On liberty’s limits: why Mill was wrong about freedom

This month, it’s 150 years since philosopher JS Mill died. His definition of freedom remains hugely influential. But is it still the right one for healthy relationships and contentment amid the isolation of modern life?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A copy of the Statue of Liberty, holding a stick of bread, stands outside a shop window displaying an 'Open 24 Hours' signs.

Photo by KC Welch on Unsplash.

You can tell what a society values by what it goes to war over. In the 17th century we fought our wars over religion. In the 19th it was empire. In the 20th and 21st, we fought our wars over freedom, either defending our own or trying to export our version of it to other parts of the world. We tend, of course, to assume we know what freedom is: the liberty to do what we like, as long as don’t harm other people. But we rarely know how time-conditioned and recent such a view of freedom is.

John Stuart Mill, child prodigy, colonial administrator, Member of Parliament and philosopher, who died 150 years ago this year, is one of the primary architects of our contemporary ideas of freedom. In his own words, his book On Liberty, published in 1859, was an exploration of the ‘nature and limits of the power that can legitimately be exercised by society over the individual’. Mill famously argues that the only valid reason for interfering with another person’s liberty of action is to protect them from physical harm. It is never justifiable to interfere with another person’s freedom to ensure their happiness, wisdom or well-being, because that is to determine what that person’s well-being is. Freedom is defined as liberty of conscience, thought, feeling and opinion, as ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits … doing as we like … without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them’.

For Mill... individual liberty is vital, not just for the sake of the individual, but for the sake of human progress.

Mill is one of the great champions of nonconformity in thought and action. Even if just one person held a particular opinion while everyone else in the world held the opposite, there would be no justification in silencing that one voice. For Mill, one of the main ingredients of social progress is freedom from the traditions and customs imposed by others, both the past constraints of tradition, and the present ones of custom, which restrict the cultivation of individuality, which in turn ‘is one of the leading essentials of well-being’. Individual liberty is vital, not just for the sake of the individual, but for the sake of human progress. Without it there will be no originality or genius, no new discoveries or innovation. Civilisation cannot advance without individual freedom which encourages spontaneous expression, the development of new thoughts and ideas unconstrained by the patterns of the past.

It is a powerful argument. On Liberty is full of the fear of Victorian conformity – the individualist’s reaction to a stifling society with a high degree of social control. It is very much a book of its time, assuming the cultural superiority of the modern age. It also breathes an elitism that looks down on the mediocrity of what it calls ‘average men’.

But more than that, there is, I think, a deeper flaw in this way of thinking about freedom. If freedom is essentially my liberty to say or do what I like, as long as I don’t tread on the toes of my neighbour, then what does that do to my relationship with my neighbour? He or she becomes at best a limitation, or at worst a threat to my freedom. There may be all kinds of things I want to do – play music loud on a summer’s night, or drive my car at 100 mph on a quiet suburban road – but I can’t because I might disturb my neighbour’s peace or risk crashing into an oncoming bus. Or even worse, my neighbour might want to play her music too loud for me, or drive her car too fast in my direction, thus invading my personal space. This approach keeps the peace between us, but at the cost of making us see each other either as irritating limitations to our desires which of course define our self-chosen goals in life, or threats to our own precious autonomy.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that

“the ethical imperative that guides modern subjects is not a particular or substantive definition of the good life, but the aspiration to acquire the resources necessary or helpful for leading one.”

In other words, in the individualised world imagined by Mill, we are all left to dream our own dreams, choose our own ambitions, and are all caught up in the fight to get hold of the money, rights, friends, looks, health, and knowledge that will enable us to get to our self-chosen destination. It therefore makes us competitors with each other, not only seeing each other as rivals in this race for resources, but also as potential threats who might stand in the way of our freedom to pursue our dreams.

