Liberty as Licence Destroys Freedom
I have just had the misfortune to hear an American ‘libertarian’ apologist for the anarchy of the rich and powerful. He was full of proud boasts of how America is a beacon for liberty, unlike the rest of the world. He condemned the way that France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, everywhere, succumbs easily to 'tyranny,; by which he means 'government' (even, and especially it seems, democratic) celebrating the way that America is the greatest defender and promoter of individual liberty that the world has ever seen. Tell that to the 657,720 who have contracted coronavirus and the 33,460 who already have died from it and the many thousands more who are sure to come. America is officially the worst affected country on the planet (and no, I don’t believe China’s figures and don’t pay any attention to what the Chinese government says). The ‘libertarian’ check on the government it defines as, by definition, an encroachment on individual liberty is culpable in these figures being unnecessarily high and will be responsible for many more needless deaths.
I pen this brief essay in light of developments in the USA and certain statements made by President Trump.
President tweeted that Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia should be ‘liberated’ after demonstrations against social distancing
This is not sound, responsible governance at all, but the very opposite. Trump has posted a number of highly incendiary tweets calculated to stoke up protests against physical distancing and other coronavirus stay-at-home measures in three states led by Democratic governors. In the very least, when considered in the most benign terms, this is an attempt to exploit frustration in some quarters at the lockdown measures established by state governments in an effort to control the spread of coronavirus. That alone is highly irresponsible, cheap, and deceitful politics. It aligns Trump with the growing number of rightwing groups behind the wave of protests against Covid-19 restrictions.
This is unpleasant company to be keeping: ‘Protesters in Michigan and other states claim to speak for ordinary citizens, but are also supported by street-fighting far-right groups.’
“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” the US president wrote in capital letters on Friday. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” He then followed these up with a third tweet: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” That is a reference to Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, who last week signed new measures on gun control into law.
In fine, it is an overt ‘libertarian’ assault on ‘government.’ The duplicity is that the ‘libertarians’ among the Republicans are authoritarian to the core and are highly implicated in the big government of militarism, nationalism, and corporate welfare. This organized hypocrisy has been carried on since Reagan. As Reagan repeated that government is the problem, seeking to roll back the state, he presided over the biggest nationalization in history, that of the State Illinois Bank in 1983. Trump’s words and actions are not merely a continuation of that hypocrisy, it is an expression of that mentality in its senility. The purpose of these statements is to reinforce a particularly pernicious and wholly false definition of freedom, one that sets individuality and sociality in antithesis and confronts the ‘free’ individual with ‘government.’ There is no sense of government as something actively and consciously composed by the governed as citizens of the public realm. Instead, individuals are self-seeking individuals and no more. One the one side, that of the individual, is ‘liberty; on the other, that of ‘government,’ is restriction and regulation. In this world, good governance is identified as inimical to liberty, and legitimate authority is castigated as authoritarianism. Such a view distorts the meaning of freedom by narrowing it down. Properly understood, good governance is not merely a condition of freedom but a dimension of it, establishing the public life that human beings as social beings require in order to individuate themselves in relation to each other. The whole liberty vs government antithesis is an infantilism. And when it is an infantilism expressed by adults who bear arms, it is positively dangerous.
We should note, too, the rank hypocrisy of the appeal to put politics to one side during this crisis. Apologists for the incompetence of the US government (and the same applies to the UK government) have insisted that this is no time for ‘playing politics’ and insisted that party loyalties are put to one side. This is a transparent attempt to diffuse criticism and postpone awkward questions until popular relief in the aftermath makes them less incendiary. The calculation is that when the full scale of culpability is revealed, people will be inclined to be more forgiving than they would be in the midst of death and debacle.
And it is utterly bogus, no matter how many people fall for it.
‘Trump has repeatedly ignored his own entreaty to put partisan politics aside during the coronavirus pandemic. His latest provocative interventions followed demonstrations against stay-at-home orders in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and other states that have drawn elements of the far right.’
The lesson is that if you are fool enough to believe that ‘it isn’t time for politics,’ those seeking to maintain control of people and resources will be practising politics every single day you are sleeping on watch.
‘Some protesters have carried guns, waved Trump and Confederate flags and sought to frame the debate as a defence of constitutional freedoms.’ They have been egged on by conservative media hosts such as Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, who said: “What happened in Lansing [Michigan] today, God bless them: it’s going to happen all over the country.”
