A rose is a rose is a rose,” Gertrude Stein said famously. In other words, some things are what they are, self-evidently so, and easily described. But that is not true of everything. We cannot simply say that “freedom is freedom is freedom” and hope to capture what freedom is. In America today, as throughout history, there are profound disagreements over what freedom is and how it is to be won. Like the road to hell, many a road to serfdom is paved with good intentions. They are shining shortcuts thought to be easy steps to liberty until they aren’t.
There is a subtlety and complexity to freedom. If we are not to be seduced by its slogans, stay content with clichés, or be deceived by propaganda, we must explore its riddles. Only experience and history will demonstrate which view of freedom is realistic and genuinely delivers. Freedom talk is not enough, and freedom protests may lead in the wrong direction. We live in an entitlement society, but no one can claim a right to be free without effort or responsibility. Freedom needs to be won, worked at, and sustained, and for that to happen, it needs to be understood. We always need to ask questions of freedom, to see whether it has become ungrounded or whether it has been subtly distorted so that it is leading to slavery, not freedom. Question Three therefore raises a foundational question: What do Americans now mean by freedom?
The essence of human freedom can be stated simply: Freedom is the capacity to exercise the will without interference or restraint as the genuine expression of who you are. Or more simply, freedom is the ability to decide what you want to choose and do what you want to do. Or more simply still, freedom is the absence of coercion. Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, defined freedom as “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.”1 Friedrich Hayek, the British-Austrian economist, wrote similarly that freedom describes “the absence of a particular obstacle—coercion by other men.”2 Rabbi Jonathan Sacks defines freedom as “the ability to choose between alternatives and to act in accordance with one’s choices.”3
“Self-determination,” “the power to do the duty that you yourself determine,” “acting in accordance with one’s choices,” “the absence of coercion.” Such definitions sound straightforward. And at least they help to identify certain foundational assumptions that underlie freedom. Most people, though not all, can agree on them. But in fact they raise a host of questions that we will need to explore.
First, freedom is a matter of the human will. Free people, we say, are those who act “of their own volition.” They “vouch for themselves” in their choices and determine what they will say and do with no coercion, external manipulation, or undue outside influence to sway what they choose. Needless to say, this assertion of freedom stands squarely against all ancient and modern forms of determinism, whether we humans are said to be determined by the stars, as the Babylonians calculated; by fate, as the Greeks held; by social and economic forces, as Karl Marx believed; by psychological forces, as Sigmund Freud claimed; by our instincts and our genes, as many philosophers and scientists now say; or by algorithms, as many futurists now claim. At some later point we must also answer how we can justify the claim that genuine freedom exists, because there are major thinkers today, such as the new atheists, who deny that human freedom is real, and there are others who have given up on the task of justifying it. But for the moment it is enough to state that the human will is essential to freedom. If the will is not decisively free, regardless of the influences that may bear on it, it makes no sense to talk of human freedom and free societies. Human freedom requires some genuine freedom of the will.
Second, freedom entails the idea of commitment making and keeping a promise. The free person acts into time, and therefore into the future, and thus into history. When any of us makes a simple statement such as “I’ll be there,” or “See you tomorrow,” we are not only expressing our will and stating an intention, but making a promise to the future. If we then go on to keep the promise, and we say or do whatever we have said we would say or do, we have kept the promise to ourselves and to the future. In that sense we have been predictable and proved trustworthy. Such promise making not only expresses the free person’s freedom but establishes a chosen obligation and helps to build social order. By acting true to our stated intentions, we live true to ourselves, fulfill our obligations, become predictable to others, and therefore prove trustworthy. Our behavior is not random, but in line with what we determined and what we said. It is predictable, in the sense that other people can calculate the outcome from our stated intentions. They can count on what we said.
Just so, trust in any society is built as free people make promises and keep their promises—whether in small and insignificant actions or in all-important commitments, such as marriage and public office. That is a key part of the trust that comprises social capital and makes a good society. Through our words, we make and keep promises to each other. And through making and keeping promises to each other, we build the trust that acts like a social glue and makes our communities peaceful, orderly, and gracious. Or conversely, we don’t keep our promises or are taught that promises don’t matter—and trust breaks down. Promise keeping is therefore vital because suspicion, rumors, deceptions (“fake news”), and behavior such as promiscuousness all undermine trust. And when trust is betrayed, it removes the insulation against feelings of insecurity and injustice, which in turn leads to grievance, anger, and social conflict.
Writing as an atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche underscored the point that human freedom is a matter of promise making. In his essay On the Genealogy of Morals in 1887, he argues that the “free man” or the “sovereign man” is the person with an enduring and indestructible will who is entitled to make promises because he has the power to keep them. At the heart of nature itself is the task of “breeding of an animal which is entitled to make promises.” Such a promise is “an ongoing willing of what was once willed.”4 He quickly added that this task is “paradoxical,” because humans make promises, but do not go on to keep them. Instead, they are prone to deliberate, intentional, and “active forgetfulness,” by which they can excuse their failure to be true to their word.5
This human inability to keep promises and be true to our word is the chronic problem that dogs the politics of freedom as well as the course of love, marriage, relationships, and free societies in general, including America. The highest form of promise making is a covenant, and even covenants are routinely broken. But the central point stands and becomes clearer still: Freedom entails promise making and promise keeping as the key to good and lasting human relationships and healthy societies. When we say that trust has broken down in America, we are saying that Americans at many levels are no longer keeping the promises that they make as free people. Post-truth America has become a land strewn with broken and betrayed promises. Indeed, post-truth Americans, from their leaders down, are becoming the personification of the unbound and unaccountable. Increasingly, there are no binding ties, only egos, interests, and hookups, and along with trust, freedom is the loser.
Third, freedom includes the notion of human responsibility. Freedom means deciding between choices and acting on our choices. Each choice could have been otherwise if we had not chosen as we did. Freedom therefore means shouldering responsibility for the choices we have made. No child, slave, or robot is free in this way. Citizenship is an adult task. A free people who will to choose freely are answerable for themselves, for their actions, and for the consequences of their actions. Indeed, the person who makes a promise becomes a debtor in relationship to other people, and those to whom the promise is made become the creditor. Only when the promise is kept is the debt discharged. Responsibility therefore means ensuring fulfillment, and through such responsibility trust is maintained and social capital built.
The responsibility that is at the heart of freedom has two companion responsibilities that are also crucial: the self-restraint that in exercising its own freedom respects the equal freedom of others, and the self-governance that in living rightly makes external compulsion unnecessary. In Lord Moulton’s magnificent description, responsible freedom is “obedience to the unenforceable.” Naturally, such responsible freedom does not come easily, and to be realistic the self-restraint freedom requires usually restrains only those who choose to be conscientious and desire to be free. And even then it requires effort, practice, and discipline: Nietzsche’s “long obedience in the same direction” and Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart.”
