podcast
If freedom is the most molecular of human desires and hope the most fragile of human capacities, then fear is an all too human anxiety—or weapon—that destroys both, in one stroke.
Whether this is the mortal fear of losing one’s own freedom, or the fear of losing power over another—the power to give oneself an unbridled freedom to rule over others—the connection between fear and freedom is more elemental than we often acknowledge. “Absolute freedom is absolute, radical evil,” says Aishwary Kumar. “The willingness to say that our freedom is boundless—or that it should have no limits—is not very distinct from our willingness to say that our excesses and cruelty towards human and nonhuman others is perfectly justified. Freedom is relentlessly tempted by tyranny; tyrants live in constant fear of freedom. Freedom and fear are connected on this mortal plane of human temptation: the temptation to be so limitlessly free that it can only end in a barbaric inequality, a cruelty without ends.”
This fear—and its counterpart, cruelty—seems disturbingly compatible with democracy. And yet, it also makes democracy wholly impossible. “Such is the enigma that Judith Shklar works through in her groundbreaking essay, “The Liberalism of Fear.” We are still to fully work out the depth of Shklar’s moral psychology, although this much is obvious: we simply cannot have a free society that is also an unequal, afraid one. And therein lies Shklar’s most profound, original insight. Inequality is the site of not just mortal fear; it is also the fuel of moral cruelty. Contra Hobbes, it is not a society of equals but a society of the afraid that is most cruel.”
Yet, to think freely of fear requires that we see in fear the sources of both an incurable inequality and our irreducible equality. “There is a kind of fear that is democratic,” Aishwary proposes, “a moral, mortal fear rooted in finitude which embraces the idea that we as human beings can feel afraid, can feel anxious about the future.”
This is why we think so closely in this episode with James Baldwin and W.E.B Du Bois, who seek to rescue fear—much like they seek to rescue freedom—from the defeatist, nihilistic rhetoric of the modern majority. “There is a way in which rejection of fear has become the most divisive, masculinist project over the last century and half,” says Aishwary. “Which is ironic, for the truth is that human beings always harbor fears that have nothing to do with their emasculation. If anything, there is the sort of fear that does not mean cowardice, that does not unleash rage, that does not compensate for itself by violence, but instead generates its own antithesis: a moral courage to be okay with solitude, with imperfection, with anxiety, with limits.”
“That is the fear James Baldwin writes of in his essay, “Nothing Personal.” That is the fear we think with in this episode, that ethics of not just ontological fear, not just existential fear, but an ethics of feeling afraid for humanity, precisely so that human freedom can be reclaimed. That ethics of embracing fear precisely so that a new freedom can be unveiled.” In Darkwater (1920), Du Bois sees in the teacher the exemplary figure of this fear (and thus of its unveiling).