At Friday’s White House coronavirus taskforce briefing, Trump played down fears that by crowding together, the protesters themselves could spread the Covid-19 illness. “These are people expressing their views,” he told reporters. “I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”
Trump has been this way before with respect to the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On Friday, Trump also stood by his criticism of the Democratic governors, even though they are following his own federal guidelines. “I think some things are too tough,” he said. “And if you look at some of the states you just mentioned, it’s too tough, not only in reference to this but what they’ve done in Virginia with respect to the second amendment is just a horrible thing ... When you see what other states have done, I think I feel very comfortable.”
Asked if he believed Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia should lift their stay-at-home orders, the president added: “I think elements of what they’ve done are too much, just too much ... What they’ve done in Virginia is just incredible.”
But when it comes to ‘incredible’ authoritarianism, Trump’s claim to ‘total authority’ to end the stay-at-home measures takes the biscuit. That was on Monday. On Thursday he issued phased “guidelines” that passed the buck – but not the bucks - to governors to make decisions on the ground about when and how to reopen.
Trump’s tweets on Friday undercut his own experts’ warnings and drew sharp criticism.
Trump’s messages are not merely mixed but incoherent, and bear the stamp of rank bad governance. We shouldn’t be surprised. When government falls into the hands of those who are ideologically predisposed against the use of government for the collective good, the result is lethargy, inattention, and incompetence. Rather than being focused on governing well, Trump has his eyes on exploiting the crisis and stoking up conflict to make political capital for himself. Hence the appeals to simplistic notions of libertarian freedom and the painting of government in caricatured forms of restriction and authoritarianism.
Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, tweeted in response: “The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting Covid-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.”
Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman who like Inslee ran for the Democratic nomination, said: “Republicans will turn a blind eye [and] too many in the press will focus on ‘tone’. But history books will say: in April of 2020, when the pandemic had already claimed 35,000 lives, the president of the United States incited people to storm their statehouses with AR-15s and AK-47s.”
There is always a high price to be paid for political stupidity.
Wednesday’s “Operation Gridlock”, a demonstration against strict stay-at-home policies ordered by Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, attracted the Proud Boys and other far-right groups who have been present at pro-Trump and gun rights rallies in Michigan.
Most protesters stayed in their vehicles and circled the state capitol building in Lansing, but a small group stood on the capitol steps to flout physical distancing guidelines. They brandished signs that included “Trump/Pence”, “Recall Whitmer”, “Heil Whitmer” and “Stop the Tyranny”, and briefly chanting “Lock her up!”, echoing Trump campaign rallies’ targeting of Hillary Clinton.
Last Saturday, the Republican senator Ted Cruz, a Trump ally, tweeted that he was going to the beach with his children. “Fortunately, I live in Texas – where we protect public safety, but aren’t authoritarian zealots – so they won’t arrest me!” he wrote.
We need to ask what sort of mentality can characterize those engaged in the attempt to provide good governance as ‘authoritarian zealots.’
The answer is the kind of people who will cheer the false conception of freedom that puts a torch under the planet and sets it alight.
Critics accused Donald Trump of trying to foment dissent, jeopardizing the battle to contain the coronavirus.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat, said Trump’s tweets about “liberating” states put millions of Americans at risk of contracting COVID-19.
"The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly,” Inslee said.
Democratic Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said he and his staff are focused on fighting a “biological war.”
“I do not have time to involve myself in Twitter wars,” said Northam, a medical doctor.
These people are idiots complicit in death and destruction, in their own country and abroad. (The word politics derives from the ancient Greek 'polites,' meaning those interested in public affairs; the antonym 'idiotes' refers to those individuals interested in private affairs only).
Denny Tubbs, 67, a gunmaker by trade and a local leader of Ohio Stands United, a gun rights group, said he would attend a protest against lockdown in the state capital of Columbus. “I’m not saying it doesn’t have to be dealt with [but] shutting down and crushing the economy is not the way to do it,” said Mr Tubbs. “Our civil rights have been stomped on.”
I can’t wait to see these idiots protesting when climate change really starts to impact, destroying not just the economy but the entire fabric of social life and civilized existence.
‘There are groups of people that value their economic liberty over someone else’s human life,’ says Nan Whaley, Democratic mayor of Dayton, Ohio.
