Three prominent Yale professors depart for Canadian university, citing Trump fears.
Snyder ist einer der bekanntesten Historiker der Welt. Sein Buch Bloodlands ist wohl auch hier in Deutschland vielen bekannt.
Hier macht Timothy Snyder ein paar Bemerkungen über Freiheit und Empathie, 26.3.2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rorpfw-SWhk
Vielleicht sind das tatsächlich die Dinge, die wir uns 2025 gegeseitig nochmal erzählen müssen?
Automatic Transscript https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rorpfw-SWhk: Timothy Snyder: 26.3.2025 “The idea that I’m free
if you take away bad things is clearly at best a half-truth. If you take away the bad things,
I still need the good things. If you take away the occupying army,
I’m still going to need to school. If you take somebody out of prison, they still need to have
a way to get a job. It’s pretty obvious that negative freedom
only matters because of positive freedom. So then you have to ask historically, where did this come from
and why is it so commonsensical. And where it comes from is as an idea
of freedom as domination essentially. So most of the time when the people in
what I considered my own tradition are talking about freedom, they’re talking about a freedom which
is enabled by the domination of others, in particular slaves. So the way that I become free
in this tradition is that I have a number of women at my beck and call, and I have serfs or slaves
who are doing the work. And in that constellation,
I have an estate, or I have a plantation, or in some larger sense,
I’m part of an empire, and that allows me to be free. But of course, it doesn’t allow
anyone else to be free. But then why is that
a notion of freedom? How does that function? It functions, so to speak academically, because we screen out
the slaves and the women and we just have this picture
of this kind of contextless person and we see him as a hero of freedom. But the way that it works in our own minds is that we fantasize
about being that person without thinking about the domination
that was necessary to be that person. And therefore we don’t think about
what would be positive, what we need to have positive freedom. It involves actually
seeing the position of the women or the position of the slaves, understanding that position, imagining the overall setting
in which they could be free, which is possible, that’s the thing. The beautiful thing about arguing
about ideas is that you realize that the idea actually traps you
in a past that you don’t have to be in. We don’t have to be
in a world of negative freedom. It doesn’t have to be the case that people who talked about freedom have
to be regarded as heroes who we worship. It could be the case
that many more people could be free, but we have to recognize the tradition,
break out of it, or talk about freedom differently. Many of the apparent contradictions
that we use to talk our way out of freedom are not real. Freedom and security is one example. The individual and society,
in my view, is another example. Our whole English-language conversation
is built around a tragic clash
between the individual and society. A lot of our culture is, too,
if you think of… We have Hollywood movies where you have to go out
and rebel against something. And the rebellion is the thing itself. And the hero is usually
a lonely hero. So we have built in this notion
that there’s a tragic clash between the individual and society,
and it is holding the individual back. And of course that can happen,
but that clash isn’t at all necessary. On the contrary. In order to become the kind
of individual who can be free, you already need
a certain kind of society around you. So if I’m going to grow up
to be a rebel, that means I have my own values
that I’m rebelling in the name of, where do I get those values? Or how
do I even become a person who could consider values and choose among them
and take risks for them? I can only do that because of
parents, friends, caretakers, a whole set of networks around me. And where in turn does that come from? Those things have to already be there. There have to be
formal and informal relationships, including political relationships,
which enable that. So in a modern society, in order to raise a child to be free, we have to have that thing
which we call the welfare state. Parents have to have vacation,
they have to have parental leave, there has to be accessible childcare,
schooling, all these things. So all these things
which we mark over here as society are actually necessary
in order to create that free individual. And so this is thinking about
what kind of society you would need to have positive freedom, you would need a welfare state. It is justified
in completely different terms, in terms of freedom rather
than in terms of solidarity or justice. It can also be justified in those ways
but I think mainly in terms of freedom. But emotionally it’s admittedly
a much more empathetic society because in order
to see freedom this way, I have to understand that I need
your freedom for my freedom. And not just in a declarative sense,
some kind of nicey-nice sense, but it is actually true
that in order for me to be free, there have to be institutions
and practices that work for everybody. That’s just a brute fact. It’s not about being nice
or trying to be generous. It’s just true that
if they’re gonna be good roads, they’re gonna be good roads
for you as well as for me. If there’s gonna be a healthcare system, it’s gonna work for everybody involved
and so on and so forth. But also empathic in another sense. And this goes also to
how negative freedom works. Negative freedom only makes sense
when you don’t understand yourself at all. And you can see this in the heroes of negative freedom
who are out there in the real world. You can have incredibly
rich and successful people who tell us that freedom is just
a matter of destroying the government, but they don’t seem to be particularly
self-aware or even happy people. And I think that’s a natural result
of thinking of freedom as being different from other people,
cut off from other people, separate, isolated in a special category, whereas to be free, in fact,
you have to know yourself, because without knowing yourself,
you don’t know what situation you’re in, you don’t really know
what choices you’re making, and in order to know yourself,
you have to listen to somebody else. And you won’t listen to somebody else
unless you believe empathically that they are in fact another human being
the same way that you are. And so, again, empathy turns out
not to be something like, “let’s just be very nice
because it’s nice to be nice”, but empathy turns out to be
a precondition to having freedom. “