London
Whenever I’m in London, I try to stay in South Kensington somewhere between the 19th-century homes of John Stuart Mill and Sir Charles Freake. Mill, of course, was an apostle of liberty and the most renowned public intellectual of his time. The lesser known Freake was a prominent developer and patron of the arts. I have no idea whether the two men knew each other. I do, however, have a good idea of Mill’s high regard for freaks in general.
At a time when the industrial revolution was in full swing and democracy was on the march, Mill argued that eccentrics are to freedom what coal mine canaries are to oxygen.
While Americans tend to assume that freedom and democracy are synonymous, Mill feared the will of the majority could just as easily crush liberty as it could create it.
Because the Framers of the U.S. Constitution were obsessed with the abuse of monarchical power, to this day Americans still consider government the likeliest source of oppression.
But Mill, like his friend Alexis de Tocqueville, knew that citizens acting en masse don’t need to wield the power of government to tyrannize others. They can impose “the yoke of opinion” through mass media or popular democratic politicking. And that was a century and a half before Twitter!
For Mill, to deny anyone the freedom to express themselves openly was more than a matter of censorship. It was tantamount to forbidding those persons from being their authentic selves, which, as Mill saw it, should be the goal of a free society. He anticipated the widespread contemporary American scourge of “preference falsification,” in which individuals misrepresent their genuine beliefs and desires to avoid social backlash.
Mill knew that society–or vocal members within it–can issue their “own mandates” and create “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of” governmental oppression. The punishment brought by one’s fellow citizens can be worse because “it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
One of the main fears Mill had of popular democracy in a mechanized world–with its never-ending pressure campaigns launched on the public–was that it would make it harder for people to be “individuals,” that more and more citizens would become “lost in the crowd.”
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Britons have long been known for being more forgiving than Americans of both eccentrics and bad teeth. Despite–or because of–their traditions, they have the latitude to be quirky in ways Americans do not. The UK has given us Monty Python and Bennie Hill. America gives us summer blockbusters, great trends, fads, and social movements. Search lights and media frenzies are part and parcel of America’s national charm.
A century ago, Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana brilliantly captured the social pressure that lies beneath our seemingly benign fits of enthusiasm. “Even what is best in American life is compulsory,” he wrote in 1920, “the idealism, the zeal, the beautiful happy unison of its great moments. You must wave, you must cheer, you must push with the irresistible crowd; otherwise you will feel like a traitor, a soulless out cast, a deserted ship high and dry on the shore.”
Given the massive efforts by a variety of sectors in U.S. society to impose their morals on the population at large–not to mention the now routine campaigns to silence ideological rivals–Mill would likely would not have considered the contemporary U.S. a very free society. He’d say it needed more outliers to break through the suffocating conformity. Conformity is the enemy of liberty.
Mill’s notion of freedom was more sophisticated than either “don’t tread on me” individualism or destructive “tear it all down” contrarianism. The kind of liberty he felt a free society should offer was one in which individuals could develop their full potential. “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model,” he wrote. It was more like a tree that needs to “grow and develop itself on all sides” according to the inner drive that gives it life.
Mill understood that individuals who don’t fit the factory mold can be huge pains in the ass. But suffering their eccentricity is the price of progress. “The amount of eccentricity in a society, “he wrote, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage.”
It’s shocking, I know, to think that the definition of freedom is not getting to constantly coerce your fellow citizens to live under your rules. Wouldn’t it be more satisfying if it meant encouraging millions of distinctively creative souls to flourish like trees?