Which says it all.
Such people would happily get us all killed by ‘the economy’ in the name of liberty than actually support, or at least not oppose, the collective action required to put the social and natural interrelation on an even keel. And there is the story of civilisation collapse in a nutshell. The idiots are too numerous and too strong, and the clever ones are too few and timorous. You don’t actually need everyone on board. If those who know the need for change were actually prepared to fight harder politically, then we might actually start to get somewhere.
Coronavirus has been a slow car crash for the US, beginning in January, with the comical POTUS who misleads the US and everyone else presiding over the entire tragedy. The US has had the worst testing response of all the developed nations of the world by orders of magnitude, and had the most lead time prior to Jan 21. We don’t even need to get involved in the blame game, the facts are incontrovertible. The scale of this disaster could have been avoided. Of course, Trump and his supporters are working hard to spin the facts and figures to tell a story of success, as well as to deflect blame from his culpability. The sad and worrying fact is that there may well be enough people out there who are motivated enough, bigoted enough, and credulous enough to fall for it and ensure Trump’s election. We should be aware that people who fall for this kind of thing are not merely dupes but willing dupes. That is, the credulous are actually not merely gullible innocents but also bigots more than willing to believe. Many people think that Trump is a moron. He isn’t. He’s adept at playing and winning at the politics of sophism. I have spent years trying to get progressive critics to see that their commitment to truth and truth-seeking in politics locates them in a tradition of transcendent standards as against the relativism and conventionalism their liberalism maintains. Too late, it seems, will they see the problem here as one of the ‘game’ to which sophism reduces politics. Trump is not hamstrung by notions of truth. He is with Thrasymachus in asserting that justice and, indeed, freedom is the interests of the strongest. Truth is of no account in such politics. The economic implications of lockdown are drastic and are causing real worries in many places. Trump therefore sees real potential in sending out a ‘Liberate’ message, but only in three swing states with Democratic governors. Whilst that message may put people at risk, especially if it is acted upon, it is actually great (although short-sighted and self-centred) politics to incite people in those states. Trump is the politician of the reality TV age. And I’m afraid that this is the ‘politics’ that people have been raised on. For years I have written on cultivating the virtues, only to be met with criticisms of ‘moralism’ on the part of progressives. Cultivation as an education of character either takes place properly or proceeds by way of dominant political and cultural forces. We have a TV reality generation and Trump is king. Any questions or criticisms that expose the falsehoods he peddles, he snaps his fingers, abuses the critics and says "fake news" and moves on. And so do his supporters. That’s a politics that is on collision course with reality. Do I blame Trump? Yes, and all complicit in his degradation of public life. But I also criticize the left for failing to take character, virtue, public life, authority, morality, and the common good seriously.
Where there is 'nothing,' argued Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, then both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights. Where there is 'nothing,' no objective truth and morality, then justice is merely a function of power. We can appeal for unity against division, but it is well-nigh impossible to make the connections with others when there is 'nothing' to unify around. A sophist politics is distasteful, an affront to truth and morality, but it makes a certain sense in a society that has lost touch with transcendent standards of justice. A deeper, richer freedom, one that recognizes individuality and sociality as two sides of the same human nature, requires an affirmation of transcendent standards as against a mere conventionalism in which justice and freedom are the interests of the strongest.