Such freedom is challenging and always consequential. It is a matter of gritty realism rather than idealism. Freedom does not mean that because we are free, we can elect to be responsible if we choose to be—as if responsibility were a higher level add-on for the virtuous. Responsibility, rather, is the soul of freedom. Freedom means that precisely because we are free we are responsible whether we like it or not. Conversely, we would cease to be free if we were not responsible. When we exercise our will to make our own choices and make our promises to the future, we are responsible for the consequences that follow. Some will be intended and some unintended, but freedom means that free people shoulder that responsibility as part and parcel of what it means to be free. Their word is their bond until they have fulfilled what they said.
In an age obsessed with entitlement and rights, the responsibility and duties at the heart of freedom often gets selective attention. Take the difference in attitudes toward responsibility in smoking or sex. The former touches on the issue of responsibility for death, and the latter on responsibility for life. With smoking, responsibility has now been widened to cover “thirdhand smoking”—the residual tobacco smoke that remains after a cigarette has been extinguished and the smoker has gone, a cocktail of toxins that can be as deadly as the original smoke itself. But with sex, it is held that initial “consent” is all that matters, and there is no further responsibility. Consensual sex is considered consequence free, so that, in contrast to smoking, all “third-party outcomes” are irrelevant—whether a sexually transmitted disease, an abortion, an unwanted child, a fatherless family, a family condemned to poverty, a young person with a future crisis of identity, or a community saddled with a social crisis. As I write, a star athlete is known for having more than a dozen children by nearly as many women. Does such behavior demonstrate America’s enhanced degree of liberty and virility, or does it represent America’s serious deficit in personal and social responsibility for life?
In sum, freedom and responsibility are inseparable and at the heart of growing into adult life and citizenship. Thus, where there is no desire to lead a responsible life, as with an endlessly delayed adolescence, or where there is no ability to do so, as with an excessive external control, there is no freedom. Free societies are responsible societies with citizens who are ready, willing, and able to assume personal responsibility. True freedom means that free people make choices, consequential choices, and whatever the unforeseen consequences or unexpected aftermaths, there is no shrugging off the fact that they acted freely and are responsible for the outcomes.
Fourth, freedom is a matter of power. In that sense it can be said that freedom empowers, just as power frees. If power is defined as the capacity to exert the will despite resistance, then power is essential to freedom. When people forget the place of power in freedom, they obscure the fact that many of the problems and pitfalls surrounding freedom grow from the confusion of freedom with power. But when power itself is mistaken for freedom, as if freedom were no more than power, as in postmodern philosophies that are the heirs of 1789, the result can be deadly. Freedom assumes and requires power, but to become free and to stay free requires much more than power.
That is where the poisonous seeds of Nietzsche’s view of freedom lie. He insists that our human “instinct of freedom” is nothing more than the “will to power.” “Why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings?”6 Alinsky concurs with Nietzsche, “Power is the right word.”7 In their view, freedom and power are one. But as we watch the endgame unfold, one thing will become ever clearer: freedom that is only power will always be corrupted, for power not only oppresses the weak, it corrupts the powerful themselves. Power without principle is a toxic corrosive. Unprincipled power inequalities, whether they play out in harassment issues, financial manipulation, or political corruption, are always lethal for freedom.
Today’s talk of a post-truth world should sound an alarm, for it is a world of power alone. A post-truth American republic will prove to be a contradiction in terms. It cannot long endure, for a free society without truth is a society that is literally out of its mind. Post-truth thinking and speaking destroy human freedom, article by article, press release by press release, op-ed piece by op-ed piece, attacking it sentence by sentence and tearing the meaning out of the words themselves. Deprived of truth, the American faculty for freedom will be bred out of the American character. Full-blown, the post-truth world creates the conditions for what Augustine of Hippo called the “lust to dominate,” which itself becomes “dominated by its passion for domination.” Poisoned in this way, post-truth “freedom” will always end in bullying and bondage, enslaving others and in the process enslaving itself and hastening its own self-destruction.8 No one should be deceived by the silken rhetoric that conceals the iron fist. Saul Alinsky praised Lenin for his pragmatism: “He said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot, but would reconsider after they got the guns!”9
Genuine liberal debate is a win-win proposition that relies on truth and not simply power. It is a quintessential expression of true liberalism. Freedom-loving liberal argument respects the dignity of the opponent, strives for truth as the outcome, and relies always on rational persuasion, not coercion. When a true liberal debater honors these principles, and then prevails in argument and establishes the truth, everyone is a winner. Even a person shown that they were wrong now knows what is right and has been led to understand it with respect. In that sense, they are freer too, even if defeated in argument.
Post-truth discourse, in contrast, is a lose-lose proposition because its sole consideration is power. With its insults, abuse, venomous ad hominem attacks, its refusal to compromise, and its fight to the death for victory at all costs, post-truth argument is not about truth at all. It is about power and winning, and as such it comes from the same post-truth stable and has the same goal as fake news. Even when power-based arguments win, their victories are pyrrhic because everyone loses. The attackers may degrade their opponents, but in the process they degrade themselves and diminish the republic and the cause of true liberalism. Nothing could be closer to the logic of 1789 and its notions of power, and nothing further from the “better angels” of the freedom of 1776 and its roots in the dignity of the person, the priority of truth, and the importance of persuasion.
Fifth, freedom is not only a matter of choice but of having genuine options from which to choose. The highwayman’s classic cry, “Your money or your life!” represents a definite choice, stark though it is. But it is not exactly the choice that freedom-loving travelers would like to choose from—above all they desire to keep both their money and their lives. The advance of radical Islamism at the point of the sword is similar (“Submission to Allah or death!”). Not far off are the dictatorial demands of the new “antidiscrimination” regulators (“Endorse the sexual revolution’s values or lose your livelihood!”—violations of conscience that a judge in New Mexico appallingly described as “the price of citizenship”).10 The choices offered by a consumer society are similarly deceptive. They may appear to be freedom’s cornucopia of plenty. But when all that consumerism offers us is too much to live with and too little to live for, it actually steals from us the choice of a good life that is anything more than a life with goods.
On the other hand, there are phantom freedoms dangled before our eyes that are deceptive because they are neither realistic nor feasible. As with the judgment of Tantalus, their promised delights are always just beyond reach. Various offers of freedom today defy reality. For the announcement has gone out that through the advances of science, technology, marketing, politics, and surgery, we are assured that infinite openness, boundless opportunity, and innovation without end are now possible for all, especially for the wealthy and the famous for whom such products are the perks of their purchasing power. “So be whoever and whatever you wish to be.” Everything, including your identity, can now be self-chosen, subjective and shifting according to your age, the size of your wallet, and your preferences—and here to help you are the goods, the life experiences, and the identity fashion kits to make your dreams possible.
The plain truth is that freedom is always limited by reality, but properly understood, that limitation is in fact what supports freedom and separates it from chaos. As the French philosopher Helvetius commented, “It is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or to swim like a whale.” Humans are not eagles or whales, so the path to freedom requires an understanding of reality and truth. Freedom requires a designed end and purpose (or telos), freedom requires a framework, and freedom requires a way of life that fits genuine human freedom. Without these essentials, the lure of phantom freedom will turn out to be a mirage and a prelude to disaster, as Icarus discovered.
