Declaration of Freedom - Chapter 5

Chapter V :  The Dignity of the Individual

The ideal is very powerful.

 - Alan Paton

The recognition that individuals are different is as intrinsic to the free society as is the recognition that all men are created equal, and the two conceptions are in no sense incompatible. Both ideas are challenged at once by the communist system. In the entire area in which the thinking of Marx and his disciples now reigns there is a powerful appeal inherent in the notion of a great monolithic society in which the individual loses his identity, because he becomes the mass man and glories in doing so. The only way in which this can be countered with success is by presenting a far more alluring alternative, the idea of a society in which individuality is respected, protected and developed.

The philosophy of freedom at this point rests upon a careful effort to face honestly what man is. Man differs from all other creatures, not merely in his capacity to experience free decision and consequent responsibility, but also in the way in which individuality is inherent in his nature. In other parts of creation we can experiment, because the separated object is so nearly worthless that, when we have used one, we can throw it away, turning, without loss or regret, to another. Thus we do not greatly care which piece of coal we analyze chemically in testing a particular vein; in similar fashion we drop one elm leaf and take up another in our botanical studies. There may be slight differences, but these differences are such that they can be neglected without harm to our enterprise.

When we come to deal with mankind, however, we find ourselves in a radically altered situation. To experiment on human beings is almost universally recognized as inappropriate and indecent. Human vivisection is, of course, possible and was actually practiced by Hitler's doctors in some of the notorious concentration camps. It could be practiced anywhere, if only we could get over the moral barrier. We could try to produce cancer in some men as we now produce it in small animals; we could occasion great pain and then observe how the pain is borne under different circumstances; we could try to induce insanity in selected individuals, while using another set of human beings as a control group. Why should this not be done? If the total state is the only thing that is important, there is no reason why it should not be done.

There is only one reason why experimentation on human beings is wrong, and that is that each individual is an object of ultimate worth. The reasons are not political, but moral, and the moral considerations depend upon an understanding of what man is. Once we have the moral position clear, political implications are bound to follow, but first we must get our moral philosophy straight.

The dream at the heart of the free society is the dream according to which each human being is honored, in his own right, and never looked upon as just a part of the faceless mass or one example of a racial bloodstream. This is really what each man wants for himself when he thinks seriously about it. Each of us hopes that he will be more than one of the farmers, one of the white men, or one of those of a certain age and class. We know we shall not live forever, and we are sure we are not indispensable. However, while we live, we desire to make some unique contribution, leaving the world a little different from what it would have been if we had not lived, and we want to be respected for doing so. We hope to be treated, not as examples, but as persons. Persons are creatures who have peculiar needs. They require food and clothing and shelter for their bodies, but these are by no means their only requirements. Each person also needs something to give meaning to his life and he needs the respect of others. So great is the need for respect that many people will sacrifice economically in order to get it. Men can live with very little bread, but something goes terribly wrong when ‘elementary human dignity is denied. Many a man would rather have equality of respect than equality of wages. Therefore, a good economic order is one which helps to give self-respect to all who toil, and a good political order is one in which there are no second-class citizens.

The whole question of prestige is one of the most important questions involved in any serious effort to build a just society. To minimize it is to court trouble, because the desire for approbation is deep-seated in human nature. It is one of the great merits of Adam Smith, who was a philosopher as well as an economist, that he was as much aware of the noneconomic springs of human conduct as he was of the purely economic ones. The Theory of the Moral Sentiments was as significant in his thought as was the more famous Wealth of Nations.

What Adam Smith saw so clearly and said so convincingly was that men cannot live happily without self-respect. Much as we may condemn ourselves for us sins and failures, we must, if we are to survive and keep our sanity, work out some system by which we have self-approbation. This is why we make so many excuses and sometimes refuse to face our worst failures. Ideally we might suppose that a man should be able to maintain his self-respect because of his own integrity, even when he is the object of contempt and reviling on the part of his fellows. From the highest point of view a man ought to be able to stand alone against the opinion of the condemning populace, because of his conviction that his action is right in the eyes of the Impartial Observer, but such a stance is reserved, usually, for moral giants. The ordinary man needs the esteem of others, in order to keep his own. It is because we are not really sure about the worthiness of our conduct that we seek so desperately the buttressing effect of the attitude of others toward us. We require the approval of others, said Adam Smith in a key observation, because "their approbation necessarily confirms our own self-approbation." ‘

