How much scandium should I exchange for freedom of expression? How many bags of iron ore is the separation of powers worth? How many tons of titanium should I hand over to secure equality before the law?
These rather odd questions are the natural and inescapable end point of any outlook that sees freedom as a commodity to be defended when certain material thresholds have been met. When we require answers to these questions before we are willing to protect freedom, then surely, we have misunderstood what freedom is about?
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Of course, there is nothing especially wrong with a bit of pragmatism in the world. If I help my friend in need by lending them some money or giving them some food, I might expect, down the line, to be recompensed with a free dinner or maybe have my money paid back. We cannot go through life in an ethereal daydream of disconnected empathy.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”, as Adam Smith, Scottish philosopher and author of “The Wealth of Nations” once observed.
However, on weighty matters that determine the future of our civilization and the types of societies that we inhabit, it is often the case that we must be willing to act on principle and to fight to defend what we stand for without demands for payment.
Rare earths and freedom
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US President Donald Trump’s plan to defend Ukraine in exchange for rare earth elements presents an especially potent example of the gray zone between the pragmatic and the principled. It’s not unreasonable that for material and advice, the US might like to discuss a deal in which the hard-working US taxpayer gets something in return. The presence of US corporations interested in protecting their rare earth acquisitions may help the Ukrainian economy and provide the country with more international security, so there is a certain advantage for Ukraine in pursuing commercial opportunities.
However, what may seem a reasonable transaction – defense equipment for minerals – which one might instigate with any nation around the world in peacetime, is not being contemplated in ordinary circumstances.
Ukraine is in a fight for its survival. Not only that, but the country is in the cross hairs of a globally important showdown between the aspirations of democratic nations and a growing armada of autocratic powers. What happens in Ukraine, it is no exaggeration to say, will establish the security of the democratic world for decades to come, maybe longer. How the West behaves in Ukraine will calibrate the ambitions and plans of autocracies far into the future.
With this set of circumstances in mind, the democratic world must demonstrate its willingness to defend its cherished ideals and establish beyond any doubt that these are non-negotiable principles that cannot be measured in the market value of raw materials.
What are the principles of which I speak that apparently sit outside commercial considerations? We might list among them free and fair democratic elections with credible political opposition; an independent judiciary; the separation of powers in the government; the rule of law and equality before the law; and the collection of freedoms that we think underpin equitable societies, including freedom of expression, assembly, conscience and the press. Democratic nations don’t claim to have achieved all these things to perfection; what distinguishes democratic nations is that they are constantly striving toward them.
Ideas of freedom cannot be commodified
One might reasonably ask why, indeed, these ideals cannot be commodified. As we cannot achieve any of them to perfection, then surely exchanging material wealth to improve one or two of them would be a sensible decision, just as I can spend more money to buy a better fridge or commit to a larger mortgage in exchange for a bigger house.
Perhaps one obvious practical reason why democratic principles are different from a fridge and the size of one’s home is that their quality influences not merely a few material items in life, but the entire bedrock of the society in which we live. Once we get into the territory of considering aspects of freedom as items that can be exchanged in a deal, then we must at once place a value on them.
Then we find ourselves in a world where national leaders could give up the rule of law because, by some spurious calculus, they have determined that it is worth trading in for a trillion dollars. Under such a regime, the fate of freedom, and the lives of a vast number of people, become arbitrary, subject to the whims and exigencies of commercial and economic factors, and ultimately dangerously unpredictable.
This brings us to the more important reason why the ideas of freedom are not tokens in a commercial game. In a world ever ready to disintegrate into barbarism, we must establish some essential machinery of governance that is rooted in a moral framework, or at least a set of behaviors that are deemed to protect people from the violent state of nature – a poor, nasty, brutish and short life, as Thomas Hobbes colorfully put it.
The concepts of private property, accountable government, freedom of the press, and all the others which I have mentioned, are not a random collection of thoughts, a grab bag of policies that have dribbled in without order over the centuries. All of them constitute a network of principles that together provide security for the individual against the coercion of other people and states. Running through them are the countless tracts and books of those who pondered these innovations and brought them into existence. They are fragile and always prone to erosion by the power hungry. We could write an endless list of the physical lives that have been sacrificed to secure them.
It is easy for the word “freedom”, when used to describe these ideas, to become hackneyed and thrown around like a cheap slogan, but there is nothing shallow or superficial about them. It has taken humanity millennia to bring these thoughts together into a coherent system of governance and they are worth far more than any mine or mountain of minerals.
When we see a country striving to build these guardrails of accountability in government and in civil society, surely our instinct should not be to weigh up how many bags of cerium they can give us in exchange for our interest in helping them build such a community. We may reasonably ask how many of these bags we can expect to receive as a remuneration for essential monies committed at the expense of our citizens, but that should be a surficial veneer on a principled stand. While we hone our deals and agree our terms, we should make it clear that the principles of freedom will be defended no matter what.
An ally of free nations should come to the negotiating table to find favorable terms on the practicalities, but in spirit and in the case where survival is on the line, they should be reliable, solid and clear-headed as friends in the pursuit and defense of liberty.
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
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