Sixth, freedom itself is not an end but a means to a goal. To achieve freedom may be a passionate goal, as when a prisoner plans to escape his bars, an alcoholic works to recover from his addiction, or a nation conspires to throw off an oppressor. But the freedom won is still only a means to an end. As we shall see, freedom from has to lead to freedom for. As such, freedom from provides the power that can be directed toward some goal other than freedom itself. The released prisoner, the recovered alcoholic, and the newly liberated people are now free to use their new freedom on behalf of any goals in life they desire. But freedom is only the means, and each individual and each nation must answer for themselves as to what they are using freedom for, and whether they are using it well.
Seventh, freedom has a social and collective dimension. It is not purely individual. Any community or country requires at least three essentials if it is to achieve freedom for everyone, not just the few. It requires foundations, in the sense of the philosophical and ethical underpinnings that can ground freedom as genuine and secure. Only solid foundations can help freedom avoid the charge that freedom is really a fiction and that the human will is in fact subject to fate or determining forces. Next, freedom requires personal self-restraint, in the sense that unrestrained individual freedom tends to undermine itself by running to excess. And, last, freedom requires that individuals know how to respect the equal freedom of all others. Only if each individual respects the equal freedom of all the others can wider society become free, peaceful, orderly, and stable, and so reach the goal that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call the well-being of shalom and the Enlightenment called “human flourishing.”
It is precisely because freedom is so human—and so desirable, so consequential, and so easily squandered—that we must always clarify what we mean by freedom. There will always be unintended and unforeseen consequences from even our best choices. We are human and we are finite, so we will never know exactly how our decisions will turn out. But for those foolish enough not to reflect on the meaning of freedom, the ratio of bad choices and consequences to good choices and consequences will demonstrate the measure of their folly.
Many people would agree with most of the seven points outlined previously. Postmodernists, however, see freedom very differently. They reject truth and equate freedom with power. But a far greater range of differences emerge when we raise some of the basic questions surrounding freedom and what we mean by freedom in practice. Consider some of the most common confusions surrounding freedom. Everyone who loves freedom must be clear where they stand on such issues, and they must be realistic about the consequences that are foreseeable.
The point is not that if we think about freedom, we will all end in agreement. We won’t—however noble and well intentioned we may be. Nor is the point that if we think clearly, we will come to a common mind. It is rather that we all need to make our decisions about freedom in light of where those different choices are likely to lead—and likely to lead us not just as individuals but as families, as communities, as societies, as nations, and now even as we lead our world and decide our human future. Living with our deepest differences means that we must acknowledge and negotiate different ways of seeing freedom.
This book sets out ten major questions to consider in exploring freedom. The list is not exhaustive, and not all the questions are of equal importance. But they demonstrate what needs to be thought through if Americans are to attain a realistic view of freedom, and to know what choices they must make today and what responsibilities they must shoulder if freedom is to flourish. Some of the issues can be expressed briefly, and some will take longer, just as some answers will be simple, some more complicated, and some highly controversial. In almost all cases the differences between 1776 and 1789 will become significant and consequential.
Readers of some of my earlier books, such as A Free People’s Suicide and The Global Public Square, will hear some themes and arguments repeated, but with a different thrust and new material. The first of those two books discussed the importance of sustainable freedom to the American experiment. But that issue is abstract for many Americans. This book goes deeper and raises the foundational question that is being raised by current controversies: What is freedom? And which of today’s two rival views, 1776 or 1789, has the better answer to that question, and one that will allow the American republic to survive and flourish?
Our discussion will highlight the inadequacies of a purely linear argument, for freedom and the tasks of living a good life and creating a free society are best understood as America’s living story rather than an abstract system of thought. Thinking through the choices surrounding American freedom today is rather like a game of chutes and ladders. Some choices represent ladders that lead to great leaps forward, others to setbacks and falls, but there is no standing still.
The difference, of course, is that the game depends on chance and the roll of the dice, which is the antithesis of freedom. America’s great experiment, in contrast, depends on the human will or, rather, on more than three hundred million human wills and their combined choices and the combined consequences of all those choices in the present generation. Only so is the great experiment handed down from generation to generation for each generation of Americans to engage and to play their part in their turn.
In clarifying what we mean by freedom, Americans must first be clear as to whether they are speaking of national freedom or political freedom. National freedom refers to the capacity a nation has to exert its will in relation to other nations and to the rest of the world, whereas political freedom refers to the degree of freedom that citizens enjoy within the nation. The difference is important. In the fifth century BC, for example, the democratic citizens of Athens proudly considered themselves to be “the school of Hellas” and the paragons of political freedom. And by contrast with the rest of the world and with most humans who had gone before them, they were. Their freedom was remarkable, and they prized it in a manner that preceded the ideals of John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and nineteenth-century liberalism by more than two thousand years. In the famous words of Pericles’s “Funeral Oration” at the outset of the Peloponnesian War,
The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called up to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, even though they inflict no positive penalty.11
Live as you please and do what you like, so long as you do no harm to others. Few libertarians could say it better today. Liberal freedom was personal freedom.
Yet that was political freedom, and remarkable as it was for its time, it was limited and in that sense inconsistent. In sharp contrast to the Jewish covenant at Sinai that included everybody, even the unborn, Athenian democracy included the small percentage of free men who made up the Athenian Assembly. But it did not include the rest of the men, and it certainly did not include the women of Athens, the children, the foreign visitors, and the slaves, and it had nothing to do with the way Athens ran its international affairs. Athens did not behave abroad as it claimed to behave at home—as the tiny island of Melos discovered to its cost when it tried to stay neutral in the Peloponnesian War. Facing the Athenian ultimatum of slavery or death in 415 BC, the Melians appealed to Athenian honor and to their status as neutrals between Athens and Sparta. But they were brushed aside with brutal cynicism. Athens would not bother to justify its invasion by making specious claims that both sides knew were hollow. The blunt fact was that “you know as well as we do that the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”12
Were the Athenians innovators in this brutal expression of unblushing realpolitik? Far from it.
Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made; we found it existing before us, and we shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is make use of it. Knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.13
But freedom for the Athenians went hand in hand with slaughter for the islanders when they stood in the way of the Athenian war machine. Empires and freedom sit together uncomfortably, and nowhere more than when the assertion of freedom becomes another name for the reckless exercise of power.
Like many earlier and later empires, such as the European empires or the de facto empire of superpower America, the very people who congratulate themselves on their freedom at home, and for fighting for freedom abroad, can easily become oppressors overseas or be perceived as such by their victims. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, and other European nations need only think of their colonialism and its multiple stains. Americans must face not only such horrific incidents as My Lai in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but the strategic folly, the historic aftermath, and the appalling death toll of the bungled invasion of Iraq and the meddling in Libya. When the well-intentioned goal of exporting democracy is based on military might and not on a realistic understanding of freedom, it becomes a sure road to disaster and a vulnerability to the charge of hypocrisy. Sadly, America no longer means freedom to much of the world. Such a lack of realism and consistency will always breed immense cultural and political problems, as today’s Middle East illustrates clearly. But the same weakness commonly recurs in many views of freedom, when two things are lacking.
