Dear Children:
There are few things that people have longed for more than liberty. In human history liberty is the one thing most denied, the most feared and the least understood of political concepts. Worse yet, once granted liberty is a moving target and will never be perfected.
That said, it’s easy to see why liberty is found so dangerous by even enlightened of dictators through the ages. For liberty to come into flower it must be granted to everyone. The country bumpkin and the wheelwright and the clergy will all outgrow their britches. The untutored as well as the learned from every corner will want a say in the affairs of state. It’s just too messy of a prospect to keep strict order.
Actually, liberty can be a bit scary for those on whom it is thrust. There will come a time when you are released from the clutches of your parents and set out on your own. Liberty can be quite prickly indeed.
Liberty is understood in modern parlance as synonymous with words such as freedom, independence, franchise and license. Mr. Jefferson, on the other hand, thought of liberty as a broad political right stemming from a previous condition of servitude. Serfs, peons, prisoners, slaves and other vassals of the state are said to be set at liberty. Liberty, in the view of Jefferson and his fellow conspirators, was different from a notion of freedom that included independence, franchise, privilege and license.
Freedoms were thought of as conditions that may be enumerated, restricted, controlled and even proscribed. Physicians, for instance, are free to practice medicine within the confines of a license granted by the state. Voting is a freedom restricted by age. Use of alcohol, tobacco and other dangerous products are controlled by taxation. A person with a license to use dynamite is not necessarily free to blow up his neighbor’s outhouse no matter how deserving that outhouse might be.
Freedom is also a feeling. We can feel free to act. We can feel coerced thereby robbing us of a feeling of freedom. Freedom may be the absence of necessity.
We’re going through this muddle to make a point: We are at liberty to experience freedoms. It is a wonderful feeling. Most of the peoples on earth are not at liberty to experience freedom.
Put another way, liberty means not captive.
Captives have a special place in our narrative. Throughout the Hebrew Bible there are stories of captivation and captives – who got captured and who got ransomed, who did the capturing; who got carted-off where. In the Christian canon, however, we have this single, poignant passage:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
Here we have a license that grants little in the way of freedom in the usual sense. That is, if we accept the usual construct of freedom as a range of permitted actions, the wider the better. Who would volunteer to be constrained? Who would accept obligations without prospect of reward?
The answer to those questions is at the core of the concept of liberty. We are at liberty to accept or reject commissions that severely restrict the range of our actions.
That’s where you come in. How you express your liberty is mostly up to you. But, as we have said in these pages before, the cost is always high. Express your liberty in a way that affronts, you will surely be affronted. Express your liberty in a way that is healing, you will lose your freedom to abuse. Express your liberty in a way that is selfish, you will do so alone. Express your liberty to control others, your life will be spent keeping them shackled. Express your liberty in the service of money, money had better be good enough.
By the same token, we are at liberty to keep our options open, to not commit one way or the other. That too has a price.
The idea that there is some higher recompense for a valued choice or penalty for a bad one doesn’t work either. Mr. Jefferson, for one, used the liberty he was granted in his own time and was judged worthy and grand. In another time, he has been vilified as a slave owner and hypocrite. He is known for articulating high-minded concepts yet abused his chattel maid.
James R. Lowell wrote a poem in 1845 that was set to music fifty years later from a Franz Josef Haydn tune. It was written to protest an American military incursion into Mexico. The Poem is called: Once To Every Man and Nation. It was once part of the rich hymnody that graced our churches. One couplet says it very well.
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
I’m just sayin’.
Much Love,
Poppy
P.S. One of the reasons our hymnody is rich has everything to do with the subject of Mr. Lowell’s poem and the music to which it is set. Fashions run in and out of our culture. Some things that are quite evocative and expressive in one age become passé in another. The Haydn tune (Austria), was originally written as a patriotic song subsequently adopted by the Nazi thugs mostly for its ill-advised line: Germany is above every nation in the world. Add to that the fashion among hymnal committees in recent decades to excise martial themes, references to physical infirmities, gender-specific believers and lyrics whose context are no longer easily accessible. The poem here loses on two of those counts. The tune survives in lots of hymnals with the title: Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken.
Just in case you’d like to read the Lowell poem, it follows.
Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.
Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.
No comments:
Post a Comment