Declaration of Freedom - Chapter 6

Chapter VI : The Ground of Hope

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that
national morality can be maintained without religion.

 - George Washington

The basic ideas of the free society all turn out, upon analysis, to be moral ideas. The free society is, in essence, the responsible society, for responsibility is the one valid alternative to both slavery and license. But responsibility is meaningless unless there is a moral order. It is utterly pointless to try to discover what it is that we ought to do, unless there is an objective standard, by which both our moral failures and our moral successes can be judged. It is idle to talk about missing the mark unless a target really exists.

The upholders of the free society, insofar as they understand their own position, are necessarily committed to a philosophy of objective moral value, and, in this regard, there is bound to be a fundamental cleavage between the two conceptions of life now competing for men's minds. The adherents of the free order are committed to the rule that no human being of any race or class is to be insulted or neglected, not because that is the way they like it, but because the sacredness of personality is intrinsic to the moral order which is part of the real world.

The idea of a moral order means that the philosophy of materialism is a false philosophy. The conviction, based on experience, is that ours is indeed a world of material forces which we neglect at our peril, but that it is more. It is also a world in which there is a real right in every situation and this, far from being a reflection of our subjective wishes, is something central to the nature of the world. The scientific order is something that we discover and do not make, and the same is true of the moral order. What the nature of the order is, we have great difficulty in knowing, but it is most superficial to infer nonexistence from the difficulty of certainty. It is meaningless to try to understand the material order unless there is one, and it is likewise meaningless to discuss what we ought to do unless we are discussing something that is objectively real. But if moral values are real, they are objects about which true and false statements can be made. The major philosophical heritage of free men, arising in great measure from the analysis of Socrates, is that of the objectivity of truth, including the truth about the good life for all men. The practical alternative to this philosophy is the notion, intrinsic to the system regnant on the other side of the iron curtain, that ethical judgments are neither true nor false, but are merely counters in the propaganda game. Lenin, in a famous pronouncement, made this very clear:

We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. We say that it is a deception, a fraud in the interests of the landlords and capitalists. We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. . . . We subordinate our Communist morality to the task. We say: Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the toilers around the proletariat, which is creating a new Communist  . . . We do not believe in eternal morality.‘

There is no way of overstressing the contrast between the rival conceptions at this point. According to one conception, the moral law is objective and inherently universal, binding on all men in all places. justice, truth and love are not manmade, even though men may have great difficulty in knowing what they involve in concrete situations. For the Marxist, however, morality is secondary rather than primary; it is whatever promotes the Workers’ State. Since morality is purely instrumental, it may be appealed to when interest is thereby served, as in discussions of the United Nations, but it may, with equal case, be neglected. Lying. treachery, deceit and even torture may be employed, without any reluctance or self-condemnation, if the class struggle seems to require these actions. In short, morality is really nothing, because it involves no genuine imperatives. In this system, "I ought" is nonsense.

Among the noble documents that have marked the stages of development of the pattern of freedom, the Virginia Bill of Rights stands very high, partly because its authors saw so clearly that liberty is derivative. ‘No free government,” they wrote, “or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation. temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." This is most certainly the truth, but there is no use in mentioning fundamental principles if no such principles exist. According to strict Marxism they cannot exist, because they are not objects which can be weighed or measured materially, but the philosophy of freedom recognizes other kinds of reality. The Russian leaders, of course, talk in moral terms and even refer to principles, but in doing so they are speaking within the context of a philosophy alien to their own. If those engaged in the formation of a free society likewise talk in moral terms, but without the belief in nonmaterial realities, which alone can make such terms intelligible, they are closer to the men of the Kremlin than they would willingly admit, for the deepest cleavage is one of belief.

