Liberty in the Age of Terror

1. Liberty's Erosion: A Crisis of Our Time

Whereas it is obvious what threat terrorism represents, the self-harm of inappropriate responses to terrorism is less obvious, more insidious, and in the long term greatly more damaging.

Complacency is dangerous. Western democracies are gradually diminishing civil liberties in the name of security, a trend that poses a significant threat to the very foundations of free societies. This erosion is often subtle and insidious, making it easy for citizens to become complacent and fail to recognize the long-term consequences. The real danger lies not only in external threats like terrorism but also in the self-inflicted wounds caused by inappropriate responses.

Crisis proportions. The conjunction of terrorism and our responses to it threatens a real political catastrophe. While the threat of terrorism is clear, the self-harm caused by reducing civil liberties is less obvious but more damaging in the long run. This is a crisis because it undermines the values that liberal societies are meant to uphold.

Themes of liberty. The core themes of liberty, equality, justice, free speech, tolerance, privacy, identity, and hope are under threat. It is crucial to understand the enemies of these values and the dangers posed to them both from within and without. The debate surrounding these issues is becoming increasingly urgent, and failure to address them could lead to illiberal and closed societies.

2. The Inconvenience of Freedom: State vs. Individual

The inconvenience of the authorities equals the freedom of the people, and is a price richly worth paying for all that matters to individual lives and aspirations.

Civil liberties protect individuals. Civil liberties exist to protect individuals against the arbitrary use of state power. Authorities often find civil liberties inconvenient because they make it more difficult to monitor, arrest, and prosecute individuals. However, this inconvenience is a necessary safeguard for the freedom of the people.

Police state analogy. Consider a typical police state where there is no regime of civil liberties. In such a state, authorities can knock on doors at any time and individuals can disappear without a trace. This illustrates that the inconvenience of the authorities is directly proportional to the freedom of the people.

Freedom's price. The inconvenience of the authorities is a price richly worth paying for all that matters to individual lives and aspirations. It is essential to recognize that the freedom of the people is not free; it requires constant vigilance and a willingness to accept some level of inconvenience. The balance between security and liberty is delicate, and erring on the side of liberty is crucial for preserving a free society.

3. Mill's Wisdom: The Essence of Liberty

There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence, and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

Individual freedom is paramount. No government has the right to interfere with the personal freedom of individuals except to prevent them from harming others. Governments do not have the right to interfere with an individual’s personal freedom even when they think it will be in his interests. This principle is essential for protecting individuals against the tyranny of the majority.

Civilized society. A civilized society protects the freedom of individuals and minorities against majorities, just as it protects them against tyrants. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence. Finding and maintaining that limit is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism.

Free development of individuality. The free development of individuality is essential to personal well-being. Conformist societies that frown on individuality are not merely repressive and reactionary, but stagnant. In every historical epoch distinguished by real progress in the arts, sciences, and government, the prevailing social ethos has been an open one, hospitable to eccentricity, innovation, experimentation, and the abandonment of traditions that have outlived their usefulness and become a barrier to progress.

4. Identity's Trap: Beyond Singular Allegiances

a person is not one thing – a Muslim or a Jew only, or an Arab or an American only – but many things: a parent, a mathematician, a Bangladeshi, a man, a feminist, a Muslim, all of these things at once, and thus a multiple and overlapping complex being whom the politics of singular identity reduces to a mere cipher and crams into a pigeonhole.

Multiple identities. The fewer identities people acknowledge themselves as having, the less free they are. Individuals should recognize and acknowledge being all of a number of things, such as a parent, a professional, a friend, and a member of a community. This allows for a more diverse and interesting life, closer to the fulfillment of human potential.

Singular identities are dangerous. The tendency to overlook the many identities a human being has in favor of a single differentiating identity is on the increase. This tendency has always existed, but it is now animating more and more dangerous divisions as attitudes harden on all sides. Overriding identities are the ones people are prepared to die for, which proves the idea’s danger.

Humanity first. The only identity that truly matters is that of being a human being. If that thought were in the forefront of consciousness every time people encountered other people, no matter what else might also be part of a description of them, the world would be a vastly better place. This obvious truth does not help to explain why identity politics has arisen in the first place, for that, attention has to be paid to questions of social justice.

5. Justice Defined: Equality and Equity

‘Equality, and where equality is unjust, equity’ would be its appropriate slogan.

