In this thread we are debating whether American society is more or less free than it was say 100 years ago. Unfortunately, a side issue has bogged us down, and I’m hoping the ubermind of Dopers can help resolve it.
The issue is: Do advances in technology that allow people to do things they could not before effectively create a new freedom?
My position is yes. I argue that, if regulations restricting the use of, say, the car, the telephone, or the internet are restrictions on freedom (which I agree they are), the use of the car, etc., must be a freedom.
Objections have been raised. The first (paraphrased and expanded) is that this expansive definition of “freedoms” renders a comparison with prior eras meaningless. Since we would generally consider 19th Century England a more free society than Communist Russia, despite 19th Century England’s lower technology, technology advances shouldn’t be considered as creating freedoms.
The second is that the freedoms caused by the advance of technology can be denied to people by means other than governmental action, the most obvious being poverty. Again, it makes a discussion of whether a society is more or less free meaningless.
“Do advances in technology that allow people to do things they could not before effectively create a new freedom?”
Well, including jshore’s ideas, advances in technology would both limit and create freedom. But to that in a second.
I would definitely agree that new technology does indeed create freedom, and in many different ways. New technology itself creates a freedom by enabling action not available before. It also creates (in theory) more jobs, giving us more options as to a vocation.
On the other side, these new freedoms themselves limit other freedoms. That is, pedestrian travel is inhibited by people driving automobiles. New technology often doesn’t create jobs without closing others; the job markets shift.
And I don’t know that I can raise an issue to that second paragraph. Indeed, it would seem that technology in effect shifts freedom quite a bit by creating it while removing others.
“The second is that the freedoms caused by the advance of technology can be denied to people by means other than governmental action, the most obvious being poverty.”
Interesting, but this sort of balls up freedom with the act of practicing freedom. For example, I am free to denounce modern politics without getting dragged to a firing squad or ran over by a tank, but just because I don’t excercize this freedom doesn’t mean it goes away. I would wonder if the same idea applies to poverty-as-inhibitor.
I have a hard time thinking that a technological society (that is, with the advent of industry and electricity control) could function in a caste system. In a class system it does work: that is what we have now. But in a caste system, where once you are poor you are poor and don’t even think about trying to get out of it, I see serious instability. That is, poverty is transient in a non-caste based class system. (I don’t doubt it might seem impossible to ever leave a class, but seeing as it happens all the time in our country I’d wonder how anyone could argue otherwise).
Because poverty is a transitory condition, wealth is not a true limit on freedom the way government regulation would be.
there is no such thing as FREEDOM, there is only POWER.
advances in technology increase POWER but they can also create dependancies, thereby giving people power over the user of the technology. the car gives you the power [freedom] to travel, but you mostly use it to get to work to make money to pay for the car. if the car is designed to become obsolete, as some wierdo asserts, then the car is an economic noose.
the same goes for computers and the internet. dynamic pricing was not possible before. those who know and control technology can/will use it to exercise power over those who know the least.
FREEDOM REQUIRES CONSTANT VIGILANCE.
VIGILANCE REQUIRES UP TO DATE KNOWLEDGE.
INFORMATION HIDING IS THE MAJOR STRATEGY OF THE ENEMY.
The side issue that is bogging you down is the defintion of freedom.
Before the theoretical social contract a person is alone in the wilderness and is completely free to do whatever they wish. But if they are to survive they must spend most of that time searching for food. Creating a social compact with others allows specialization so that a person could do something they do well for a shorter period of time and trade something to someone for food. This would leave time free for doing whatever a person wished, and more choices as well for what to do with that time. Other people will have the skills to create things that a single person does not, opening new possibilities. According to Locke himself, human beings exchange a state of natural liberty for a state of social liberty*
For me freedom is the absence of legal constraint. Opportunity is the absence of other constraint.
I am free to go on a cruise but I don’t have the opportunity because I don’t have the cash.
I have the opportunity to buy marijuana but I am not free to do so because I live in a backward democracy.
Those are political definitions, in casual conversation I use the word more freely.
