Back to the Stone Age II A: The Price of Freedom
Classical Liberalism and its stepchildren—socialism and libertarianism—are founded on error, and no error of the liberals is more manifest than their credulous faith in individual liberty. It is summed up in Rousseau's famous declaration (which begins The Social Contract) that "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Any normal person who has lived for twenty years knows that the opposite is true, that man, whatever freedom he might eventually secure, is everywhere and always born a slave, to his natural appetites, to the mother who nurses him, and to the family that attends to his every need. Advocates of infanticide have often tried to fix the period during gestation when an infant becomes viable. It is a pointless debate, since no infant or child of five can provide for his own material needs. The best a child of twelve could hope for, if abandoned by relatives and friends, would be to be made the slave—probably a sex slave—by some adult. In simple societies, teenaged boys might be able to fend for themselves, but in our own world, it is the rare college graduate—to say nothing of all those hapless PhD's in universities-- who can take care of himself.
A liberal might retort that Rousseau was not talking about people being literally born but of man's basic nature, as when Aristotle declared that all men by nature (physis, the process of being born and growing) strive to know or that man was born to live in a commonwealth. If this interpretation were true and Rousseau were correct about human nature, we should expect to find moral, social, and political liberty in the most natural, that is, the simplest and least-developed societies.
It is true that some misguided anthropologists have gone in search of freedom-loving savages, and at least one tribe, the "gentle Tasaday," was invented by an enterprising minister of tourism in the Philippines, but the brute fact is that the least developed peoples, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the forest-dwelling pygmies, and the Eskimos are precisely those that are most dependent on their family and tribe and least capable of even imagining what liberty, in any sense of the word, might mean. Long before states and governments were created, men and women were "enchained" by parents, patriarchs, and tribal elders. Apes and lesser mammals are even less capable of freedom: the only freedom a male chimpanzee enjoys is when he is expelled from his band and forced into an existence so wretched he cannot endure it.[i]
Although we know that the attainment of liberty and autonomy is consistent with something in our nature, there is nothing natural, much less easy about the condition of freedom. It is as artificial as haute cuisine and formal verse. Political liberty can only be achieved by people who enjoy social freedoms, such as the ability to marry, bear and rear legitimate children, and conduct business, with little interference from political authorities, and true social freedom is only possible for human beings who are morally free or at least strive to attain moral freedom. Many people are too mentally deficient, lazy, or corrupt to accept responsibility for themselves, and when they enter into marriage or a business deal, their unreliable character can lead to evil consequences that invite legal or political intervention.
This abstract description can be illustrated by the sort of people who, for example, are continually bringing children into the world and expecting their neighbors or the taxpayers to support them, who work for wages but are forever calling in sick or slacking off when the boss is not looking, who make big financial deals based on false promises that bankrupt their victims. The welfare mother has more in common with Bernie Madoff than is commonly realized.
But if liberty is like haute cuisine and formal poetry, that would suggest it is not entirely artificial. After all, we all like to eat, and much of what we like is determined by a natural appetite for what we need. The rhythms of poetry and music, while they are created within specific societies, appeal generally to our desire for order. In that sense, we might agree that man has a natural appetite for freedom and will even fight not to be enslaved by others, but this appetite can be expressed savagely by anarchist mobs on a looting spree or in a disciplined and purposeful construction of the institutions, the rule of law or constitutional order, that make it possible for us to be free. It is the difference between grubbing for roots and berries—or the bugs we find in a manure pile--and the elaborate skills and rituals required of civilized cooks and diners in France or China.
Liberty in the European sense is a gift of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had a fuller understanding of the concept. At the most basic level, they spoke and we continue to speak of being free from some constraining force. The slave becomes free when he no longer has to obey a master, the Greek cities of Ionia were free when the Persians were driven out. But the ancients also saw liberty in a more positive light. The truly free were not bound by material necessity to spend their time on menial tasks like digging in the dirt. If they were farmers, they owned enough property and slaves to be able to take part in the religious and political life of their community. Ideally, they would receive the education that enabled them to appreciate poetry, music, and even philosophy. These arts were called technai eleutherioi in Greek, which the Romans translated as artes liberales, the arts that a free man cultivated and in cultivating become truly free.
