Liberty

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Preface

The word “Liberty,” which I have with some reluctance chosen to stand as the title of this book, means so many things that it often means almost nothing. I have attempted no abstract discussion or definition but have endeavored to show what those who have most thoughtfully considered the subject throughout the ages have meant by Liberty. I have also discussed the subject in the light of the general philosophy of life and of the psychological and historical facts which form the background of such discussion.

My first thought was to publish a book with the title “A History of Liberty,’ but many histories of liberty have been written and they are usually dull legalistic discussions, or are rhapsodical accounts of heroic battles for freedom. The impression given is either that liberty exists as a thing in itself in a sort of vacuum or else that an innocent and a pressed humanity knowing well what liberty meant has progressively emancipated itself from unjustifiable tyranny. Humanity once having gained a victory for the rights of man, it is assumed that the crowd has persisted in the love of freedom and has sought only to secure its blessings to the future.

Some such view appears to be taken for granted by most Americans. This is a “free country” as a result of the heroic feats of our ancestors. Liberty has been.

achieved once for all. The cause of freedom is that of the vii

Vill PREFACE masses against real or possible alien oppressors. Liberty and popular government are much the same, and the idea of liberty has become so associated with patriotic emotion that it has become more a matter of pride in history,— or in popular fictions about history—than a clear, rational concept.

We are inclined as a people to substitute emotion for thinking in dealing with most of the important concerns of our common life, and our attitude toward liberty is no exception. We persuade ourselves, for instance, that we entered the late war in order to make the world safe for democracy and were thus true to our historic role as a nation, fighting for liberty. As a matter of fact, many thinking people among us have long entertained certain misgivings about democracy. They knew the motives which prevailed in the average legislative assembly, local and national. We were already critical. We knew the “hysteria” of crowd behavior in our democratic society. We had reason to suspect that now since ancient tyrants had been overthrown the emergent enemy of human freedom is the crowd itself. We had seen evidence of its susceptibility to catch word, half understood ideas, and to designing propaganda of all sorts. Epidemic outbreaks of mob violence and quixotic crusades of alleged moral reform were not unknown among us. The extent of the venality and corruption in our political life had disturbed many who knew the facts and had meditated on their significance.

Since the war, we have had to witness a widespread cynical tendency to subordinate many of our traditional American ideals to the end of material prosperity. We haye seen orgies of intolerance and we have noted too

PREFACE. 1X often the degrading influence of popular prejudice and ignorance on many of the values of our civilization. We have seen more than one of our traditional guarantees of individual liberty shrink before the well meaning attempts at reform and the organized activity of groups inspired by profit seeking motives. Many have consequently been inclined to dismiss the cause of liberty as a popular illusion. Upon the majority, however, those who have tried to warn the public of the danger of loss of our inherited freedom have made little impression. Somehow, such warnings have appeared, and in fact often have been, little more than irritating criticisms of our ways of life and have offended against popular patriotic sentiments. Notwithstanding such warnings, we as a people feel still that we are dutifully patriotic when we give lip service to traditions of freedom which are seldom honored in daily practice. Warnings put forth as emotional appeal, often made in a spirit of denunciation and of partisanship, are worse than useless in the cause of liberty.

The time appears to have come for Americans to think dispassionately about this matter. We have long needed a rational and critical understanding of our philosophy of freedom. As I have pointed out in the ensuing chapters, it is ironical that in a ‘“‘free country”? where public education is maintained at great cost, to prepare our youth to live in a nation dedicated to liberty, so little concern has been given to the understanding of liberty that great classics on the subject, like Milton’s dreopagitica, Locke’s essay on Toleration, and Mill’s essay on Liberty,— documents which should and could be known and understood by every high school student—are almost never taught.

x PREFACE

Our people have little of the philosophy of freedom. Even our professed liberals are commonly confused, striving as they do to reconcile the classical understanding of liberty (as a rational achievement) with the romantic notion of freedom as a natural right. Little serious attention has been given to the conflict among the varied traditions of liberty we have inherited from the past, or to the problem of valuing them, noting their irreconcilable differences and striving to apply what might be most suitable in them to present conditions.

This book is an attempt to call attention to this situation and to point out what wise men of the past have meant by liberty, to make clear the incompatible presuppositions which lie behind the various traditional uses of the term “liberty,” and to show that liberty has certain necessary relations to a definite and growing type of culture. I trust I may have succeeded in making it clear that the dangers to liberty against which we today must stand guard do not come from a traditional or master class, or from an alien tyrant, but lurk in precisely those impulses in the nature of all of us which are commonly manifest in crowd behavior.

