicting concepts.

Of course there are other ways of aggregating information about threats to freedom. A prediction market would do a better job ranking the importance of these threats and their likelihood. But then we’d be left without the eloquence of David Mamet–“The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.” And the status-affiliation of associating ourselves with such people. Maybe in the best of all worlds we’ll have both–solidarity and facts. In the meantime, give Bellow’s collection a read and decide for yourself.