Freedom, so they believed, was not a natural condition. The natural man was a brutish savage, like the patriarchal Cyclopes described by Homer. They are huge and powerful but also arrogant cannibals. Odysseus, an intelligent Greek, easily disposes of Polyphemus, who has hospitably promised to eat him last. Both Plato and Aristotle use these fictional savages to illustrate the condition of natural men. They were a great deal wiser than the liberal philosophers who concocted the myth of the noble savage. Montaigne's "Essay on the Cannibals" inaugurated a lie that culminated in Rousseau's Essays on Equality and still finds echoes among the more naïve armchair anthropologists.
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Jacques Barzun wrote that Rousseau is better represented by the complete quote from "The Social Contract":
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. I will now endeavor to show why they [the chains] are legitimate."
According to Barzun, Rousseau wrote that the Noble Savage was "amoral," so I doubt Rousseau would look to his nature for guidance.
If Barzun is correct, a traditionalist might blame Rousseau's "The Emile" for progressive education, but not for the Noble Savage's superiority.
According to Barzun, Rousseau, when asked, advised Poland and Corsica to write their constitutions to suit their peoples' traditions, customs, and present needs. If only our Supreme Court Justices could reason like that.
First, I hope that we can all stick to the argument and not get lost in a maze of quibbles. Second, Mr. Barzun is a humane and intelligent man, who is, alas, also a liberal and rather too prone to defend the French, much as Belloc very foolishly not only defended but extolled Robespierre. Rousseau is a complex and intellectually confused character whose thought led him into advocating something like a totalitarian state, but, although he was brilliant at times, he was irrational, dissolute, and paranoiac. His insane advocacy of natural liberty and human rights is at the root of the Jacobin evil, and it is a complete waste of time to mount any defense of such a disgusting person and so evil a thinker.
PS Before reading Barzun, read Rousseau, and you will see what you are dealing with. I am not writing these pieces to deal in cliches out of the Catholic Encyclopedia or pop intellectual history. If I am wrong, it is because I have drawn erroneous conclusions from the original texts and not because I have been misled by an essayist.
" The natural man was a brutish savage, like the patriarchal Cyclopes described by Homer. They are huge and powerful but also arrogant cannibals. Odysseus, an intelligent Greek, easily disposes of Polyphemus, who has hospitably promised to eat him last. "
Polyphemos: ‘“Stranger, you are a simple fool, or come from far off, when you tell me to avoid the wrath of the gods or fear them. The Cyclopes do not concern themselves over Zeus of the aegis, nor any of the rest of the blessed gods, since we are far better than they […].”’ (9.273-287)
The Greeks, typically, take a sane view of the natural man. On the one hand, they are not attracted by savages and barbarians and do not tend to go native in a foreign land, while, on the other, they also understand that there is a common human underlying all the ethnic and cultural diversity. Herodotus was infinitely curious about other races--Persians, Egyptians, et al.--and he paid tribute to their virtues, but he nonetheless regarded the Hellenes as the best of mankind.
the only freedom a male chimpanzee enjoys is when he is expelled from his band and forced into an existence so wretched he cannot endure it.
In The Law,Bastiat recommended banishment rather than capital punishment because he thought that banishment would be worse, and of course he was opposed to capital punishment. At least that's the impression I got when I thumbed through my copy, found that passage, determined that I had wasted my money, and decided not to read it.
If banishment from one's native village, society, or country was such a heinous punishment, then if it was ever a common practice, I wonder why in the world the liberals of the 1600's would have come up with this stuff about being 'born free'. Someone's probably going to tell me that banishment was not very common at all, except for certain Athenian elites, who usually lived quite nicely in exile and then returned home when their exile ended.
Either way, the point is this: either Rosseau was not seeing something (or intentionally ignoring it, was bullheaded, didn't care, or just never thought of it, etc.) or else it was Bastiat who was not.
The liberals of the 17th century were obviously intelligent, educated men for the most part, but it's easy to see that there was some kind of step down from what had come before, and they were only about 300 years from the late middle ages. This is all relatively speaking, of course, since we have come a long way down since then, and they were giants by comparison to modern liberals. Even so, I wonder just what was at the root of this early decline. There had to be a philosophical root to it. Is this something that will be addressed, or is it too off topic?
This is all relatively speaking, of course, since we have come a long way down since then, and they were giants by comparison to modern liberals. Even so, I wonder just what was at the root of this early decline. There had to be a philosophical root to it.
The straight-line path of leftism in history is quite traceable, though many schemes ranging from partially-true to totally false have been proposed. Basically you have Renaissance Italians suddenly acquiring a fetishism for Greek paganism (Dr. Fleming, didn't you mention once that they got some of their ideas from traces of pagan idealization that survived in the Byzantine Empire?) that managed to seep into mainstream European society once the breach was made between Catholicism and Calvinism (it is no accident that the first Revolutions were generated from within those societies - England and France - that were on the cuff of the divide between the two).
