The fight over masks is really a debate over how Americans view our fundamental freedoms

anti mask man cutout protest — A 'Hazardous Liberty! Defend the Constitution!' rally to protest the stay-at-home order in Olympia, Washington.
Karen Ducey / Stringer

During this pandemic, the way we view our safety versus the way we view the safety of others illustrates a divide in how Americans view basic liberties.
The debate over wearing masks is a perfect example of this.
There are four views of liberty according to author David Hackett Fischer, and they each illuminate the way Americans are behaving during the pandemic.
George Pearkes is the Global Macro Strategist for Bespoke Investment Group.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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How we treat other people in society reveals our fundamental understanding of liberty. Different understandings of the concept of liberty have very different impacts on individuals and society as a whole, and the arrival of COVID is helping to highlight the tradeoffs of the freedoms we preserve for ourselves and each other.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the liberties we take with others' safety and the liberties we hold for ourselves reveal fundamental, competing differences in how Americans conceive of our freedoms.

But the coronavirus offers a chance for us to reassess our assumptions about the costs to others that taking liberties impose, and illustrate the need for a more egalitarian approach to making our way in the world.

Four views of liberty

In his massive book on the migratory origins of America's voluntary society, Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer identifies four different conceptions of "liberty" that all found their way into our national political culture: ordered, hierarchical, natural, and reciprocal.

These liberties are different ways of viewing the concept of freedom, and they have all played roles in American culture. The conflicts in our society highlighted by COVID generally and the push to wear a mask specifically neatly highlight these various conceptions of freedom.

Efforts to require masks are a straightforward expression of ordered liberty. The concept of ordered liberty argues that without structure and a set of rules which are enforced for the common good, society would devolve into chaos. Mask orders are quite literally saving society from itself, so that we can be more free than we would if COVID spread even further and faster.

Hierarchical liberty takes a different view: that hierarchy is the source of liberty. In this understanding, people of a lower rank do not have the same liberties or rights as those with higher rank, and that system of inequality actually improves society. To a believer in hierarchical liberty, hierarchy brings harmony and therefore freedom.

You won't find much respect for hierarchical liberty among those who follow a more natural liberty, which boils down to refusing any authority at all. Mask orders from local government and local business are seen as equally unacceptable to a natural libertarian, but they're also not going to be bothered by someone else deciding to mask...after all, that's their business.

Finally, we come to reciprocal liberty, which is best thought of as a generic application of The Golden Rule. Under principles of reciprocal liberty, any threat to one person's freedom or safety is a threat to the freedom or safety of all people, because that same threat may eventually be turned on whoever is avoiding it today. This approach would dictate mask-wearing not out of paternalistic concern for the wearer, but out of the wearer's concern that they may endanger the people they interact with.

These principles of liberty may be understood through a meal at a restaurant.

A diner focused on ordered liberty would assiduously follow the rules for patrons laid out by the restaurant itself, and by applicable government regulation. If not required to by the rules established, the diner wouldn't wear a mask. The fact that staff did wear masks wouldn't be strange to them...after all, the rules don't say they can serve without a mask, unlike the diner.

If that same diner had a hierarchical view of liberty, they might decide it was right and proper for the diner to be protected by mask-wearing staff's face coverings, but pay no mind to the risks their unmasked exhales create for staff. After all, there is an order established, and their liberty is greater being from a higher class or socioeconomic standing.

The natural libertarian may reject wearing a mask in the restaurant, complain about how spaced out seats were, or go the other way entirely and assiduously dine in an N95 out of fear of the virus. Either way, others wouldn't factor much in their thinking, regardless of position.

Finally, a reciprocal conception of liberty would dictate that any time a server approached the table, diners would pause, don masks, and keep them on until distance was re-established. After all, the server is at risk if the diners are not wearing masks themselves.

My wife and I decided that our first dinner out in a post-COVID world would be dictated by those reciprocal principles. It made the meal quite nerve-wracking by the standards of fine dining, both in terms of explaining our thinking to staff who had not encountered that sort of behavior before, and because we had to constantly look out for servers approaching the table. But we also felt more comfortable knowing that we were doing our best to treat servers as we expected to be treated ourselves.

American liberties before the virus

Our stratified and increasingly unequal society has been cast in even sharper relief by COVID. By-and-large, American society has steered further towards its hierarchical influences over the last several decades, with some influences of ordered and natural liberty sprinkled in.

Our economic model is reliant on services consumption, and the conventional wisdom for successful service is "the customer is always right". This dynamic appeals to both hierarchical and natural concepts of liberty: customers are on a pedestal above the services workers who cater to them, and face little restriction in their desires from any authority.

In a system of ordered libertarian thinking, disrupting a business because an order is incorrect makes no sense; a loud argument that bothers others is just as problematic as an incorrect order. Similarly, venting frustration and petty tyranny upon service workers makes no sense to a reciprocal libertarian, because receiving that sort of treatment is such a difficult experience.

Another example of hierarchical liberty current reckoning with police violence. But unlike consumer culture, police brutality appeals to ordered liberty; a conception of freedom requiring order sits at the core of any argument that atrocious force in response to disruption is justified.

A path forward

Just as the virus may offer us the opportunity to make choices that are more reciprocal, society as a whole would be well-served by a reciprocal approach to problem solving.

At the individual level, it requires a simple application of human empathy. In any situation of conflict or dispute, simply asking oneself "how would I feel being treated the way I am treating someone else?" can go a long way.

In public policy, renewed focus on solutions grounded in consent, agency, and discussion are more reciprocal than institutions which enforce order, create hierarchy, or retreat from intervention of any kind. Reciprocal libertarians always take up the pen and the chat over the gun or the court, and encouraging that sort of approach would do much to improve conditions for all Americans.

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