Equality vs. Equity. Equality means treating everyone the same, while equity means treating people fairly based on their individual needs. A strictly egalitarian society would be unjust and unachievable if it meant that unfair equalities prevailed. Crucial equalities, such as equality of opportunity, equal rights, and equality of citizenship status, are the foundation of the just society and are therefore non-negotiable.

Social justice. One major reason for the rise in identity politics is the lack of social justice in the world. This lack expresses itself in "them and us" terms, where "they" are in some way depriving "us" of something we need or desire, oppressing "us" in one of many ways, disrespecting something that "we" value, or sometimes just doing better than "us" for reasons that "we" think are bad. These sentiments operate within and across societies and are fertile ground for resentment and eventually conflict.

Fairness and equity. A robust, common-sense outlook might be that at any point in the historical development of a society, there will always be a reachable consensus about what kinds of distribution of goods and burdens would count as just (or as fair) to all parties, including minorities. This implies the existence of certain universal and inalienable rights, of exactly the kind that human rights instruments seek to protect. A society that recognizes the claims of justice as the foundation of entitlement to equal treatment in one fundamental range of respects, and equitable (strictly fair) treatment in all other respects, is to that extent a good society.

6. The West's Liberties: A Self-Inflicted Wound

To defend ‘freedom and democracy’, Western governments attack and diminish freedom and democracy in their own countries.

Irony of the "War on Terror." Western democracies have undermined their own civil liberties in the name of security, a self-inflicted wound that does the terrorists' work for them. This is because terrorists seek to frighten their victims into self-repression, thus making their victims do their work for them, achieving what the terrorists’ brand of religious or political orthodoxy would achieve if they could impose it. To reduce our own liberties in supposed self-defense is thus to hand the victory to the terrorists at no further cost to them.

US and UK policies. The governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom claim to be promoting "security" in reaction to the threat of terrorism, but their policies have resulted in a significant erosion of civil liberties. This includes increased surveillance, expanded powers of detention, and restrictions on free speech. The US Patriot Act and the UK's anti-terrorism legislation are prime examples of this trend.

Erosion of rights. The governments of the US and UK chip away at their own civil liberties, apparently indifferent to the consequences. They thereby do the terrorists’ work for them, a point worth repeating because among the terrorists’ reasons for seeking to hurt major Western countries is antipathy to the Western way of life: to their social and educational systems, their politics, their freedom of speech and belief, the freedom enjoyed by women, and other products of the individual liberty that defines them.

7. Free Speech: The Cornerstone of Freedom

Free speech is simply too important to be compromised by anything other than the very best and most urgent of considerations.

Fundamental civil liberty. Free speech is the fundamental civil liberty without which there can be no others. Without it, none of the other liberties can even be claimed or defended. This is why there has to be a refusal to allow "feeling offended" to serve as a license to censor the freedom to criticize and satirize.

Social and political satire. Social and political satire is one of the healthy features of debate in liberal democracies, and so is challenge and criticism. Efforts to silence people who say things you do not like to hear are regressive and unacceptable. Everyone who believes in a free, open, and grown-up society should reject attempts to bully others into silence.

Limits to free speech. There can be good reasons why information, texts, or pictures should be prevented from reaching the public domain, as when military and commercial plans are kept hidden from rivals. When this is a temporary expedient and reasonable in the circumstances, it is not censorship. Censorship proper occurs when a government or an organized lobby of some kind seeks to prohibit publication of information or opinion, or all or parts of texts or pictures, because it thinks its own or "the public’s" interests will be harmed by them.

8. Tolerance: The Bedrock of a Free Society

Tolerance is not a demand to license just anything whatever, least of all behavior that threatens the rights of others; it is a demand to respect others’ rights and entitlements even when one does not agree with their views or share their interests.

Essential for a good community. One of the essentials of a good community is tolerance. Tolerance matters for the obvious reason that the diversity of interests and desires people have is sometimes so great that we don’t even understand why others should think and behave as they do; and yet we acknowledge their right to do so, because we cherish the same right for ourselves.

Paradox of tolerance. A tolerant society is always at risk of tolerating those who are intolerant, and allowing movements to grow which foster intolerance. The remedy for the paradox of tolerance is that tolerance must not tolerate intolerance if it is to protect itself. Tolerance is not a demand to license just anything whatever, least of all behavior that threatens the rights of others.

Active tolerance. Tolerance is an active thing. It involves recognizing the right of others to be different from oneself, and allowing them the space and opportunity to speak from their different perspective and (under the usual constraint of not harming others) to live it out. It involves putting up with the fact that others seem odd, or offensive, or disagreeable.

