Slouching Towards Gomorrah (10 page)

T
HE
R
AGE FOR
L
IBERTY AND THE
P
URSUIT OF
H
APPINESS

F
or all the decades lurid brutality and revolutionary upheaval, the Sixties were not a complete break with the spirit of the American past. Rather, those years saw an explosive expansion of certain American (and Western) ideals and a corresponding severe diminution of others. That deserves to be stressed because if modern developments are in the American grain, if they grow from our roots, as there is reason to believe they do, they will be much harder to reverse than it is comfortable to think.

Though the Sixties brought American concepts of liberty and equality to new extremes, that possibility was always inherent in those ideals. Equality and liberty are, of course, what America said it was about from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is customary to grow misty-eyed about the elegance and profundity of that formulation. It speaks in the vocabulary of natural rights,
which many Americans find congenial, though without examining the full implications of that vocabulary.

It was indeed stirring rhetoric, entirely appropriate for the purpose of rallying the colonists and justifying their rebellion to the world. But some caution is in order. The ringing phrases are hardly useful, indeed may be pernicious, if taken, as they commonly are, as a guide to action, governmental or private. Then the words press eventually towards extremes of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that court personal license and social disorder. The necessary qualifications assumed by Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration were not expressed in the document. It would rather have spoiled the effect to have added “up to a point” or “within reason” to Jefferson’s resounding generalities.

The signers of the Declaration took the moral order they had inherited for granted. It never occurred to them that the document’s rhetorical flourishes might be dangerous if that moral order weakened. When they had won their independence and got down to the actual business of governing a nation, the Founders were not so lyrical. The “unalienable Rights” of the Declaration turned out, of course, frequently to be alienable. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, for example, explicitly assumes that a criminal may be punished by depriving him of life or liberty, which certainly tends to interfere with his pursuit of happiness.

The tension between the rhetoric of the Declaration and the practicalities expressed in the Constitution is instructive. The former articulates a confident liberalism, while the latter assumes that there will be restraints on that liberalism. To note this is not to adopt the old canard that the Constitution was the instrument of a conservative reaction against the liberalism of the Declaration. To the contrary, the Constitution and the laws it permitted expressed the constraints on liberty assumed by those who signed and welcomed the spirit of the Declaration. But these assumptions and restraints are passive and proved ineffective to halt the aggressive march of liberalism to its present condition.

Liberalism does not vary; it is always the twin thrusts of liberty and equality, and these never change. What distinguishes apparently different stages of liberalism…classical liberalism from modern liberalism, for example…is not any difference in liberalisms but a difference in the admixture of other elements that modify or oppose it. Liberalism
itself (putting aside, for the moment, its egalitarian element) is nothing but an effort to struggle free of restraints on the individual.

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, and the Declaration of Independence is an Enlightenment document. That means not only faith in the power of reason to build a just and stable social order, but also emphasis on the individual as the building block of society. The Enlightenment optimists made a serious mistake about the nature of the individual human in whom they placed so much faith. Robert Nisbet notes that the men who laid down the principles of liberalism…Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Jefferson, for instance…thought “such traits as sovereign reason, stability, security, and indestructible motivations toward freedom and order” constituted the nature of man, that man was “inherently self-sufficing, equipped by nature with both the instincts and the reason that could make him autonomous.”
¹

The American Founders shared those sentiments. Jefferson said, “the Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions….” Gordon Wood comments that “Americans, like others in those years, … posit[ed] this natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being…. It made benevolence and indeed moral society possible.”
³

Men with such views of human nature would naturally continually emphasize liberty. Though they surely did not envision a society resembling ours, they set in motion a tendency that, carried far enough, could and often did eventually free the individual from almost all moral and legal constraints. (Again, I am speaking of areas of life where radical egalitarianism does not hold sway.) The tendency
is forwarded by persons for whom that prospect is attractive. This form of liberalism was powerfully stated and carried to what may seem its logical conclusion in 1859 with the publication of John Stuart Mills
On Liberty.
Mill advanced “one very simple principle”: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection…. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.”
⁴
The individual is to be free both of legal penalties and the “moral coercion of public opinion.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that Mill contradicted his own principle in other, far less libertarian writings both before and after
On Liberty
, though he did so without mentioning the contradictions.
⁵
Although in
On Liberty
he argued that every idea was to be examined and opposed in order to approach truth, elsewhere Mill wrote that it is essential to the stability of society that some fundamental principles of the system of social union be held sacred and above discussion. Although
On Liberty
called for freedom of action, individuality, even eccentricity, for the discovery of new practices, new modes of living, what some today might call “alternative lifestyles,” elsewhere Mill praised restraining discipline and the subordination of the individual’s impulses and aims to the ends of society.

