Everyday Freedom

Something is wrong. Throughout the West, people are angry, anxious, and discontented. Paradoxically, the ill temper arises amid wealth unimaginable to our recent ancestors. (But perhaps this is not a paradox after all. Recall 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”) Shouldn’t we be at ease, sated or at least palliated by material and technical advances that have taken so much suffering out of life?

In Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society, Philip Howard ventures to diagnose the cause of the puzzling distempers of our time. Our malaise proceeds from the fact that the most advanced societies of the West have deprived human beings of agency. We live, often well, but we are not in charge of our circumstances. We can’t act in accord with our own judgments. Although we’re afforded many rights, we’re not permitted to roll up our sleeves and get things done.

A lawyer and noted advocate of regulatory and government reform, Howard has written extensively about the suffocating grip of rules, procedures, and “best practices.” His 2014 book, The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government, documents the evolution of today’s technocratic regime. Well-meaning people fight corruption, waste, and fraud. Good! The problem is this: To prevent bad things from happening, we’ve adopted elaborate systems to check abuses, and these systems, replete with detailed regulations and bureaucrats to enforce them, have the unintended effect of preventing good things from happening.

Howard is alive to the ways in which tort liability and regulatory restrictions pinion private initiative. Imagine that a hurricane topples trees and blocks roadways. Common sense urges local residents to fire up their chainsaws and clear the obstructions. But they hesitate. Someone down the street notes that a local ordinance requires permits for tree trimming. Another person reminds the gathered men that occupational safety regulations dictate the use of helmets. Are there enough safety vests to go around? A lawyer chimes in, warning that any mishap might trigger civil liability. Instead of getting on with what needs to be done, local residents look nervously out their windows, waiting for “the professionals” to come and do the job.

This scenario is repeated countless times, often in circumstances in which explicit regulations are not at issue. In my childhood, adults would not hesitate to chastise neighborhood children when they misbehaved. Now, few intervene. They worry that they’ll be shamed as “judgmental” or derided as busybodies. Our therapeutic culture has become all-powerful, turning “no” into a hurtful word. And if the children are black or fall under another category protected in civil rights law, adults are doubly cautious, eager to avoid even the appearance of failing to respect diversity or violating the imperative of inclusion.

Taken individually, each rule, regulation, legal stricture, and cultural expectation is well intentioned. Construction helmets reduce head injuries. Legal liabilities encourage care and caution. It’s a virtue to respect cultural differences. But Howard’s argument is that, in aggregate, these constraints too often deter us from taking individual responsibility and getting on with what needs to be done. Inefficiencies pile up. A mess cleaned up spontaneously by confident citizens; a troublesome student dealt with according to the judgment of a seasoned school principal; infrastructure projects run by hurry-up bosses such as Robert Moses: These and other independent actions are replaced by clunky and often unresponsive procedures and bureaucracies.

As Bad as the inefficiencies are, the moral and cultural consequences are worse. Howard is right about human beings. We are spirited creatures. We take great satisfaction in solving problems and overcoming obstacles. People are proud of their ability to make a difference. When a group of strangers succeeds in freeing a car stuck in the snow, they high-five over their success. These moments, often trivial in the grand scheme of things, are deeply consequential for our sense of ourselves as purposeful agents capable of making a difference. This is what Howard means by “everyday freedom.”

Matthew Crawford has plowed this furrow with great insight. He’s alert to the imperium of experts that usurps individual judgment and initiative. In his account, “the scope for meaningful action by citizens has become so constricted that people don’t enjoy real ownership of their world, whether on the level of individual agency or of collective sovereignty.” His concerns echo those of Philip Howard. Crawford: “Initiative and discretion have been . . . crowded out by bureaucracy and expertise, wielded remotely.”

A culture of safetyism can quickly shut down initiative. A generation ago, parents readily volunteered to chaperone middle-school kids on their field trips. Today, they are deterred by required training and protocols to prevent the possibility of sexual abuse. Again, the intention is good. But costs can outweigh benefits. A zero-tolerance mentality introduces friction into what were once organic, well-functioning moments of collective action by ordinary people.

Moreover, as Howard observes, the zeal to drive out every possibility of bad things happening nurtures a “culture of distrust.” When we’re fixated on what can go wrong, we begin to view our neighbors as potential sources of harm rather than partners in common projects. The same holds in the realm of civil rights and anti-discrimination. These laws and expectations cast relationships between employers and employees, teachers and students, even neighbors and customers, as presumptively suspect. As a result, people tread carefully and minimize close interactions and cooperation with strangers, contact that can be difficult, awkward, and fraught, given our fallen state.

Howard urges us to turn away from rules and procedures. We need responsible people to occupy positions of authority, people we can trust to make good decisions, not always, but often enough to make the mistakes and misjudgments tolerable. Effecting this change will require more than a relaxation of legal regulations that over-police decisions, although that’s certainly important. Howard urges that we need to pivot away from efforts to eliminate risk and toward a culture that tolerates imperfection. When we try to drive out the possibility of making mistakes or doing something wrong, we squelch freedom. We’re human beings, not machines, which means that we’re finite, imperfect, and prone to sin. A culture of freedom champions virtue and holds accountable those in positions of authority. But it’s not utopian. Everyday freedom will never be perfect, and trying to make it so has brought us only mistrust, disquiet, and pessimism.