9. "War on Terror": A Misguided Approach

‘History teaches us that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure,’

Harmful phrase. The phrase "War on Terror," coined by President George W. Bush, has been more harmful than helpful in addressing the world's present difficulties. It lumps together all non-state, self-constituted groups who choose violence as their means, offering them a common identity and a spurious justification. It also leads to a uniform approach being taken to dealing with those groups, when in fact each one requires its own tailored approach.

Soft power vs. hard power. Whereas the hard power of bullets and bayonets can win battles, it is only soft power that can win wars, by fostering dispensations in which appropriate institutions and sustainable development can produce peace and prosperity. Terrorists are symptoms of a variety of problems, not the whole of the problem itself. They are the pus in the festering sore, the flies on rotting offal.

Alternative phrase. One alternative phrase that might be coined to replace "War on Terror" therefore could be "peace-making on the various problems part of whose outcome is terrorism." Infinitely less glib and quotable than what it replaces, it at least has the merit of being more constructive, and wider in its reach over what has reduced the world to the primitive resource of bare-knuckle fighting as a supposed remedy for its turmoils.

10. Combating Terrorism: Reasserting Liberal Values

In a time of genuinely serious threat it is justified to place temporary and careful limits on certain civil liberties, if a good case can be made for doing so.

Not a war between West and Islam. It is essential to understand that the struggle against terrorism is not a war between the West and Islam. It is not just the West whose civilian populations and economies have to be defended from attack by terrorism, for there are states in the developing world under the same threat from sections of their own populations who employ the same means, and whose support comes from the same dark spiderweb of funding and arms supply which links disparate terrorist organizations across the world.

Temporary limits on liberties. In a time of genuinely serious threat it is justified to place temporary and careful limits on certain civil liberties, if a good case can be made for doing so. But the stress lies on all the words involved: "genuine," "temporary," "careful," and "if a good case can be made for doing so." What is unacceptable is permanent reduction of civil liberties.

Addressing the root causes. Part of the misnamed "War on Terror" has to involve making the world a fairer place, where everyone gets a hearing, and where injustices have a genuine chance of being remedied. Without this, peace is unlikely. Getting a hearing on condition of giving others a hearing, compromising, accepting that some of one’s desiderata are not going to happen, or not yet, are all marks of grown-up citizenship of the world.

11. Surveillance State: The Price of Security?

The wholesale invasion of privacy represented by all these measures constitutes a massive change in the relationship between the citizen and the state, and turns the state into a snooper, a Big Brother institution, whose instruments of surveillance and control are premised on the idea that every citizen is a potential suspect, and must be treated as such.

Orgy of surveillance. Western democracies have launched themselves on an unprecedented orgy of surveillance of their entire populations in order to catch or pre-empt the few who do (or might) pose some kind of risk to them through crime or terror. This includes the use of CCTV cameras, biometric identity cards, and the monitoring of electronic communications.

Change in relationship. A requirement for every citizen to carry a device that enables the authorities, on demand, to access immediate and conclusive information about them, dramatically changes the relationship of individuals to the state, from being private citizens to being numbered conscripts. Any individual thus tagged and numbered is a trackable, controllable unit, exposed to continual monitoring if any of the authorities empowered to carry it out choose to do so.

Justifications challenged. The claims of security are too readily allowed to override those of civil liberty. As James Madison said, "The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." That is why, even in times of danger, one of the truest of commonplaces is that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

12. Human Rights: A Universal Standard

Rights and liberties are indivisible.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations in 1948, is an important document in the history of our contemporary world. It sets out a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, and enjoins UN member states and their citizens to strive to promote respect for them.

Inviolability of the human individual. The intention of the first three articles of the UDHR is to assert, as the default position, a status of inviolability for the human individual, independently of any other fact about him or her. For a central example, it opposes forcing him onto a train, transporting him to a death camp, and murdering him in a gas chamber there. And as a corollary it implies that there has to be a very good reason indeed for the life, the equality, the liberty or the security of individuals to be abrogated.

Law and due process. Law and its due process lie at the heart of the possibility of rights because without them the idea of rights is in any practical sense empty. The articles assert everyone’s right to be treated as a person before the law, equally with all other persons. They state that everyone is to have access to effective remedy for violation of his rights, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and a fair trial.

Last updated: March 18, 2025