But that leaves the question of why "individual liberty" or "individual empowerment" should have become the crying mantra of the movement. We know why Sade and Laclos wanted to weaken men and "liberate" young girls, sure. But not all the philosophes were sexual perverts (that we know of). What led to this notion? I don't know that I have the answer, but I'll take a guess...
Was it a longing for the religious toleration known in the Roman Empire? But "religious freedom" in Rome was not by a longshot anything similar to what we see in modern, secular civic spheres, and the way we in the West are inclined to think of "religious adherence" today is something that really only applies to Christian sects and to a lesser extent to Islam, and to a MUCH, much lesser extent, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
So perhaps the ex-Christian champions of liberty simply weren't able to throw off their "confessionalist" notions of cults, and these lingering notions combined with their longing for "tolerant" Rome led to the sort of indifferent pluriconfessional arrangement we have worked out today. (Am I on the right track?)
But then this leads to the question of why leftism should have ended up working toward liberty from everything and anything, i.e., the general dissolution of society and social ties at all levels. Is that the libertines' addition? And if so, how did it become so perfectly fused, as it is today, with the notion of "religious liberty" championed by the classic liberals?
But then this leads to the question of why leftism should have ended up working toward liberty from everything and anything, i.e., the general dissolution of society and social ties at all levels. Is that the libertines' addition? And if so, how did it become so perfectly fused, as it is today, with the notion of "religious liberty" championed by the classic liberals?
I would venture to guess that, since religion governs morality, the idea of 'religious liberty' would inevitably, whether the originators intended it or not, work itself out as an idea of moral liberty as well, which may not necessarily lead to the advocation of total licentiousness, but sure does help to point the unscrupulous in that direction. It may be that once the thing got in motion it was all inevitable, and if Rousseau and de Sade had not taken up the mantle, then some other depraved individuals would have.
That's the problem with coming up with big ideas. Conceive one, and some fool or dirtbag will grab it and run with it, sometimes trampling the helpless, and sometimes right off a cliff.
That brings us full circle. There seems to have been a lot more lack of foresight, philosophical and ethical myopia, hidden or not so hidden immoral agendas, and just plain foolishness in the intellectual ferment that began in earnest in the 17th century than in any previous time since perhaps the period of the early Christian heresies.
As an aside, the fascinating figure of Plethon came to mind when you mentioned the Byzantines. Also, if that was at least partly the source, then they certainly have gotten their revenge for 1204. Montezuma turns out to have been only a minor player in that art.
Let us save the tale of what I call "the conspiracy of conspiracies" until another day. When Cosimo heard what Plethon had to teach, he was a receptive audience and commissioned the young Ficino to master the subject. Obviously, there were elements in the ruling class, and not just in Florence, who were eager to get out from under the burdens of the Church and find eternal bliss by going through the back door. Parallel to the Byzantine underground tradition of paganism, we can see centers in West: Muslim Spain, Muslim and Jewish influenced Palermo, as well as the magical and alchemical traditions. When the liberated pagan Frederick II held court in Palermo, he and his cabalistic Jews and magical Muslims were joined by none other than the great Scottish magician Michael Scott. But this is a very long and complicated story and hardly relevant here.
What is relevant to note is that the Renaissance, for all the positive things that were done, is essentially a rebellion and not just against the Church but against Christianity. The goal in art, literature, and philosophy was to replace man made in the image of God with man made for man, each one an individual in his own right, with a capacity for infinite perfectibility, whether through Neoplatonic magic, as was the case with Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and their disciples, or, as later, through mathematics and science combined with magic, as with Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. The liberation project, as we might call it, has had a series of ever-changing goals, but the overall objective has always been what Voltaire described as wiping out the consubstantial. None of this has much to do with real paganism or real Platonism of the type taught not only by the master himself but also by Plotinus and Porphyry.
PS There is a curious tradition that Florence was plagued, in the later Middle Ages, by Epicureans, by which they must have been hedonists who were indifferent to religion. A lynching occurred at a streetcorner--Croce di Trebbia--where there is an historical marker. Dante accuses Farinata the Ghibelline of having been an Epicurean and locates him in Hell with his philosophical fellows. I have no idea of what truth there is in any of these accounts, but it is enough to indicate that there was in Florenfe a strong party yearning to breathe free.
None of this has much to do with real paganism or real Platonism of the type taught not only by the master himself but also by Plotinus and Porphyry.
