Taking Liberty With Freedom
Richard P. Moore May/June 2002
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
Taking Liberty With Freedom
By Richard P. Moore
Though September 11, 2001, will be remembered as the day that changed America, we shouldn't forget October 31 of the same year. That was the day that President George Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which gives the government the kind of sweeping powers of arrest, detention, surveillance, investigation, deportation, and search and seizure that, just a few months earlier, would certainly have been deemed by many as a constitutional and moral assault on our most basic freedoms. "This law is based on the faulty assumption that safety must come at the expense of civil liberties," says Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (A.CLU) Washington office. "The USA PATRIOT Act gives law enforcement agencies nationwide extraordinary new powers unchecked by meaningful judicial review" Just how fair and just these new governmental powers are, how effective they will be, or what abuses (if any) might arise from their implementation will ultimately be judged by the tribunals of history. Until then, whether one agrees with the ACLU warning or not, there's no question that in post-October 31 America freedom and liberty aren't exactly what they used to be. All of which raises some interesting questions: What is freedom? Are there actually different conceptions of freedom? What is freedom grounded in? And why should we be given freedom at all? While most in North America take freedom for granted, as we do the motion of the earth, we might be surprised to find just how slippery the whole notion really is. It brings a realization that we could easily lose it, too.Contrary to popular conceptions, the idea of freedom didn't begin on July 4, 1776, along the eastern seaboard in the American colonies among a group of White European (slave-owning) males. However hard for some red-blooded Americans to accept, freedom, or the notion of freedom, has a long and colorful history that predates Jefferson, Madison, and Washington by thousands of years.
About a millennium before Christ, in India and Nepal, the notion of freedom appears in the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, sacred Hindu texts. There freedom is depicted as a personal spiritual matter more than as a political one. This concept of freedom is illustrated by a story of a man who walks into a dark room. Suddenly he freezes; coiled in the corner is a snake. Barely able to control himself because of fear—his breath tight in his lungs, his muscles tense like rocks, his heart racing—he slowly retreats out of the room that he had wanted to enter. Later, when there's more light, he cautiously peers into the room and sees that the "snake" that caused him so much fear was really just a coiled rope. He now enters.
For these ancient Hindus, then, freedom comes when one is liberated from fear, from illusion, from ignorance; and this liberation can happen only through self-knowledge, through personal discipline. Freedom is release from cravings, from obsession with wealth or goods, from the carnal desires. Freedom comes from within; it's not something that's granted by the government.
Yet it's not out of government purview entirely. Though it's hard to think of anything more potentially dangerous than a government trying to enforce that kind of freedom, another threat, and the more common one, comes when laws are written that could stand in the way of those seeking that kind of freedom: laws that prohibit the spiritual exercises, reading, or worship that one deems necessary to achieving this freedom. History is, sadly, replete with such examples.
Democracy Not Freedom
Ancient Greece, classical Greece, is often seen as the time when the concept of freedom first arose in the West. Much of this is related to the application of democratic principles to their government. And though much freer than, for instance, the repressive rival state of Sparta, down the road, Athens and its democracy need to be kept in context. Of about 360,000 people only about 40,000 could take part in the civic debate. The rest were slaves, women, and children.
What many people don't realize, especially in free and democratic America, is that democracy can hardly be equated with freedom. If 20 people vote to oppress three people, is that a free society? If a majority votes repressive legislation, is that freedom? Thomas Jefferson warned that threats to freedom come, not when the government acts against its constituents, but when "government is a mere instrument of the major number of its constituents." Mobocracy is the pejorative term for it, and history is replete with examples, one of the most famous taking place in democratic Athens itself, with the trial and death of Socrates. Plato, as he watched the Athenians vote to put his beloved teacher Socrates to death (charged with, among other things, teaching against the state gods), wrote some of the most eloquent attacks on democracy, arguing that the masses of people, who know nothing about the intricacies of statecraft, shouldn't be the ones in charge of making it. The point is simply that however much democracy can be linked to freedom (after all, aren't the people themselves, as opposed to a tyrant, more likely to make laws that give themselves freedom?), the two are not synonymous. Majority rule can be just as oppressive as a tyranny, a truth that America's founders understood only too well. This explains why they were careful to build into the U.S. Constitution specific mechanisms designed to blunt the power of the majority (the electoral college being one major example).
Jesus and Freedom
We have a transcendent expression of freedom in the words of Jesus Christ, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). Jesus was talking distinctly about spiritual freedom, the kind that not-govern-ment can grant. Jesus was making no political statement; He was not advocating any specific type of government or political system. Instead, His concept of freedom is something that really transcends politics; it was meant for people living in any political system, including imperial Rome, hardly a bastion of liberal progressivism, to be sure.
