David Hackett Fischer: The Evolving Meaning of Freedom and Liberty
David Hackett Fischer, in the NYT (2-7-05):
IN Baghdad's Fardus Square, where Iraqi civilians and American marines so famously pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, Iraqi artists have raised a new sculpture on the same pedestal. It is a monument to liberty and freedom, and unlike any other in the world.
In Europe and America, the favorite symbols of liberty and freedom are individual figures like Marianne or the Statue of Liberty. This Iraqi statue is a family group: mother, father and child so close together that they become one being. Above them are a crescent moon and sun, emblems of Islamic faith and Sumerian culture. One of its creators remarked that both civilizations "have called for love, peace and freedom."
The Baghdad monument was the work of a group of Iraqi artists called Najeen, or the Survivors. After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, they worked underground to keep alive the spirit of liberty and freedom. Their monument has a message about that. "Freedom is not a gift from people with tanks," Basim Hassad, a Najeen member, told a BBC reporter. "What we see in our country could be the first signs of freedom. ...What remains is a history that we will make together with the Najeen group at its heart."
Foreigners who opposed the Iraqi war were not impressed. "On top of the marble column where Saddam's statue stood, someone put up the most hideous monstrosity I've ever seen," one wrote contemptuously. "A green statue ...with a face that's not recognizable as anything human. It's supposed to be some kind of 'goddess of liberty,' but it looks like nothing in any of the worlds."
The writer missed the meaning of the monument, which in fact has much to teach us about liberty and freedom. These ideas are growing and changing rapidly today, and their long history is more dynamic and diverse than our thoughts about it. There is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world, though many people to the left and right believe that they have found it. And, yet, there is one great historical process in which liberty and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways.
The words themselves have a surprising history. The oldest known word with such a meaning comes to us from ancient Iraq. The Sumerian "ama-ar-gi," found on tablets in the ruins of the city-state of Lagash, which flourished four millenniums ago, derived from the verb "ama-gi," which literally meant "going home to mother." It described the condition of emancipated servants who returned to their own free families - an interesting link to the monument in Baghdad. (In contemporary America, the ancient characters for "ama-ar-gi" have become the logos of some libertarian organizations, as well as tattoos among members of politically conservative motorcycle gangs, who may not know that the inscriptions on their biceps mean heading home to mom.)
Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and, especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave. (In science, eleutherodactylic means separate fingers or toes.) Freedom, however, comes from the same root as friend, an Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging.
We English-speakers are possibly unique in having both "liberty" and "freedom" in our ordinary speech. The two words have blurred together in modern usage, but the old tension between them persists like a coiled spring in our culture. It has inspired an astonishing fertility of thought. Americans have invented many ideas of liberty and freedom. Some are close to independence, others to rights of belonging. Most are highly creative combinations. For most people they are not academic abstractions or political ideologies, but inherited ideas that we hold as what Tocqueville called "habits of the heart." They tend to be entire visions of a free society, and we see them in our mind's eye through symbols and emblems, much as Najeen envisions symbols in Iraq.