Well, most or all "neo-Pagan" or "neo-Platonic" movements have little connection with actual pre-Christian Indo-European folk religious ritual apart from a bit of romantic fetishism and the fact of being non-Christian. (The funniest examples, which admittedly have little to do with the subject at hand but are too good not to mention, are the silly pseudo-Celtic "Druid" costumes of the "Wiccans." The neologism for this, as we know, is "fakelore.") But real Roman Pagans had families and notions of respect for social order, even if they did not yet understand the Theological Virtues. And that leads me to my question...
The liberation project, as we might call it, has had a series of ever-changing goals, but the overall objective has always been what Voltaire described as wiping out the consubstantial.
Did the first revolutionaries, these Renaissance neo-pagans, inadvertently create a line of thought that would culminate in the destruction of any sort of order, or did they, like Voltaire, Sade and Sartre after them, know what they were doing/living when they created a sort of "liberty" that amounted to utter hedonistic isolation?
I have no idea of what truth there is in any of these accounts, but it is enough to indicate that there was in Florenfe a strong party yearning to breathe free.
Within the general populations of nations, do you think that the poison of leftism spreads more by preying on natural desires for freedom and justice and directing them toward a false solution, or by tapping into a naturally perverse and childish desire to have everything one's own way? In the upper echelons of societies we can see examples of both, but I wouldn't feel qualified to say which one dominates (though I would guess the latter). Or for the bulk of common men, is it just a matter of having been lied to and buying into a lie?
"Within the general populations of nations, do you think that the poison of leftism spreads more by preying on natural desires for freedom and justice and directing them toward a false solution, or by tapping into a naturally perverse and childish desire to have everything one's own way? In the upper echelons of societies we can see examples of both, but I wouldn't feel qualified to say which one dominates (though I would guess the latter). Or for the bulk of common men, is it just a matter of having been lied to and buying into a lie?"
(-end quote)
Yes, in the West, which is young they can't hold for example Heraclitus' opposites in consciousness at the same time. So they must believe, This, or, That. Plus usually their overlords, can't parse that either. So from a position of social superiority, i.e. the bird's eye view, they take advantage of This or That. That is life in the West presently. Enjoy, it; the Orient, for example is worse, even though an older culture. There's no answers. Life itself is the riddle. We only have to ask the right question each step of the way. You did, congratulations, I hope you're satisfied for the moment. Gear up, and ask the next one? (Here's mine, don't take it personally, you probably won't, - getting laid enough? If so, good, if not, go for it)
Mr. Yurick, you might be interested in the Ifop study from last March, in my country, which examined people's frequentations vis-à-vis the opposite sex in terms of political and religious attitudes and habits. The results (particularly with respect to the correlation of such frequentations to religious belief and practice) might surprise some people, and a cynic might quip that "liberty is overrated." On reflection, the truth is that, while it is never desirable to completely repress all of one's urges, just as a faucet is useless if jammed with putty, a life without a reasonable amount of rules and restraints is like a faucet without a spigot: incapable of anything beautiful or graceful, unable to get anything accomplished. Burke, whatever his shortcomings as a philosopher and historiographer, was at least a man of wholesome instinct, one who perceived there must be some difference between liberty and libertinism. This shows in his writings. And I, whatever my shortcomings as a Christian, like to think I at least aim to respect that difference in my personal life.
And that's all the answer you're going to get to a wrongly-posed question.
Dr. Fleming writes: "too prone to defend the French, much as Belloc very foolishly not only defended but extolled Robespierre."
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.' Hilaire Belloc
I think today if the great man were living, he would not care if his books were read or not given the audience.
Always a great fan of Belloc, I read him frequently. We all make foolish mistakes, myself far more often than Belloc, but then we are human. Mistakes are particularly forgivable when they arise from a good impulse, such as love of kith and kin. Belloc and Barzun were/are French and loyal to their nation.
Always a great fan of yours too Dr. Fleming, and meant only that the one thing Belloc asserted in his voluminous writings that Americans could agree with and is taught in every history dept. in the United States, " Republics and Democracy are a bloody business, but they are always worth it" is of course the one thing you find objectionable. I agree with you but who cares about such costs these days.
Always a great fan of yours too Dr. Fleming, and meant only that the one thing Belloc asserted in his voluminous writings that Americans could agree with and is taught in every history dept. in the United States, "Republics and Democracy are a bloody business, but they are always worth it" is of course the one thing you find objectionable. I agree with you but who cares about such costs these days.
