Freedom is a Group Effort

By now, you have probably heard about the Bucha Massacre, or some other item from the laundry list of atrocities committed by the Russian troops invading Ukraine. I had been dreading and half-expecting this, because from early on I suspected that Putin's emotional goals for the war probably included torturing Ukrainians. (Still, I had hoped that the mobile crematoria Russia brought were more for covering up the true numbers of their own dead than those of indomitable Ukraine.) Troops that are trapped by bad strategy and worse supply lines so that they are threatened, bored, miserable, hungry, cold, and ANGRY are prone to cruelty...even before the ultimate commander's obvious desire to dehumanize and exterminate the enemy finishes unleashing the beast within.

Ukraine has more than proven its devotion to the liberal ideals that make the West something worth fighting for. They've reminded the rest of us that those ideals don't have to be empty promises. That our ancestors left us something beautiful in among the garbage they couldn't let go of. We inherited more than imperialism, colonialism, bigotry, and the ugliness that goes with them. The fact that our ancestors never lived up to their beautiful ideals doesn't discredit the ideals. It means that we should do better than they did.

We owe Ukraine a huge debt, especially if they do break the back of the Russian army for us all. What Vlad the Imploder is encouraging or allowing in Mariupol and Bucha, he would do to the rest of us. But thanks to the sacrifices, cleverness, and courage of Ukrainians, Russia may soon be too weak to try it on us -- if we give Ukraine the aid it needs to defeat the invading Russian army and send them home whipped and weeping. That will bring new problems, but I think we'd rather have the problem of a defeated, humiliated Russia with a broken army, instead of the problem of a strong Russia attacking more of its neighbours because Putin and pals like dominating and subjugating.

What is Freedom?

While choice can never be completely taken away, the range of choices available to us depends on how much freedom or liberty we have. I was Grammarian at a Toastmasters meeting recently, so I was looking for a word of the day, and looked up the etymologies for words like "freedom" and "liberty", since those are on everyone's mind lately.

"Freedom" and "liberty" each come from different root words^[1] in Proto-Indo-European, but they convey the same concept and paint the same rough picture. They are both rooted in what life was like for many thousands of years, for the vast family of Indo-European cultures who, wave after wave after wave, swept over huge swathes of Eurasia, often by force, often subduing their cultural kin as well as strangers, often warring with their neighbours.^[2]

What is that rough picture? That freedom was the precious result of group effort and good luck. You were free because your tribe was free.^[3] Your tribe was free because it was strong enough to enslave or drive off its attackers instead of becoming enslaved by them. We are watching this ancient process play out live on the news in the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- complete with looting, raping, sacking, pillaging, and mass enslavements and deportations -- in the heartland of the ancient people who spread that style of war far and wide for millennia.^[4] This is a Bronze Age war fought with 21st century weapons.

Today, people born in the right places get to delude themselves that freedom comes for free, and that it's a right. That personal freedom is a natural state disconnected from the broader group's freedom. The invasion of Ukraine is frightening and painful partly because it strips away those comforting lies.

Those of us born free are enormously privileged to live in a time and place where so many people are free and let others live in peace and freedom too. Where the dream that all people will be free by nature and free by right, living together in peace, is even this close. Despite all its bigotries and inequities, our partial, messy prototype of widespread freedom is tremendous progress.

The debt that we owe to our children and our ancestors is to increase and distribute freedom yet more widely and evenly, but without taking freedom for granted. Freedom is a rare prize, won by the blood, sweat, and tears of the generations before us, and we ought to treat it that way.