LIBERTY VS. LICENSE

Declaring independence: Family ties and self-control free us from enslavement (Marvin Olasky, 6/28/03, World)

Freedom is not "just another word for nothing left to lose," as Janis Joplin sang before she drugged and drank herself to death. Actually, the word free in Old High German, as Gregory Beabout of Saint Louis University showed, stems from the Indo-European prijos (dear, beloved) and is related to the Sanskrit priyas (dear) and priya (wife, daughter).

The word free is also connected to the Old English frigu (love); Germans and Celts used it to mean neither controlled from outside the household nor enslaved, but benevolent toward and intimate with those inside. In Danish, I'm told, frie means "to make an offer of marriage," which should be done both through free choice and love. The etymology explains why the goddess Frigg was the Old Norse equivalent of Venus, the goddess of love in Roman mythology. Perhaps Fridays (the name derived from Frigg) are for lovers-and marriage is an act of freedom that promotes true love.

In the movie Braveheart, when William Wallace (played by Mel Gibson) under torture near the end yells "Freedom" and envisions his murdered wife, he is thinking as a Celt would have. [...]

The 1904 version of "America the Beautiful" proclaims, "Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law." Liberty, self-control, and the external control of law all work together to keep us from being enslaved by our temporary desires. Two centuries ago, the antonym to liberty that sprang to people's lips was not slavery but license. A free person stood in the middle of a spectrum, tugged by one mob to embrace libertinism or another mob to hug dictatorship and political slavery.

A century later, we've forgotten much of that. But if we want to maintain independence, we should dare to remember.

The manner in which each extreme must lead to its opposite--libertinism provoking a crackdown and repression fomenting revolution--is nearly enough to convince you there's a divine hand at work that points us instead towards the conservative form of liberty. Nearly... Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2003 9:34 AM