The problem with libertarian conceptions of freedom is that they are premised on the pre-social, self-possessing, self-interested individual. That individual is a fiction based on a wholly false ontology and a wholly false understanding of human sociality and interaction. The view maintains that individuals are possessors of ultimate rights which are prior to society and which they ‘contract in’ to society to defend and advance, and ‘contract out’ of society whenever these private ends are not served. It is a view which lacks a truly social and public dimension. The problem is not that individual rights are wrong but that they are partial, delivering only an incomplete freedom. As social beings, human beings require a public life in relation to each other in order to individuate themselves. Human beings need each other to be themselves. A libertarian freedom separates the two defining aspects of humanity, its individuality and sociality, thereby cutting off the individual from all that is required for a truly fulfilling and flourishing life in community with others and in productive orientation to the world. Against this, the discrete individual of the liberal ontology sees the world and others as external to him or her, a potential threat to individual freedom, something to be checked, staked down, owned, controlled, resisted, used, exploited. The social interaction which proceeds on this basis is thin and instrumental: each sees the world and its ‘resources’ as well as other individuals other as means to purely private ends, with the result that all become subject to an alien externality as a result of the unintended consequences of mutual antagonism and cancellation. For those who ‘win’ at this ‘game,’ such external constraints on individual freedom – in terms of economic imperatives and their deleterious social consequences (unemployment, inequality, poverty, famine), war and terrorism, climate change are of no account. In the short run, they make substantial gains. So, of course, they celebrate such anarchy as ‘freedom’ or individual liberty. The truth is that such selfish, exploitative behaviour generates an external constraint that ensures the least optimal outcome for all. But the libertarian conception recognizes no ‘all,’ and considers notions of ‘community’ and ‘common good’ as abstract fictions potentially repressive of individual liberty, particularly when advanced by ‘government.’ Those who argue that human beings are social beings who require a public life, including good, effective government bolstered by a welter of intermediary institutions, are criticized as ‘authoritarian.’ The basis of the charges lie in a philosophy and ontology which is wholly false to human nature, history, and sociology, and its damaging effects are all around us. The human race is not being afflicted by the forces of nature but by the unconstrained collective force which is the result of activities proceeding within a specific socio-economic system. Constraint in this sense is both a condition and a dimension of freedom, in that it embodies a co-responsibility as well as personal responsibility in social and institutional forms. Individuality and sociality are not antithetical, personality and community are two essential aspects of the same human nature, history, and sociology. The libertarian conceptions severs the two and so establishes ‘debate’ on wholly false premises. Anything that counters and checks the libertarian position is denounced as ‘authoritarian.’ We are in the hermetically sealed world of the ideologue, fundamentalist, and fanatic. The theory and practice of that libertarianism is deadly, peddling wholly deluded notions of individual freedom that, given the need for universality and commonality on the part of human living, cannot but take monstrous forms in various ersatz, surrogate ‘communities.’ Tellingly, the people who are quick to condemn ‘government’ in terms of social and environmental undertakings either turn a blind eye to militarism, corporate welfare, and nationalism, (which also takes the form of a religious nationalism), or actively support such things. In other words, for all of their stated premises of methodological individualism, they do actually recognize that the social nature of human beings requires some form of communal identity, a need they supply in the monstrous and bastardized forms, concerned not to serve a genuine sociality, but to impose a false unity that preserves existing social relations intact.
There is nothing wrong with individual freedom. The moral and ontological ultimacy of each and every individual is the premise of the religious ethic, certainly the Judaeo-Christian ethic I adhere to. But the religious basis of that ethic makes it clear that we should reject notions of individual self-sufficiency. Shorn from its grounding in God, that ultimacy of the individual curves inwards on the ego, instead of expanding outwards to others. The original conception sees an expansion of being outwards to God, society, and nature. The libertarian conception which separates individuals from each other and hence from society, from nature (reducing nature to a resource to be exploited and used to private ends), and from God (who can merely be discarded as an unnecessary hypothesis), reverses the direction until the world is closed up in the ego as a prison. The actions produced as a result of that mentality in turn turns the world into what Max Weber described as a ‘steel-hard cage’ that determines the lives of each and all with ‘irresistible force.’ In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber traced the evolution of religious thought and practice through the Protestant Reformation, liberating the individual from religious intermediaries in the Church, only for them to become subject to a range of earthly powers as the products of their own hands came to take alien form and assume an existential force of their own. The new idols are capital, commerce, and money. The individual is liberated from God but comes to be subject to new gods in the form of impersonal, uncontrollable forces that constraint human life from the outside. Ayn Rand considered religion an ‘affront to reason,’ but at the same time she didn’t subscribe to Kant’s notion of human affairs being governed intersubjectively through the universality rationality implicit in the common moral reason of each and all. She held Kant in the same contempt she held religion and the religious. I find it interesting how many of the Christian right lionize Rand. She is anti-socialist. Weber, too, held that socialism was a ‘pipe dream’ that would realize only a generalized unfreedom. That he argued that this collective unfreedom would be the generalisation of the bureaucratisation and rationalization extended by capitalism indicates that he was no apologist for the prevailing system. He also considered capitalism to have become the new enchantment, the new religion, replacing the true God. The light cloak of faith, he concluded, had become the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity. That makes him an uncomfortable anti-socialist ally. Ayn Rand is an apologist for the rich and powerful, so she serves fine, regardless of the total contempt she expresses for religion.