The belief which is really crucial in the struggle of ideas is far more than a matter of philosophy, than of politics or economics. Both the tyranny and the freedom come from deeper sources. If men accept the positivist philosophy that law is nothing but the will of the ruling power, there is no valid reason for not going the whole way with a totalitarian system. Few have seen this more clearly than Emil Brunner, in the following words:

The totalitarian state is simply and solely legal positivism in political practice, the abrogation in actual fact of the classical and Christian idea of a divine "law of nature." . . . If there is no justice transcending the state, then the state can declare anything it likes to be law; there is no limit set to its arbitrariness save its actual power to give force to its will. If it does so in the form of a logically coherent system, it thereby fulfills the one condition to which the legality of law is bound in the formalistic view of law. The totalitarian state is the inevitable result of the slow disintegration of the idea of justice in the Western world.’

The cleavage in regard to moral conduct is so great and so basic that even those who have been committed to radical causes have been forced to recognize it. Harold Laski, who undoubtedly belonged to the Left Wing of the British Labour party, was honest enough to say clearly that the Communist party, as he knew it, acted without reference to moral scruples. His words are searching ones:

The passion for conspiracy, the need for deception, the ruthlessness, the centralized and autocratic commands, the contempt for fair play, the willingness to use lying and treachery to discredit an opponent or to secure some desired end, complete dishonesty in the presentation of facts, the habit of regarding temporary success as justifying any measure, the hysterical invective by which they wrought to destroy the character of anyone who disagreed with them: these in the context of an idolization of leaders who might. the day after, be mercilessly attacked as the incarnation of evil, have been the normal behavior of Communists all over the world.

The fact that the upholders of a free society are necessarily committed to a belief in the valid demands of a moral law is both a source of strength and a source of weakness. It gives strength for the long run, but is often a handicap in the short run. Commitment to the truth may be a serious limitation on freedom to attack opponents. This is because the philosophy of freedom determines not merely what we say, but also the way in which we say it and the evidence on which we depend. The Communist spokesman is, in one sense, far more free than his opponents are, because he need not be limited by what is historically the case. The question of who started the aggression in Korea is not, by communist standards, a matter determined by objective truth, but rather a matter determined by the needs of political strategy.

Once we understand that the free society involves a belief in objective morality, with all the attendant handicaps, we are in a far better position to present the exciting proposal to the world. Equal justice and respect for personality do not then stand alone, unsupported, but rest on a firm foundation of what is really right. They are not ideas which we choose, but ideas which are recognized as inherent in a truly moral conception of the universe. Not only must the leading ideas be joined together for mutual support, as we have seen in earlier chapters; what is more important is that all of them, once they are joined, require a common foundation in the nature of things. Only on such a foundation is there reason for hope. Our hope lies in the fact that the free society has ultimate and eternal truth on its side.

Good as this is, and important as it is, the emphasis on moral foundations is not enough. Law is wonderful, but, when we think carefully, we know that Law requires a Lawgiver. Of all the ideas connected with the free society, the one which is the most exciting, as well as the most fundamental, is that the Lawgiver truly is, and is not a figment of our imaginations or a projection of our human hopes. Both socialism and secularism are widely espoused as substitutes for a deep religious faith, but they are obviously inadequate if something stronger can be presented as the more reasonable alternative.

There is a rational system of belief which can give support to the poor faltering inhabitants of this earth and, at the same time, make reasonable the leading ideas of the responsible society. This is not a matter of speculation, but is, instead, a developing historical faith that has already been tested by the verification which cumulative experience provides. It is something about which there is no need for a thoughtful person to be apologetic.

