Declaration of Freedom - Chapter 2

Chapter II : The Positive Proposal

This republic was not established by cowards;

and cowards will not preserve it.

 - Elmer Davis

It is right that we should ponder much on the rise and fall of cultures. Why do some die? Why have some remained? Why have some risen after a fall? The full answers to these questions we do not have, but of this we may be sure: there is no necessity of decline. The notion that societies inevitably grow old and die is the mere dogma of fatalism and is far from being self-evident. There is no serious reason to suppose that our human destinies are predetermined in any such manner. What is far more reasonable is the assumption that we can, by taking thought, make a difference. Indeed, apart from this assumption all effort is ridiculous; it is the assumption we must make if we are to do anything at all.

The notion that there is an inevitable dialectic of history, according to which our kind of life is already in its autumnal decay, soon to fall of its own weight, ought not to impress us at all. In any case our best chance to refute it is by helping to produce a course of events which of itself contradicts the dogma. Our task, then, is to light fatalism in every form and this we do by the clear acceptance of the belief that men, including ourselves, are responsible creatures, because we can make decisions and, by decision, alter the course of history. On the basis of historical determinism, planning is impossible, because even the decision of the planner is itself determined by prior events. We reject historical determinism, however, as something inconsistent with experience.

The only effective way in which we can fight fatalism is by the elaboration and espousal of a way of life that is so effective in its essential attractiveness that it becomes a causal factor in the development of history. Events then take place, not merely because of material resources or even psychological conditioning, but because of loyalty to the truth as ascertained. Human decisions are made, not solely by reference to external conditions, but far more by reference to moral values which, when apprehended, are operative in conduct. This is true both of individuals and of societies.

A way of life, if it is to be effective in securing assent and thus altering the course of history, must be inherently self-validating. Buddha told the princes of Kalama not to believe in anything because it is tradition, or because it has been taught by teachers and elders or because others have believed in it, but to ponder upon it and weigh its points before accepting it. The task before us is that of presenting an alternative to communism with such clarity that men who are honestly seeking the way may ponder upon it and finally accept it without the intervention of the psychological pressures which we associate with propaganda.

Cultures do not decay because they are old, but because the men and women in them fail to give their minds and their wills to the task of meeting the conditions of survival. A culture does not survive merely by rich resources and merely by physical power. These are important, but they are never sufficient. A culture will not survive without a generally shared set of convictions that are comprehensive, coherent and positive. Therefore, the single most crucial factor in survival is a set of beliefs. These beliefs are concerned with what is both right and possible for man on this earth at this point in history. It is not enough to have a dream of some impractical Utopia; what is required is a conception of a way of life suitable to our state as men and women here and now. If we have such a conception, and if we give it our full commitment, the chance of survival is immense, whether our culture is old or young.

Sometimes, in the fierce battle of propaganda which marks what Arnold Toynbee has called “the missionary war," we permit the development of a wholly negative approach. Many in the free world have put their entire ideological effort into the prosecution of a program of anticommunism. While this is understandable it is nevertheless a serious mistake. The formula for survival, to which serious thought drives us, involves chief attention to the positive approach, because, in the struggle of ideas, the negative approach is never enough. The negative assault may be necessary, but it certainly is not sufficient. It is not sufficient because, in the long run, the loyalties of people depend on what they are for rather than what they are against. People can be united by hatred or by a sense of danger for a little while, but the time is bound to come when this appeal is ineffective. If we are to win men permanently it cannot be by what we hate but rather by what we love. The primary difficulty inherent in a merely negative strategy is that it may subject us, unwittingly, to new dangers while we are fighting old ones. While we struggle against the totalitarianism of the Left, we may forget the equal danger of the totalitarianism of the Right. The elementary yet tremendous fact is that the alternative to an evil may itself be evil.

Mere negativity tends to blind us to the fact that anti-communism is not, of itself. beneficent. We ought to have some way of reminding ourselves periodically that there was once a man named Adolf Hitler. This dangerous man was as anticommunist as any person can be, but he was also demonically evil. He was clever enough to use popular opposition to one evil in order to introduce another and equally dangerous one. If opposition to communism is sufficient, then Hitler was excellent. If, as the years go on, we forget Hitler, and if Mein Kampf becomes merely a quaint musty book. then the pain and sorrow of the victims of Buchenwald and Belsen and Dachau will have been largely wasted. The only way in which their pain may not prove to be the unmitigated tragedy of waste is to make sure that the lesson of their pain is not forgotten. Martyrs are wasted when men forget.

