Radboud Philosophical Facutly Journal

Categorie: Jonas Hoekstra

  • The (Un)freedom of Dutch Housing

    In the Netherlands, there is a housing crisis. This fact has been so unanimously agreed upon that it even became one of the main spearpoints in the 2023 Dutch elections under the moniker of ‘bestaanszekerheid’, or security of living (NOS 2023). The main problems that make up this crisis are the scarcity of available housing and the price of housing that is available. Citizens looking into purchasing a house are often outbid, and those applying for social housing are placed on waiting lists that may take up to 17 years in some municipalities (Buijtendijk & Buijs 2023). One of the main driving forces in this housing crisis is the privatisation of the housing market during the 90s (Kras 2022). This privatisation was aimed at providing more citizens with cheaper housing due to competition on the open market. Privatisation also meant there would be less social housing and more opportunities for house ownership. Why is it that the liberalisation of the housing market, which would give citizens more opportunities and freedom regarding housing, has made many citizens unfree due to their inability to find a stable place to live?

    ​A central turning point often mentioned regarding housing in the Netherlands is the 1990s (Kras 2022). Before this period, it was often the case that municipalities owned large pieces of land and willingly distributed these to housing associations eager to start building affordable, accessible housing. This meant municipalities had control over the amount, size, and specifications of new housing. An inevitable shift occurred during the 1990s when the citizen became important as an individual and consumer. Citizens had specific, personal wishes and desires, which also affected their perspective on the role of housing in society. Creating considerable diversity in housing types and fulfilling more specific wishes regarding lifestyle became central. Adding to this, providing citizens with the ability to own a house privately became a central political goal (Haas, Heerink, and DWARS Commissie economie, n.d., 12). To fulfil these goals, municipalities sold their shares in land and housing projects, thus privatising the housing market.

    ​This tendency in economic politics is also considered to be a shift from socialist politics towards a more liberal mindset. Liberalism, as an ideology, focuses on personal freedom and the freedom to conceive of your own personal idea of ‘the good life’. This is also often referred to as the idea of negative freedom. With negative freedom, citizens are free to decide for themselves and free from interference from others (or the state). Negative conceptions of freedom also stimulated the liberalisation of the housing market. Citizens would be able to choose a living space that best suits their taste. Thus, by focusing on providing more options (type and size of a house, private or social housing, etc.), a citizen’s personal freedom is increased. While on paper, citizens are free to choose what kind of housing they desire, in practice, they do not have the ability to actually express this freedom. Due to privatisation, housing prices have increased, and the availability of housing has decreased, which has, in practice, made citizens less free. In this sense, citizens are forced to apply to any social housing projects that remain or apply for a mortgage that limits their financial mobility significantly. While liberalism proposes an ideology of personal choice and freedom, the practical consequence is that citizens have become less free.

    ​A potential opening to escape this deadlock in housing is finding a different conception of freedom, namely, positive freedom. Positive freedom is generally conceptualised as the idea that citizens have the freedom to actualise the possibilities given to them (Warburton, n.d.). Positive freedom focuses on the ability to make a specific choice. This is opposed to a liberal conception of freedom, which focuses on the opportunity to make choices, not your actual capacity to make choices. Hegel suggested that free will is actualised through the choices that individuals and collectives make; therefore, being able to actualise choice is more an expression of freedom than the opportunity to make choices. A housing market focused on positive liberty is thus focused on realising citizens’ ability to receive housing, instead of providing irrelevant possible choices. This would, for example, lessen possible options in housing but make the options that are there more accessible.

    To provide some perspective, this idea has already been realised in Austrian social housing (VPRO 2023). In Austria, over 80% of citizens are eligible for social housing and pay comparatively little for their housing. In the Dutch context, social housing is seen as something for ‘the poor’ and is generally seen as undesirable. This is completely reversed in the Austrian context. Citizens see social housing as something positive and that it does not entail living in poor or inadequate housing. Positive freedom, when translated into providing as many citizens as possible with adequate housing, causes innovative and livable housing options to arise (VPRO 2023).

    Additionally, other opportunities open up by providing more citizens with suitable housing. Since citizens can now access housing more easily, they may also have better job opportunities and access to social and community participation. Thus, by providing accessible housing, citizens have more choices that are open to them, and become, in turn, freer. Citizens in this situation are less restricted and gain opportunities instead of losing them.

    ​While the housing crisis in the Netherlands may seem like a purely practical or technical problem, it is, in actuality, fueled by a specific, negative conception of freedom. Therefore, the housing crisis problem can only be resolved by adopting a new conception of freedom. This can be found in positive freedom, which focuses on capabilities instead of opportunities. Additionally, housing based on positive freedom has already been realised in Austria, which could serve as an example for the Netherlands to tackle its housing crisis.

    Bibliography

    Buijtendijk, Richard, and Madeline Buijs. 2023. “In Nederland sta je eindeloos op de wachtlijst voor een sociale huurwoning.” Colliers, October 5, 2023. https://www.colliers.com/nl-nl/research/factcheck-in-nederland-sta-je-eindeloos-op-de-wachtlijst-voor-een-sociale-huurwoning.

    Haas, Raoel, Vincent Heerink, and DWARS Commissie economie. n.d. “Waarom de huizenmarkt altijd faalt. Een economisch-historische analyse van huisvesting, marktfalen en woningcorporaties.” Accessed August 20, 2024. https://dwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Manifest-Volkshuisvesting.pdf.

