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Free Peoples
Dec. 8th, 2009 02:29 amI think that somewhere along the way Americans have lost sight of the fact that people don't generally come with a strong sense of what it means to be free, even if freedom is a right granted by nature. Freedom is, to put it Thomistically, a habitus which is formed in communities starting at a young age based on natural inclinations which can just as easily be vitiated by servility.
One of the only good arguments against the mass immigration of Europeans into the United States was the sense that these people were servile, used to obeying priests and princes and therefore ill-suited to our republic. I wonder whether there wasn't something to that argument when I look at the declining value we as a society place on liberty and freedom.
Authorities are instantly obeyed, presidents are fetishized as saviors, freedoms are traded away in exchange for new titilations in our increasingly trivial society. I think it starts when kids are young, with teachers, who are agents of the state in many cases, set up as miniature despots and children are told the whole of their lives - social, intellectual, and monetary, depends on their obedience regardless of whether the rules conform to logic, reason, law, liberty, revelation, tradition, or common sense. When such unthinking obedience is enforced in school, is it a wonder that conformity, anonymity, and mediocrity become values, or that virtues like the fortitude to stand on principle (even against principals) or the refusal to compromise self-determination are considered wicked and disruptive? Even worse, people who don't conform find themselves alone and filled with self-loathing, turning to digital delight, drugs, or even suicide to achieve artificially the deadened worldview which has become the hallmark of their supposed peers.
Most pernicious is that businesses, the Church, the universities, and governments all cooperate with this vitiation, preferring drones to leaders and leaving critical thinking and principles for those who can afford them (or worse, the Congress). We are a people unable to be led because will not go anywhere, preferring the unthinking, challenge-less life of slavery to the prospect of a change in the precious status quo people will pay so very much to protect.
This isn't limited to the large institutions of society - debate teams and WoW guilds and livejournal communities are the domain of those who care nothing for liberty, ignoring rights and duties in favor of control. It perverts us every time we assent to authority which does not accord with our reason and our conscience, and we become that little bit less free, that little bit more willing to sacrifice our self-determination and the pursuit of our own excellence on the heathen altar of slavish expediency.
We are a nation founded on revolution, when men of great learning dared to demand liberties which were their birthright and so effected the first separation of a colony from an Empire in the history of the modern world. It was the first in a great series of the triumphs of liberty over totalitarianism, but it seems that America, the mother of Republicanism, stands in need of her own Prague Spring, another rededication, even at the cost of blood, to the proposition that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain, inalienable rights, lest the experiment we brought into the world fail, and our way of life perish from the Earth in favor of rule only by those who can find it in themselves to care about anything but their own delight.
One of the only good arguments against the mass immigration of Europeans into the United States was the sense that these people were servile, used to obeying priests and princes and therefore ill-suited to our republic. I wonder whether there wasn't something to that argument when I look at the declining value we as a society place on liberty and freedom.
Authorities are instantly obeyed, presidents are fetishized as saviors, freedoms are traded away in exchange for new titilations in our increasingly trivial society. I think it starts when kids are young, with teachers, who are agents of the state in many cases, set up as miniature despots and children are told the whole of their lives - social, intellectual, and monetary, depends on their obedience regardless of whether the rules conform to logic, reason, law, liberty, revelation, tradition, or common sense. When such unthinking obedience is enforced in school, is it a wonder that conformity, anonymity, and mediocrity become values, or that virtues like the fortitude to stand on principle (even against principals) or the refusal to compromise self-determination are considered wicked and disruptive? Even worse, people who don't conform find themselves alone and filled with self-loathing, turning to digital delight, drugs, or even suicide to achieve artificially the deadened worldview which has become the hallmark of their supposed peers.
Most pernicious is that businesses, the Church, the universities, and governments all cooperate with this vitiation, preferring drones to leaders and leaving critical thinking and principles for those who can afford them (or worse, the Congress). We are a people unable to be led because will not go anywhere, preferring the unthinking, challenge-less life of slavery to the prospect of a change in the precious status quo people will pay so very much to protect.
This isn't limited to the large institutions of society - debate teams and WoW guilds and livejournal communities are the domain of those who care nothing for liberty, ignoring rights and duties in favor of control. It perverts us every time we assent to authority which does not accord with our reason and our conscience, and we become that little bit less free, that little bit more willing to sacrifice our self-determination and the pursuit of our own excellence on the heathen altar of slavish expediency.
We are a nation founded on revolution, when men of great learning dared to demand liberties which were their birthright and so effected the first separation of a colony from an Empire in the history of the modern world. It was the first in a great series of the triumphs of liberty over totalitarianism, but it seems that America, the mother of Republicanism, stands in need of her own Prague Spring, another rededication, even at the cost of blood, to the proposition that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain, inalienable rights, lest the experiment we brought into the world fail, and our way of life perish from the Earth in favor of rule only by those who can find it in themselves to care about anything but their own delight.
