[Mb-hair] OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Freedom's Not Just Another Word By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 7, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Freedom's Not Just Another Word
By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER

Wayland, Mass. ‹ IN Baghdad's Fardus Square, where Iraqi civilians and
American marines so famously pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in the
spring of 2003, Iraqi artists have raised a new sculpture on the same
pedestal. It is a monument to liberty and freedom, and unlike any other in
the world.

In Europe and America, the favorite symbols of liberty and freedom are
individual figures like Marianne or the Statue of Liberty. This Iraqi statue
is a family group: mother, father and child so close together that they
become one being. Above them are a crescent moon and sun, emblems of Islamic
faith and Sumerian culture. One of its creators remarked that both
civilizations "have called for love, peace and freedom."

The Baghdad monument was the work of a group of Iraqi artists called Najeen,
or the Survivors. After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, they worked
underground to keep alive the spirit of liberty and freedom. Their monument
has a message about that. "Freedom is not a gift from people with tanks,"
Basim Hassad, a Najeen member, told a BBC reporter. "What we see in our
country could be the first signs of freedom. ...What remains is a history
that we will make together with the Najeen group at its heart."

Foreigners who opposed the Iraqi war were not impressed. "On top of the
marble column where Saddam's statue stood, someone put up the most hideous
monstrosity I've ever seen," one wrote contemptuously. "A green statue
...with a face that's not recognizable as anything human. It's supposed to
be some kind of 'goddess of liberty,' but it looks like nothing in any of
the worlds."

The writer missed the meaning of the monument, which in fact has much to
teach us about liberty and freedom. These ideas are growing and changing
rapidly today, and their long history is more dynamic and diverse than our
thoughts about it. There is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in
the world, though many people to the left and right believe that they have
found it. And, yet, there is one great historical process in which liberty
and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways.

The words themselves have a surprising history. The oldest known word with
such a meaning comes to us from ancient Iraq. The Sumerian "ama-ar-gi,"
found on tablets in the ruins of the city-state of Lagash, which flourished
four millenniums ago, derived from the verb "ama-gi," which literally meant
"going home to mother." It described the condition of emancipated servants
who returned to their own free families - an interesting link to the
monument in Baghdad. (In contemporary America, the ancient characters for
"ama-ar-gi" have become the logos of some libertarian organizations, as well
as tattoos among members of politically conservative motorcycle gangs, who
may not know that the inscriptions on their biceps mean heading home to
mom.)

Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and,
especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and
Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave.
(In science, eleutherodactylic means separate fingers or toes.) Freedom,
however, comes from the same root as friend, an Indo-European word that
meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by
bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both
meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence;
freedom referred to rights of belonging.

We English-speakers are possibly unique in having both "liberty" and
"freedom" in our ordinary speech. The two words have blurred together in
modern usage, but the old tension between them persists like a coiled spring
in our culture. It has inspired an astonishing fertility of thought.
Americans have invented many ideas of liberty and freedom. Some are close to
independence, others to rights of belonging. Most are highly creative
combinations. For most people they are not academic abstractions or
political ideologies, but inherited ideas that we hold as what Tocqueville
called "habits of the heart." They tend to be entire visions of a free
society, and we see them in our mind's eye through symbols and emblems, much
as Najeen envisions symbols in Iraq.

I have counted more than 500 such literal symbols of liberty and freedom in
America alone. In the American Revolution they included New England's
Liberty Tree with its collective sense of town-born rights, Philadelphia's
great Quaker Bell ringing for all humanity, Virginia's hierarchical Liberty
Goddess, South Carolina's Liberty Crescent, and the rattlesnake of
individual independence, with its motto, "Don't Tread on Me." Other emblems
were invented by German immigrants, African slaves, trans-Atlantic artisans
and Loyalist elites. All were different combinations of liberty and freedom.

The Civil War, of course, was a conflict between visions of liberty,
freedom, union and rights of belonging on one side; and ideas of states'
rights, separation and liberty to keep a slave on the other. Many competing
images of liberty and freedom appeared in the Progressive Era, and again in
the 1930's when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "broader definition of
liberty" and "greater freedom, greater security" were fiercely opposed by
the conservative Liberty League. It happened again in the 1950's and 60's,
with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of freedom as rights of
belonging, and Barry Goldwater's impassioned idea of liberty as independence
from intrusive government. But perhaps the most fertile period of invention
was the late 20th century. Through 16 generations, American ideas of liberty
and freedom have grown larger, deeper, more diverse and yet more inclusive
in these collisions of contested visions.

One can observe this growth not only in America as a whole, but also in the
thought of individual Americans. An example, of course, is George W. Bush.
His speeches before 2001 centered on a particular idea of personal liberty,
private property, individual responsibility and minimal government. By his
second inaugural last month, that vision had grown larger. It preserved the
idea of individual liberty, but also quoted Franklin Roosevelt's "broader
definition of liberty" and "greater freedom from want and fear." It embraced
Dr. King's "freedom now," and adopted the universal Quaker vision of
"liberty throughout all the land," even enlarging it to "liberty throughout
all the world."

How these words will be defined by acts in Mr. Bush's second term remains to
be seen. His first administration was very careless of civil liberties for
others, and little interested in civil rights; he spoke often of the rights
of the unborn but enacted fiscal policies that betrayed the rights of
generations to come. One hopes that the larger spirit of the second
inaugural address will appear in political acts to come.

I found it most striking that Mr. Bush also explicitly recognized that
liberty and freedom take different forms throughout the world, where "others
find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way." His
phrasing would seem to recognize that this is a global process that is
broader than the American experience of liberty and freedom, and yet
preserves the same dynamics.

In India, for example, leaders of the Congress Party have combined Western
ideas with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs to create old-new visions of liberty
and freedom that are unique to that republic. In Beijing, the students who
constructed the Goddess of Tiananmen Square in 1989 created a new symbol
that combined American liberty and freedom, Russian socialism and Chinese
culture, a radical new vision of a free world. The people of Eastern Europe
have invented their own visions from traditions like Poland's collective
memory of its "golden freedom" during the 17th century. The same thing is
happening in Ukraine and the Balkans, Latin America and Africa, Southeast
Asia and the Pacific.

Most of all it is happening in Islam today. We find it in the Baghdad
monument that links liberty and freedom to the faith of Islam and the
history of Mesopotamia. We see it in the ink-stained fingers of millions of
Iraqis, held upright in a new symbol of courage against tyranny, pride in an
ancient past, and hope for the future of a free world.

The catch, of course, is that people become more truly free only when the
central ideas are respected: liberty as the rights of individual
independence, freedom in the rights of collective belonging. Many on the
right and left continue to call for one idea without the other, but the
strongest ground is in the center, where they come together.

People across the globe will continue to create new combinations of liberty
and freedom, with an inexhaustible fertility of invention. These visions are
profoundly different from one another, but they are all part of one great
historical process that is more open and free than any one idea of liberty
or freedom has ever been, or even wished to be.

David Hackett Fischer, a professor of history at Brandeis, is the author of
"Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search |
Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top