Uneasy and Sleepless

 The Foment Of Fairness

We have been working through David Fischer's Fairness and Freedom, which claims to be a "history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States".  It represents a history of the idea of freedom and liberty, as developed in the two respective countries.  [David Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).]

In a nutshell, the thesis is that the United States has been built upon and moulded around the idea of freedom as liberty from state oppression, whilst New Zealand has been built upon the idea of freedom as fairness throughout society.  The brush strokes of the thesis are necessarily broad and all-encompassing.  Critics would allege that this necessarily leads to over-simplification.  However, wrinkles aside, the basic thesis has enough correspondence with reality to warrant consideration.


Roughly, the US concept of freedom grew out of the historical experience of liberation from the political control and dominion of Britain roughly two hundred years before New Zealand came under the governance of Great Britain. 

In a nutshell, the slogan, "Give me liberty or give me death" meant that in general US settlers and eventual citizens of that independent country were prepared to lay down their lives in the struggle to throw off the rule of the British monarchy.  Out of this grew the desire for limited government, strictly constrained by a constitution, a rule of law, a separation of governmental powers, and a federation of sovereign states.  Liberty was thus a negative concept: it encapsulated being free from despotic, authoritarian, and tyrannical government.  It was not a libertarian rejection of government per se, but the rejection of a certain kind of government, where citizens had few rights and the Crown controlled popular political assemblies. 

The NZ concept of freedom grew out of a very different philosophical framework, due to the fact that the power of the monarchy in the UK attenuated over two hundred years in favour of more democratic, popular control.  The UK had gradually become a constitutional monarchy, with the Crown and country subject to the will of Parliament, increasingly dominated by the Commons.  In the case of New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, freedom from the Crown and the political control of Great Britain was not the issue.   It was the growing desire to live in a land and under a social and political system that was fair. 

If the US idea of liberty was essentially negative--liberating citizens from tyrannical, absolutist government, the NZ concept of fairness was essential positive.  It sought a view of liberty that involved removing inequities and inequalities, so that everyone could have a fair go.  Thus, colonists and settlers from the UK essentially were coming to to New Zealand not to escape from tyrannical government controls and rid themselves from state oppression.  They came to have a new life, a fairer life, where they could own land, pursue their trades, make a living and a better life for their children and grand-children.  "Better" meant socio-economic advancement, rather than liberty. 

Both the United States and New Zealand can speak eloquently and fervently about "freedom", but the meaning of the term has been fundamentally different in the respective countries.  The New Zealand concept of freedom as fairness explains why it rapidly moved to become a socialist country--albeit, socialism without socialist doctrines.  Why?  Well, the role of the state was to ensure that everyone had a fair crack at life. 

In this sense, of course, life is fundamentally structured against liberty as fairness.  One person is born with musical talent to a middle class family; another is born tone deaf to a poor family.  How can that be fair?  The fundamental idea that rules in New Zealand is that it's not fair at all.  It is the role of government and the responsibility of society to ensure that the natural unfairness of life is attenuated and that the poor, tone deaf child is compensated in some significant ways, so that he, too, can have a fair crack at life. 

In a nutshell, for New Zealand a free society is a fair society which requires that society compensates the disadvantaged.  Fairness and freedom is essentially procedural egalitarianism.  That is what New Zealanders mean when they speak of freedom, or liberty.  Positive conceptions of "freedom" or "liberty" inevitably produce a soft-despotic society where government attempts to manage and control all things.  Because life itself is "unfair" government and civil society become exhausted trying to reshape and remake the very nature of life and existence itself. 

Two consequences cascade down from the idea of liberty as "fairness".  The first is a general social exhaustion.  The struggle for liberty is never ending; it is impossible to achieve; there are always inequities to be combated.  New manifestations of "unfairness" emerge every day.  The negative conception of liberty as freedom from political tyranny is truly liberating.  Once achieved, one is free to be and become as one wishes, or as circumstances roll.  But positive liberty--the establishment of fairness--is never achieved, never satisfied.  Liberty as fairness leads to a peculiar kind of societal enslavement--of constant carping, complaining, bemoaning, guilt-manipulation, busy-bodying, and covetousness.  The price of such liberty is not eternal vigilance, but ceaseless, enslaved foment. 

The second consequence is that freedom as fairness requires society to be strongly secular. Any form of discrimination or distinction is easily painted as unfair.  Woman, children, ethnicities, cultural traditions, disabled people, etc. are quickly seen as missing out, as being treated unfairly, as not getting a "fair crack".  Religions, by their very nature, discriminate ideologically and often practically.  They define gender roles.  They proscribe unethical practices.  A society relentlessly driving for "fairness" cannot abide such doctrines or practices.  Such religions resist the kind of egalitarianism demanded by doctrines of fairness--and, therefore, must be opposed, restricted, restrained.  The only alternative is a drive to impose militantly the religious philosophy of secularism. 

Freedom's fair land has become the realm of the lidless, restless eye.