A tale is told—it is not apocryphal—that when Lenin and Trotsky were drawn up on the outskirts of Moscow in a train after the communist victory, the whole country in ruins and tens of thousands dead and still lying in the fields unburied, Trotsky asked Lenin: “But now are we going to have freedom?” Lenin answered: “Freedom? For what?” In this exchange, I am going to take Lenin’s side against Trotsky, although personally I have always found Trotsky to be a more sympathetic figure than Lenin.
Our goal here, as I understand it, is the role of love and liberty within a commonwealth that would embrace both. My opponent is free and I am in love. Many readers of this journal are too young to remember the famous debate between L. Brent Bozell and Frank Meyer that worked itself out in the pages of National Review. Although the subject was couched in terms of virtue and freedom, the subject in truth was the same facing us today. I am filled with deja vu.
Years pass and the applications of philosophical options change but the delineations seem to retain their original lineaments.
Permit me to advance a philosophical proposition to the truth of which is evident to anyone who attends carefully to what he does when he chooses anything freely. Liberty is a function of Love. Choice bears upon means capable of achieving what I love at this moment. My love may be vicious or noble; it may be steady or ephemeral but nobody is free when he loves, in the moment which he loves. There is an eternity about the act of love even if it lasts for only a minute. When a man says to a woman, “I love you,” unless he be a liar bent on conquest, what he intends is eternal. The love may pass but while it lasts it enjoys an everlasting character.
If I were to spend the evening at leisure (I was perhaps free to make this decision but once made it is my love), I will command my intellect to discover the means whereby I might achieve that love. I might determine that I can fulfill my desire by reading a book I have wanted to read for some time; by lounging in my room doing nothing; by going to a motion picture; by playing chess with a friend. Note carefully: None of these is my end, neither reading the book, lounging in my room, playing chess, or anything else. My concrete end is an evening of leisure. As means, no one of them determines me because the others will do the job as well.
Not being determined, I determine myself. This self-determination in reference to an end is the essence of free choice. Free choice is an act of the will towards some finality loved, and that act is not determined if there is a multiplicity of ends capable of fulfilling the same goal. Somebody once asked G.K. Chesterton what book he would want—he could only have one—were he exiled on a desert island. Chesterton answered: a manual on how to build a boat. His end would be to get off that bloody island and go home. If the only way to do so was to build a boat, he would build a boat or at least try to build a boat. When only one means emerges as capable of reaching our end, there is no freedom at all. Freedom emerges as a psychological possibility when there is more than one means to a finality, none determining the will but each capableof achieving the goal. Freedom psychologically is always a means, never an end.
From this we can draw the conclusion that no polity under the sun has ever been constructed around freedom as an end. The business is a philosophical and psychological impossibility. We are not free with reference to goals we love, and these goals antedate any exercise of liberty on our part.
Often classical liberalism and libertarianism have raised the banner of absolute liberty as a political goal. But this cannot be done, try as we may. Love governs liberty. When men try to pull this off, they end in tyranny. Plato’s “democratic man” lacks any fixed goal or love. His psyche soon degenerates into being the slave of his passions. If I am not guided from some star without, be that star noble or ignoble, I will be governed from within by the basest of my instincts.
Political freedom in the West was born, teaches Lord Acton, when the subject of existence, the individual person, was institutionalized in the Middle Ages in more than one way. Being a member of a guild, a township, kingdom or empire and Church, man had to choose in case of a conflict between them. Where there is no conflict between means—and means always conflict because the election of one of them involves the abandonment of the others—there is no liberty, no political freedom. And these choices are always made in the light of some love that moved the man making the choice.
Every polity known to man historically has been knit into being, rendered therebythe polity that it is, by some love annealing into unity and society men who would otherwise be isolated into an anarchy, Hong Kong or Singapore versus the United States or France, let us say. Many years ago I coined the term “public orthodoxy” to describe that to which I refer here: the public orthodoxy consists in those convictions,and our love for them, that stamps upon a society the seal of its very identity, that makes this community to be what it is. This public affirmation of the absolute can be enshrined in a constitution. It does not have to be. It can be discovered in the songs, the art, the style of being surrounding any given society. At bottom this affirmation is always religious because it reflects how men respond to their brush with the absolute.
Societies are what they are thanks to what they love, and freedom within such communities, should it flourish, is always in terms of something more profound than liberty: it is love. If the question before the house is either liberty or love, then I insist that the opposition is false. If the love be a love of virtue then that love englobes liberty because without liberty virtue is always truncated.