The simple truth is that freedom is meaningful only in a social and relational context, involving constraint of some kind. The constraint that human beings choose to subject themselves to is implicit in the notion of self-assumed obligation. This holds that human beings are obligated only by those laws that they have had a hand in making. That principle needs to be qualified further. The principle requires a legitimate public community, of which each and all are associating and interacting members. The constraint that human beings undertake to apply to themselves is thus something that is given consciously and in associative form. This is very distinct from the constraint that comes to be imposed upon human beings as a result of the uncoordinated, incremental, and unconscious actions via the socio-economic systems. The alienated powers and external imperatives of the capital system have being made by human hands, but not consciously. The constraint of the capital system is therefore illegitimate. And in the form of economic and environmental crisis, that capitalist constraint is also (self-)destructive.
The principle of rational freedom holds that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all individuals. The libertarian conception separates individuals from each other and from community and common purpose, atomizes the public community, and ultimately reduces life to discrete individual choices, events, and happenings. It is this fractured terrain that generates the illegitimate external constraint that is inimical to freedom. Without the unity and solidaristic interaction and exchange between individuals, the assertion of individual freedom issues in a collective unfreedom. Each individual relates to other individuals as means to private ends, with the result that the public life all require to individuate themselves socially is dissolved, with all becoming subordinate to external force. Instead of mutual aid, there is a mutual cancellation, with freedom cancelling itself out in the clash of competing individual projects. The will and interest of the most powerful prevail, which is why libertarianism so clearly has the form of ideology and apology. But the conception and practice of libertarian freedom is destructive and deadly.
As social beings, we require community, coordination, cooperation, and constraint. The components of that constraint, how that constraint is constituted and supplied, is the key question. In a social context, there will always be constraint. This is a clash between a constraint that is consciously and communally supplied by individuals associating together and determining as active, informed citizens of the public realm, and a constraint that is externally, unconsciously, and impersonally imposed through the consequences of private choices and actions, with the choices and actions of the most powerful having the greater weight. It is a choice between the legitimate constraint of a public community and the illegitimate constraint of uncoordinated private choices.
The key insight is that nothing destroys freedom more than a freedom conceived as unrestrained, individual self-assertion. It is an ancient lesson. Liberty, they say, when they mean licence, wrote Aristotle in the Politics. So what, libertarians may respond. Aristotle, after all, is identified as an ‘enemy’ of the ‘Open Society.’ Libertarians can be found openly charging Aristotle with being an ‘authoritarian’ who believed that the individual was the possession of ‘the state.’ This charge makes a nonsense of Aristotle, but is a fine, concise statement of the nonsense that libertarian freedom makes of human social existence. There was no ‘state’ to Aristotle, certainly not in the sense of the abstraction of the modern state in institutional separation from civil society. For Aristotle, there was no dualism of private and public individual, these were two aspects of the same being. Liberal thought falsely separates the two and so places its critics on the other side of the antithesis, thereby making a nonsense of their thought. For Aristotle, individuality and sociality are two sides of the same human nature. Whenever these sides are separated it makes a nonsense of life, liberty, and humanity.
The lesson is that freedom entails not just personal responsibility and self-control but also a co-responsibility and a consciously chosen self-constraint exercised in and through legitimate public community. This is not the either/or that libertarians make it. Of course, when this becomes an either/or, it becomes easy to portray those arguing for legitimate constraint and ‘government’ as authoritarians. That charge is based on a false ontology and philosophy and is philosophically, sociologically, and institutionally crude and illiterate. Personal and collective responsibility proceed hand in hand within communities of character and practice, involving the creation of the ‘happy’ habitus in which the virtues can be known, taught, acquired, and exercised.
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention, 1787
I use‘happy’ here in Aristotle’s eudaimonistic sense of flourishing. And human beings flourish as individuals only within a social and relational context. It is this last requirement that goes missing in libertarian conceptions of freedom.