While, in any particular situation, there may be only one way of going right, there are, ordinarily, many ways of going wrong. This was seen by Aristotle in his suggestion that truth is of the nature of the finite, whereas error is the nature of the infinite. The clear implication is that, however great the emergency, we are never relieved of the intellectual necessity of presenting a positive system for criticism and for potential adoption. The only answer to communism that is worth making is a positive answer.

If negativism is inadequate in the struggle of ideas, neutralism is even worse. It is easy to see why large sections of the human race are seeking to be neutral in the world struggle and we can even have a certain sympathy with those who hope not to be drawn into the major orbits of power, but in the end neutralism is never defensible. It is not defensible because the option of our time is a forced option. What is demonstrated vividly is the logical principle of the excluded middle. There is no middle ground between the proposition that the individual has no rights other than those which the state sees fit to grant him and the opposite proposition that some rights are inherent and unalienable. If the first proposition is true the second is false. In matters as fundamental as this, neutralism is a mark of confusion or of cowardice.

What we have to present, therefore, is a positive proposal about the way in which the good life for man on this earth is possible. This proposal does not come from any man's study and it does not come, as the central idea of Marx came, from meditation in the British Museum or any other library. The positive proposal is not something that has been invented by one thinker working alone, but something which has emerged in human experience during many years, but especially during the last two thousand years. It is not as old as the dictatorship idea, which was already old in the days of the ancient Mesopotamian empires, but it is old enough to be well tested.

Though the proposal has been more fully demonstrated in some areas than in others, there is no reason why it should have any geographical limits. It is not the Western proposal. though it has seen more development in the West than anywhere else; it is not the American proposal, though it has been one of the chief causes of the direction which American history has taken. In its essence the proposal goes back to the rational vision of Greece and to the moral vision of Palestine and particularly to the fertile combination of these two. The developing conception has included the Roman respect for law, without Rome's discrimination between citizens and inhabitants; it employs the power inherent in natural science, but need not include the tendency to elevate science into a dogma; it uses the advancing techniques of political democracy, but need not adopt the naive view that man’: dignity is insured merely by a system of voting. At the heart of the proposal is a conviction concerning what man is, and how, consequently, he ought to be treated, in the light of what is objectively true about the world and especially the moral truth about the world. “Liberty,” said Berdyaev, “will be saved by its union with truth." ‘

What has developed slowly and haltingly through the centuries is a beautifully balanced conception by which civil liberties are asserted and maintained, by which the lone individual is protected against the onslaughts both of his fellow citizens and the state as a whole, by which the will of the people can be made to prevail, by which the powers of government are separated and therefore mutually restrained, by which initiative in business enterprise is encouraged yet the unfortunate aided, and by which the organs of public opinion are allowed to operate in such a way as to thresh out issues in the open.

This precious and complex instrument came, like any invention, by the work of numerous minds in different generations, but the historical development has been strikingly unequal. Though, as de Tocqueville said, the democratic revolution is the oldest movement of history, it is only in the last few centuries that it has been the constant object of intelligent concern of many first-rate minds. Various factors have combined to make possible this rapid growth in democratic thought, just as others have combined to make possible the development of natural science in the same period.

One of the most important reasons for the democratic surge was the opening up of new lands where new experiments might be conducted. With a little imagination we can now understand the excitement of our ancestors as they began to contemplate the possibilities presented by the Americas, by Australia and by New Zealand. In some of these, including great parts of North America, the land was practically empty, the native population being so small as to present no serious obstacle to a new start in human society. Here was a magnificent opportunity for a matching of philosophical conceptions with physical opportunity. What men had dreamed about had come to pass! Here was the state of nature, with the resources unexploited, the land untilled, the great forests standing. In the memorable words of the Mayflower Compact the social contract was a fact rather than a speculation.