EVERETT DEAN MARTIN New York | May, 1930.

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Chapter I The Confusion Of American Liberalism

Liberty is one of the outstanding problems in modern civilization. It is an ironical fact that one hundred years after Andrew Jackson’s victory swept the common masses of America into supremacy in political power we still find liberty an issue in the United States. What have Americans been doing with their freedom since the year 1828?

Every time the question of freedom is seriously raised in this country it would seem to be considered a challenge to certain ‘‘one-hundred-percent”” American groups, such as the fundamentalists, the Ku Klux Klan, the Anti- Saloon League, various Protestant and industrial organizations, and even the Daughters of the American Revolution. It is a striking fact that these people on the whole are descended from the early British immigrants. They are the people whose ancestors believed that they were establishing here the world’s first great experiment in achieving a society of free people. They are the children of the men who in the crisis of American history pledged their property, their lives and their sacred honor to make America free. They are the descendants of the people who, when they had realized their independence, wrote and adopted a constitution in order that they I might secure the blessings of liberty to their descendants forever.

It is a significant fact in American history, too, that most of the present liberals are of the newer immigration, who bring to this nation a recent European heritage, and that most of the reactionaries in America seem to be the descendants of the men who risked their lives to make America free. It is further ironical that the reactionaries, who seem to have abandoned all interest in securing freedom, honestly believe that they are the defenders of American liberty and of our free institutions. Here we have an instance of a situation in which the populace must be liberated from its liberators. This is an old, old story, for it has happened many times in history.

Perhaps the present issue of liberty in America is not really a struggle for liberty at all, but merely a rationalization of the attempt of industrial workers and city dwellers to claim their place in the sun of American prosperity, social prestige and political power. And this, too, would be an old, old story, for many times in European history a class of men has rationalized just such interests and purposes as the struggle for the emancipation of all men. However, there is here something much more profound than any such view of the situation. The problem of liberty is deeply imbedded in the difficulties and conflicts of Western civilization. The French scholar, André Siegfried, in his book, America Comes of Age, says that in America many of the magnificent material things have had to be achieved at the sacrifice of individual liberty, the sacrifice of things which in the Old World are regarded as the greatest: victories of civilization. He further says that in America the profit motive dominates everywhere and that under the spell of this motive all intellectual activity which does not contribute to profit is discouraged. As a result, we Americans have set up conformity as the greatest requirement of our lives. This demand for conformity in the interest of profit, says Siegfried, is not imposed on the American people by the upper classes, nor by the government; it is imposed by the great masses themselves. This is a thought that ought to: make us pause and think about ourselves. Just how is liberty an issue and against whom is it primarily a challenge?

One hundred years ago the struggle for liberty was a struggle of the average individual against the tyranny of a nobility, a monarchy, a priesthood. Now the enemy of liberty seems to be the crowd itself, operating through the instrumentalities of the Machine Age and its social organization. If this view is correct, then the problem of liberty must be recast in new terms of social psychology. [It becomes a challenge to men to understand themselves and to master themselves in new ways in order that they may retain some vestige of their inherited freedom.

We men of the Twentieth Century are less keen about our freedom than any generation in modern times; certainly less concerned about human liberty than people were in the days when they were striving to achieve it. This is a psychological situation which is common enough.

The things which we take for granted are the things for which we no longer fight. But when a populace becomes indifferent to its freedom, it begins to lose it.

It was ten years ago that the Armistice was signed, ending the Great War, and if you look back over the ten years you will find that there has been an astonishing revival of illiberalism in the United States. Most of the great illiberal movements which now torment us have had their victory, and many their origin as well, during the last decade. For instance, militarism has vastly increased. To-day it is a disgrace to be a pacifist in the United States. Prohibition is another fruit of these last ten years. We have witnessed in Massachusetts the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the tragic result of conflict between radical and conservative mob movements. More recently a similar conflict in a Southern state makes mockery of both civilization and our inherited liberties. Fundamentalism has grown stronger, during this decade, and religious bigotry has again raised its ugly head among us. It is altogether conceivable that the fundamentalist, anti-evolution mania may in the next ten years achieve a victory in America similar to that which prohibition has achieved during the last ten. The same people are behind both movements, the same religious fanaticism has inspired them both, and there is no assurance at all that we shall not have another amendment to the Constitution forbidding Darwinism.