For a start, such an inconsistent view of freedom hurts others because it lacks the principle of reciprocity that genuine freedom requires if freedom is to walk hand in hand with justice. The Golden Rule applies to freedom. There is no claim to freedom for anyone anywhere that is not at once a claim to freedom for everyone everywhere. Such consistency is of course easier said than done. The hardest thing is to be free in such a way that one person’s freedom does not restrict another person’s freedom and vice versa—which is where the practical challenges start and things get complicated.
Winston Churchill, for example, was often criticized for his passionate and simultaneous defense of both liberty and empire, as if they were entirely contradictory. Yet part of his defense of empire was on behalf of liberty. He gave a stout defense of India’s sixty million “untouchables,” and could not stand the hypocrisy of the upper-caste Brahmins of his time. At one and the same time, he declared, they took part in elevated Oxbridge discussions of John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher of freedom, and then showed complete indifference to the suffering and even the existence of their fellow Indians, the Dalits, or “untouchables.”
Churchill’s inconsistency pales into insignificance beside the inconsistency of the American founders. They trumpeted freedom before the world and declared freedom for themselves, only to deny it to their slaves. It was the inconsistency of this very evil that grew into the rank hypocrisy that triggered the sixties’ revulsion against 1776 and the swing to 1789. Consistency over freedom can be difficult, but debates about it should be candid, and both the charges and the responses should humble. If Americans must never forget the fatal contradiction over slavery that betrayed the promise of the American founding, Christians must never forget the evils of the church’s blatant denials of freedom down the centuries.
Such American and Christian hypocrisies have had a profound impact on history, and neither will be lived down easily. But there are many other examples of blind spots today. For example, why do many Muslims welcome the right to convert to Islam but justify killing a person for apostasy—in other words, deny someone the reversible and reciprocal right to convert from Islam? Or again, why do many advocates for the sexual revolution emphasize freedom of choice and demand full legal protection for those who freely choose an alternative lifestyle, but insist that counseling for those who freely choose to change from the alternative lifestyle should be made illegal? Or again, why did the determinedly liberal and anticolonial Obama administration forcibly impose its sexual agendas on cultures around the world in a manner that was experienced by many countries as a new “cultural colonialism”?
Such inconsistencies are impossible to miss, and they are unacceptable to anyone who cares for a consistent freedom that also serves justice for all. Those who insist on their own freedom at the expense of the freedom of others may be powerful enough to press their demands regardless of the freedom of others, but they should be under no illusions: Their insistence is an abuse of the power that is implicit in their freedom. In overriding the freedom of others they are contradicting the genuine freedom they claim to promote. As George Orwell wrote, “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”14
There is also a further problem. Inconsistent views of freedom not only oppress others, they eventually corrupt the free themselves. By ignoring the power factor in freedom, the powerful create a fatal blind spot that distorts and damages the possibility of achieving lasting freedom for themselves. By definition, power is essential to freedom, for without power freedom could not exert its will. But unbridled freedom, or freedom that is stripped down to power alone, is dangerous because it is no longer restrained by justice, mercy, and a consideration for others—in a word, by principle. Under the guise of freedom, such power may oppress the powerless, but the less obvious, though equally great danger is that such power will corrupt the powerful themselves—the chronic curse of empires, whether political, religious, or commercial, and the chronic curse of ideologies in the post-truth age when power is the only consideration.
Lord Acton’s maxim is famous. “Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”15 It was written in response to someone who had defended the Borgia popes as being above the judgment of other humans. The unrestrained power of the free is one of the greatest enemies of freedom. This stark truth forms half of one of the most precious truths offered by Jews to the world: “Freedom abused sours life, whereas suffering shared sweetens hardship.”
Andrew Schmookler has captured the enduring dilemma of unprincipled power in his “parable of the tribes.” What will happen if a group of tribes live close to each other, and all but one are committed to peaceful coexistence? One is willing to use force and violence to pursue its ends. There are only so many options for the peaceful tribes facing the violent tribe—destruction, submission, flight, or imitation—a peace-loving tribe takes to powermongering too to defend itself. The last option enables the peaceful tribe to survive, but at a price. It survives only by becoming more like the violent enemy it seeks to resist. Schmookler’s lesson is one that should be branded indelibly on the hearts and minds of Americans now espousing a post-truth postmodernism that glories in realpolitik and power. “In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system.”16
The reason why this happens underscores Lord Acton’s maxim perfectly. Schmookler argues it’s because “power is like a contaminant, a disease, which once introduced will gradually but inexorably become universal in the system of competing societies.”17 To be sure, most ordinary Americans do not knowingly subscribe to the truth-free philosophy of postmodernism advocated by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. But having been careless about truth and relativism for several generations, Americans have welcomed the post-truth world without realizing it, and are now beginning to experience what it means—the will to power working its way out as powermongering in politics, fake news in journalism, domestic abuse in families, conspiracy theories in the social media, and a general bullying in social and sexual relationships. Truth-free power has contaminated the American republic, and American freedom is being rendered powerless.
Second, Americans must be clear whether they are concerned with internal freedom or external freedom, or both. Individualism is highly pronounced in our advanced modern societies, and libertarianism is the default philosophy of millions. The current ruler in America is the unencumbered American self, and the reigning ethic is radical autonomy. The right to privacy is presumed to be sacrosanct (though in fact increasingly threatened by surveillance and bureaucratic regulations). “Don’t tread on me,” “the right to be let alone,” and “Not in my backyard you don’t” (NIMBY) are not only slogans and bumper stickers but the core attitudes of the modern heart. In such a world all that matters is external freedom. What you do with your internal freedom is considered your own business and nobody else’s.
We forget that for most of human history it was not this way, and there was a good reason why. It was certainly not this way for the early Americans whose visions of freedom inspired them and paved the way to the revolution that built that freedom into a political system. Their natural talk was communal. It was all about “covenant,” “community,” “civil life,” the “common good,” “the good of all,” and the “commonwealth,” just as ours is all about autonomous individualism. They spoke as freely of responsibilities and duties as we speak freely of rights and entitlements. Indeed, they thought that excessive autonomy was a form of license that was just as much of a problem as excessive dependency. They would have considered our present attitudes unrealistic and foolish, and there were good reasons why. For one thing, they lived in and depended on community in direct ways that we do not need to. For another, to almost all the world’s great religions and most of history’s respected philosophies, internal freedom mattered more than external freedom, and without internal freedom external freedom counted for little.
Jews, Stoics, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, for example, all had very different views of what they considered freedom and therefore salvation, and what they aspired to as the good life. They differed strongly over what freedom meant, why it mattered, and how it could be achieved. But they all agreed in stressing that internal freedom was prior in time and higher in importance than external freedom.
For Confucians, and for Stoics such as Seneca and Epictetus, the poor man in his hut with internal freedom was freer than the rich man in his palace with all his wealth and luxuries. For Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, it was only when he had left his princely kingdom and attained a state of “right-mindfulness” beyond the extremes of self-indulgence on one side and asceticism on the other that he could achieve the enlightenment of the “not-self” and could exult, “It [not I] is liberated.” For both of them, external freedom was a matter of almost complete indifference.