If, however, the question is crafted in such fashion that we are asked to elect either love as an end or freedom as an end, we face a sundering sword separating traditionalists from libertarians and quasi-libertarians and, I must add, traditionalists from neoconservatives. A nest of contradictions swarm into the debate and render it futile at bottom. If by freedom we mean choice, and thus far this is the meaning I am giving to the word, then I think I have demonstrated already that choice can never be an end in itself. Even more: if we were to choose between choosing and a good loved and cherished, then some even deeper end must be loved by us that presumably can be fulfilled by one another of these two putative means. But one of them, choice for the sake of choosing, is no end at all and furthermore—even if we could pull off this
psychological legerdemain—in what service would this choosing be?
But there is a second and even deeper meaning to the word liberty, a liberty beyond freedom of choice, and this is liberation from evil. Although the man whose character is not annealed in the good proper to his nature can occasionally choose to act decently, this act is difficult, rare, and capricious. Virtue—the teaching is Aristotle’s—involves a steadying of the will which makes honorable decisions relatively easy. The good man does not have to agonize over whether he will pay what he owes. He just pays out of a nature inclined towards honesty through much experience in being honest. Virtuous life and the love for it is all the more virtuous in the measure of the ease with which we exercise our liberty towards the good.
From these considerations follows the truth that a political order geared toward nourishing the good life and virtue, its love, removes—to the degree possible—the temptation to vice, to wickedness. If we have chosen virtue over vice, then we shore up the weak, strengthen our young, and we outlaw depravity when we have to. Love opposes liberty only when liberty opposes love. The question must shift to the content of love. If conformed to man’s good, then liberty is properly put to that lofty service.
If the love is opposed to man’s good, then liberty is properly repressed by an ordained love—as does the love of a father for his son’s good prohibit that boy from losing himself in debauchery. Laws against pornography, public indecency, abnormal behavior, the glorification of greed and gluttony, and finally — abortion, cut down a man’s choices but in doing so liberate him,free him from temptation and open him to the good life. We all know the nineteenth century romantic tales about good men who play the piano in brothels. As entertaining as these stories might be (I found one or two of them very amusing), they can scarcely be thought to reflect reality soberly.
If you live in filth, you are going to get dirty. Every good polity protects the virtue of its people but, paradoxically, this limitation of the freedom of choice is for the sake of the higher liberation from evil of which I have just spoken.
I sometimes think that men such as my old friend Frank Meyer, now gone to God, thought that we should make it hard for people to be good by permitting every option, no matter how evil, to stalk the streets and tempt the soul. Possibly this extreme exaltation of freedom wants the good life restricted to those few who are strong but who are willing to let the rest of us wallow in sin. I find here a lack of charity. I am my brother’s keeper! Our weaker brethren and our children, possibly the mass of mankind, are also called to virtue and society is obliged under its command to seek the common good to make it feasible for them to find the good. Every society protects its public orthodoxy or way of life. Censorship is consubstantial with political existence.
Liberals usually censor conservatives by silencing them, not publishing them, banishing them from television and other mass media, denying them tenure at universities. But the children of mammon are wiser than the children of light! This effective repression would be normal behavior were it not compounded with the hypocrisy that they are the party of liberty. The traditionalist is more honest when he states flatly, as I do here, that some repression and censorship are indispensable for the flowering of good men in the large and by the handful.
The usual skeptical and relativist reply to such reasoning is the customary epistemological negativism. Some of you are thinking it right now! How do you know what is the good to be loved? What if your good not be mine? And all of this goes with the talk today about “values,” yours versus mine.
And the answer to this is simply to point to the two thousand and more years of Western Civilization which has built up slowly a consensus on the nature and content of the natural law, itself a participation in the Divine Law. If the decay caused by publically and even legally established skepticism denies that tradition, then all standards collapse, and we return to the jungle. Then indeed we choose for the sake of choosing, we raise the banner of total liberty which soon collapses, as Plato taught, in the tyranny of the passions. We are there already.
We cannot walk in the streets of our cities at night. Our houses and apartments are turned into armed camps. Our children are sexually abused and our women are raped with impunity. Half of the American population is armed to the teeth. No man can trust his own shadow. No common belief unites us in anything and as civility becomes a memory and perversion and infanticide are converted into “alternative life styles.” Our only hope is the Lock and the Key as Hobbes once put it, keeping out the savagery from beyond. But we are all free! Are we not? Into these ruins has collapsed what was once the glory of mankind, Western Christian civilization, “the saving grace of this world,” in Belloc’s immortal prose. And that grace is now gone because rejected in the name of a false understanding of liberty.
