Tag: freedom

3.2.7 On norm

People live in the narrow world. Norm is in ordinary state what people often are not aware of, or it is not what they take time and think about it carefully in their life. However, they sometimes notice that it was inconvenient, for example. In daily life, many citizens are not aware of the ceiling, some go beyond that framework, but those people described as some are limited in a few. In order to be against the stringent norm, to create a culture first with limited community towards their society is a way to spread their opinions. Historically, there are times in which people live in the world of narrow norm. Even one may live in the world of narrow norm at present. Some opinion suggests that over the centuries people come to live in the narrow norm, with things established as civilisation is built up. On the other hand, there are things that one cannot talk in one epoch, but later in another epoch those can be talked with less conflict. Even if it causes tension among people, there would be times in which for the progress of civilisation, one would have to claim for public benefit.

In the case of emergency in society, the pressure on the urgent needs narrows the sphere of tolerance. This sudden decreased tolerance often weeps out the existing values except the ones the society recognise as important at the moment. In other words, limited number of values comes to dominate society with the sphere of freedom narrow. Other values than a few of domination tend to be underestimated or ignored. It often has a force of excluding freedom and the number of people who care about freedom also decreases. If certain period of time, what has been unusual and unacceptable is forced to be put in practice, some may recognise that it is the ordinary. Not only the effect that changes are infiltrated into society consciously or unconsciously, people do forget what has been ordinary.

People sometimes say that if they get older it gets more difficult to develop their abilities than they were child. That is presumably because they become more established when getting old. Their personal norm is more established. They have a variety of factors surrounding them based on their history. If they can break the established factors apart, they can make their own way less restricted by their past establishment. They can develop their abilities unrestrictively, if without being surrounded by it. Sometimes, people are obsessed by the conventional knowledge that they got in the past. It may hider their progress.

The world history as a whole may have been on the path of progress, it is on the way of progress by breaking through the established history of themselves — in the meantime it also has been creating success on top of the wisdoms built up by the previous generations.

The divided preference, from which channel they get information, create different social groups. If people spend more in what they are interested in, they become more divided into specific domains. If society is divided and what their mainstream media covers is also divided, what people in the society believes in is also separate in two opposite positions. Americans’ trust towards media became lower as described that “Forty-five percent of Americans say there is a ‘a great deal’ of political bias in news coverage (up from 25 percent in 1989)”(1).

While maintaining the potential of diversity, it is beneficial to secure the places where people of different domains can interact. Diversity, in one sense, leads to the broader sphere in which people live in. The actual experiences that people regularly visit a place or are based on their custom create powerful intimacy which is more physical sense rather than theory.

Although it is important to have discussion in terms of whether hate speech should be regulated by law or not since legal aspect in society is one of the significant domains, discussion from other perspectives provides another insight on this issue and deepens discussion.

There’s been a discussion whether we should restrict certain kind of speech such as hate speech. Discussion on the policies is what is here regarded as environmental one. Considering the balancing of regulation in society, that is to what degree it implements regulation on expression, given the nature of contingency of freedom. This characteristic that freedom is not absolute makes it necessary to think about others in exercising freedom including freedom of expression. The necessity to care about others prevents the abuse of exercising one’s freedom and rights. Even though there’s a value that we should protect freedom and rights, it should not support that we can utter anything based on the freedom of expression we have. In order to balance this relationship between one’s freedom and its contingency upon others, the development of sentimentality is proposed. This development of sentiment underpins the part of oneself to think about others.

The way of governance is not limited to only law but also social norms exist in society. Beyond legal framework which is law, norm exists in a society. Regulation is not only laws, but also norms are. One doesn’t have to construct society only by the border between legal and illegal. Some sphere in between there, or other factors are to introduce flexibility to that regulation, norm is one besides law.

If societal norms are too restrictive, it has oppressive effect. In the meantime, the stability in a society comes from maintaining norm. Education has an effect in creating shared norm among citizens by which society maintains stability. However, it is a matter of balancing and it would be better not to leaning towards one end. For instance, securing the sphere of freedom absorbs the stresses among citizens, not always we should bind ourselves by norm. Additionally saying, norm doesn’t have to be the one which is standardised, it can be taken for granted that diverse standards coexist in a society.

Education is a type of activity that educator gives a framework to students. How students are evaluated is based on the frame of the previous generations. Evaluation in a educational course is just to look at a limited aspect of student. If students strive to get better grade, they get themselves adapted to the criteria, but not necessarily all people have to move that way. It often has potential in unevaluated areas. It may not be inevitable for evaluators to set the criteria, but sharing that the potential of each person is not limited to how they are judged by educational institution, exams, or company makes difference.