It is instructive of the temper of our times that it is the Mill of
On Liberty
who is widely known and admired while the non-libertarian writings of the man Ms. Himmelfarb calls the “other Mill” are far less often read or cited. It is typical that a law school casebook designed for the study of the first amendment is dedicated to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Stuart Mill. I don’t think the author was saluting the “other Mill.”

Mill’s “one very simple principle” is, of course, both impossible and empty. Impossible, because the complex relations of the individual and his society cannot be reduced to a single rule. If that could be done, we should have arranged our society in conformance with the best rule, or at least some single rule, long ago, but all of human history shows that is not the way any real society has ever operated. The principle is empty, because, as stated, it does not really tell us much. Mill thought he knew what conduct of a man concerns others, but the others will often have quite different
ideas about what concerns them, and there is no reason why their opinions on that subject are not as valid as, or entitled to more weight than, Mill’s.

Depending on how the harm is defined, so that the right of self-protection is triggered, the principle can lead either to tyranny or license or any condition in between: tyranny if a community defines harm as encompassing even Anthony Comstock’s psychological anguish at not being certain that private immorality is not taking place; license if only physical or material injury counts as harm. In the first case, the television lenses of the Comstockian moral police would peer everywhere. We would live in Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In the second case, there could be no laws or even moral coercion, for example, about prostitution, indecent exposure, public drunkenness, obscenity, and the like. There is no reason whatever why a community should not decide that there are moral and aesthetic pollutions it wishes to prohibit. Though Mill elsewhere assumed standards of decency…the restraints of law, religion, and morality…that would make his principle less dangerous, this passage contains no such explicit safeguards, and events have proved that standards of decency erode rather quickly. It is difficult not to agree with the man Ms. Himmelfarb calls the “other Mill” rather than with the one who devised “one very simple principle” that underlies today’s rage for liberty, or what our forefathers more accurately called license.

Nevertheless, Mill’s influence remains pervasive, a testament to the power of an idea that has been repeatedly refuted to continue to dominate the sentiments of men and hence a culture. Perhaps, Ms. Himmelfarb suggests, that is because “‘One very simple principle’ is always more seductive than a complicated, nuanced set of principles. And this particular principle is all the more appealing because it conforms to the image of the modern, liberated, autonomous, ‘authentic’ individual.”
⁶
There is a popular notion that expanding the sphere of liberty is always a net gain. That is, quite obviously, wrong. If it were true, our ultimate goal should be the elimination of all law and all the restraints imposed by social disapproval. That condition of moral anarchy seems to be one we are constantly approaching but can never finally reach.

Perhaps the immediate popularity of
On Liberty
was entirely due to its simplicity, but it is also possible to think that we tend to
overrate the power of social philosophers to change the direction of a culture. Perhaps Mill was influential while British legal scholar James Fitzjames Stephen’s contemporary rebuttal
⁷
dropped from sight…until recently it had long been out of print…because the culture was moving towards Mill’s liberalism semiconsciously and gradually adopted this articulation of its inchoate mood. That speculation may be reinforced by the fact that while Mill’s principle became widely known at once, “By a kind of cultural lag the practical implications of Mill’s idea of liberty did not make themselves felt until long after the idea itself had become thoroughly familiar, so familiar that we have almost lost sight of its origin. Only now are we experiencing its full impact.”
⁸
This suggests, perhaps, that the culture created the status of
On Liberty
as much as the book created the culture. The culture had been moving in the direction of Mill’s principle at least since the Enlightenment. Ms. Himmelfarb notes that Mill’s essay “points to a radical disjunction between the individual and society…indeed, an adversarial relationship.”
⁹
That is precisely what is to be expected of the socially and morally separated individuals the Enlightenment liberals contemplated.

The idea of liberty has continuous change built into it, precisely because it is hostile to constraints. Men seek the removal of the constraint nearest them. But when that one falls, men are brought against the next constraint, which is now felt to be equally irksome. That is why the agenda of liberalism is in constant motion and liberals of different eras would hardly recognize one another as deserving the same label. Harry Truman would have hated the Sixties, and, because his liberalism contained more powerful constraints on individualism, he was not a liberal in the same sense that Bill Clinton is. The perpetual motion of liberalism was described by T. S. Eliot half a century ago: “That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature…. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards something definite.”
¹⁰
What liberalism has constantly moved away from are the constraints on personal liberty imposed by religion, morality, law, family, and community.