Getting a Life

One of the most, for me, provocative little essays I have ever read was one years ago in The American Scholar, about an orange Nehru shirt and a brown knit suit.  The author, whose pseudonym was Demosthenes, wrote of a recurring nightmare in which, on a visit to Los Angeles, he was killed in a car accident, and remained unidentified. The nightmare was that he was then buried wearing that orange shirt and brown knit suit.  Demosthenes’ point was that we get so wrapped up in choosing life styles (Nehru shirts and brown knit apparel were endemic at the time) that we forget to choose actually living and, in the process, lose our real identities.  Living involves far more than a fashionable suit.

On this day after Independence Day, fresh back from a week at the beach, I am intrigued by how we as Americans so focus on the right to Liberty  enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that we forget it was only second on Jefferson’s list, sandwiched in between Life and the Pursuit of Happiness.  For after all, what is Liberty without Life, and what is the meaning of an unhappy Liberty?  Jefferson was writing about the functions of government, and since then, we’ve all agreed that he basically got it right. Nevertheless, politicians and columnists still ponder whether the role of government is to provide safety nets, or stay out of the way of business, or provide a properly regulated environment, or whatever.  The answer of course is “all the above.”

Following Jefferson’s thoughtful construction, we can see that a primary function of government should be to help enable each person’s living a life best suited to their own skills and goals and vision of happiness, in part by standing protectively in the way against things like poor education, bad health care, and inadequate access to all the shared goods and services that together form our modern civilization; in other words, to protect the right to live your own life as best you can.  We sometimes forget that the author of the Declaration of Independence felt that his greatest achievement was the furtherance of public higher education.  That view is a broad definition of safety net that goes beyond the limited poverty elimination usually associated with that term.  Equality of incomes or of outcomes is not implicit in such a safety net, but a far more powerful role of government is, beyond the “defense only” view of libertarians but short of the equality of everything views of radical egalitarians.  Much more of this broad function of government is contained under the “promote the general Welfare” clause of the Preamble to the Constitution than we often are willing to accept.

Such a broad view of the role of government as that possessed by the founding fathers cannot be achieved without cooperation and accommodations from all.  That is the task now before us as a nation: to move beyond a nearly blind focus on “Liberty as no restrictions whatsoever” to recognition of Liberty as a shared enabler of all of us living better lives together.  We have for too long chosen a radical individualism life style at the expense of our identity as a people.  It’s time to wake up.