When we contemplate the deep truth of what Adam Smith says, we understand better how we may harm or help one another, not merely by what we give or withhold of material products or opportunities or even rights, but by our attitude toward persons. The most damaging feature of colonialism, which has built up so much resentment, has not been the economic exploitation, but the unwillingness of the colonist to look upon the native as a social equal. If anyone supposes that these matters are trivial, he has only to consider the degree to which such disrespect and the revulsion against it conspire to make history. The blood of white boys has been spilled in Asia, partly because of the bitter and understandable reaction of Asians to the experience of disrespect and the long accumulation of resentment. On no other hypothesis can we understand the fierceness of some of the recent battles. Only those smarting from a sense of insult would fight with such fanatical  Even military victories and defeats arise in part from moral causes.

The demand for respect is part of the emerging revolutionary movement of our time and is quite as important as the economic or political factors. It cannot be suppressed. This is one of the reasons why the continent of Africa is such a powder keg in contemporary civilization. It is an area in which the original inhabitants, in many parts, have been denied respect equal to that which the occupying descendants of Europeans demand for themselves. Serious trouble is inevitable unless the attitude can be changed in time, for the demands of human nature will not change. If correction does not come in a good way, it will undoubtedly come in evil ways, of which the Mau Mau is one terrifying example. If the Mau Mau trouble is now settled, other and similar troubles will arise.

We cannot change the human desire for approbation, but we can, if we are wise, change the basis of approbation. One of the biggest revolutions that will occur, as we understand more fully the philosophy of freedom, is a revolution in the basis of prestige. The need of such a change is illustrated by the story told by Dr. Albert Schweitzer about the work of building his hospital at Lambaréné, in French Equatorial Africa. The great philosopher and physician was carrying beams through the African settlement and, needing help, called to a native, dressed in a white suit, who was visiting a friend, a hospital patient. The man refused to help, explaining that he was an intellectual, to which Schweitzer replied that he had always wished he could be an intellectual but evidently he had not succeeded! The African native, of course, must not be condemned for the incongruity of his reply. For one thing, it was hardly possible for him to appreciate the intellectual eminence of le grand doctor, and, moreover, he was accommodating himself to a local pattern of respect.

In Chapter IV we stressed the importance of the idea of equality, but we must remember that the equality we seek has nothing to do with sameness. We are not all alike and we can be thankful that this is so. Far from deploring this situation, we rejoice that we were created with differences of sex, with differences of race and with differences of ability. The white men can do some things which the black men cannot do, and the black men can do some things which the white men cannot do. The elementary, but extremely important, consideration is that things can be different without being better and worse. A wild cherry tree and a violet are not the same, but who can say which is better or even more beautiful? Boys and girls ought to be treated equally in their education, but only a mind distorted by militant feminism could suppose that this means that their education should be the same. We pierce through most of the confusion on this subject when we recognize clearly that equality and identity are two distinct and separate categories, rather than one. In a free society there is no need to neglect the real differences of level among men nor should we try to cast all into the same mold. Exupéry was speaking for the great tradition of freedom when he said, “In my civilization he who is different from me does not impoverish me—he enriches me."

If once we recognize clearly the distinction between equality and identity we are prepared to understand that cultures, as well as individuals, may be equal though different. The ancient cultures of Africa and of Asia are radically different from those now dominant in the West, but this alone does not mean that they are inferior. The world is made a far richer place by virtue of the fact that the human race speaks many languages, writes in many differing literary forms and has different religions. Western man can be thankful for the Moslem or the Hindu cultures, while Moslems and Hindus may be thankful for the productions of the West. Few considerations are of greater significance in the final production of a just and lasting peace.

It is intrinsic to a free society that the right of respect should be guarded for every individual. Some men are ignorant, some are stupid and some are cruel, but it is the right of every man that he should be met without prejudgment. Each man, of every color and class and nation, must be counted innocent until he is proved guilty, and he must be counted worthy of respect until he demonstrates his unworthiness.

