The Purpose of Liberty

After all the unpacking and picture hanging of moving to a new place, I got down to re-reading, for a book club and to celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, John Stuart Mill’s great essay, On Liberty.  Though published in 1859 in England, it contains ideas on every page relevant to the hot-button issues of current American public policy, from the Snowden affair to how to deal with education.  I don’t always agree with Mill, but I’m always challenged by him.  

It reminded me of what we, liberals and conservatives alike, have lost through our incessant squabbling, and how the current mess got started in the first place.  Yesterday, I got 10 emails from various liberal groups, and seven of them included personal attacks on either McConnell, Boehner, the Koch brothers or the conservative members of the Supreme Court.  Had I been on conservative mailing lists, I’m sure I would have gotten just as many diatribes against Obama, Reid, Pelosi, etc.   It was Mill who commented that remarks offensive to us are not only acceptable in political debate, but necessary to shed light on our opponents point of view and possible truths in it that we may not have recognized. Mill further stated that the only statements really offensive and reprehensible were those that are personal attacks  on an opponent.  They shed no light and generate only anger.

One of our book club members commented that she didn’t know whether Mill was liberal at all, that he was not like any liberal she knew today and was, she thought, more a libertarian.  I got a little inward chuckle out of that because Mill not only is known as “The Great Liberal” and the “Father of modern liberalism”, but also included in the expanded versions of the essay, not shown in all editions, reference to the “dubious indifference to the lives of others” of the libertarians of his day, who had lost sight of the fact that liberty is not an end in itself but has a purpose; it is not an unrestricted license to do as you please, but a best means of improving the lives of all.  Preserving liberty requires social responsibilities toward others.  That in fact is the heart of liberalism.

That is why the book club member was partly right and rightly confused.  Mill was also skeptical of big government as likely to induce excessive conformity and loss of the individualism needed to find solutions to difficult issues.  He supported standardized testing in education but freedom for parents to decide how their children would be taught; he probably would have supported both “No Child Left Behind” and Charter Schools but would have been against “Common Core” standards.  His specific solutions may or may not work today, but his goal was to ensure children got a good education, not to standardize how it was taught.  He did not believe that government action was always the solution or that, in fact, there was one right solution.  Mill is like few liberals today, just as few conservatives today are like Edmund Burke, the “Great Conservative” who was Mill’s conservative counterpart.  Burke believed that the good things of the present should not be sacrificed for the promises of an uncertain future, but few conservatives today would state issues that way.  Goals instead are things like keeping a budget always balanced or limiting immigration or preventing gun control.  Why those are the goals is rarely asked.  It is interesting that Alfred Keynes cited Burke’s maxim as his basis for unbalancing the budget temporarily in order to infuse money into the economy to prevent the economic deprivations that were occurring during the Great Depression, yet he is hated by today’s conservatives as the inventor of socialist economics. Both conservatives and liberals have started to enjoy the fight so much that they no longer remember why the fight is worthwhile, or how to get things done.  They have lost the vision of their fundamental purposes.

I could trace the root causes probably back to the primary system and gerrymandering (though George Washington was already warning against factionalism and political parties in his day.)  The unfortunate consequence, however it arose, of the constant fighting is like being in a run-away carriage headed for disaster while fighting each other furiously for control of the reins.  The disasters today range from climate change to economic inequality that tears our country apart to endless, senseless killings, but we ignore them for the joy of the fight.  We could use a bucket of cold water.

We are faced with a dilemma.  Liberty requires diversity of opinion and approaches.  But solutions to major problems require solutions acceptable to at least a majority..  We need that diversity of ideas Mill sought as a product of liberty and we need also a national commitment to solutions.  That is an impossible dream without recovery of our vision of why liberty is important.  I share Mill’s view that a nation is made up of people and the purpose of liberty in the first place is that it is the best way to improve the lives of all the people.  All subsequent political goals and solutions should flow from that, and anyone’s idea of how to do that merits consideration, whether through government or whatever else that works. It’s time we dropped the labels, and the recriminations and character assassinations that follow from them.   I have begun automatically rejecting any pleas for political funding that include personal attacks on opponents, no matter how much I agree with overall stated goals.  If enough people begin to do that, perhaps it will add up to a bucket of cold water.  Other ideas are welcome.