So, all along the line, we see a slump in liberty and, curiously enough, we see it among professed liberals themselves. This generation sees its liberals more futile than liberals have been at any time since the Seventeenth Century. They are bewildered. They have no followers. They speak a confusion of tongues. One would think, if one watched the way in which people behave to-day, that the great liberators of human history had never lived. We have forgotten what the lot of the common man was before our Bill of Rights was wrested from the hands of unwilling monarchs. We have forgotten what it means to live in communities where there is no constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishments. Compare to-day with the Seventeenth and Highteenth ‘Centuries! Think of the fact that almost uniformly in human history the great benefactors of the human race have had to live in exile because they have , given humanity new truths and have challenged its old beliefs. We have forgotten what liberty has cost. We no longer have even a very clear conception of what we mean by liberty.

Men have had at least two things in mind when they have talked of liberty. The first is concerned always with concrete issues and the attainment of concrete rights. For instance, the men of the Renaissance, when they spoke of liberty, meant freedom to study classic literature in opposition to religious obscurantism. To men of the Protestant Reformation, liberty meant the right of private interpretation as opposed to the existing hierarchy. In the English Revolution it meant the immunities of the subject in opposition to the aggrandizement of an over-reaching monarch. In Nineteenth Century England it meant free trade in opposition to governmentfavored monopoly. In every instance there was a concrete, © definite issue. The trouble with this conception of liberty is that it is always paradoxical. We are conscious of it only when we meet its opposite.

Our modern ideas of liberty are confused by theories derived largely from the teachings of Rousseau. This second philosophy of liberty, as distinguished from the first, which is specific, envisages liberty in general, as a state of human happiness. It is vague, the outcome of philosophical discussion. The first is realistic and is based upon experience; the second is idealistic and is based upon emotion. The first stands for self-discipline, the second for spontaneity. The first holds that liberties are a human achievement; the second that liberty is a natural right, a gift of nature. The first conceives of liberty as an outcome of culture and a means to culture; the second maintains that liberty is an escape from the burdens and artificialities of civilization. The first stands for individual responsibility; the second says, Let the people rule. The first philosophy usually prevails when men live under a government in which they do not participate and from which they must wrest their rights. ‘The second philosophy prevails when men think they own their government. Men who hold the first view demand a guarantee of individual liberty with which to secure their rights. Those who incline to the second base their hope of freedom on the natural good will and increasing power of the masses. When the first philosophy prevails, men are careful and critical of custom and law. They would keep these things in their control in order that individuals may be free to vary. The second philosophy enfranchises the mass and makes crowd domination possible.

The history of liberty in our times is the story of the transition of our modern thought from the first philosophy to the second. There are three causes for this transition. The first was economic. It began in the Eighteenth Century and was greatly accelerated in the Nineteenth, when the Industrial Revolution brought opportunity to individuals to exploit their fellowmen. Individualism became the slogan of industria] magnates. They resented and resisted all legal control over their behavior. But industrialism had created great changes in social conditions—overwork, long hours, city slums— abuses which made the workers as a class demand that something be done to bring under the law the men whose economic power was putting them into the position of tyrants above the law. The situation was so bad that it necessitated a program of social legislation.

The second cause for the transition from the old liberalism to the new was religious and had to do with the degradation of three ideas of Protestant Christianity in the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century. The first of these was the idea of salvation, the second the idea of evangelism, and the third the idea of the church militant. When the Puritans came to America they were Calvinists, and the Calvinists were tremendously interested in the salvation of the soul. Salvation was the chief and most important business in life. But the Puritans did not believe that salvation was for everybody. It was for a small proportion only, for the elect of God. Calvinism was broken up in this country partly by deism, which swept away vast numbers of the educated masses, and partly by Methodism, which, with its promise of free grace for all, won many thousands of converts. As the Calvinistic idea of salvation of the elect in the world-to-come became degraded and popularized, it was transformed into salvation of the citizens of the American Republic in this world. This led to the prophecy frequently expressed by reformers in the Nineteenth Century, that the millennium was at hand and that the Kingdom of God was to be set up in the Republic of the United States. Thus the State, with its program of legislation, was burdened with the task of the perfection of — the individual.

The second idea, which suffered degradation, was that of evangelism. When the Puritans established their theocracy in New England, the preaching of their doctrines was kept in the hands of a few relatively welleducated men, but later the situation got out of control. Jonathan Edwards was largely responsible for this. He started a great religious revival in the United States in the Eighteenth Century. He held that when a person is converted he has an intense emotional experience, which transforms him from a state of sin to a state of grace. When men are saved and have a sure sign of grace, they have something to say and they need no theological training in order to say it. Therefore the converted masses gave rise to vast numbers of uneducated and unadjusted preachers, Everybody preached. We became, and have remained, a nation of evangelists, each occupied with preaching social salvation to his neighbor. Hence each citizen became the keeper of his neighbor’s conscience.