Our democratic institutions cannot stand alone, but require a philosophy of life to sustain them. The only philosophy of life that is capable of sustaining these institutions in their complexity is one which is centered in the sacredness of personality. This philosophy received one of its most valuable expressions from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century in what is known as the second formulation of the categorical imperative, a formulation which is a potentially universal possession. “So act,” said Kant, “that thou dost treat every man, whether in thine own person or that of another, as an end in himself, and not as a means merely." In brief, we are never to treat any human being as a mere instrument or a tool. Things have instrumental value, but persons also have terminal value. Foolish and wicked though individual men and women may be, each is infinitely precious and is the object for which the political institutions exist. The ideal, which we recognize in our best moments, but do not always demonstrate in practice, is that, when we see another man, whoever he may be, we do not ask, first, how useful he will be to us, as though he were a machine, but rather how the world looks through his eyes, for he too is human. The basic moral rule, to which there is no possible exception, is “treat every person as a person and never as a thing."

The contrast between the two philosophies which now tend to divide human allegiance is sharply marked at this point. It must be true that many persons in Russia and China and the satellite countries live by the rule stated above, whatever the official doctrine, and it is certainly true that many in what we call the free world fail daily to live by this rule, but between the two avowed philosophies the contrast is immense. Unless this contrast is overcome there is no chance for real peace in the world. Between the two ideals there is no possible compromise.

The most practical form that the philosophy of individualism can take is the habit of looking upon each one as one. There is, of course, a constant temptation to look upon individuals as primarily members of the total society so that we say, in our terrible jargon, that the individual is expendable. We are tempted to treat people socially as segments of the group or of the profession which they represent. This would be reasonable if we were dealing with the pieces of a stone, but a society is not a stone or remotely similar to it. A society is made up of distinct individuals, each with his own unique history, his own unique consciousness. his own unique sorrows and pains as well as ambitions and sources of pride. Each of these is violated if he is considered merely as part of the great unconscious mass. To treat a man as anything less than an individual is to dehumanize him, blurring the distinction which exists between the human and the subhuman creation or the mechanical order.

This is not to say that the life of the group is unimportant. We are, indeed, social beings, as well as individual beings, and we need one another terribly. but the best society is the society which sees that each member is more than social, viz., individual. Does the group exist for the individual or does the individual exist for the group? The question is unanswerable, because it is badly framed. The true situation is that man's intrinsic nature is such that the individual cannot realize his full potentiality except as a member of the fellowship, but, at the same time, the fellowship is not worth preserving unless it is so formed that the value of each individual is jealously maintained.

When we deal with the dignity of the individual we are very close to the cornerstone of a true democracy. Any society which could even approximate this ideal would be exciting. The ideal of individual worth can apply to our education, where we must be concerned not only with the dignity of the individual student, but also of the individual teacher and the individual parent. It applies to our industry, signifying that, in even the largest factory, a vast difference must be recognized between workers and machines. The machines may be interchangeable, but the men are not! If each person employed can feel that the management shows an interest in his personal life, the whole system will function better. If he can own part of the industry in which he works, so that he is a partner in the enterprise, that is still better. The growing tendency in this direction is one of the chief reasons why the predictions of Karl Marx about the reactions of workers have been proven by events to be fantastically false. Communism did not arise first in those countries where Marx said it would.

The effort to deal with each one as one is the perfect antidote to guilt by association. No man is responsible for the opinions of his father or his wife or his neighbor, but he is responsible for his own. It is a monstrous thing to do what is done in some parts of the world when a man’s loved ones are punished in reprisal for his break with the regime. The extreme case is that of the M.V.D. in Russia, where an order has established the rule that, if an officer defects, his next of kin is to be punished by death. This is normally an effective deterrent, but it is completely revolting to those who have been nurtured on the conception of individual justice.

There are many possible applications of this central philosophy of the supreme value of the individual, but three are especially relevant at this juncture: the application to the political system, the application to the economic system and the application to the problem of racial discrimination.