Man loves a new start and, for great numbers of the human race, a new start was possible at the beginning of modern history. In every case, however, the new start had an ancient background. It was a great moment in modern history when William Penn sat before the fire in his English home and dreamed up his Frame of Government, designed for use in a new and fabulous land, but many of his thoughts were thoughts enriched by a long history. It was out of the heritage of the Bible and the classic authors and the great philosophers that he thought and wrote. In short, the social experiments were new in opportunity, but old in conception and with indebtedness to many.

It is a mistake, often repeated, to speak of American civilization as a young civilization. When we analyze the notion we find that it is either meaningless or false, because the new land was settled by people who already possessed a culture to which they were consciously loyal. Indeed it was loyalty to some aspects of this culture, such as religious freedom, which drove many of them to the new land. De Tocqueville saw this point early in the nineteenth century and said it in a convincing manner:

The Anglo-Americans settled in a state of civilization, upon that territory which their descendants occupy; they had not to begin to learn, and it was sufficient for them not to forget. Now the children of these same Americans are the persons who, year by year, transport their dwellings into the wilds and with their dwellings their acquired information and their esteem for knowledge. . . . In the United States society has no infancy, but it is born into man's estate.’

A little reflection makes us realize that what the acute Frenchman said was true. When de Tocqueville was writing, the young people at Oxford, Ohio, were reading the same books that young people were reading at Oxford, England. Jefferson could understand the writings of John Locke at Monticello as easily as in London; Thomas Paine could write equally well in Philadelphia and Paris; the Biblical basis of Lincoln's great prose was not seriously affected by his residence in Illinois. Thus we may say that the particular point of human history at which the new land became generally available for new social experiments was most fortunate. It came after the understanding of the intellectual heritage had been facilitated by means of printed books. Laboratory tests of ancient hypotheses were made possible on a grand scale and from these the whole civilized world may still profit.

Now, in the twentieth century, the proposal is of sufficient maturity to be presented to all the world with confidence and without apology. This is possible in spite of the fact, already noted, that there is always some contrast between the life we prize and the life we demonstrate. The fact that we never have complete fidelity to principle need not render us apologetic about the enunciation of a principle which is inherently valid. The fact that men often reason illogically does not detract in the least from the essential soundness of logical principles.

It is only fair, at this point, to admit that the philosophical task of the free society is more difficult than is the corresponding task in the controlled system. This is true for two chief reasons. First, the free system is necessarily more complex; we cannot accept any theory of man as oversimplified as is the materialist conception, because we are bound to recognize different elements in human nature which are in inevitable conflict. In the second place, our task is more difficult because the free society is varied. It is part of our glory that we have not one official voice, but many voices and that each is free to speak. If, however, our only mark is diversity, if, as a people, we have nothing in common to say, we turn out to be nothing at all. We must discover a unity beneath the diversity. This is never easy, but it must be done.

The proposal which we make is, by its very nature, complex. It is more than a system of economics, more than a political system, more than a religious faith. lt is all of these combined in an organic whole in a way that is creative of novelty. No single idea in the proposal will stand alone, because each needs the others both for correction and support. It involves liberty; it involves equality; it involves the dignity of the individual; but what is most significant is the way it involves all three of these together. For lack of better language we say that our declaration is one of freedom. but the society we seek, while it is indeed the free society, is more than that.

Insufficient as freedom is, in the effort to denote our complex proposal, it is a good place to begin. It is not by accident that the part of the world which attempts to be loyal to the way of life which is the chief alternative to communism is most often called the “Free World." Because freedom has a passionate appeal to the human mind which nothing else can equal, emancipation is the unending business of mankind. Men want peace, and they want it badly, but, when they think carefully, they realize that, though peace is a blessing. it is a conditional blessing. Socrates inaugurated the great tradition by affirming, before those who condemned him to death, that there are conditions under which it is not worth while to live. That peace, like life itself, can be bought at too high a price was brought vividly to our attention by Haile Selassie in a crucial hour. “If you have peace without justice,’ he said, “you have neither peace nor justice.”

Freedom is so great a good that, when it is genuine, it is worth any price of which we can think. It is right, therefore, that, as we consider different ideas in order, we should begin with the consideration of freedom, since, of all the ideas which combine to constitute the complex system we seek to describe and defend, the idea of freedom is in every way first.