The heart of this whole world view, on which so many of the world religions unite, in spite of particular differences, is that behind and beyond our world of change there is Another, the Living God. A world, which is forever passing away, cannot explain itself and requires, therefore, an explanation beyond itself, if we are to avoid the confusion of hopeless irrationality. This world makes sense if it is God's handiwork, but. if God is not, it is an incomprehensible mystery. Of all the facts which are embarrassing to the materialistic atheist, the most embarrassing is the fact of personality, as illustrated in himself. How could personality, which demonstrably exists, have arisen in a purely impersonal world of mere matter and energy? The logic is that Divine Personality can explain the existence of finite persons and matter and energy, whereas matter and energy cannot explain personality. There is undoubtedly an order to the universe, as the movements of heavenly bodies so vividly demonstrate, but what is the nature of that order? If it is only a mechanical order, there is fundamental irrationality, because such an order cannot account for the experiences we know best, the experiences in which thought becomes a true cause of motion. The Marxists, of  course, try to maintain that freedom of thought is unreal and that what we think is determined in advance by prior material events. However, this is the weakest point in their system, if we consider seriously human experience, for such a system rules out all possibility of responsibility. No man is responsible for what he cannot help. But if we pay any attention to experience, we must somehow include responsibility, since this is more deep-seated than any other part of our common experience.

The great heritage, then, is based on the notion that the order of the universe is fundamentally a purposive order. If our reasoning on this point is valid, our world is a world with a deep and pervasive meaning. Behind the passing shadow of events is not some impersonal dialectic, exhibiting the oddly self—contradictory notion of a material entity acting like a mind, but rather a great loving and patient Purpose, the Purpose of Almighty God who made us and whose servants we are. This we ought to present to the world, not as something which we have dreamed up in order to make us feel good, but as the only intellectual alternative to the sheer irrationality of the pure secularist or the manifest inadequacy of the Marxist dialectic. The best reason for accepting the theistic faith is not that it makes us feel good, or even that it can be instrumental in maintaining our culture, but first of all because we are driven to it, by rational consistency, because it is true.

The idea that the world order is fundamentally purposive is one of the most exciting ideas of which we can conceive. We are purposive, of course, but we are much weakened in our efforts if we believe that we are alien accidents in a world which has spawned us as incredible mutations. We are sheer oddities if the stream of events has risen higher than its source. The man who is constrained to believe that the world order is merely mechanical may be personally a good man, but, if he is intelligent, he is bound to be a lonely man. If our only hope is in our own little experiment on this tiny planet in the Milky Way, we know that our lives are both temporary and unsupported. But if, on the other hand, we are driven by rigorous thought to believe that this is God's world, that the Milky Way and all the rest are under the care of One who made the world in love, as the scene of the great experiment devoted to the development of finite creatures who can be trusted with the dangerous gift of freedom, life is shot through with both meaning and power. If, in addition, we have reason to believe that our life here and now is only the beginning of an everlasting life in which we have a chance to grow in harmony with God's purpose, then even our short days are dignified and glorified.

Above all, this faith gives a meaning to our little lives, without which we cannot long endure. We know that millions now find some meaning in the belief that they are being used by the dialectic of history, but how poor this impersonal force must seem in contrast with what might be known and loved. The prophetic heritage teaches us that at the heart of the historical process is not some impersonal force, but One who knows and cares and who has a special purpose for each one of His children, even though He has given them the privilege of spuming and spoiling it if they choose. Each has a vocation, and in this the smallest life is dignified insofar as it is truly a dedicated life. The prayer of each then becomes, ‘'0 Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Purpose,” but the prayer can be a conversation rather than monologue. The dialectic cannot answer, but God can answer and does.

If we need something to buttress us in the inevitable struggles of life, there is nothing that can help us more than the conviction that each one of us is sought by Him who made the Pleiades and Orion, that each of us is truly known as no finite man can ever know us, and that, in spite of our feebleness and sin, we can become channels of God's universal love. Even the unjust happenings of the present life cannot dismay us, because this life is not all. If God really is, then a future life is required in order that the manifest injustices of the present life may be redressed.

One natural result of this kind of intelligent faith is an almost boisterous joy. The classic expression is bound to be, "We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.“ Persons with this vibrant faith will face hardship, misunderstanding and loss of loved ones, and all will face the death of their own bodies, but the triumphant faith takes these exigencies into consideration.  This faith is so strengthening that it ought to be uniting. The chasm between a merely secular conception of the world and any conception in which the Personal Basis of the moral order is recognized is so great and so crucial that those who believe in the latter are foolish to let their particular differences divide them. Moslems and Christians and Jews and many more need to know that they have the greatest things in common. The question of the particular banner is secondary.