Like the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth called his followers to his way, though it was radically different from the way of the Buddha. As a Jew, Jesus called his followers to a way of life that reflects the Jewish view of the essential goodness of creation and the importance of life within law. So the way of Jesus, like Judaism itself, is world affirming, whereas the way of Buddha reflects the Eastern view of reality as illusion (maya) and is therefore world denying. But Jesus stands with Buddha, the Stoics, and the Torah in stressing that the inner is more important than the outer—though their respective notions of the inner are quite different. His revolution did not begin in the streets, as did that of the Zealots of his day and the French and Russian revolutionaries later. For Jesus, both the problem and the solution began in the heart. “Above all else,” King Solomon had written earlier, “guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Prov 4:23 NIV).
Jesus taught the same. Many of the religious leaders of the day were obsessed with a myriad of rules and regulations covering what people put into their mouths, but that for Jesus was irrelevant. The root of the human problem lay in the heart, and it was from the heart that its poison spread. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man” (Mt 15:19-20). The same point is true for America today: Freedom’s most critical battlefield, where the wars are lost and won, is always the human heart. Enviers, slanderers, and haters, for example, can never be free. Freedom, as Tocqueville emphasized centuries later, is always a matter of the “habits of the heart.”
The Hebrew Torah teaches plainly that whereas God creates order, humans create chaos, and the root of the human problem lies in the heart. As Rabbi Heschel writes, “Evil in the heart is the source of evil in deeds.”18 Or in the words of Rabbi Sacks, “The human drama can be summed up as follows: God is free, God creates order. God gives man freedom. Man then creates chaos.”19 Not long after Genesis describes the fall of humanity, God himself delivered the blunt assessment that “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Gen 6:5 NIV). The Bible’s underscoring of every, only, and all the time are unmistakable, and this Jewish understanding carries a vital implication. Evil has an internal as well as an external face. Rabbi Sacks again: “Evil has two faces. The first—turned to the outside world—is what it does to its victim. The second—turned within—is what it does to its perpetrator. Evil traps the evildoer in its mesh. Slowly but surely he or she loses freedom and becomes not evil’s master but its slave.”20
Great African American leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington understood both the primacy of internal freedom and the fallacy of those who stop short with external freedom alone. Booker T. Washington was freed by Lincoln from slavery in Franklin County, Virginia. His memoir, Up from Slavery, is remarkable for its complete absence of any bitterness. “I resolved,” he wrote, “that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. . . . I pity from the bottom of my heart any individual who is so unfortunate as to get into the habit of holding race prejudice.”21 In strong contrast, he wrote, there were those then (and those today) who make it their business to keep stoking racial wrongs in the public square. “Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances because they do not want to lose their jobs.”22 Born in slavery and later facing the evils of the Ku Klux Klan, Booker T. Washington knew the degradation of slavery all too well and hated it as an institution, but he was a man without bitterness. The stark contrast between the spirit of such great African American champions and that of many of today’s activists is stunning. These opponents of slavery knew that freedom that begins in the heart cannot issue in hate, whereas activism that is not free in the heart only compounds hate even as it claims to fight hate.
Along with notions such as the presence of sin and the passing of time, the primacy of the heart is central to the realism of the biblical view of humanity, freedom, and change. From the master story of the exodus to the manifesto of Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God, it is clear that the biblical view of freedom is radically different from Eastern freedom (such as the Hindu notion of moksha). It does not withdraw from the world. It engages the world in ever-widening circles of justice and compassion that are fired by a passion for external freedom. But it begins in the heart, and it never reaches farther and lasts longer than when it stays consistent with the internal freedom of the heart. According to this view, individual lives and the general conditions of wider society will never be free unless there is freedom in the hearts of the liberators as well as those they set out to free.
Needless to say, this recognition of the primacy of the heart does not mean that either governments or laws should attempt to regulate the inner world of the mind and the heart. That was the horrible mistake of the medieval world and of twentieth-century totalitarianism in both its left-wing and right-wing forms. And as we shall see, it is increasingly the mistake of the American Left. In both the medieval and the modern case it flows from a form of government that is based on power and is willing to invade even the private sphere. For freedom-loving people, the private sphere is the inner sanctum of freedom, just as freedom of religion and conscience is the inner sanctum of the mind and spirit. No one has the competence to invade the private sphere, and above all to invade the heart and mind of the individual person, and it is emphatically not the business of the government.
Yet when it comes to our hearts and our minds, governments are both incompetent and incontinent. They cannot judge, but they will not stop, so down that way lie the dire evils of increased surveillance, coerced consciences, empires of the mind, political correctness, thought police, torture, and the vile notion that “error has no rights”—and the death of true liberalism and a free society. But for those who take inner freedom seriously, and therefore see freedom of religion and conscience as inviolable, it means that no free societies can ever turn a blind eye to schooling and to the cultivation of virtues and the “habits of the heart.” Far from civic luxuries, they are essential to freedom, and outer freedom by itself will never be enough. A key part of true freedom, the highest part in fact, will always be the self-restraint that is “obedience to the unenforceable.” A high and widely respected view of human dignity is the final barrier against the all-seeing and all-intrusive state that knows no limit to its appetite.
Third, Americans must be clear whether they are speaking of negative freedom or positive freedom. Always a vital distinction, the difference between the two aspects of freedom was underscored by the life and work of the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin. I well remember dinners at All Souls College, Oxford, when the rich, deep eloquence of his voice warmed to the importance of the subject. Put simply, negative freedom is freedom from, whereas positive freedom is freedom for and freedom to be. In English, one word, freedom, covers both meanings, but in Hebrew there are two different words—ḥofesh, meaning “freedom from,” and ḥerut, meaning “freedom for.” Both aspects of freedom are absolutely necessary. Negative freedom, or freedom from, is foundational and essential, and all views of freedom require it. No one who is subject to the will of another or under the power of an external force can claim to be free. This person is either a child or a slave. It does not matter whether that power is political, as with an unjustly jailed dissident; chemical, as with a heroin addict or alcoholic; psychological, as with the victim of a playground bully or domestic violence; or spiritual and intellectual. All freedom, however understood, must begin with freedom from.
Importantly, within the biblical view that shaped the early Americans, negative freedom was not simply preliminary in time, it was prophetic in terms of truth. Slavery in Egypt was to be replaced by social justice in Israel, and remembering the former was to be a spur to the Jews maintaining the latter. The same was true of Christian conversion and its relationship to Christian living, as exemplified in the abiding popularity of John Newton’s song “Amazing Grace,” as a slave trader turned Christian convert. And the same should be true for American freedom: precisely as Americans remember what they were freed from, and remember the thousand and one oppressions from which others need to be freed as they were once freed, American freedom can maintain an animating gratitude that keeps it from the complacency that is the beginning of the end of freedom. In short, telling and retelling American history is as important to American freedom as American law schools.