The struggle to be free is inherent in the human predicament and is unique to man. The other animals have problems, but they do not have the problem of the integrity of the self-conscious individual who must always feel the tensions set up by the relationships between self and society. Since it is inherent in his predicament, the problem of freedom is never fully solved. Being both social and individual in his requirements and being self-conscious about both, man finds himself in an unending emotional crisis. Freedom is not something which can be purchased once and for all. It is not a matter in which there is any easy security. The human situation is such that we have neither security nor simplicity of defense. Not only must the victory of the free spirit be continually rewon; it is also necessary that the battle be forever waged on more than one front at the same time. The fight is always the fight against tyranny, but the tyranny can come from many sources. On the one hand, the threat to freedom comes equally from the Right and from the Left, while, on the other, it comes from anarchy as truly as it comes from slavery.

The arch enemy of freedom is slavery, but it may be either the slavery inherent in the undisciplined self or that imposed by outside authority. Though this double threat is continuously present in human life, it is accentuated in the modem world, which has seen extremes both of dictatorships and of license. It is simple-minded to suppose that the alternative to dictatorship is the life which has no controls and is therefore marked by self-indulgent or irresponsible action. The life devoid of all controls is no more truly free than is the ship which flounders in the storm without rudder or compass. Far from being free, it is in complete bondage to the wind and weather.

The true life for mankind, which is the life of perfect freedom, is as far from the one kind of slavery as the other; it is equidistant from dictatorship on the outside and from spiritual emptiness on the inside.

The evils of anarchy are not as easy to see as are the evils of dictatorship, but they become obvious when we realize that the extreme of liberty, which is its negation, provides an ideal preparation for the emergence of a totalitarian order. This development, so amply illustrated in contemporary history, especially in Germany between the wars, was understood thoroughly by Plato. Indeed, Book VIII of the Republic, in its analysis of the way in which extreme democracy carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction and consequently leads directly to the success of the tyrant, is almost uncanny in its contemporary application. This is not to say that liberty is ever evil, but rather that there are several ways of missing it. "Liberty," said Burke, “is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened.” Since Burke had so much to do with the clarification of the ideal which this book seeks to describe in contemporary terms, his succinct statement bears repeating here:

The extreme of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains nowhere nor ought to obtain anywhere; because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment. Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.’

The heritage of the free society which has been developed laboriously by the thought of Plato and Burke and so many others during more than twenty centuries involves an increasing insistence that the limitation which makes the possession of liberty possible is always a self-limitation. If my neighbor is to have freedom to keep his goods, I must limit, voluntarily, my freedom to take them. If I am to have some freedom from annoying noise, my neighbor must voluntarily curtail his production of noise. If a government is to enjoy freedom from corruption, this cannot come by means of the secret police. It cannot come over any considerable period or with any genuine success unless the factor of moral integrity is the dominant one. Since integrity cannot be compelled, freedom, in the deepest sense, is always a moral matter, far more than a political one.

Though the tension between restriction and the assertion of a personal freedom never ends, it ought to be possible to End a pattern of existence which takes the twin dangers into consideration and develops a plan by which the worst excesses can be avoided. The ideal is to make possible the greatest amount of individual freedom of action that is consistent with the orderly conduct of joint action. For example, the citizen ought to be free to choose his own medical service, but he ought not to be allowed to endanger the health of the entire community by going about while suffering from a highly communicable disease. The citizen ought to be free to start a business, but he ought not to be free to peddle habit-forming drugs. He must be restrained, by joint action, from wanton behavior, not because freedom is evil, but because freedom is so good that we desire it for all concerned. It is right that I be limited in the exercise of my freedom when its exercise endangers the freedom of others. Our goal, then, is not merely  the free individual, but a society of free persons. Genuine freedom is that in which we are protected both by the laws and by inner moral restraints. Otherwise our freedom is endangered by every predatory power, whether in ourselves or others. One of the most memorable statements of this conception is that of John Locke, in the following passage:

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it, a liberty to follow by his own will in all things where the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject  to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another

man.