At the same time, too, spiritual freedom cannot be separated from political, not when a government acts with overt hostility against the "truth," a common paradigm in the past and one that exists even now (just ask those who, in some Muslim lands, seek that kind of freedom, the kind that Jesus said came from following Him).
Another paradigm, and just as dangerous, is one in which the government seeks to make sure that all people follow the "truth." However egregious such a notion seems to postmodern Western sentiment, where the whole concept of "truth" itself has become suspect, this logic isn't as outrageous or as
natural law, that tells us we should be free? When we say that a person has the right to pray or that a person has the right to vote, where do these rights come from? Are they transcendent absolutes existing in some sort of Platonic realm of ideas, or are they simply human constructs of a certain society in a certain time that creates for itself its own notions of rights and freedom? We often assiduously assert "our rights," which is fine. But on what basis do we claim these rights, these freedoms, as if we have some natural or God-given claim to them? The concept of "rights" itself comes heavy-laden with the presupposition that it's something we deserve, something owed to us by virtue of being human. What is the distinction between a right and a privilege, and how do we draw that distinction? Is it a right, or a privilege, for a foreigner to be allowed into America? Is it a right or a privilege not to have to face surveillance by the government? Is it a right—that is, some sort of preexisting eternal principle not to be tried by a military tribunal?
In short, is there some natural law, something existing in nature itself, from which we derive freedom? Even if so, it's open to various interpretations. Aristotle, looking around at the, world, believed that nature clearly showed that some people were to be slaves, others masters. Thomas Jefferson, in contrast, looking around person could discern.
If one takes a Darwinian world-view, presupposing a single-tiered, naturalistic reality as the total of the world itself, then it's really hard to argue for freedom on anything other than purely selfish, survivalist grounds: is freedom good for the species or bad?
Indeed, if rights are derived from humanity, from human needs, from human nature, from human desires alone -- because these needs, natures, and desires are malleable, fluctuating, and transient -- all concepts of rights and freedom based on them must be as well. Maybe that's good; maybe rights and freedom should change along with desires and needs; maybe our concepts of freedom should fluctuate with the weather or the moon; maybe there should be no rights, only privileges. Maybe truth is more poetic than geometric, more hormonal than metaphysical, more like wind than rocks; if so, then using the word "rights" is, itself, somewhat fallacious.
On the other hand, many believe that the only way to truly have rights and freedom is for them to be grounded in the God who created us; otherwise, rights and freedom are
purely subjective human-made constructs with no foundation other than who happens to be wielding political might at the time.
Of course, claiming that these rights are grounded in God—while certainly helping establish them as concrete, eternal entities not subject to cultural or political whims— opens up a whole host of other problems. Whose God? What's His will for us? Who interprets God's will? It's one thing to say that our rights and freedom are found in God; that's fair enough. The hard part comes in trying to discern just what they are. Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson both profess to serve the same God. Both even read the same Bible. Both would probably agree that freedom and rights have their foundation in God. But the two men often oppose each other on what they understand freedom and rights to be, each one taking his position from what he understands God's will to be. At base we must recognize freedom as a matter of conscience and a personal moral response. We dare not proscribe it for another.
The USA PATRIOT Act
Freedom is like happiness; we know it when we see it, though we're often hard-pressed to define it adequately. But who says we have to? We can be happy without knowing exactly what happiness is, can't we? And we can be free, too, without knowing all the fine points and nuances of what it means. Yet we must also beware: freedom, like happiness, because it is so nebulous and abstract a concept, can easily slip away.
Most Americans right now aren't too concerned about the USA PATRIOT Act. Maybe once all the rubble is cleared from ground zero, they will be. And that's good, at least to a point. The task for a free society is how to balance basic concerns for safety, commerce, and general welfare with the freedom it loves and cherishes. Most societies, even the freest ones, are willing to constrain behaviour to preserve / the public order, particularly in times of crisis. The concept I of society itself, by its very nature, implies a certain restriction of freedom. Law, the foundation of any society, by its very nature as law, automatically places restrictions on freedom. Yet any free society that stops examining itself, that stops questioning its leaders, that stops holding those in power accountable, will soon cease to be free.
The USA PATRIOT Act, for now, has hardly undone the U.S. Constitution. But if there are a few more terrorist attacks, if thousands more Americans are killed ... then who knows? October 31, more than September 11, might prove to be the day that truly changed America.
Richard P. Moore is a freelance writer who has specialized in religious lierty and constitutional issues. He writes from Maryland.