There is however another, older view of freedom, rooted more in character and virtue than in individualised personal goals. This version, found in classical literature, sees liberty not as freedom from the limitations and social expectations that stop us following our self-chosen desires, but freedom from the passions. The Greeks viewed the soul as like a ship which should sail serenely towards the harbour of such virtues as prudence, courage and temperance. It was guided on this journey by paideia, or education in virtue, yet was at the same time buffeted by the winds of irrational and destructive impulses such as envy, anger or lust that threaten to blow it off course. For them, our passionate inner desires are not the sacrosanct moral guide to our true selves but are a distraction from the true path of virtue.

True liberty is freedom from anything that would stop us becoming the person we were created to be.

This version was developed further by Christian thinkers such as St Paul, St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For them, true liberty is freedom from anything that would stop us becoming the person we were created to be: someone capable of love for what is not ourselves – for God and our neighbour. True liberty is freedom from internal urges such as the greed, laziness or pride that turn us in upon ourselves rather than outwards towards God and each other. It is also freedom from external forces such as the grinding poverty that dangles the temptation to steal in order to survive, or an economy that constantly tells us that if you don’t acquire as much stuff as your neighbour you are a failure. It is not so much freedom for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves: freedom from self-centred desires, or the crippling self-absorption that makes us think only of our own interests. It is freedom to create the kind of society where we are more concerned with our neighbours’ wellbeing than our own.

In this view of freedom, my neighbour becomes not a limitation or a threat, but a gift – someone without whom I cannot become someone capable of the primary virtue of love. Putting it bluntly, if I am to become someone capable of other-centred love, I need someone to practice on.

This Christian understanding of freedom offers a vision of society where you might begin to trust other people to look after your own needs, because they are looking out for yours. It is also a vision of freedom that delivers personal happiness better than the libertarian view. Becoming the kind of person who has learnt, as St Paul once put it, to ‘look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others’ is in fact a recipe for healthy relationships and contentment rather than the increasing isolation of much modern life.

Mill may have had a point in the stifling conservatism of Victorian Britain, but in an age of increasing loneliness, isolation and anxiety, his view of freedom doesn’t help build good neighbourhoods, families or communities. We need a better version - one that brings us together, rather than drives us apart.

Article

Attention

Culture

Weirdness

Wildness

26 November 2024

6 min read

Take a walk: the world is weirder than you think it is

Psychogeography and the dark alleyways of the mind.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

A backlit person at twilight holds a hand out towards the camera, holding some fairly lights

Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash.

This article, by Blake Collier, first appeared in Mockingbird. Published by kind permission.

Entre chien et loup.

The phrase literally means “between dog and wolf” and has most immanently been used to describe the twilight hour where day and night intermingle before night fully takes hold.

Jean Pruvost, a linguist who has studied the expression, gave some background on ‘entre chien et loup.’ He says it comes from a Latin phrase, intra hora vespertina inter canem et lupum, that dates back to at least the seventh century. And it refers to the time when the daylight dims and you could mistake a dog for a wolf.

One could imagine before the advent of electricity and modern public lighting how ambiguous this time of day could be as the landscapes around your small village were being consumed by the darkness — the human eye not fully able to calibrate fully for day or for night, hence the inability to distinguish between a friendly pet and a looming threat.

This is what is popularly known as liminal space in our current epoch. This liminality is always present, however, not just at dusk. As we move through the worlds we inhabit, whether natural or built, we are constantly finding ourselves within transition or transformation. Psychogeography is a broader term that is often used to investigate the liminal movement of bodies through space. In its most simplistic form, it is how our mind interacts with and processes the physical landscapes that we inhabit and how those landscapes affect our mind. The actual history of the term is much more complicated — honestly, convoluted — however at its core it is scratching at the nebulosity of things like entre chien et loup.

At the outskirts of a city or town, one begins to see the fraying of the edges, those areas where we have yet to fully enact our illusory control over the land.

About seven or eight years ago at the height of my running prowess, I got up one Friday morning very early and started a ten-mile run I had planned around nearly the full border of my hometown of Canyon, Texas. I did not know if I would make it the whole way, but the intent was there and the map was set. However, something interesting happened as I began plodding down my route. Those lines that show up on our maps often engender varying qualities of trails. Most of the time I was hitting asphalt and sidewalks, but when you are following a broad circle around a town, it’s not uncommon to find ambiguous stretches between incorporated and unincorporated parts of the town. Somewhere within the first mile or two, one of the “roads” I had included on my path ended up being nothing more than a worn trail through prairieland behind a group of houses.