The political application of the philosophy of individualism is that of the wisdom of diversity. There ought not to be a monolithic state, demanding and receiving absolute loyalty from all inhabitants of an area. Government is something man needs, but government becomes evil and dangerous when the submission it requires is absolute and all-inclusive. We ought to have conscientious objectors and we ought to honor the dissenting conscience. Only thus are we likely as a people to see any issue in its fullness.

What we require is not less loyalties, but more. Part of the reason why each person is different from every other is that each has a different set of relations and consequent claims upon him. Clark Kerr, chancellor of the University of California, has put vividly the use for a multiple society in the following words: ‘We may find that the greater hope for democracy lies with a multiplicity of allegiances-to self, family, union, church, employer, and government. . . . The great danger is not that loyalties are divided today but that they may become undivided tomorrow.” Western man honors the memory of Wendell Willkie, but there is an important sense in which his most famous phrase is really frightening. What if ours should really become one world, with one tyrannical government, one bureau of psychological conditioning for all and the elimination of the pull of all other loyalties except one? This is the nightmare of 1984. Ultimately we must have one world of men freely joined, but unity under dictatorship in which the dignity of the individual would be forgotten or obscured would be worse than division.

Much as a free man owes his nation, he has other debts which he is bound to respect. He ought to be encouraged in recognizing his debt to a host of associations which compete for his time, his attention and his money. Moreover, he owes something to himself. Only in such a fashion can integrity be maintained and fostered. It is in such a connection that we can see the real glory of the conception of separation of church and state. This separation, where it is upheld as a principle, is not accidental, but follows from the main idea. Because each one is one, life presents a multiplicity of valid claims which always exist in unresolved tension. This tension, far from being evil, is always a potential good and certainly something to be cherished. Music cannot be played except upon tight strings.

A second application of the philosophy of individualism is an economic one. We must try to produce that kind of economic order in which the dignity of the individual is recognized and enhanced. The most practical way in which this can be done is by the careful development of the idea of ownership. It is significant that the great monolithic culture, which is the chief alternative to the free society in the modern world, rejects the principle of ownership. The people of Russia, since the establishment of the communist regime, have not been allowed to own the land they work or the houses in which they live. Ownership has become an almost forgotten category, though it has been found expedient to reintroduce a little of it at certain points.

The idea of ownership is really one of the greatest ideas in the world and, when rightly shared, does more than almost any other to support the dignity of the individual. It is partly because it stresses the dignity of ownership that the story of Naboth's vineyard is so important in understanding the origins of the free society. What the story tells us is that the emerging social consciousness of the prophetic movement recognized that even the king could not arbitrarily dispossess the modest landowner without due process of law. To take away Naboth's vineyard, the prophetic leadership of Israel saw, is to do something damaging to Naboth himself, for property is an extension of the person.

Ownership has much to do with the formation of personality. The child’s developing character is formed, in no insignificant part, by the belief that some things are his. In these he can take legitimate pride; by these his self is buttressed and extended. The child who has lived in many rented and obviously temporary premises is often greatly strengthened by moving into a house in which his family belongs. The whole situation is radically altered when this occurs, even though the house may be humble and the land on which it sits may be small. ‘A man who stands on his own soil tastes eternity,” said Chesterton. It is obvious that a community of home owners is more stable and responsible, from every point of view, than is a community of people who own practically nothing. Those who own, even if their ownership is modest, have a greater stake in the community and a greater concern for its welfare.

Ownership is fundamentally, then, a moral or spiritual idea, but at the same time it helps to decide what the right pattern in economic or political matters may be. If ownership is such a good, if it helps so much in buttressing men and women in the self-respect with their natures require, then it follows that we ought to have as much of it as possible. Ownership is so good for human beings that it ought to be widely shared. This automatically rules out two familiar social systems, full state socialism, on the one hand, and concentrate(l capitalism, on the other. The former, when followed to its logical conclusion, is a situation in which there is no private ownership, but all rent from the state, while the latter is a situation in which only a few own and the vast majority are propertyless.