Sam Rocha writes well here:
I am afraid that today there are a lot of people in the USA, and even in the Texas Hill Country, who seem to think that freedom is an “Into the Wild” or “Grizzly Man” fantasy. I call this “Braveheart Freedom” because it is an idea of freedom that thinks that freedom simply means the absence of external restraint or control. “FREEDOM!”, yell these William Wallace wannabes. “Braveheart Freedom” will get you killed, even the movie proves that much. If you run happy go lucky into a thick patch of bluebonnets, without a care or concern in the world, you are not truly free and your false sense of freedom holds you in a certain kind of bondage, like ignorance holds the fool. You may think and believe that you are truly free, but your presumption of freedom imperils you. And, if you run into that same patch of bluebonnets with a child who doesn’t know any better, then things are morally even worse because your idiotic “freedom” now imperils others, too.’
Braveheart Freedom Will Kill You by Sam Rocha, 14 April 2020·
True freedom entails responsibility. Whatever you choose to do in life, you have to accept responsibility both for yourself and your surroundings, including the health and well-being of other individuals. This was once basic liberalism. The individual is free to choose and to do as he or she pleases, so long as it causes no harm to others. The law served to ensure non-harm and keep the civil peace. This was viable only within certain moral parameters. It seems clear that such liberalism was parasitic on the moral capital created and nurtured by the Christian culture of the past. In time, though, for reasons adumbrated above, liberalism shed its metaphysical underpinnings in God and, instead of expanding being outwards to others, started to close in on the discrete ego. The only god now was that of the self-choosing individual. The moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual thus dissolved into egoism, narcissism and ultimately solipsism. The commonality and universality required to keep some kind of public and social life in place came to take abstract and external form, experienced and felt as repressive to individuality, difference, and otherness. Even now, critics of the prevailing social order are prone to remain within the confines of a false liberal ontology, repudiating arguments for community and the common good as potentially repressive of individuality, difference, and otherness. In remaining within the mindset to be challenged, critics will remain permanently marginalized and excluded.
There is a distinction to be made here between positive and negative freedom. Libertarians take their stand on negative freedom, arguing that freedom entails a freedom of the individual from control, constraint, government, and authority. The individual is ‘free to choose,’ in the words of Milton Friedman. The problem is that without a context, a ground, a goal or, indeed, a God greater than the individual, that choice cannot but become empty. A self-validating choice is also self-defeating in that it is lacking in possibilities of fulfilment. It lacks a limit and a standard. Freedom is not merely a freedom from something, which in the context of public and social life involves the individual in a constant battle against supra-individual entities. A deeper and richer freedom entails a freedom for something, something greater than subjective choice, and which involves open relations and solidaristic interaction with others. True freedom is a positive freedom of this kind, entailing a freedom for happiness and the good life in public community with others. This is Aristotle’s notion of human flourishing, a notion which acknowledges that human beings are social beings, and not pre-social, pre-possessing discrete entities.
The ‘happy’ social individual is able to confront unjust constraint and control and illegitimate community and authority in asserting the intrinsic human dignity of being free. As Sam Rocha comments, ‘the only way a person can find freedom from unjust restraint or immoral control is because they first have this internal sense of freedom for something. The person who has this internal sense of freedom can never be a slave, even if they are in bondage. When freedom is just the absence of authority, it quickly can lose its sense of responsibility and sense of what it is for. This kind of freedom becomes purely external and loses the real internal soul of freedom. This is the “Braveheart Freedom” that will get you killed.’ He concludes:
I wish this was all just a trip down memory lane with some preachy ideas about freedom. It is not. Right now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are a lot of people selling snake oil across the USA and even in my beloved Texas Hill Country. These snake oil salesmen say that quarantine measures, enforced by the rule of law, are a violation of their freedom. Well, in a way they are right. If you think that all there is to freedom is this kind of “Braveheart Freedom,” then every single imposition you face can be framed as a violation and harm. But this is a false and dangerous idea when it prevents you from protecting yourself, your loved ones, and your community. When freedom is not only divorced from responsibility but also makes us irresponsible, then, it is a truly poisonous thing.
Some of these people claim that Benjamin Franklin is on their side because of this quote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Here is the thing: Franklin was not advocating for a reckless idea of freedom here. He was advocating for the just taxation of the Penn family for the frontier defence expenses that they were incurring and were unwilling to pay. I won’t go into the details, but Franklin is treating both Liberty and Safety here on fairly equal terms when the quote is put into its proper context.
