Freedom and its Betrayal
Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, July 1

Sally Millard

Marking the 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin's lectures 'Six Enemies of Human Liberty', Phil Collins of the Social Market Research Foundation, Ann Widdecombe MP, AC Grayling, reader of philosophy at Birkbeck College and Ziauddin Sardar, writer and critic, were brought together, with Jonathan Freedland in the chair, to discuss the limits to freedom today.

Each speaker was invited to speak on the two things they felt provided the most significant barriers to freedom. Kicking off the debate, Phil Collins suggested that poverty was the biggest enemy of freedom. For Collins, freedom is more than the absence of constraint, but has to incorporate the capacity to act. If we don't have the means to exercise freedom, then it is meaningless.

Responding to this point, Widdecombe argued that no-one felt that poverty was acceptable today, therefore it could not really be seen as an enemy of freedom. Unfortunately there was little opportunity in the discussion to develop this argument further, although a related point was raised by AC Grayling. He gave ignorance as one of his enemies of freedom - without education, we do not have the knowledge to make choices.

The confusion here is between having freedom and having the capacity to exercise that freedom. This is often expressed as concern about freedom being a luxury of the chattering classes. Only those of us who have all our material needs fulfilled can afford to talk about such abstract concepts as freedom. But I would contend that freedom and development do not have to be counterposed, but rather should go hand. Both freedom and development suggest independence, and if we muddy the discussion about freedom by confusing it with basic needs we are in danger of avoiding the pressing question of freedom and put this off to another day.

Collins' second enemy of freedom was inhibition, or the fear of the unknown. This was a pertinent point, perhaps especially in the post September 11 world, when we often hear the demand for security taking precedence over liberty. One example of this is the governments desire to snoop on our emails on the spurious premise that in doing so they can perhaps prevent future harm. But the future is, by its nature, unpredictable, and if we take this view then we provide a blank cheque for any incursion on our liberty.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as he has just written a book called Why do People hate America? Ziauddin Sardar's first enemy of freedom was the US. Not the American people, but the American state as the controlling power in international institutions and cultural forms. Sardar argued that as the most powerful nation its foreign policy was the deciding factor, making international agreements or treaties meaningless if the US doesn't agree.

Linked to this was his second, and perhaps more interesting enemy of freedom, the future. For Sardar, the concept of the future we have today is one that is pre-determined via technological advance and globalisation. This, he argued removed the notion of agency from the agenda because it made it difficult to imagine any alternatives.

The most contentious points of the evening were raised by Ann Widdecombe. Unsurprising because, as a Tory she is an easy target, and disappointingly, rather than taking up her more substantial arguments, the tendency on the panel was to make cheap jibes at her expense. Her first enemy of freedom was political correctness which she argued quite convincingly led to censorship. Using the example of holocaust denial, she argued that no matter how mad you thought someones idea was, you should allow them to raise the debate so that you could argue with them. Banning an idea or a word because it was offensive did not allow a debate to take place and therefore prevented people drawing their own conclusions.

In order to come to your own point of view, you had to be able to reject alternatives. Unfortunately today, any idea strongly held is seen as not politically correct and consequently debate is stifled. Whilst the argument she presented was on the face of it quite a strong one, she let her true colours show when she raised her second enemy of freedom, secularism. In her devoutness to the religious cause, she was quite prepared to allow laws on blasphemy, because 'these were harmful to people as they caused real hurt'. Thus in her denial of it, she confirmed the very premise of freedom of speech, that it is indivisible.