The chief antidote to the shallow notion of freedom as something to be appropriated without effort is the really profound idea that freedom is something to be earned. When the adolescent demands, as a member of a free society, that he be allowed to make his own decisions about his hours, his studies, his social life, his car driving, he is asking for what is essentially self-contradictory, because the kind of freedom which he demands is something that can only come at the end of a process rather than at the beginning. Real freedom is a goal to be passionately sought, not a starting point from which we lightly set out. Only the person who has thought much, suffered much and restrained himself much, is really free to make a genuine decision. Otherwise the decision is a matter of whim or prejudice. Only the person who has learned to deny himself has the right to assert himself. Only the responsible can be trusted with complete freedom.

This insight, which is so easy to miss and the failure to appreciate which has such damaging results, is really very deep in our emerging culture. The greatest single expression of it is found in the New Testament, in the words of Jesus, which constitute the heart of the Christian teaching about freedom. The words are these: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."  The most remarkable feature of this remarkable teaching is the sequence of the steps. Freedom is not here the point of departure, as we commonly suppose it to be, but rather the goal of the undertaking. Freedom is something to be achieved and it is achieved by following carefully a series of steps. Each step, after the first, is the result of prior steps, and each step. other than the last, is the condition of what ensues. Truth like freedom, comes at a price, and the price is the acceptance of discipline, since a disciple is one who follows the discipline.

We see, then, that genuine freedom is made understandable by three relevant considerations. The first is that freedom is primarily an ethical conception and meaningless on any other basis; the second is that freedom is to be found only at the end of a process, rather than the beginning; and the third is that the essence of that process is discipline, voluntarily accepted. The freedom we prize, in the societies that endure, is the freedom of self-disciplined men and women who have the same kind of ability to act in consideration of their fellows that an athlete has to run his race. The paradox is that the disciplined runner is far more truly free than is the undisciplined Manner. The point is even more obvious in the field of artistic experience. Because I have not disciplined myself by long hours of self-control in practicing scales, I literally am not free to put my fingers on the piano keys as I now wish to do. Neither artistic nor scientific skill is possible except on moral grounds.

It is not enough to announce a belief in freedom, and leave the matter there. What is required is that we espouse a view of the world and of life in which freedom is an indigenous part of a coherent total picture. What is obviously required is that there be no fundamental discrepancy between a man's philosophy and his politics. It is not logically permissible to uphold the freedom of civil liberties unless there is an area of freedom of choice, and it is not logically possible to uphold freedom of choice unless ours is a world which includes realities beyond those of materialist determinism. Our view of the world must be big enough to include both the facts of natural science and the moral responsibility of the scientist.

The essence of the matter is that the free society is, in reality, the responsible society. The only alternative to all kinds of slavery is responsibility. Freedom cannot be won or preserved except as we achieve or recover our faith in the ability of man to use his reason and not be compelled by the powers of propaganda or psychological pressures. “Freedom,” says Helmut Kuhn, “is rational choice.” Men are free only when they recognize themselves as human beings and not as things which can be manipulated or merely counted.

The idea of responsibility is one of the great ideas of the world. The responsible man rejects all fatalism and especially the fatalism of historical determinism or inevitable economic development, because he knows that there is an area in which it is his own decision that makes the difference. By accepting responsibility for his own acts, he stands up on his own feet and declares himself a man.

The recognition that freedom, when analyzed, turns out to be a moral ideal rather than a political one is very important for the entire war of ideas which marks our world. Apart from the whole conception of a moral order, freedom is really meaningless. Perhaps this is why the communist thinkers say so little about freedom. They talk easily of peace, because peace can be presented as the absence of war, but freedom as the successful resistance of external restraint or compulsion would be incompatible both with their philosophy and their practice.

Contemporary man has before him, not three roads, but only two. Since license is not possible as a continuous practice, the practical choice is necessarily limited to a free society, on the one hand, and to a dictatorship of either the Right or the Left, on the other. The question is whether man's vocation, as a responsible creature, is honored or denied. Our contention is that the dream of a free society, in which men and women are truly responsible, paying gladly the price of freedom, is not simply one possible choice among many, but the only possible choice for rational men who understand what their essential nature is. It is the only acceptable alternative to a system in which men are seen as pawns in the class struggle. Insofar as we understand, even partially, the wonder and mystery of being human, there is only one possible road. Only those who follow it know where it leads.