Yet negative freedom is still only half the story. By itself, negative freedom leads only to license and would end in either chaos or tyranny. No one achieves full and genuine freedom unless they go on to experience positive freedom—the freedom to be and the freedom for whatever vision they believe is their purpose and fulfillment in life. This point is the watershed truth for understanding freedom, and it entails two vital dimensions. First, freedom is not the permission to do what you want, but the power to do what you ought. And second, such freedom is not individual only. Each person’s freedom is free only to the extent that each one respects the equal freedom of all others too. Universal freedom therefore means freedom for everyone in a double sense—freedom for each person and freedom for all in the service of the good of all.
Therein, of course, lies the rub. There are three distinct sides to freedom, and they each save us from another side that by itself can easily go wrong. Negative freedom sets us free by saving us from despotism, legalism, and overregulation, which are the fruit of positive freedom gone wrong. Positive freedom makes us truly free by saving us from anarchy, lawlessness, and anomie, which are the fruit of negative freedom gone wrong. And collective freedom means that no individuals are fully free unless their freedom respects the freedom of all others, without which individual freedoms have gone badly wrong, favoring the rich, the powerful, and the talented at the expense of others.
Negative freedom assumes little except the desire to be free, and does not pause to ponder the impulse behind that desire. In the form of libertarianism, it is unquestionably the going desire of many if not most young Americans today. They simply desire freedom from all restraints, and who can blame them? But there are two potential flaws at the heart of this desire. As Abraham Heschel notes, negative freedom “not only overlooks the compulsions which often lie behind our desires; it reveals the tragic truth that freedom may develop within itself the seed of its own destruction.”23
To be sure, almost everyone can agree on the importance of negative freedom because it means only freedom from constraint and coercion. Indeed, it is essential to saving us from the extreme of authoritarianism. But positive freedom is where the debates and disagreements begin, because it assumes and requires more. Positive freedom requires a vision of truth, character, ethics, and the common good—for unless we know the truth of who we are and how we are supposed to live and to live with others, we cannot hope to attain the freedom of being ourselves and offering the same freedom to others. How we view the truth of who we are will be decisive for determining our ability to attain the freedom of what we desire to be and for deciding whether claims for freedom are true or false. As G. K. Chesterton observed, “You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump: You may be freeing him from being a camel.”24
Once again, a major flaw in American freedom today stems from carelessness about the so-called post-truth world—in other words, the world of postmodernism that Nietzsche ushered in during the 1880s. Freedom without truth is completely and utterly impossible. Without truth there is no freedom, and it is no accident that all the celebration of the post-truth era has led to a corresponding rise in fact-checking, because life with no truth is impossible. It is also a common mistake to reduce the positive-negative distinction to an argument between conservatives and liberals, as if conservatives advocate the former and liberals the latter. Both are essential to a healthy view of human freedom, and the counterbalancing emphasis on positive freedom was once a clear liberal theme too. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his Journal, “Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George the Fourth and continue slaves to prejudice? What is it to be born free and equal and not to live? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?”25 After all, as he wrote later in Walden, “It is hard to have a southern overseer, it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all if you are the slave driver of yourself.”26
The fact is that there is simply no substitute for positive freedom, and no amount of negative freedom alone will ever make up for its absence. But that point raises several difficulties for a free society such as America.
Most people today do not take the time to explore the notion of an examined life and the good life, so they rarely consider the truth of who they are.
Following the ravages of postmodern philosophy and the current vogue for a post-truth world, the notion of truth has itself been called into question today.
Truth implies falsehood, and together they both imply certain things that should be avoided as wrong, which flies in the face of the modern talk of total freedom, complete relativism, and absolute nonjudgmentalism, with no limits at all. All too often, Dostoevsky’s “If God is dead, everything is permitted” becomes the unspoken attitude that any denial of total freedom is a total denial of freedom—which in turn flouts reality and ends in folly.
Ours is a world of exploding pluralism in which “everyone is now everywhere,” so modern diversity raises the specter of competing, if not clashing, visions of positive freedom. Whose view is to be encouraged, and how are we to live with the clash of differences, so that each person’s freedom respects the freedom of others (the subject of question six)?
Before moving to All Souls College, Oxford, Berlin had lived much of his life in Russia, where he witnessed the evils of the Soviet idea of positive freedom, and he knew the terrible experiences of his people, the Jews, under the claims of medieval Catholic dogma. He was therefore notoriously chary of all claims to positive freedom. Yet in private conversations Berlin always insisted that both aspects of freedom were equally essential to the understanding of freedom as well as to the achievement of full human freedom. For freedom faces not one danger but two equal though opposite dangers: from one side, the danger of despotic control, from which we are saved by negative freedom; and from the other side, the danger of chaotic lawlessness, from which we are saved by positive freedom. Negative freedom is therefore vital, but by itself it is only a half-truth and, pursued for its own sake, it turns out to be a fool’s gold. It is urgent for Americans today to consider the fateful difference between “do as you please” freedom and “do as you ought” freedom. The only question is whether that recognition will come in time for the American republic to survive.
National or political freedom? Internal or external? Negative or positive? Are such distinctions important, or are they only a matter of semantic fussiness? Many people today would dismiss such questions as a waste of time. Let those worry about them who care. All that matters, such people say, is that freedom is real in practice, which for most of them means that freedom is defined as external and negative freedom. Americans should be free to do whatever they like, so long as they do no harm to anyone else. Nothing else is anybody else’s business, so outer freedom is sufficient, and if outer freedom is in place, society can afford to ignore inner freedom. Or at least, they say, it is for each individual American to decide whether inner freedom is their concern. It is no business of anyone else, and it is certainly not the business of the government.
Such attitudes are widespread, not only in America but throughout the modern world. Philosopher John Gray highlights the appeal of negative freedom as the indispensable beginning of freedom: “Negative freedom is ‘true’ freedom because it best captures what makes freedom valuable, which is the opportunity it secures to live as you choose.”27 That is true and understandable, but negative freedom is only the beginning of freedom, and there are major reasons why the distinctions matter and why the present generation needs to think more deeply about the nature of full freedom.
The first two reasons lie at the heart of the fundamental contrast between the American Revolution and the French Revolution and its heirs. They each have radically different views of freedom. The first concerns the reason why 1776 emphasized positive freedom and 1789 emphasized negative freedom. For those who are heirs of 1789, freedom is essentially negative and external, liberation from whatever is considered externally repressive—variations on the famous theme set out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of his Social Contract: “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”28 Get rid of whatever are reckoned to be the chains, 1789 claims, and humanity will then be free. But for those who are heirs of 1776 and the Jewish and Christian understanding, freedom certainly begins with the negative and the external, but that is only the beginning. Freedom has to grow to be internal and positive freedom too. Liberty is more than liberation. It starts with liberation, but it requires truth, character, and an ethical way of life in order to flourish.
In the Jewish and Christian understanding, freedom is more than a question of simply being free or not free, for as Rabbi Sacks points out, true freedom is like art, literature, music and poetry, and other achievements of the human spirit. It “needs training, discipline, apprenticeship, the most demanding routines and the most painstaking attention to detail. No one composed a great novel or symphony without years of preparation.”29 Liberty in this view begins with liberation, but it does not end there. It is a process and a matter of growth, discipline, and hard work. It is a person-by-person and a generation-by-generation achievement, and not a once-for-all, hand-me-down legacy. In a word, it takes positive freedom to fulfill negative freedom.