It is difficult to really grasp the degree to which this mantra pervades American history departments until one has actually sat a University-level class on American history. When liberty, a fine thing, is presented as something of substance on which to construct a society and not merely a means to an end, we have a problem, and this problem is closely related to the critical question that no one ever seems to ask when he champions freedom: Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Are we free only to write songs and stories about "liberty," only to make art about "liberty"? To build a family centered around the value of "liberty"?
American history textbooks are by and large insufferable in this respect. I remember an AP-level book called "The American Experiment." How insulting is that? Would any other people on Earth stand for their country being called an "experiment?" Why do we? What are we, lab rats?
This may be one reason why right-thinking Americans are too easily turned off by the U.S. and tempted to search elsewhere: indeed, no one (at least no one who is in a position to get the word out) these days has seemed to care enough to produce a viable and readily-available counter-narrative that sufficiently appropriates the 2100-some years of history that preceded the permanent appearance of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere, a history that is as rightfully our own as much as it is Britain's, France's, Spain's, Germany's and Italy's.
And if we want to know why the U.S. and increasingly France are being subsumed into the Third World, then let us forget for a moment about immigration, fecundity and effeminacy and look at the way history is taught in those countries, because the history of something amounts to the thing itself, and the guardians of American and French history can no longer remember the story of real peoples. All that matters now is the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1905 Law and Lawrence v. Texas. These, and not real men, real heroes, real events, are the pillars of history as it is taught in American and French classrooms. They are not solid materials on which to build a society. The Mexicans, Arabs and Southeast Asians who can remember real stories (true or imagined) are the ones who will inherit the future.
At the same time, as Dr. Fleming observes, Liberty in the European sense is a gift of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and as such the creation of the concept and the men who created it are a part of our cultural patrimony to be discovered, rediscovered, celebrated and built upon. Nevertheless, the libertocentric narrative of American history HAS to go. It is significant that in a discussion of American conservatism Dr. Fleming has taken several posts before treating the subject of liberty. If only we could have more of that, in every discussion about America.
Nick,
John Lukacs once dismantled one of Gary Will's monotonous rants about "new ideas having finally arrived always and everywhere in the 20th century." I think the name of it is Bare Ruined Choirs. Of course Wills is still trotted out of the stable to this very day when the New York Times Review of Books needs a Catholic to commit suicide in public. Even last week I saw where Gary Wills was still reviewing Catholic books for the New York Times just like Chris Mathews reviews catholic politics for the "working class ." I have lived all of my life in anti-catholic territory where only 2% of the population is Cathoic. Yet, I would rather have a bible thumping baptist or a notorious bandit as a neighbor than the likes of these apostates speaking ignorantly about what they do not know and never attempted to practice.
It is not a coincidence. There have always been heretics who could slip under the nose of the anathemas and inject their poison into well-meaning faithful. In these last five decades, however, dissent has become a tolerable thing, because if man has a "right" to determine his own religious beliefs, as Dignitatis Humanae suggests, then logically he should also have the right to fashion for himself a Catholicism shorn of essential doctrinal and moral teachings of... Catholic magisterium. Why not?
Religious liberty! Such a wonderful thing.
Liberty in religous matters is a very complicated subject and really far afield from the cultural aspects and consequences of its application. In one sense we all execise religious liberty in the context of knowing, serving and loving our God. Or as today, remaining in the more ferral and fallen state of ignorance, hate and discontent. Authority is what has been lost,not liberty. Some say the scripture is the authority , others the tradition, still othersboth scripture and tradition. Or for a shorter version, what Christians have always taught and believed. One thing is for certain, the idea of shoving a particular sect or cult down the throats of individuals of a particular culture against their will has never been a part of Christian teaching. Its practice is lied about and exaggerated in our anti-christian culture but there is very little truth to the assertion in fact or even in semi-honest history. This idea remains very popular among the pagans , neo-pagans and secularists who are now in chargeof what Dr. Wilson has referred to as the silenced majority. But their purpose is to destroy, belittle and ultimately eliminate the divine order of things from the hearts and minds of men. In this they will not be completely and totally successful as not even the gates of hell can prevail to eliminate it,although there is little evidence as to what level of insignificance it might be reduced. The only thing I would remind my Protestant friends is that they are far ahead of the Catholic apostates in the essentials of redemption and should never abandon the sacrament of baptism and marriage in favor of the now popular serial polygamy practiced by most Catholics in America.
I'm looser, sometimes it's strength, (under God). Flexibility, faith...but I hear you.