If one of the tests of a good society is wide sharing of ownership, we have reason to be thankful for the marvelous agricultural system which was developed in most of North America as the new land was occupied. Part of the reason for this development was physical, but a still more important part was ideological. In any case the standard pattern, as it developed, was that of a single family, with its own house and barn, living on its own hundred and sixty acres. The most significant feature of the pattern was the degree to which, in the vast majority of cases, the family which owned the land also worked it. This pattern, which we tend to take for granted, without full recognition of its wonder and beneficence, was not inevitable. The pattern could have been developed in other ways; there could have been great landed estates with absentee owners, and with most of the work done by landless men; there could have been a system of collective farms, such as have been tried with such indifferent success in the alternative civilization.

It has been pointed out by many observers, including the great de Tocqueville, that the conception of “peasant” never took hold in America. In its place there arose the conception of a proud, hard-working man, whose holding might be small and whose mortgage might be large, but who tasted eternity daily by standing on his own soil. The productive capacity of this system has been so great as to involve an embarrassment that is far from common in human society, the embarrassment of surplus. We know a good deal about a system if we learn that too much success is the major problem. We cannot doubt that the degree to which the dignity of the individual has been maintained and encouraged has played an important part in this success.

A third relevant application of the principle of individual value is to be made to the race question. It is practically impossible to exaggerate the contemporary importance of this question in nearly every part of the world. The problem has always presented itself, but in the contemporary scene the way in which it is handled has become a crucial factor in the whole course of history. The right handling of this is indeed a factor in survival.

It is the philosophy of individual value that gives us our clue to the right handling of this crucial problem. What we must always do is to ask, in regard to a member of another race, what we, as individuals, would desire if we were in their places. And we know very well that what we should desire would be the kind of treatment in which personality would be more significant than racial characteristics. The way to treat the brown man is to treat him as a man; the noun must take precedence over the adjective! This is not always easy to do, but the formula is sound, and in any case it gives us a standard by which to judge. The ideal helps to alter the course of events.

There are three fundamental stages in race relations. The first stage, and one which has been widespread in the world, is that of racial antagonism. Because the people are different in some ways they often hate and despise one another as groups or engage in a struggle for power and prestige. This is always tragic and ultimately a denial of the life of freedom.

The second state, which is produced by conscious effort and attention, is that of racial tolerance. In this stage men try to be fair and to see to it that members of other races have their share of the good things of life. The enlightened members of the dominant race try deliberately to help the less privileged races to have opportunities, both economically and culturally, so that equal justice may be done. In practice this often gives the member of the hitherto oppressed group a practical advantage. Sometimes he is given a position because of his racial membership.

Necessary as the second stage is, and much as it is an advance over the stage of racial antagonism, there is a third and final stage which is far superior to it. In this stage men become unaware of race and make decisions wholly without reference to it. This is our clear ideal and is obviously as far beyond the second stage as the second stage is beyond the first. In a society marked by this ideal in practice each one would be advanced strictly on his own merits, the extraneous elements being neglected because they are not noticed. There will never be any real solution of the race problem on the basis of racial tolerance, but there can be a solution on the basis of racial unconsciousness. It is important to know that this is implied in the idea of a free society.

The hardest problems of mankind are so difficult that they cannot possibly be solved except on the highest ground. The ideal presented in this chapter may seem too high, but it is time for us to realize that victory in the struggle to build a peaceful world is not possible on any lower level. We do not know whether we shall win or whether we shall lose in this struggle, but we at least have reason to know that we cannot win unless we take the high ground.

The high ground, which is the ground of potential victory, is fundamentally a matter of loyalty. The only way in which men can overcome or avoid the tragic consequences of a divisive or inadequate loyalty is by the acceptance of a larger and more healing loyalty. In many places in the United States, the important and effective thing to say about discrimination is that it is “Un-American.’ What must be understood is that “Un-American," in this context, means ‘inconsistent with the dream of a society which involves the inherent dignity of each member of it."

The great moments in human history come when men are wise enough and good enough to match their economic power with the power of the spirit. But we shall never have the power of the spirit unless there is something in which we greatly and deeply believe. There is nothing in which modern man can believe more generally, more wholeheartedly and with more intellectual integrity than the infinite worth of the individual. But the honest seeker, who shares this belief, will find that he cannot stop at this point, exalted as it is. The logic of the situation will carry him to a still greater faith. To the elucidation of that logically necessary faith the final chapter will be devoted.