Once again, negative freedom by itself is deceptive. It carries a siren lure that needs to be clearly recognized and firmly resisted if it is not to shipwreck more American views of freedom. Rabbi Heschel captures the point with precision:
For freedom is not an empty concept. Man is free to be free; he is not free in choosing to be a slave: he is free in doing good; he is not free in doing evil. To choose evil is to fail to be free. In choosing evil, he is not free but determined by forces which are extraneous to the spirit. Free is he who has decided to act in agreement with the spirit that goes beyond all necessities.30
The second reason Americans need to think more deeply about the distinctions stems from another aspect of the contrast between 1776 and 1789, and it explains why so many libertarian views of freedom are shortsighted. As freedom from, negative freedom is empty freedom. It says nothing about what freedom is for. Only positive freedom has content and therefore has a hope of being solid and lasting. Thus freedom-loving people cannot afford to put their confidence in what is only negative and limited from the start. The contrast between the revolutions is all too clear here. For 1776 and its heirs the focus was on truth, whereas for 1789 and its heirs the focus was on power. The former stresses inner freedom as well as outer freedom, and both negative and positive freedom, whereas 1789 stresses outer freedom over inner freedom, and negative freedom at the expense of positive freedom. For 1776, freedom is viewed as personal freedom from government control, whereas 1789 views freedom as progressive freedom through government control. The former is realistic about human nature and the potential for the abuse of power, and therefore takes “under God” seriously, whereas 1789 is utopian about human nature, and has no final accountability.
These differences work their way out in numerous different ways—for example, in their different attitudes to how they pursue change and transform societies. Central to 1789 and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a new view of revolution that placed its confidence in the power of reason and attempted to transform societies by working from the outside in—in other words, by starting with political institutions, and above all by changing the structures of the state and using them to transform citizens coercively.
The spirit of 1776 was quite different. The “lost cause” of the English Revolution of 1640 and the successful American Revolution of 1776 are often described as conservative, and they were. But in fact they were also profoundly radical in their realism. They took their cue from the Hebrew Scriptures, held up Israel’s exodus from Egypt as their pattern for liberation, and took seriously the biblical view that change and transformation must always include inner freedom, which will take time. They were revolutions in the hearts and minds of the people before they were revolutions in the streets, and the streets (and the ardors of the revolutionary war) never overwhelmed the hearts and minds of the people and their leaders. In 1818, John Adams wrote famously that America’s “real revolution” was the revolution before the Revolution: “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”31
In stark contrast, the French (1789), Russian (1917), and Chinese (1949) revolutions were radical but utopian, and destructive because they were utopian in the sense that they believed in human perfectibility. They rejected the Bible and took no interest in the exodus as a pattern for liberation but instead took their cue from the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong, respectively. They started as revolutions in the streets and were led by elites rather than being in the hearts and minds of the many. In each case these three revolutions attempted a total transformation of human behavior through manipulating the levers of state power. But they utterly failed to transform human nature; they each produced forms of revolutionary government that were even more tyrannical than the ancien régimes they replaced, and they each created killing fields that are an indelible stain on their memory.
A key feature of the difference between these two types of revolution was the biblical insistence that change takes time, that transformation requires patience and can afford to be incremental, and that it will always fail if it does not take seriously the primacy of the human heart and its freedom. To be sure, there is a potential danger in the 1776, Jewish and Christian approach to social transformation. It may be realistic about the importance of inner change to the point where it degenerates into quietism and ends in supporting the status quo and changing nothing. But the clear and certain danger in the approach taken by 1789 and its heirs on the left today is unmistakable. It is utopian, and it must therefore close the gap between the ideal and the real by using coercive means to transform society into its image of the ideal society. That coercion may sometimes be crude, through state violence as in totalitarian societies, or it may be subtle, through the systematic imposition of overburdening regulations and laws, as in the efforts of socialism and the sexual revolution in modern democratic societies. But because it is utopian, it will always have to be coercive in the end.
No one should fool themselves into thinking that the choice between these visions of freedom is merely theoretical, for the practical differences are as stark as night and day. In the same way, Americans must size up today’s claims for change and revolution, and examine their underlying philosophies. Do they come closer to the ideals and ways of the American Revolution or to the ideas and practices of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions? Here, as ever, differences make a difference. And there is always a final factor. If the four revolutions are assessed in terms of their contributions to human freedom, only one conclusion is possible: The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were each a failure. Only the American Revolution, even with its shortcomings, was an overall success in terms of freedom. Unless there is a decisive restoration of 1776, and this time an expansion of its promise to everyone, every movement toward 1789 will sentence America to recurring bouts of the abuse of power that betray a fatal disease in the health of the republic.
Americans must debate these differences and decide these definitions with care. They are not rolling the dice, as in a game of chutes and ladders. Each decision they make means that they land on certain squares and not others. There are choices and there are consequences, and Americans therefore have to be clear what their choices are, why they are making them, and what their consequences may be. Those who emphasize the primacy of outer transformation proceed one way and must do so as a matter of their principle and its logic, whereas those who emphasize inner transformation proceed another way and must also do so as a matter of principle and logic. For the utopian, the revolutionary is the poet who works with the dream of a clean slate and the blueprint of a more perfect society—as Mao Zedong set out to do for China. For the conservative the revolutionary is the realist who understands the necessity of inner transformation and the free choice that it requires.
The third and fourth reasons to take inner freedom and positive freedom seriously are that they are vital to shaping society constructively, and without them American society is prone to a serious malaise. Devotees of negative freedom constantly tell us that we are “free to do whatever we like, so long as we do no harm to others.” Negative freedom is all that matters. California, for example, is often hailed as the state for freedom par excellence—“Think what you like, say what you feel, go where you want, do what you choose, and dream what you wish.”32 From the free-speech movement, the hippie, and the surfboard to the laptop, the iPhone, and the driverless car, California’s freedom is always boundless and infinite, and we haven’t seen anything yet, we are told.
Such claims overlook the fact that negative freedom, by itself, is negative in another sense too. Negative freedom is a freedom to which no one has ever said no, and by definition no one can ever say no. As a freedom from any and every no, negative freedom is totally unbounded, which is both its appeal and the seeds of its own self-destruction. The resulting irony is striking to outsiders, though rarely addressed by Americans. The proud boast that America is the “land of the free” obscures two equally obvious facts. At the personal level, the land of the free is also the land of a thousand compulsions, addictions, and recovery groups. (In 2015, deaths through drug overdoses were more than those by gun homicides and car crashes combined.) And at the public level, the land of the free is the land of growing surveillance (the so-called Gaze of the Guardians),33 deep financial indebtedness, and constant eruptions of rage, resentment, and accusations of hate from one group or another. Hegel’s argument that slavery gives rise to a culture of resentment can be turned around: a culture boiling with resentment, as America is today, is a sure sign that the people are not as free as they think they are.
