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

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.