In the context of media, Japanese society (or at least those who are more in the position of activism) focused on the self-censorship of media in especially the second half of 2010s. The focus on media was partly from the aspect of freedom of the press. Through this period, the citizens in Japan on the Internet, came to recognise this media tradition and got frustrated. The traditional norm got influenced through the accumulation of voices among citizens feeling the negativeness of this situation. Since the voices among citizens were visible on the Internet, it was presumably sensed by those who work in media industry. Through not just media’s self-censorship topic but also other old structural topics in society, the norm slightly changed towards the first half or the middle of 2020s that people tend to more criticise, for example people inside the mass media such as newsreader speaks critical view towards their own company in news programme when their company was to blame.

The restrictiveness of norm depends on country. Where a country has more conservatively been built, it is narrower than other countries. Japan’s narrow norm puts people into a thin frame, compared with Europe which has wider norm. Japanese society is conservative, stable and so forth. Its norm is more shared within the entire society. That may be the cause of less progress of the country. Japanese society has been having 空気, and it has been recognised with importance at least among some people in the past(2).

The Japanese word “空気” isn’t what we can see, and the kinds of it aren’t distingushable clearly. It is what the places and persons there create, but not necessarily the contribution deriving from their positive actions but rather even passively created in some cases. That is to say, for instance, if people in a society don’t take action and stay calm for a while, that also becomes the norm.

(1) ‘Public trust in the media is at an all-time low. Results from a major new Knight-Gallup report can help us understand why‘, Knight Foundation, published 16 January 2018, accessed 4 February 2024, https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/10-reasons-why-americans-dont-trust-the-media-d0630c125b9e. This sentence is also cited in Mark R. Levin, Unfreedom of the Press (New York: Threshold Editions, 2019), p.12. First Threshold Editions hardcover edition.

(2) One of the persons that focused on it is Shichihei Yamamoto. 山本 七平, 「空気」の研究 (東京: 文春文庫, 2018). 新装版.

2.1 Freedom

Published on 10 July 2024, last updated on 13 July 2024

With regard to freedom, there’s a variety of subjects to think about as such that freedom should be secured from government so that citizens can act freely without oppression. Another is the exercise of one’s freedom and its relationship with other people in the same community. Government has their authority to coordinate different interests among different people, which could be interpreted to resolve the conflict of the citizenry.

It is often seen that discussions on freedom go to the extreme edge. When someone was asked not to do a certain behaviour or action, they may claim that it is their right to take the action, but it sometimes feels that saying it one’s own right doesn’t always justify the act. Assume that most people claim their behaviours as their rights even if that harms others, it can be, in other words, regarded that it is one’s right to harm others. Also, one sometimes asks, if it is free, whether one can do everything we want.

One can argue that just because freedom should be preserved doesn’t mean that people should be freely behave whatever they want. The debates around regulation are complicated ones. Some people in a society, those who are more liberal and human rights activists in particular, argue the importance of freedom, that is what I agree with, but in some cases it is dubious that we can prioritise freedom held by people to be exercised in all the cases. People often think of extreme cases that are extremely free or not free at all, but it is a matter that to what degree freedom is ensured. To what extent freedom is tolerated depends on how people create their own culture. The benefit of freedom is to be able to choose the ways in which one acts. If not allowed, one is not able to choose their preferrable way of behaving. It is likely to cause anxiety in the minds of people and distortion in society. It is basically a balance between to what degree we prioritise the freedom of people and to what degree we restrict the freedom of people due to the effect that one’s exercise of freedom causes. Although many support the deployment of human rights concept in societies, to what degree freedom should be exercised among citizens needs to be discussed since the exercise of one’s right can influence others in the same community.

If one is in power, it may be harder for them to allow others to have freedom as it may affect negatively the advantages of those who are powerful. Contrarily, the importance of freedom is easier to understand by imagining the situation that one is not able to behave freely. While learning lesson from the past history of oppression on freedom, people with liberal thoughts has been expanding the human rights culture with some countries moving towards democracy. The culture of human rights and respecting freedom are a progress which has been cultivated from the previous generations.

In talking about freedom, the topic of the rights of individuals are often associated in discussion. Claiming the rights is to claim being able to choose the exercise of power, that is to say that they can choose if they exercise it or not at the moment. The empowered individual has power to some degree. Regarding the rights of people, the United States is known for the unique history. Historically saying, it is described that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”(1). The United States has been focusing on the rights and its protection. They have the famous Bill of rights, to explain it concisely, “The Bill of Rights, drafted by Madison, was passed by the new Congress in 1789 and ratified in December 1791. Its ten articles, incorporated as the first ten amendments to the Constitution, explicitly protect a range of fundamental individual freedoms”(2). The history of these rights-related background in the US contributed to their current culture of the emphasis on the rights.

Footnotes

(1) Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p.13. This is what Thomas Jefferson wrote.

(2) Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. 2008. The Federalist Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xxiii.