The idea of the church militant was the third to suffer degradation. The church has always been militant, always at war. Christianity is a crusading religion. And so the idea of the church at war with the world came to America, and to the evangelistic reform psychology were added an impulse to crusading and an attitude of intolerance. Liberty cannot prevail against such an attitude, for we get from it a sanction for manipulating and regulating our fellowmen.. We Americans, of all nations on earth, are the most obsessed with regulatory ideas.

The degradation of these three ideas—salvation, evangelism, and the church militant—constitutes the second reason for our having changed from the old liberalism to the new, to the idea of the sanctified and glorified liberty not of individuals but of the mass.

The third cause for the change was political. The old struggle for liberty was, as has been pointed out, a struggle of common men against a sovereign. For several hundreds of years that struggle went on. Every clause in our Bill of Rights, every right that we enjoy was wrung from an unwilling sovereign who sought to impose his will upon the people. When the sovereign is no longer a king but the sovereign people itself, the situation is entirely changed. When the mass becomes sovereign it immediately announces: The voice of the people is the voice of God; and, The people can do no

Io LIBERTY wrong! There is no longer the same reason for protecting the individual against the sovereign when the sovereign happens to be ourselves acting as Mass. The question is, How are we going to protect the personal self of ourselves against the public self of everybody?

There is a myth that the rank and file of humanity, acting as a mass, want liberty. There is a legend that it is they who have achieved what liberties we have, that all that has made for human progress has been won by great, nation-wide, spontaneous uprisings of the people. Is this legend based on fact? Historically, it is not. It is doubtful whether liberty has ever been won permanently by a mass movement. Furthermore, the masses on the whole have persistently been indifferent to their own liberty. Take the American Revolution as an example. It seems to have been a mass movement. Careful analysis by no less an authority than James Truslow Adams results in his saying that more men in America fought on the English side during the Revolution than on the Colonial side. He says that one-third were utterly indifferent to the whole matter, numbers of whom were bullied or forced into service to the Colonies, that one-third of the people were Tories, and that only one-third actually participated.

The psychological fact is that to the mass of men, acting as a whole, liberty is primarily the removal of restraint on crowd behavior, and what crowds call liberty is not liberty for the individual: it is liberty for.

the crowd to act without considering the results of its behavior on other people.

There are four or five psychological characteristics of crowd or mass behavior that we need to remember. The crowd or mass tends to act on what we call the “all or none’’ principle. If a crowd gets angry, it is angry enough to kill. If it is amused it laughs at everything. Every emotion is overdone. All of a sudden, usually over some utterly trivial matter, a crowd goes mad and wrecks everything. A crowd never stops to consider the means, never asks whether the thing it wants done could be done in a better way.

The second characteristic of the crowd is opinionated obstinacy. The less a man knows the more strongly he is convinced that he knows it all. The reason for this is that most of us get our beliefs from the people about us. Nothing so supports us in the delusion of infallibility as the fact that all the people around us believe the same thing, and crowds are essentially obstinate because each member is bolstered up by everybody else about him. In such an atmosphere it is difficult for freedom to survive.

In the third place, crowds think almost entirely in terms of propaganda. Very seldom does truth come to them clean. Popular propaganda supports us in our conceit and in our prejudices and we like it. It frees us from the necessity of thinking for ourselves. But it lays us open to tremendous insincerity. It was once said “Ye shall know the -truth and the truth shall make you free.” But the truth that comes to crowds is a tainted thing. If our freedom depends upon truth it is discouraging to look to the mass of mankind for it.

Not only is the crowd opinionated and credulous of misrepresentations, but it is intensely factious. A faction is a group of people who act without regard for the results of their behavior on others. Factionalism itself means not only intolerance but ruthless indifference to the thoughts and wishes of people outside the faction. The social bond, which is consideration of one for another, is broken. This is a characteristic of mass behavior.

Finally, mass behavior is essentially conservative. It resents variation and nonconformity. There is a tendency on the part of everybody to try to reduce everybody else to an automaton. The crowd governs not by reason but by the force of taboo, which is no more valid to-day than was the ancient tribal taboo. Even the idea of liberty itself has become taboo. There are vast areas where people think there is something queer about you if you tell them that you believe in liberty.

