A HIERARCHY OF FREEDOMS

NOREENA HERTZ | September 8th 2008
"When someone's freedom is to the
detriment of another's then perhaps it must be subjugated", explains Noreena Hertz, an economics writer...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

Intelligent Life asked 11 eminent people from different walks of life to look back over their adult lifetime and name the freedom we have gained and lost that means the most to them. They were free to take freedom in any sense, political or cultural, social or technological. What mattered was that it mattered to them.

THE ECONOMICS WRITER: NOREENA HERTZ

Aged 40, author of “The Silent Takeover” and “The Debt Threat” and visiting professor,
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

FREEDOM GAINED:

In my teens, my fingers
were nicotine-stained and my school uniform stank of smoke. Cafés, pubs and
bars were places where a cigarette proffered meant a friendship made. As an
adult a new freedom I particularly relish is precisely the prohibition of an
environment conducive to that--the globally expanding ban on smoking in public
places. This policy has granted me the freedom to avoid being an unwilling
inhalant of what we now know is extremely dangerous. And I hope it has taken
steps towards liberating future generations from my teenage addiction. In the
process it both enhances our collective health and has begun to liberate
precious health-care resources. Which hopefully means more money available to
society as a whole.

Of course, my new
freedom gained is another's loss. But when someone's freedom is to the
detriment of another's then perhaps it must be subjugated. There is, it turns
out, a hierarchy of freedoms. And freedom to pursue good health definitely
trumps both the freedom to blow smoke and the freedom to market an agent of
death with little impunity or inconvenience.

FREEDOM LOST:

A freedom I mourn is a freedom
that we have collectively lost: the freedom to travel without fear. Although
Israeli citizens have for many years known what it felt like to wait at a bus
stop, not knowing if only their body parts would disembark at the end of their
ride, it was September 11th 2001
that marked the end of the freedom to travel fearlessly for us all. The pornographic imagery of the twin tower
attack juxtaposed with the heroism of the United passengers created an enduring
narrative in which heroes could be killed by aeroplanes that could not be
protected even by a power as great as that of the United States.

When similar
atrocities were then reproduced first in Madrid
and later in London,
and when shoes and bottles of soda became transmuted into potential aeroplane
explosives, travel irreversibly traded in its image of comfort and glamour for
one of inconvenience and fear. The fact that something as ordinary, as
necessary and as commonplace as travel could become a killing field begot a
whole host of new fears, a sense that we were now living at a time of
existential threat. Let us be vigilant in these times and make sure we don't
give up too many freedoms in the name of protecting our own security.

Up next: the freedoms gained and lost by Geoffrey Robertson, QC, a leading human-rights
barrister and author of "Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice"

Picture credit: hjl/flickr

Co-ordinated by Horatia Lawson