Liberty and Freedom

Liberty and freedom, to most people are about the same thing, and rarely do we stop to actually ponder what each is and how they interact.

For starters, liberty, as defined by Harriet and John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" is the principal of establishing all laws and rules upon the basic idea of preventing harm to persons and property. This does not include protection from offense, as that is the basis upon which all religious wars have been founded. The laws that protect our person and our property, to respect liberty, must be founded upon the most certain reason. Reason being that process of comprehending the relation between cause and effect that provides the most constant of conjunctions. Reason is one of the primary interests of philosophy and has been very well characterized as to what is meant by it.

Freedom on the other hand is pretty near the opposite of liberty. Liberty is the protection of basic physical needs, both our persons and our livelihoods. Needs are pretty much a one to one mapping of the physical realities of existence upon the extant self. They represent the immediate maintenance or gratification of the self with what is immediately available in one's environment. If all that people required was to be fed, housed and watered we could be kept satisfied and happy in a feed lot. The difference between this existence and what really keeps people happy, according to Kant, is morality. Morality, as defined by A.N. Whitehead, is predominantly a concern for how actions in the present affect the future. Freedom, then, can be taken to be not concern for needs now, but concern for future need satisfaction. The actions that relate to need satisfaction now and need satisfaction later are distinct and highly contrasted.

By basing all laws strictly upon the principals of liberty, we are left with the freedom to concern ourselves with the future. The difficulty comes when laws become too invasive and too complex that we are left with too little freedom to contend with. David Hume claimed that human beings all have a basic need to participate in civil society, a need for social approval. Social participation being a primary means by which individuals can safeguard against future shortage. Hume's claim is that when individuals fail to discover any means by which they can earn social approval, they are left with no freedom except that found by turning to crime. Crime representing a total resignation to immediate need satisfaction with no concern left for future events nor consequences, which results from a prolonged absence of approved social integration.

Now, when laws are established there has been an historic tendency to continually add them to the books. While this may be fine and dandy, it pushes up against the limits of human freedom. Every law added to the books may represent an addition to liberty, but it also represents a subtraction of freedom. There is no accountability mechanism by which the sum of legislation is restricted to the real. What I would like to see is a rule added to constitutional law that caps the total number of constitutional amendments. The number I choose is 26, since it is equal to the number of letters in the alphabet, and if that is enough sounds to represent everything in our lives, it should also be a sufficient number of principals of law. All additions must come either as improved formulations of existing amendments or as replacements for outdated or dysfunctional amendments.

In the U.S. Constitution, for instance, do we really need an amendment instituting prohibition and then one nullifying it? There are two spots to install new amendments. Constitutional amendments, for instance, banning gay marriage, are anti-Christian, as Christ told the apostles to go out to the people as he had come to them, that is as teachers, not as rulers. The kingdom of Christ not yet come, all those who usurp the authority of Christ represent anti-Christ. The guilt of such imposers falls not upon those that must obey, but upon those by whose authority such law is implemented. Hence, there should be first a much higher level of somber and sober thinking with regard to such topics, which would be more strongly felt if the means by which an amendment were added required the somber consideration of the simultaneous subtraction of another.

The primary reason to have morality is to foster cooperation, which concerns itself only with future events (all cooperation involves a future goal), which requires morality to equal freedom. So morality is the freedom to cooperate voluntarily. In fact, the entire capitalist market system is based upon the voluntary contribution of labor in exchange for a wage. Leaving Capital free to profit from the excess value produced by the cooperation of labor, which typically folds back in to increase the quantity of Capital infrastructure within which labor can cooperate to produce even more wealth (Wealth: being the sum of necessaries luxuries, convenience and knowledge in a nation - another misconstrued term). So to a dominant extent, morality translates, in our society into wealth production, or at least it is supposed to when the terms are correct. And morality is nothing less than freedom, since freedom can only be that which is not immediately critical.

Liberty addresses that which is immediately critical and freedom addresses future liberty. Freedom, then sounds a lot like what many people today mean when we say "sustainable" or "sustainability", and this derivation is securely grounded in our philosophical tradition in the work of Emanuel Kant. When we complain about the sustainability of the earth, of the importance of global warming and the need to address it, of agricultural waste and agricultural soil (The Farm Bill is really the FOOD Bill in disguise), of species diversity and the roll of nature in the production of the air we breathe, the hydrological cycle, which includes the purification of the water we drink, and the insects that pollinate every flower that produce the grains that feed us, or the birds that keep insect populations stable... what we are really complaining about is our freedom. We are complaining about the lack of cooperation between capital, labor and government. The arguments against freedom being based upon arguments for liberty, mostly property protection or property aggrandizement, or worse = increasing political power.

The more we lose freedom, the more crime emerges out of the failure of an increasing number of individuals to feel they can contribute to the necessary functioning of civil society, which then represents a threat to other persons and property, a threat to liberty. The two require a balance for civil society to function. Increasing crime yields an increasing burden on wealth in the form of police, court costs and prisons. Internationally, the imposition of rules and laws result in war, which is a gargantuan drain on productive capital. Balancing the freedom to cooperate, with laws that compel cooperation is a necessary roll of government in a civil society, and just as in a job, running for political office is voluntary, so it is imperative that anyone who assumes the task complete it responsibly.

So, while we naively sputter the words 'liberty means freedom', perhaps we need to reconsider what the H we are talking about.

An interesting thought with regard to the idea that people have a genuine desire to cooperate socially revolves around sex. A question I have been mulling is whether sex is 'the mutual gratification of pleasure' or whether it is the 'pleasure of mutual gratification'. Perhaps it is some of both, but even a little bit of the latter yields a big incentive for social cooperation. Sex then, could be considered an instinctive basis of morality. Abstinence is then the restraining from the natural incentive of social cooperation.

Has anyone else noticed the absence of public displays of affection during unnecessary war years?

Peace and love