Force, Morality and Collegiate Date Rape

An old friend of ours in Greece, a child during the WWII Nazi occupation, likes to say, “What could we do? They had the gun. We had nothing.”  It is also his response to a lot of different current situations, like bank takeovers in the EU, as a kind of resigned recognition that Might, whether moral and legal or not, commonly justifies itself simply by its superior force - “Might makes Right.”   Victimhood becomes a natural outcome of weakness, whether physical or financial or military, and an acceptable social norm.  In fact, challenging that norm becomes a dubious revolt against nature and an act of social rebellion.

George Will has taken a lot of flak, and rightly so, for his comments on June 6 in the Washington Post criticizing the victims of collegiate date rape as glorifying victimhood and “being a survivor”; in effect, he labels them as whiners wallowing in the privileges of a rapidly shifting and nuanced moral scene on college campuses these days.  He seems to equate the problem with the misbehavior of children, best policed by the stern parenting of the college itself - by the way, has anyone seen “in loco parentis” around lately? I haven’t in years - and such campus shenanigans as beyond the interest of the law.  An excellent analysis of Will’s core argument was done by Alyssa Rosenberg on June 11 in the Post, and many other opinion pieces on the subject are busily unraveling the many other weaknesses in Will’s argument.  But the fact is that Will’s argument is perfectly consistent with his general libertarian principles.  He’s applying the same kind of logic to date rape as he would apply to the activities of Goldman Sachs, and in the process laying bare a fundamental social issue.

I’ve commented before that American Libertarianism is based mainly on a misty-eyed memory of a past that never existed, where solitary heroic figures struggled with gun and plow against nature, hostile Indians and outlaws.  Hobbes was referencing the early American frontier when he described life outside civilization as “short, mean and nasty” and that’s how the frontier was perceived from England.  In real life pioneers travelled, lived and struggled together in groups.  The town names of places like Syracuse New York, Rome Georgia and Athens Texas show that thoughts of civilization were never very far away.  My great-great-great grandfather, who migrated from Virginia to Georgia to Alabama, with mostly the same neighbors in each place, lived to 77 – a good age even by today’s standards.  I have a diary of the trip my family made along with a dozen others by wagon train from Alabama to Texas in 1868.  Pioneering was a community venture.  Our volunteer fire departments are a truer heritage from our pioneering forebears than Marlborough Man.  Libertarians who think they did it all themselves and owe nothing to others discredit both their neighbors and their ancestors. 

Deeper down, libertarianism as practiced by some is Cain’s rejoinder to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  It is a trained lack of empathy with the needs of others, self- justified by the excuse that you shouldn’t interfere with the lives of others and they shouldn’t interfere with yours.  Their problems are their own business and you shouldn’t intrude.  Sometimes, it is mere moral laziness. But, like Cain’s response, it is often a cover-up for having done harm to others that you are ashamed to admit.  You have used force of some kind, whether financial, legal or physical, in a way that you know is morally irresponsible.   And to excuse yourself and be consistent you have to excuse others for doing the same thing, and excuse the enabling things like laws stacked against the poor that allow it to happen.  Letting that predation go unanswered simply spreads the problem throughout the entire community.

That is what makes it a social issue.  We today have the same kinds of dangers as did our pioneering ancestors.  For raw nature, substitute climate change.  For building a town, substitute infrastructure development.  For battling French and Indians, substitute a wild and bewildering array of foreign policy challenges. And for outlaws, substitute individuals and institutions from big corporations to collegiate rapers that prey on the weakness of others, sometimes by getting the laws changed to enable doing it more easily. And community responses are required for community dangers. Things like “big government” are our community vehicle for exercising countervailing force against the dangers we all share.  The more complex the tasks to be done, the more complex the organizations to get it done need to be.  Ignoring the dangers doesn’t make them go away.  

 We live today in a social environment of religious differences, income inequality global economics and diverse life styles that drive us apart in ways never experienced by our ancestors.  Our greatest danger is the splintering of our own society.  A new Pew poll reveals that the majority of those polled would not want a family member of a different political party, and that liberals and conservatives don’t even like the same kind of housing.  Activists in each party regard a victory by the other as a national disaster to be avoided at all costs.  We’ve got to get past those dislikes or disregards of others or we will become victims of our own misdoings.

We need the same kind of community spirit that our ancestors had to get the many things done that desperately need doing.  And we need more effective, not less, government as a tool to do the job.  Cain’s rejoinder won’t get the job done.  And solitary battles against our own neighbors won’t either.