Opposition to vaccine mandates is part of a larger fight for freedom

Freedom used to be a universally held value. From John Locke to Martin Luther King, from the French Revolution and the American War of Independence to the struggle against Apartheid, the concept of individual freedom has had ubiquitous support bar from unsavoury totalitarian regimes. But these days the idea is becoming increasingly controversial. The pandemic has brought this into sharp relief, where civil liberty concerns about vaccine mandates has been dismissed as conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers and opposition painted by some as akin to terrorism. 

But while vaccine mandates may be one of the more obvious manifestations of how the concept of freedom has fallen in esteem, the insidious attack on liberty has tentacles reaching far deeper than the push to force needles in arms. In academia, a profession increasingly engulfed in the culture war, freedom is unsurprisingly being dragged into the racism debate. In his book White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, the now deceased historian Tyler Stovall claims that what he calls the ‘Western idea of freedom’ is rooted in racism – a claim that seems based on the fact that the Enlightenment and the trans-Atlantic slave trade were contemporary phenomenons. This is a similar argument made by the 1619 Project, an attempt by journalists from the New York Times to ‘reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’. In this re-writing of history, the American war for independence becomes a fight to maintain slavery and merely a fight from ‘white freedom’ as opposed to ‘black freedom’.  

Why would left wing academics turn on freedom and try to racialize the word? It is part of the larger fight to undermine Western values which has engulfed academia. Whereas ‘white freedom’ is based in individualism and free market capitalism, the realization of ‘black freedom’ requires an upheaval of society and – of course -socialism. In an interview with The Nation, Stovall states that democratic socialism is ‘vital in the struggle against white freedom.’ The phrase ‘struggle against’ is of course revealing. What we know as Freedom must yield to a new standard. ‘Socialism does have the potential to empower power all people’, Stovall says. 

So, the opposition to vaccine mandates is not merely a fight against involuntary medical injections. Something larger is at stake: the idea that individual freedom as advanced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment is sacrosanct. We can of course acknowledge that at the time when these ideas were articulated many held contemptible ideas on race without tarnishing the idea that ‘no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions’ as John Locke wrote in the late 17^th century. Allowing the erosion of what we understand as freedom is a slippery slope to no less than the undermining of Western civilisation. For some, that is the goal. Others should take care to avoid becoming the useful idiots of such insidious forces and remember that freedom does not come without cost. We can disagree on whether to take a vaccine or not. Let’s not sacrifice our way of life because of it.