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Mike Schur and Todd May: What We Believe About Freedom
MIKE SCHUR, former showrunner for the NBC series “The Good Place”. His book, “How to Be Perfect,” was published this year.
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TODD MAY served as philosophical adviser for the book.
Freedom, perhaps the most sacrosanct concept in American life, is under attack. We’ve heard this drumbeat for some time, but it’s been especially loud this past year, when requests for tiny sacrifices of freedom (like wearing masks) were repeatedly met with anger, scorn or calls for some kind of nebulous revolution.
For Americans, the concept of freedom is and has always been a third rail; it cannot be touched without sparks flying. Recently, this freedom has too often been interpreted as the limitless ability to believe what one likes, regardless of where the facts lie. This in itself might not pose much of a problem except for the fact that our beliefs don’t merely lie dormant inside the belief cabinet in our minds; they give rise to action. What we believe and how we act are intertwined.
Philosophy requires us to interrogate our own beliefs in addition to the beliefs of others. But before we begin that interrogation, we need to locate an “ur-belief,” a principle that underlies or informs all the beliefs that come after. This is ours: As members of a society, we have obligations to others. Why do we need to believe in obligations to others in order to adequately approach many of our other beliefs? Because to believe adequately, we must first understand that our beliefs are inseparable from our responsibility for the safety and happiness of those with whom we share our planet. Without that, we will lose the possibility of a common social existence. We will fulfill Margaret Thatcher’s infamous quip: “There is no such thing as society.”
Consider this: What we believe about the climate matters because we have an obligation to future generations. What we believe about masking during a pandemic matters because we’re obligated to protect the vulnerable. What we believe about elections matters because we have an obligation to our fellow citizens. And what we believe about the beliefs of those who disagree with us matters because we’re obligated to respect them, just as they’re obligated to respect us. As Gandhi said, nobody has access to all of the truth.
We hasten to add here that although many of our beliefs are bound to obligation, not all of them are. We can all believe that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is best made with raspberry jam, or that Marvel movies are overrated (or underrated) without any reflection on what this means for other people. Huge parts of our lives can be lived in unfettered freedom.
But other times the ripples of our choices will collide with the lives of others, and our freedom to do and believe what we want needs to be tempered. When we act or commit to a belief, we often consciously or unconsciously run through a checklist of reasons for why we’re doing so, and to what end. If the first item on that checklist is always: “Because I have a right to do and believe whatever I want,” then Thatcher is right. There is no such thing as society. There is only Steve, Jamel, Selena and 332 million other siloed ego-states; a confederacy of individuals for whom freedom, safety and the ability to flourish are zero-sum competitions.
But if instead the first item on that checklist is: “Because I care about the lives of those around me and understand that they have the same right to flourish as I do,” then we acknowledge that we are not alone on Earth, and that our freedom isn’t any more important than anyone else’s. If we do that, society holds.
It will be pointed out — and rightfully so — that “obligations to others” is a nebulous concept. How much should we consider those around us before we decide how to act and what to believe? To what extent should we limit our own freedom in consideration of those around us? Is there a calculation we can do? A scale we can use? An app we can download?
In short, there isn’t. But there are benchmarks that can serve as guides to belief. For instance, we can trust scientists about scientific matters and doctors about medical matters instead of relying only on ourselves and other nonexperts. But even these benchmarks have their limits (which we can capture with a single word: economists).
There are other areas in which the benchmarks are unclear. What, for instance, should we believe about the proper constraints on free speech? Here we must feel our way, using Gandhi’s dictum and recognizing the various others who are affected by our speech. And in feeling our way, we recognize that we often fail. Perhaps this is why believing in absolute freedom is so tempting — if we follow that path, we are always “right,” which is easy.
One of the authors, in designing the TV show “The Good Place,” came to the conclusion that a key ethical concept is that of trying. (Which author this was — the professional TV show runner or the other guy — we will leave as an exercise for the reader.) We try to believe rightly about choices and actions that affect other people. Then, when we fail, we try to do better. It’s not as easy a path, but it’s certainly a more compassionate one, and importantly a more human one.
This is what we think of as our ur-belief: Before we decide what to believe, we have to believe that other people matter. If we act with this obligation in mind and we fail to get it right, then we have to reconsider, learn more, aim to improve and try again. Our inevitable failures will mean more, and be more productive, if they are grounded in what we might simply call “consideration for other people” — the notion that there are people around us who are affected, directly and indirectly, by so much of what we believe and say and do.
Conversely, if we act only out of a sense of unlimited personal freedom, our failures will mean nothing. The refusal to recognize that we have obligations to others and that our beliefs and our behavior should respond to that recognition, is one we allow ourselves at our peril.