Love means always caring enough to say no. Every responsible parent knows that. Yet Americans are becoming unbounded, unbridled, unbuttoned, and unblushing in both their language and their behavior. Almost anything now goes in America, and most Americans love to have it so. Yet Americans are far from being as free as they boast. The reason for the contradiction is simple, and it would have been plain to the ancients. External freedom without internal freedom is hollow, and negative freedom without positive freedom is dangerous. They may even provide a mask that obscures dire forms of bondage. Whatever people may claim, no one addicted, no one caught in debt, and no one driven by rage, resentment, hate, cruelty, or rank bad manners is free. Addiction, debt, rudeness, resentment, rage, and hate are chains as heavy as those holding down any convict or slave, and more and more of American public life is held by these addictions or fueled by these emotions—on both the right and the left, and among the “elites” as much as the average Joe. With no repentance now required of perpetrators, and only rare forgiveness now offered by victims, it becomes impossible to draw a line between the American present and the past. So the past remains present, and the anger, grievances, and resentments from slavery and the other evils of three hundred years of America’s past accumulate steadily and now have the American present in a stranglehold. Twenty-first-century America is anything but the land of the free.
There are many needed responses to this situation, but the underlying principle is the same. We humans are free to choose, yes. We all have willpower. But freedom always carries an open-ended either-or potential. So while we are free, we are also responsible, in that we are never free from the consequences of our choices. We can make a perfectly free choice to do either right or wrong, or tell the truth or tell a lie (and obviously our views of those things may differ too). But if we choose to do what by our own lights is wrong, and we do not check and reverse that choice, it will lead from wrong choice to repeated wrong choice, to habit, to compulsion, and finally to addiction. In short, there are habits of the heart when we deal with the good, the true, and the beautiful, and there are habits of the heart when we deal with the bad, the false, and the ugly. With pornography, as with lying, alcohol, drugs, and countless other choices, there is a point at which willpower becomes powerless and freedom ends up as addiction. In short, there is a point at which we simply cannot stop. As Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for emphasizing, an important moment comes when the only element of control we have left is to admit that we are out of control. We are no longer free. We are addicts. We are powerless. And we need help from a power higher than ourselves.
The Bible and the Jewish sages have taught this all along. At first, the evil impulse is “as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart rope.” It starts as a “wayfarer,” then becomes a “guest” and finally turns into a “master.”34 In his Confessions, St. Augustine described the outcome of the process in his own life with a candor that was remarkable for a Christian bishop in the fifth century, let alone the wider standards of his day. And he speaks directly to our own day when the excesses of advanced modern freedom have led to numerous addictions. “Because my will was perverse, it changed to lust, and lust yielded—to become habit, and habit not resisted became necessity. These were like links hanging one on another—which is why I have called it a chain—and their hard bondage held me hand and foot.”35 According to the realism of this view, sin is the fruit, the judgment, and the punishment of sin.
Sir Walter Scott famously made the same point in the nineteenth century in connection with lies, rather than lust, and President Clinton illustrated it equally famously in the twentieth—both of them in terms of a free choice to tell a lie rather than tell the truth. “Oh! what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!”36 Choose to do wrong or choose to lie, and what starts in freedom ends in bondage. Just so, too many American companies now believe their own PR and do not realize how they have descended into mediocrity, and too many American celebrities have fallen captive to their own conceits and prisoners to their own pride. The plain lesson is that full freedom requires truth and inner freedom, and not just outer freedom. Outer freedom exercised without the guidance of truth and inner freedom may lead directly to forms of inner bondage that require rescue and recovery from outside.
Again, the question arises as to whether current American views of freedom take this truth into account—for example, the total freedom and the complete nonjudgmental relativism advocated by the sexual revolution. There are many views of freedom that flatter to deceive, and we must assess them with a realism born of history and tough-minded thinking.
The fourth major reason why it is foolish to be satisfied with negative freedom (freedom from) is that this mistake exacerbates a serious condition in American society—the frustration gap between the promise and the fulfillment of American individualism. Individualism and its promise of individualization (“You are free to be whoever you wish to be”) are both strong in America, and here to stay. But while the stress on negative freedom promotes the promise, the absence of widely available positive freedom prevents the fulfillment. The result is that individuals are caught in a bind. They are officially and, as it were, de jure free. The right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. So says the Declaration of Independence, and so says the American dream and the allure of its ever-changing and ever-new do-it-yourself consumer identities and lifestyles. So say radical new philosophies such as social constructionism. Never has the day of self-assertion and self-discovered happiness seemed brighter, yet individuals are still not de facto free or free in reality. And without positive freedom (freedom for) they can never hope to close that gap and become truly free.
Just as the Israelite slaves were ordered by their Egyptian taskmasters to make bricks without straw, and under the same deadline, so today’s American individuals have the allure of a thousand freedoms dangled before them but are not given the positive freedoms to make them possible. Rarely have humans ever been freer than middle- and upper-class Americans today. They can become almost whomever they like, do almost anything they wish, go almost anywhere they desire, and see and know almost whatever they want to discover. Yet as with the Hebrew slaves, the outcome can be insufferable. Making bricks without straw was unreasonable and impossible. Just so, Americans set out daily to make millions of individual self-assertions at the invitation of negative freedom, but without the complement of positive freedom they prove a recipe for massive frustration. They are chasing a will-o’-the wisp that dances ahead of them but can never be caught.
Little wonder so many Americans fail in their pursuit of happiness. For all their touted freedoms, they are restless and dissatisfied, and sometimes confused and angry. They were told they were free and given a thousand recipes for happiness. Why then do they feel so frustrated and anything but free or happy? Why are the magazines and marketers able to sell them a whole new range of options the next week or month? The truth is that many of the promised consumer freedoms turn out to be insignificant, and the promised life transformations turn out to be impossible. The outcome is a further twist in the corruption of public life through life politics. Citizens of the American republic degenerate into individual Americans, each with their own hurts and prejudices. Society then becomes another word for peg communities, communities on which hurting and angry individuals can hang their grievances. Thus the search is mounted for scapegoats and strangers to blame, and politics and the public square become the arena in which squabbling egos can air their resentments and fight for their interests. And a crucial reason for this catch-22 is simply the lack of a wise understanding of positive freedom.
Again, will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the third question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: How do you define freedom today? What is your own working definition? How do your friends and colleagues understand freedom? What will happen if most Americans continue to focus on external freedom rather than internal freedom and on negative freedom rather than positive freedom? Have you chosen carefully between the different conceptions of freedom that come from 1776 and 1789? What place do you give to the role of the heart and to the importance of the habits of the heart?
The recurring theme in this third question on the checklist is inescapable: choices have consequences. As Americans choose their freedom and make their beds, so they will lie in them. And there will of course be consequences, whether they are conscious of their choices or not. How much better to make the choices with the full clarity that we ought to bring to our choices. The politics of freedom is strenuous enough for those who understand its demands, but for those too careless to understand it, the consequences and the unforeseen consequences are likely to be unpleasant. The choices are for Americans to make and for Americans to reap. It is time for Americans, from each successive president to the youngest school child, to explore what they mean by freedom, and to know whether they have thought through the outcome of the kinds of freedom they are pursuing.