UNFREEDOM IS SO MUCH EASIER

American freedom is a divisive concept (Anatol Lieven, August 6 2003, Financial Times)

Educated Americans often say rather mournfully that Tony Blair expresses American values and goals better than the current US president. Whether this is what a British prime minister is elected for is, however, questionable. For while many US values may be virtuous in themselves, they can also be terrifying in their naivete.

This is above all true of "freedom". Mr Blair stressed this theme in his speech to the US Congress last month: "Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit and anywhere, any time, ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same. Freedom not tyranny. Democracy not dictatorship."

He then went on, like most Americans, to identify these values specifically with the US: "Don't ever apologise for your values. Tell the world why you're proud of America . . . What you can bequeath to this anxious world is the light of liberty." In a speech punctuated by an embarrassing number of standing ovations, no lines were more enthusiastically applauded. For this is the basic, boilerplate stuff of American political rhetoric.

But this vision of a simple, eternal, universal and universally accepted version of "freedom" is not true and never has been true, not only
internationally but within the US as well. Far from being straightforward and self-evident, the meaning of freedom has always been and remains ambiguous and contested. [...]

Americans need to profess absolute belief in their contradictory creed in part because a shared allegiance to it is one of the things holding their disparate society together.

Got that? The most successful, stable, and disparate democratic republic in human history is held together by its peoples' shared belief in the universalist Judeo-Christian notion of intrinsic human dignity and the freedom it necessarily conveys, but this is a divisive concept. He's right of course--if you oppose freedom we're likely to divide you from something up to and including your life. But the British at least used to agree with us. In fact, the jealous defense of freedom was their cause first:

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.

[T]he people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands.

    -Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies ( 22 Mar. 1775)

Little wonder that Tony Blair heeds its siren call. But Europe, and sadly even England, is a far different place than it was in Burke's day. Now it may be that Theodore Dalrymple describes the European character better when he says:

If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one's own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is a complete nightmare.

Such freedom is a nightmare, of course, not only for those who possess it, but for everyone around them. A man who does not know what to do with his freedom is like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match is thrown: he goes off in all directions at once. And such, multiplied by several millions, is modern society. The welfare state is - or has become - a giant organisation to shelter people from the natural consequences of their own disastrous choices, thus infantilising them and turning them into semi-dependants, to the great joy of their power-mad rulers.

    Don't set the people free: many poor souls need institutions, but the ideologues and cost-cutters insist on giving them autonomy (Theodore Dalrymple, 12/14/02, The Spectator)

This kind of state does indeed lead to a quiescent uniformity in a way that a free society never can. But those statists--like Mr. Lieven and "Educated Americans"--who seek such a deracinated future for the West are not merely different than Americans; they are our enemies just as surely as the Islamicists. What Mr. Blair has shown us is that, should a time of choosing come, he'd fight with America for freedom. Hopefully most of the rest of his people would also. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2003 10:08 AM