Patterson’s recent book, Freedom (487 pages. Basic Books. $29.95), won the 1991 National Book Award for nonfiction with its exploration of how and why freedom came to be the central value of Western civilization. In an interview with NEWSWEEK last week, he warned that new governments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union may pick up our worst features and wind up as “just another totalitarian system.”
His book’s central message is an old and brutal paradox: that good and evil are inseparably entwined. Freedom is the heart of Western culture, “the germ of its genius and all its grandeur,” but it’s also the root of Western greed, alienation and social injustice. That dark underside, Patterson warned last week, already plays too large a role in America-and it’s what the East is likeliest to imitate.
To Westerners, the concept of freedom is so basic that we overlook the fact that most cultures have rejected the whole idea. In societies where discipline, divine authority and protection in a social order are prime values, freedom is equated with being outcast, lost or abandoned. Forced to find a word for this strange new idea, Japanese translators in the 19th century chose jiyu, which until then had meant licentiousness.
Only Greece had the unique combination of economic and social development to make the soil fertile for liberty. But from the beginning, Patterson says, freedom wasn’t a single idea but a chord made up of three separate notes. Over the centuries the notes have wavered and taken turns in dominating the chord.
In modern America, the dominant note is personal freedom: the freedom to do whatever a person likes up to the point of interfering with others. In fact, Patterson says, the American view of freedom has become so one-sided that we are downplaying the second note, civic freedom-which gives members of a community a voice in running it and guarantees personal freedom by participation in government. And we deny altogether, sometimes fiercely, the third and most troublesome note in the chord: what Patterson calls “freedom as power,” or sovereignal freedom.
This concept began in the dominance of some city-states over others, which were ruled or forced to pay tribute. In the Persian wars, this power to rule came to be seen as freedom. The wars would free Greeks from domination and affirm their natural superiority: Greeks were born to rule barbarians. Patterson cites historians, playwrights and philosophers who consistently used the word this way: “Freedom … meant the freedom to rule over others.”
At first, sovereignal freedom extended only to Greek aristocrats. Then it stretched to empower non-noble citizens who had distinguished themselves in battle, and the value of sovereignal freedom took on overtones of valor, glory, honor and aristocratic responsibility. Finally, Plato’s last works depict the ideal state as an autocracy, in which benevolent rulers head a hierarchy of “willing submission to virtuous laws.” Nearly everyone in Greek society had some power over inferiors; at the bottom, slaves were “socially dead” and didn’t count.
As the slaves could testify, sovereignal freedom held the seeds of corruption. In Patterson’s view, it dominated the chord through the Middle Ages, when barons bickered over the “liberty of gallows”–their grisly freedom, granted by the king, to hang anybody they pleased. More recently, Patterson says, Nazi Germany made many Germans feel they were “a free state, the freest and most powerful collective experience of any Western people up to that time.” Moralists may be outraged, he says, but the fact is that Hitler acted on a vision of freedom traceable to Plato himself.
As Patterson said last week, the sovereignal note is the only part of the chord of freedom that has much resonance in Russia and Eastern Europe, where the authoritarian tradition has ruled for centuries. But the other notes of freedom can go sour, too. Personal freedom can lead to selfishness and a dehumanizing contempt for society’s losers. Civic freedom can degenerate into demagoguery and mob rule, and all too often is built on the exclusion of whole classes-women, blacks, the poor–who become– collective nonpersons, defining what real people are.
Americans have constructed another pitfall for the new nations, Patterson says: “We have sold democracy and freedom with the assumption [that they] are associated with all the goodies of capitalism.” But if the newly freed people adopt democratic forms of government in the belief “that all the goodies they see on TV will materialize instantly, there’s a danger of deep disappointment.” The next step could well be a charismatic leader who offers to restore order-and produces fascism.
That would be another demonstration of “the tragic interdependence of good and evil.” But then, freedom itself presents the same paradox. If it means anything, anywhere in the world, it is the chance for people to confront both good and evil in themselves, and do more good than harm.
