Back when I was in high school, I attended a debate camp at Dartmouth. As I roamed the hallway, looking for something thought provoking to my teenage pretentiousness, I came across a few books being given away by a political group on campus. I managed to finagle several of the books, and devoured part of one in my dorm room that evening.
If you can still find it, ‘The Economics Of Freedom: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You”. is an interesting and accessible start to understanding economics.
Something about me has always yearned for manifestos. Perhaps its because manifesto writers are willing to spell out the unsayable, utter the unthinkable, and challenge an aspect of society. In a sense, a manifesto is a dissent and a vision for a different future. I like to put myself in the shoes of those with ‘radical’ ideas and ask myself what would cause someone to believe something.
Anyways, I’ve been leafing through some of the Students For Liberty books I have over the past few weeks, and I thought Dr. Sarah Skwire’s contribution on the topic was substantively different than many of the other essays in “Why Liberty”. In the libertarian spirit of overly-analyzing others’ thoughts, motivations, and ideas, I thought it was worthy of a fresh response in 2021.
Many libertarian essays aim to convince by focusing on first principles, and showing how the premises naturally lead to their conclusions. This is often inaccessible for those without a strong background in logic, and the flow, structure, and imagery are often neglected when thinking about what liberty means. Dr. Skwire’s essay emphasizes style, flow, structure and imagery in explaining how liberty is foundational to artistic freedoms.
To summarize this essay:
A. Being an artist means being vulnerable to the state
B. Artists today (to their detriment) forget that serious infringements on creativity are often the norm, and that creation is an act of freedom.
C. Even art not typically associated with freedom works on behalf of liberty.
D. Art’s nature is freedom.
E. Art is good, & is able to be produced in both oppressive and tolerant regimes alike. Oppressive regimes may be better because freedom is more clearly taken away
F. Another view is that only self-restraints are legitimate in the world of art because it would challenge the audacity of creations
G. Artistic freedom is more closely related to other freedoms than one would think.
Underneath are some quotes from the essay that I find especially compelling.
- “To be an artist has always meant to be terrifyingly vulnerable to the controlling hand of the state”
- “We think of artistic freedom as the fulfillment of our desires to make the images we want and use the words we want without being held to restrictive stylistic guidelines”
- “The Parrot Sketch is, simply by existing, as much of a blow for liberty as the debate over the legitimacy of different forms of government in the Holy Grail”
- “Art happens in the moment when our perceptions shift: the Pointillist painting seen from one foot away and again from across the room; the contrast between Laurence Olivier’s and Kenneth Branagh’s films of Shakespeare’s Henry V“
- “Art, like liberty, has no patience for ideology”
- “Understanding emerges through the process of creating art- as knowledge emerges through the interactions of a free society”
- “Artistic spirit in the face of oppression suggests that, for the best art, you need a little tyranny”
- “Artists have died for their use of the cameras, the brushes, the pens, the chisels, the instruments, the dancing shoes we use to make our art. It is up to us, then to use those same tools to make our art as we like and to do our work as we like, and to make possible the art and the liberty of others”
Pros:
This was an easy essay to read and follow. It didn’t resort on byzantine arguments and instead quoted many crusaders for both art and liberty. This was well-put together stylistically. In particular, the irreverent section, and the disgust (sometimes) associated with subversion managed to create a clear yet uncomfortable mood. Many of the quotes of the other authors were well-integrated, and the topic was stuck to well.
Cons:
Many proponents of things typically not associated with liberty hold artistic freedom as an item in a bundle of social goods. It’s not clear that those skeptical of “capitalism” or free enterprise would see this as implying the point. Even viewed sympathetically, I could see a strong link between art and freedom, but not an inseparability. It could be the case that liberty can be separated from art, but it simply hasn’t yet. I thought the conclusion was written a little less deliberately than the rest of the piece.
Overall: This is an interesting primer on combining artistic freedoms with other forms of freedom. This has a very Robert Nozick-ean style to it in that it argues that things that seem not to be linked are. I’d recommend this to people who are interested in art but have reservations about liberty broadly.
Isadore Johnson's Website 