Many a conservative has uttered the claim that they are only trying to protect their “freedom,” which is precious to them. This is hard to argue against so liberals, like me, ask them to clarify what their notion of “freedom” is. They respond with something along the lines of “what we had when….”
I have commented before that conservatives have a much too rosy picture of the past while liberals have a much too rosy picture of the future. With regard to the “freedom” most conservatives say they want: freedom to do what they want personally, freedom from governmental interference in their lives (except in the case of abortion, women’s rights, etc., etc.), freedom to do what they want in business, and so on, harkening to the past is a strange approach.
If you go to our deep past, back to when humans lived in tribes or family groups, what kind of individual freedom did we have? In such a small group, there was very little individual freedom. One did what the tribe needed. You had no choice of occupation. You didn’t get to choose who you worked with. You didn’t get to choose who you married, or whether you married. You didn’t get to choose where you lived or what you ate, and so on. You did what the chiefs/leaders told you to or you found yourself alone.
If you jump from then to much closer to now, the conditions were much the same. As an individual, you had the choice to starve and not much else. Most people did what they were told to do by a religious official or a rich person. Ordinary people did not have the resources to strike out on their own unless they were quite self-sufficient and there were very, very few of those people.
So, from where did the idea of “individual freedom” come? It came from modern society. The closer you get to modern society, the more individual freedom there is.
And what is it that most conservatives are rejecting?
You got it in one: modern society.
Conservatives have existed throughout human history. You can’t go back to a previous time for which there are written records without finding complaints from conservatives about the moral decay of society and the same for “today’s youth.” Youths are pretty much the only humans who have the energy to oppose the inertia of our society, so they are an obvious target for progress suppressionists. So, as our society has “decayed” we have become more and more free.
Conservatives apparently want the product of the modernization trend (freedom), but don’t want the modern along with it. Any who say we were “more free” in the past are probably pointing to a privileged group, such as the rich, who had a pocket of greater freedom due to their wealth, or to a group who had privileges hard wired into society, such as racial privileges. The “freedom” of those people was at the expense of large numbers of other people and was a false kind of freedom.