It is important that we realize the close connection between the respect for personality, explained in Chapter V, and the religious ground from which this comes, a connection so often mentioned by President Eisenhower. The problem is that of how we are to defend and support the conception of the unique worth of each individual. This is not an easy matter, because, as we admit when we are frank, few men are truly noble and some are actually vicious. The ordinary man is not of such obvious worth and he may, in practice, be a very poor creature indeed. Why, then, is he valuable?

This question is unanswerable on the merely secular basis, but it has a most convincing answer on the religious basis. Man becomes an object of value only if his value is derivative. As a physical or even a moral specimen he may not be much good, but if he is a creature made in God's image, that is a different matter entirely. Then he has, in spite of sin and failure and ineptitude, a link with eternity. Because few men have seen this as clearly as did the late William Paton, his eloquent words can profitably be used here:

But if this humble and obscure man is in reality one whom God has made, whom He has made in love, so that he shall never know peace except in loving God in return; if this man is one to whom God speaks; if this man is the object of a Divine solicitude so great that the Word became flesh for his salvation, the Son of God died for l1im—if this be true, then this humble and obscure man has a link with eternity, with the creative love that made the world. He cannot then be rightly treated as a cog in a machine, or a sample of a racial blood-stream or one of the individual atoms that make up a nation.‘

Though many sins have been committed in the name of religion, it is nevertheless true that religious vitality tends to produce social sensitivity and the consequent overcoming of human injustice. This is because no man can hold to the prophetic faith with any seriousness without proceeding to the recognition that all members of the human family, of every nationality and cultural condition, are really brothers and sisters, because men who have the same father are indeed brothers. The Creator has no stepchildren. The first of the writing prophets put the matter in the form of a question, asked by God, “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me?"‘ And even before the time of the writing prophets, Elijah, by his defense of the dispossessed and mistreated, in the person of Naboth, gave one of the first clear leads in all human history, in the direction of equality before the law and due process, including the idea that even the king is under the law.’

We have not paid enough attention, in the history of ideas, to the Biblical basis of our democracy, partly because the basis has been so familiar that it has not been noticed. It is important, however, in that it applies to all three of the leading ideas of democracy and not merely to the notion of equality. It is significant that the planning program of Isaiah 61 was taken by Christ as his golden text when, at the beginning of his public career, he visited his home town of Nazareth. The words are thus in both the Old Testament and the New, and they are still exciting:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.‘

We owe more growth in social responsibility to the religious heritage than to any other single factor in our culture. The major religious tradition has not been one of self-centered concern, on the part of the individual, for his own spiritual welfare. “True godliness,” said Penn, “does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it." There has been, for centuries, a strong emphasis on what religion requires in social justice, as indicated even by the way some of the Hebrew Prophets interpreted the command for the Sabbath rest as a protection for the toilets and by the way the Koran is concerned with daily life. It is possible to make a strong case for the proposition that john Wesley did more to produce the labor movement in England than did Karl Marx.

The historical fact is that it was chiefly by religious motivation that we became aware of the cruelty with which we dealt with the insane; this is how we were first inspired to build prisons designed to make people better rather than worse; this is how consciences were first aroused about injustice to backward peoples. It was no accident that the first public document in American history protesting the institution of slavery came from a deeply devout group in Germantown. Why was john Woolman's the first really effective voice in the Western world in denouncing human slavery? It was, as he has told us himself, because of his religious experience. The intensity of his devotion led directly to his social concern.

What Woolman's religion (lid for him was to develop in him an extraordinary tenderness toward all human beings, whether known or unknown. As he read that God had made all men in His image, Woolman really believed it, not merely with his head, but also with his heart. He opposed slavery forthwith, not because of some doctrinaire position arrived at by mere thought, but because he truly felt for all other creatures in the same essential predicament in which he found himself. He knew, then, that their similarities were more significant than their differences; he knew that pain and bereavement meant the same, and hurt the same, among black men as among white men, and among foreigners as among neighbors. Equality was transformed into solidarity.

