Freedom

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 1: Freedom – To ensure the future of this American Idea, we should:

• Insist on freedom’s preeminence as a God-given gift.  There are few things that move to the top of any list.  Freedom does based both on its immeasurable value to human life and on its source.  And any time someone talks about freedom as something granted by anyone else – government, society, the people – we need to oppose their erroneous notion as the damaging lie that it really is.  President William Henry Harrison said,

These precious privileges…the American citizen derives from no charter granted by his fellow-man. He claims them because he is himself a man, fashioned by the same Almighty hand as the rest of his species and entitled to a full share of the blessings with which He has endowed them.[i]

• Remember that freedom is only owned by individual human beings.  Freedom isn’t ethereal, an abstract notion, or something possessed by a group or nation.  Freedom is a very real possession of each and every human being.  Groups don’t have freedom – only the people in them do.

• Be aware and unembarrassed about the Western, Christian foundation of freedom.  Freedom didn’t just happen like a random mutation in nature.  Freedom in the full, rich, individual sense of the word is nearly absent from human history until the collaborative rise of Western civilization and Christianity.

Someone can hate this fact – they can hate Western civilization, and hate Christianity – but they will be hard pressed to come up with any other explanation for the rise of freedom.  The default historical position is top-down hierarchy, control, coercion, organized theft, and power in the hands of the few.  Typically, only the chosen few at the top experience anything like freedom.

The best of the Catholic Church in the early Renaissance – Erasmus, among others – argued for renewal and a focus on individual spiritual regeneration instead of the crushing weight of a rich, government-connected church.   The best of the Protestant Reformation/Revolt wasn’t against authority, but rather for freedom of thought, conscience, and action in a Christian context.  The best of the Catholic counter-Reformation wasn’t against Protestants, but rather for the freedom that comes from a true commitment to Christian values.

No other religion can make this claim.  As practiced for a millennium, Islam (the word means “submission”[ii]) is about top-down authority, dogmatism, resistance to inquiry and debate, and…well, submission.  This isn’t to say that it’s all bad, but merely that it isn’t designed with freedom in mind.  Hinduism is about one’s place in the physical and eternal order of things, with elements like its caste system being fundamentally opposed to human dignity and freedom.

Other religions are about personal development and even perfection, with little to say about freedom or the dignity of the individual in society.  The religion of no religion – atheistic communism or totalitarianism – has nothing to say about freedom and claims that dignity (such as it is) comes from the state.

“There are limits to how much an Islamic republic and a communist state can have in common, but they seem to agree on what to avoid: Western-style freedom,” noted The Economist.[iii]

• Make freedom the first criteria in every public discussion.   In America, freedom has often stood in the background, acknowledged in importance but left out of focus.  We can use the 7 Spirits of Freedom, discussed in the chapter on Freedom in the book, to bolster our freedom-first conversation.

All public actions have the potential to harm the public.  They must be approached with great caution and severely limited.  They can harm us in countless ways, including making us sheep.  “The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population,” noted writer Mark Steyn[iv].   In the end, one of the strongest measures of the degree of freedom is the degree to which collective action is limited or prevented.

We should always ask, “Will this help or hurt individual freedom?”  If it helps, it may still not be a good thing – but if it hurts, it is always a bad thing.

• Know that freedom dies in the absence of watchfulness.  Freedom isn’t gained in its fullness one time for all time.  Freedom isn’t won forever in one victorious battle.  It must be defended in an endless series of battles against a host of relentless foes – power-seekers, wealth-lovers, elitists, intellectuals, presidents, governors, lawmakers, judges, bureaucrats, czars.  When they die, others like them take their place.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, a thousand pages of rules and regulations were added every year to the CFR (code of federal regulations).[v]  It’s doubtful that much, if any, of this was for the good of freedom, and likely that most of it was to its detriment.

Freedom has to be carved out of the jungle of human nature and collective evil.  And the jungle is always growing back, always trying to reclaim its domain, always trying to overrun an outpost of liberty.  Only watchfulness and effective action can prevent it.

• Resist confusing democracy and capitalism with freedom.  Freedom first.  If we focus on freedom, we can ask how democracy and capitalism can preserve and enhance it.  But these systems alone, without the relentless focus on freedom, aren’t freedom and can even be used to limit or destroy freedom (For example, when democracy becomes a tyranny of the 51 percent or when capitalism becomes a tyranny of the greedy and corrupt).

• Check politicians and their platforms against the conditions of freedom.  Nothing is easier than for a politician to mouth the words “freedom” and “liberty.”  And nothing could be further from some of their plans.  Freedom isn’t one of the rules of the game – freedom is the game.  We need to listen to whatever politicians or their parties are saying, and then compare and contrast it with the 12 conditions of freedom presented in the chapter on Freedom.

How are they with opposing viewpoints (diversity)?  Do they ever mention where rights really come from, or do they talk about government as the creator of rights (justice)?  Are they focused on similar opportunities or on similar outcomes (equality)?  Do they talk more about the community than they do about the individual (dignity)?  In their view, does prosperity start with the free market or with costly government (opportunity)?  Do they think we’re primarily responsible for taking care of ourselves or for taking care of those who should be taking care of themselves (responsibility)?

Do they want charity to be you-driven or government-driven (generosity)?  Is truth-telling built into their belief system (religion)?  Do they talk about a culture that fosters personal freedom or government-dictated obligations (society)?  Are they specific in how they and their peers should serve the people and when they should do nothing (government)?  Are they enamored with foreign adventures, or do they understand that minding our own business is probably already too big a job for them (independence)?  Do they really disavow war, or just the other guy’s war (peace)?

These 12 are table stakes.  Any politician or party who violates even one is not friend of freedom – or of you and me.

• Weigh government on the freedom scale.  Too many public conversations trail off into details – platforms, programs, bills, taxes, spending, budgets, ways and means – without ever addressing the big questions.

Instead of, “Should we spend $10 billion or $50 billion on that?” we should be asking, “What’s the effect on freedom of any expenditure on this?”  There are always unintended consequences of any action, and we can’t think about them all.  But can’t we at least think about the consequences for human freedom?  And not the freedom for a person to have someone else pay for their needs or assume their responsibilities, but true American freedom.

In part, we have the talk radio factor.  If a show has 4 hours to talk about the defects of one celebrity or coach or athlete, that person will be the devil’s apprentice by the end of the 4 hours.  Something has to fill up the time, and it’s usually negative.  We have too many politicians, committees, and commissions working full time on the minutiae of life – of our lives.  They fill up the time, often in a negative way and frequently at the expense of freedom.

The big question?  Is this government promoting civic freedom or strangling it?

• Weigh society on its ability to enhance true freedom.  Society has a more subtle, nuanced role to play than government does.  A girl of 15 who is free to have serial sex and STDs and unwanted pregnancies isn’t really free in any meaningful sense.  A boy or man who is free to have serial sex and spread STDs and unwanted pregnancies is just as unfree.  They’ve become slaves to what society has refused to condemn and has lost the will to oppose.

Millions of people in the middle of a nominally free society are chained by terrible addictions and ruinous behaviors.  A free society has a responsibility to define freedom in a much more elegant way than just “an unobstructed choice to destroy your life.”

The big question?  Is this society encouraging personal freedom or abetting its decline?