Of course, the defenders of “Braveheart Freedom” remove the words of Benjamin Franklin and others out of their public and moral context, because their assertions of individual freedom are made in abstraction of all context. They pay no attention to the bounded and interconnected nature of human social existence. They pour vitriol on every and any source of authority that seeks to constrain individual actions to the common good. Their “Into the Wild” and “Grizzly Man” ideas of freedom are juvenile, turning liberty into a licence for irresponsibility.
I started by noting the contemptuous tone libertarians adopt in speaking of those with alternate conceptions. In insisting that their definition of liberty is the one and absolute definition, they turn upon critics as by definition authoritarian enemies of liberty. That is about as totalitarian a piece of reasoning as anything they claim to find in those who argue for legitimate self-constraint in public community.
Sam Rocha argues that ‘worst of all, these freedom lovers often make fun of people who do not share their idea of freedom.’ He understates. Making fun of those of contrary persuasion is the least that these people do. On many occasions they are openly vitriolic and condemn contrary voices of being totalitarian, authoritarian, and little different from Stalin and Pol Pot. Only today I heard a libertarian on Russia Today (Alan something or other, peddling his book) denouncing Germany, Italy et al for slavishly submitting to authoritarian rule. I call it good government based on sound science and ethics and social responsibility.
They seem to think that the person who has a fuller idea of freedom in mind (an idea of freedom that includes responsibility and the greater goods that freedom is for) is, somehow, a slave or coward or even un-American or anti-American. They seem to think that “Braveheart Freedom” is the only version of freedom the USA has to offer. Make no mistake: There is nothing necessarily American, in the best sense of the word, about a willy-nilly fetish for a sense of freedom that no one would have recognized in 1776.
There is nothing remotely brave in telling people to just run through the bluebonnets with no concern for rattlesnakes. I may look ridiculous jumping up scared in front of my kids, but I hope that it teaches them a lesson that a certain degree of fear has a place, sometimes, like just about everything else. In the absence of such healthy fear, which for many religions would include fear of the Lord, there is no true freedom. Fear for one’s own life can be good in the right measure and fear for the life of someone else can also be good. Lacking either in any measure does not make you brave.
It makes you stupid, selfish, and licentious. And that is precisely what these people want to make of society and public community. It is part of our tragedy that we have let them get as far as they have done, and do as much damage as they have done.
My prayer for those who are selling snake oil during this pandemic is that they all live to regret it. If they do, and I truly hope they do, they might learn an important lesson about the true meaning of freedom.
In a recent post I quoted Rousseau, ‘man is born free but everywhere is in chains.’ Many people mistakenly believe Rousseau to be asserting here an individual liberty against all chains. Not so. In The Social Contract, Rousseau argues that the illegitimate chains of the fraudulent social contract imposed by the rich be replaced by the legitimate chains human beings as citizens forge between themselves within a genuine public community. Too many conceptions of freedom envisage the breaking of chains and the flying away of individuals to be free to be whatever they want to be and do whatever they want to do. That libertarian conception of freedom issues not in freedom but in new chains and new constraints at least as repressive as the old, and often more so. For genuine freedom, it is not enough for the individual to be against something, he or she must be for something, and be for it in association with others. It was a view which profoundly influenced Kant. I shall end with a quote from this interesting article on the radical potential of Kant in defining a rational freedom:
'Kant argued for a radically democratic kind of republican government. From Rousseau, Kant draws the idea that it is not simply enough to grant individuals the private liberal right to impose laws upon their personal behavior. Civic freedom is in many respects as important as liberal private rights, and the two must operate in tandem. For the state to retain the “rightful condition” of legitimacy, citizens can only be subjected to laws which they themselves have helped formulate and to which they have consented. Any system of government that doesn’t adopt such a democratically egalitarian approach to politics— for instance, one which concentrates political power in the hands of a small elite with economic clout—is illegitimate and cannot compel obedience from its citizens. Such arguments can be used to critique contemporary liberal democracies for concentrating too much political power in the hands of a select few. Many Kantians, such as Rawls and Nussbaum, have gone further: arguing that to truly realize Kant’s arguments about human equality, one needs to go beyond the political and moral sphere and secure a high standard of living for all human beings.'
'Each person must be granted an equal say in the laws that govern him. Respecting the equal dignity of all means not allowing too much economic inequality to persist—especially if, as researchers like Gilens have observed, such economic inequalities unjustly result in the concentration of sociopolitical power in a few hands.'