10.5.18 - Granularity of Freedom

There's this idea in our liberal democracy that political philosophy is a kind of technology that has been evolving more or less consistently for all of human history. That along with our actual technology getting better, our ability to imagine and adhere to more evolved forms of governance is also getting better.

This is already a pretty fluffy and unprovable statement. But witness the fact that our modern democracy plucked a successful form of governance from the ancient world, bypassing many more recent centuries of political philosophy built on concentrated power and divine rights and stuff, and successfully scaled it to unify a country many times larger than the entire ancient Hellenic world.

So if you accept the premise that our capacity for political evolution is growing, you start to wonder what the core metric is that is improving. I think it might be the granularity of freedom afforded by the system.

Freedom, in this sense, means some combination of agency and wherewithal. Not necessarily a Galtungian freedom from deprivation, but something along those lines. The ability / responsibility to self-correct your deprivation or famine or subjugation when it's happening.

It's relatively easy to give freedom to a large group of people. That's every nomadic tribe in history. Within the tribe, people may not be free, but the tribe itself is. The granularity of freedom offered by the system is not very high.

Then you start to develop natural rights and other individualistic concepts, and if your political philosophy is evolved enough to take them seriously, you are now able to see intra-tribal subjugation (slavery) as wrong, and eventually illegal. So by the time you get to something like a representative democracy, for example, you have freedom extending from the nation level all the way down to individuals.

Permitting freedom on this level requires enough moral imagination that I don't think it would be possible right off the bat, coming from a primitive subsistence survival.