Shall we despair because few men love liberty? It has always been so. Liberty is not a natural gift. The problem of freedom involves the whole problem of civilization. We can no longer fight a king to obtain our liberty; we have to fight for civilization in ourselves and in our communities. No people can remain free now who are not civilized. In the Twentieth Century, every person who achieves self-criticism or discrimination in matters of thought, intellectual honesty, and skepticism of popular slogans, is really a friend of liberty.

Chapter II The Story Of Liberty In Ancient Athens

One reason why people cherish the delusion that they are still free long after they have lost or destroyed the liberties won by their ancestors lies in the boundless vanity of man when acting as mass. The mass in modern | / times believes it is sovereign. As sovereign it is free. The exercise of the collective will may mean tyranny for every individual, but men will hardly resent it while each man believes that his will is part of the collective will. Men are sensitive about their freedom when the sovereign is another. They are less so when ‘“‘the people” is sovereign.

Another cause of the delusion of the survival of lost freedom is the modern idea of progress. There is a popular philosophy of history which holds that all creation is working steadily and inevitably toward the ultimate perfection and happiness of man. The masses are being progressively emancipated. Each succeeding generation sees the human race throw off some ancient bondage. The complete triumph of liberty is the fixed goal of history and men are uniformly, progressively, advancing toward that goal. I do not find any such universal trend in history. There is nothing fixed or determined about the achievement of freedom. There has indeed been little general agreement as to what it is. Liberty has meant different things at various periods, always disputed, often whimsical and elusive, depending on accident, on economic conditions, on conflicting psychological factors and cultural ideals. In any case liberty must be achieved, struggled for and jealously guarded even in the house of its friends. The history of liberty is not the story of the progressive emancipation of mankind; it is the revelation of the fact—almost the monotonous repetition of it—that every kind of freedom is achieved with great struggle, and may be lost so easily that men often do not miss it when it is gone.

In general it may be said that men have pursued freedom on at least four divergent paths. Sometimes, as at present, the paths seem to cross and there is confusion. We may think first of liberty as a cultural achievement. According to this new view liberty is not a gift of God or _ of nature. There is no liberty in general; there are rather a number of concrete rights, immunities, abilities, guarantees of the individual. These liberties are possible only in a civilization of a certain type; they cannot exist apart from law, reason and self-discipline. In this sense liberty may be said to be a “function” of the virtues, Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice. It proceeds from certain behavior patterns of civilized people and becomes an accepted set of social adjustments. People learn to exercise a measure of restraint over their own predatory tendencies, to respect one another’s independence, grant one another opportunity for self-development and personal responsibility. In other words, people have liberty when on the whole they are intelligent enough to create a social order in which both the individual citizen and the govern- \ ment mind their own business and refrain from meddling with others in matters which concern only themselves. Mankind in general has never possessed the intelligence and virtue requisite for such freedom, but there have from time to time been attempts to achieve it, especially on those rare historic occasions when a liberally educated minority found itself temporarily in a position of leadership. Perhaps the first to hold this philosophy in the Western World were the Ancient Athenians. Some of our modern ideas of liberty have thus been derived from the ancient Greek thinkers, through the Renaissance and the classically educated liberals of the Eighteenth Century.

Secondly, we may think of freedom as a return to_nature. Since human behavior must, unless it is to end in chaos and destruction, conform to the laws of nature, why not recognize nature as the criterion of the right? Let human law be the expression of natural law. To understand and obey the laws of nature is the highest wisdom. It is also the only way to be free. To live in conformity with nature is to obey the laws of one’s own being. Nature imposes no other bond. All bonds are imposed on man by man in the course of civilization. The more complex civilization becomes the greater the burdens, the more numerous the rules, the more galling the restrictions, Our artificial way of life is the mess of potage for which man has sold his birthright. It is moreover vanity; its joys are illusory when they are not, as they usually are, vices. The true happiness of man is to be found in the simple joys of nature. Civilization corrupts and weakens man as it enslaves him, in fact it is hardly anything more than a foolish system of mutual exploitation all for the sake of empty appearances and for possessions which are really unnecessary and worthless. Man in the state of nature was free because he had not yet imposed upon himself the burdens of civilization. When man obeyed only nature he was not only free but healthy and good. He would be all this now but for the evil influence of our corrupt civilization. To be free, be yourself, be natural. Do not try to crush out your instincts and emotions as civilization demands. You have a natural right to live your own life. Your instincts will guide you to the good life once they are no longer corrupted by the vices of civilization. Unfortunately the vices and slaveries of civilization have become the vested interest of the master classes. Liberty therefore means the emancipation of the masses, the overthrow of the rulers, the reassertion of the natural rights of man. The great apostle in the modern times of this philosophy of freedom was Rousseau.