I bring this story up because, though I did not know it then, I was enacting a psychogeographic practice. Iain Sinclair, who is probably one of the most well-known proponents of modern psychogeography, walked the M25 around London in seven different treks over a time period. The M25 is a 125-mile loop around London and is considered one of the busiest highways in the world. As he ambled along the highway — sometimes on asphalt, sometime “around” the trace of the highway — he would take note of what he saw, and he eventually wrote the book London Orbital. This practice allowed him to see London in a new way because at the outskirts of a city or town, one begins to see the fraying of the edges, those areas where we have yet to fully enact our illusory control over the land. They have neither been captured by urban sprawl nor have they been renovated and gentrified. These lacunae are ambiguous regions between the built and unbuilt (or decayed). Once again, we are placing ourselves intentionally into places where we attend to the ley lines which connect the physical markers to the perceived or imagined topographies of the places where we exist.

To put it bluntly, being intentionally attentive to surroundings can trigger investigations into the seen and unseen powers that hole up in our built environments and the natural world that pushes back against it.

The path through the prairieland I spoke of earlier ended at a concrete curb and a recently repaved residential street that ran right next to a Catholic church, almost like the church was posting itself on the fringes of the town to warn of impending threat, or perhaps giving a welcome sight to a weary traveler. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

Yet it is exactly this work of attending to where we live and reacquainting ourselves with it that is, I believe, at the heart of this purposeful ambulation through space. Our lives fall into banality most of the time. We take everything for granted and we see our lived environment through that myopic lens. But take a walk on the outskirts of where you live, without a phone or music or any other technological mediation, and just look around the space and pay attention to how it embroils your emotions. I can nearly guarantee that you will find the place you live is much weirder than you thought it was, and you might even learn a thing or two about what your place values. I knew that Catholic church was in that general area of that path, but I didn’t realize how that path would empty me out before its hallowed presence.

However, as I thought about it, it made sense that in this community the Catholic church would be found on the edges of the town. There are somewhere around ten other churches in a town of about 17,000 all of which are Protestant. However, if you go just ten or eleven miles west to the town of Umbarger, the roles are reversed. There is still one Catholic church, but as far as I know no Protestant churches. Merlin Coverley, in his book tracing the history of psychogeography, finds that “contemporary psychogeography as closely resembles a form of local history as it does a geographical exploration.” One could take the observations from their ambulation and dig into their place’s past to see why this might be the case. However, this is very much the chien of this psychological study of environment.

What about the loup? Psychogeography has always had connections to the occult and the weird. Coverley continues later in his book,

“Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to psychogeography today: the mental traveler who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by the awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging; and the use of occult symbolism reflects the precedence given to the subjective and the anti-rational over more systematic modes of thought.”

All of this is to say that what we might find out about the place we live in when we give ourselves to its fringes and walk its shores might have a darker tone which implicates local politics and powers. Perhaps we will even find ourselves confronted by a metamorphosis which changes the very way we live, work, and move in these places.

Sinclair’s earlier work Lud Heat in 1975 set out to remap London by way of connecting London’s churches built by eighteenth-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and their odd loci to numerous prominent murders like the Radcliffe Highway Murders and those by Jack the Ripper. There is a thread that ties some of the imagery Hawksmoor used in his churches to ancient Pagan symbolism. To put it bluntly, being intentionally attentive to surroundings can trigger investigations into the seen and unseen powers that hole up in our built environments and the natural world that pushes back against it.

If nothing else, this study of the ambiguous transgressions between mind and place helps us bring a new profundity to our existence. It psychologically brings us back to a place where our intellectual, physical, and technological prowess cannot protect us from the hairs that stand on the back of our necks. Because everything, if attended to perceptively, can be seen as a dog or a wolf. And that should give us great pause in the everyday grind of our lives.