    Kras, Jeanette. 2022. “Waarom oplossen woningcrisis zo moeilijk is: ‘We zitten gevangen in het systeem.” Welingelichte Kringen, January 5, 2022. https://www.welingelichtekringen.nl/economie/3158548/waarom-oplossen-woningcrisis-zo-moeilijk-is-we-zitten-gevangen-in-het-systeem.html.

    NOS. 2023. “Bestaanszekerheid is een belangrijk thema voor veel kiezers.” NOS, November 5, 2023. https://nos.nl/collectie/13960/video/2496803-bestaanszekerheid-is-een-belangrijk-thema-voor-veel-kiezers.

    VRPO. 2023. “expeditie beter Nederland.” Last modified November 30, at 20:30 (CET). https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2023-2024/Expeditie-beter-Nederland.html.

    Warburton, Nigel. n.d. “Two Concepts of Freedom.” OpenLearn. Accessed August 20, 2024. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/philosophy/two-concepts-freedom/content-section-3.3.

  • Reviewing Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological

    As the title suggests, Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological is a book about ecology. However, in a sense, the book tries to do more than simply presenting a philosophical, anthropological, or biological perspective on ecology. It tries to give an expansive critique on the way in which a lot of ecological thought is structured, and why this way of thinking is faulty. Morton adds that it is this faulty way of thinking that got us into (climate) trouble in the first place. Within the book, Morton also aims to provide us with a conceptual toolkit that may remedy our faulty ways of thinking. Each chapter follows a relatively similar structure, wherein Morton notes a problem, explicates it, and critiques it. The final part tries to provide a new way of thinking that may remedy this problem. For clarity’s sake, I will also follow this structure in my analysis of the book.

    Factoids, Objects and Neolithic Thinking

    One of the main points Morton argues in Being Ecological is that our way of perceiving reality is fundamentally wrong. While this may seem a somewhat large claim, Morton does provide ample argumentation for this throughout the book. In the introduction, he writes about the way in which we present ecological information to ourselves. Information about climate change is often presented as a compilation of data that must convince us of something – namely, climate change. Morton states that small chunks of data are presented as holding a fact, which he calls “factoids” (Morton, 2018, 8). These factoids appear to factually tell us something about reality, and therefore hold some kind of truth. The reality is that factoids are only interpretations of small pieces of data and are therefore not facts, but only fact-like, as Morton states. A lot of ecological thought is concerned with the idea that if we can compile enough factoids, we will ‘get’ climate change and will be able to act upon it. Morton relates this scientific perspective to the way in which human beings think about reality at large. We perceive ourselves as a rational subject that is independent of the world and can perceive and ‘grasp’ things around it, be that via sight, sounds, or scientific analysis. Objects exist outside of the human psyche and are there to be analyzed, grabbed, utilized, etc.

    This idea of the human psyche being independent of ‘things’ is a symptom of ways of thought that originated in the Neolithic period (Morton, 2018, 50). Morton states that historically, since the move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society, humans have started to create conceptual separations between animal-human, culture-nature, master-subject. They claim that this idea of human beings being able to rationalize and divide the world has, in turn, led to industrial capitalism and the problems that have arisen from it.

    OOO

    Morton presents his answer to the problem of Neolithic thinking in the form of object-oriented ontology (OOO). Object-oriented ontology is a way of thinking about ‘things’. It proposes that all things exist in the same way, thus there is no way in which human existence is more important than the existence of any other thing. Additionally, it maintains that there are infinite ways of accessing things in the world, such as grabbing, throwing, talking to, drawing on, etc. Therefore, you can never exhaust the way in which things can be accessed. This means that things remain fundamentally independent and can never be fully grasped.

    This also means that all things, animal, plant or stone, cannot be reduced to the way humans perceive them. In this way, OOO can help in combatting anthropocentric ways of thinking, including those that privilege the position of humans above animals and objects. In summary, Morton thus states that ‘being ecological’ is “acknowledging in a deep way the existence of beings that aren’t you, with whom you coexist” (Morton, 2018, 128). This means that we accept the fact that we cannot fully grasp the essence and existence of beings around us, but we also accept that these beings exist, nevertheless. Being ecological is therefore a way of opening up and letting the existence of other beings into our own lifeworld.

    Assessment

    In general, this work is great at tackling the issue of anthropocentrism and presents an original critique and a strong response in the form of OOO. The work goes beyond simply diagnosing the problem in the form of socio-political structures that cause climate change. However, one point of critique that may be raised against this work is the fact Morton writes quite erratically. Morton often begins a chapter by expanding on a certain idea or thought, but then suddenly switches to another subject, leaving the explanation of the idea unfinished. This is a reemerging pattern in the work, and it significantly harms the readability of Being Ecological. Regarding accessibility, I therefore argue that although this work is accessible for a wider public, base-level knowledge of philosophers like Kant and Heidegger is necessary. The reason for this is that, while Morton does explain the ideas these philosophers hold, they are often brought up quite spontaneously in the text. Nonetheless, despite these shortcomings, this is a strong public philosophical work that provides an original narrative about ecological thought, which also serves as a good introduction to Timothy Morton’s further body of work.

    Bibliography

    Morton, Timothy. 2018. A Pelican Introduction: Being Ecological. Pelican Books.