Woolman's real secret, which truly accounts for his social sensitivity, lay in his sense of membership in what Albert Schweitzer has called "the fellowship of those who bear the mark of pain.” He would have understood the words of Gandhi, "Democracy is complete identification with the poorest of mankind." A few weeks before he died of smallpox, in 1772, Woolman was traveling in the north of England and had leisure there to write the following revealing account:

In a time of sickness, a little more than two years and a half ago, I was so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy colour between the south and the east, and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be and live, and that I was mixed with them, and that henceforth I might not consider myself a distinct or separate being.

There is a chance for liberty, equality and dignity, when solidarity is felt, and solidarity arises from a real sense that all men are sons and daughters of the same Father.

Today, after many ups and downs, we are, in many parts of the world, in another period of religious vitality. The marks of the new vitality are many, including the demand for religious books, the increased attendance at public worship, and the reappearance of mass evangelism which, many supposed, had lost its appeal forever. There are likewise evidences of renewed religious vitality in those parts of the world in which the Judeo-Christian conception is not dominant. An illustration of this is the organization of the highly important Sixth Buddhist Congress in Burma, with a widespread renewal of Buddhist loyalty. Even in Russia the new vitality is felt, and this we know by the contemporary attack on faith as mere superstition.

If the present resurgence of faith can help us to be truly humble, with contrition for the ways in which we have resisted the full demands of brotherhood, and if, in addition, it can fill us with courage to work for freedom and justice wherever that work is possible, ours can be a truly wonderful time. The demonstration, in any society, of what is involved in the demands of prophetic religion, would be so appealing that it would be invincible. If we could really put it into practice, in any thorough way, in all phases of our lives, economic, political, educational, the result would be so revolutionary and so exciting that the news of it would pierce any man-made curtain, whether constructed of iron or bamboo or any other substance.

The present division of the world is a terrible thing and must not go on forever. But how can it be ended? The notion of two parts of the world, going on for centuries, with radically incompatible purposes, in which each is committed to thwarting the other if possible, but also in which one side is necessarily committed to subverting the other by force and by conspiracy, is truly horrible. It must not be!

Since we reject a planned war, with its mutual destruction, as wholly inadmissible, the only solution open to us is dedication to the enterprise in which, perhaps very slowly, we so demonstrate a truly free society, both in our internal affairs and in our just dealings with others, that the idea finally penetrates. Our only opportunity, consistent with our democracy itself, is to show to the world something so intrinsically appealing that the children of the men now in the Kremlin will be moved to espouse it. Stranger developments have come in history, as we are reminded when we remember that those who belonged to the first Christian society on the continent of Europe, the Church at Philippi, were sent a letter in which they were saluted by “those of Caesar's household." The ideal of a society of perfect freedom has penetrated before and it can penetrate again. But, before it can penetrate, it must be understood and loyally accepted.

What the accurate historians of the future, if there are any, will say about the last half of the twentieth century is still to be decided. We know that it is a time of strain, but it may also become a time of greatness. This is wholly possible because the human spirit can thrive in difficulties and we have unlimited spiritual resources on which to draw. We have behind us a noble tradition of dedicated courage; we have the power of truth; we have the conviction that the God of all the world is calling us to a great response; we have a solid ground of hope.

In all our endeavors we can have no better golden text than the words of President Eisenhower at Evanston, ‘Now ours is a time when great things must again be dared in faith." Ours need not be the last generation, and it need not be the lost generation, providing men now living can become truly devoted to the fairest dream that mankind has yet known. We dare not make small plans, because they have no power to move men's hearts. The course of history in this generation depends, not on the inevitable movement of impersonal forces, but upon the nature of the dream which possesses us, upon our dedication to it and upon the courage with which we pursue it.

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