Albert Camus once said:
“For whomever is alone, without a god and without a master, the weight of time is terrible. One must then choose a master, God being out of style.”
Is liberty, the most sacred of American values — and a concept that has taken, in recent decades, its most radical form, stripped of all corresponding responsibilities, and of all obligations to virtue — really, for most people, the blessing that we fashionably suppose it to be? Or is it possible that to be happy in unconditioned liberty — that is, to be able to maximize one’s individual potential for happiness — requires qualities that vary widely, and innately, from person to person?
If the best society is that which maximally enables and fosters the happiness of its people, might it be that such a society is one which provides liberty (and expects virtue and responsibility in return) according to that varying distribution of individual capacity, rather than one (such as America claims to be) that grants it absolutely and identically to all, regardless of whether it is a blessing or a curse?
This question, which most goodthinkful people will consider shocking even to ask, calls into question the fundamental principles of the Founding, and of democracy itself. But the question is a fair and honest one, and if our goal is not conformity to fashion, but to understand, as the wise have sought to do for millennia, the stubborn truths of human flourishing, then we shouldn’t fear to ask it.
Over at The Orthosphere, JM Smith brings to our attention the all-but-forgotten writings of George Fitzhugh, who had some definite (and by today’s rules, dangerously radioactive) opinions on the matter.
Here.
5 Comments
Not trying to be difficult Malcolm, but is there a headline?
If I may make just a brief point: are there perhaps better defenders of inequality and localism than say, yet another Southern aristocrat who wants to rationalize away slavery by making all the usual cliched arguments? There are plenty of intellectuals to appeal to here after all. John Adams, Wendell Berry, Tocqueville, etc.,etc. Why build a strawman that all licentious leftists can just easily knock down?
Hi Jason,
Thanks — I had neglected to add the title before publishing, and dashed off without noticing. I’ve added it now.
Keep in mind that these weren’t cliched arguments in 1857, when Fitzhugh was writing, and that nowadays even the slightest whiff of such a position – that the move from an ordered social hierarchy, with a web of mutual obligations pointing both upwards and downwards, to a chaotic “free-for-all”, in which liberty becomes license, and all requirements of civic (and other) virtue have been dropped from the equation, might have been a mistake – is considered utterly taboo and instinctively to be rejected, as if by an involuntary nervous reflex.
The question of whether absolute liberty is an unbearable burden for some, and one that it may well be unjust to expect them to carry, is, I think, very much a live one, especially in an age when we have also discarded, as obsolete, all the guidance and scaffolding of transcendent metaphysics. We may feel that we have moved so far along the “moral arc of the Universe” that we can dismiss the question out of hand, but we should ask ourselves: how’s it really going these days? Look at our decaying societies, our “deaths of despair”, the degradation of every aspect of popular culture, and the breakdown of all the ligatures that once bound us together, and ask: is this really such a golden age of human purpose and fulfillment that we no longer even have to wonder if we’ve overlooked something important? Something is clearly broken. Might we have gotten our priorities wrong?
This is a difficult and important topic, with many ramifications and no wholly satisfying answers. Can we still be philosophers about this in the 21st century, or is the subject now closed?
I’ll add one more thing: that as much as we imagine that Liberty is the summum bonum of the America imagined by the Founders, it was a very different concept of liberty then: one that was bound and circumscribed by a great many essential conditions and obligations that we have almost entirely discarded, and most of which we only remember at all nowadays to mock them for their quaintness.
Thanks for your, as always, charitable and considered response Malcolm.
I’m all for posing difficult questions about the suitability of certain individuals (or let’s be blunt, races and ethnicities like Asians, Latinos, and Africans) to exercise democratic self-governance. It should not be a closed matter, as you put it; modern pathologies where the old prescriptions appear obsolete may demand more potent remedies. A certain caution and respect is called for though in grappling with such problems and putative cures, it seems to me, accompanied by that always rare capacity for self-knowledge and an awareness of personal egotism and sin. I don’t detect that quality in Fitzhugh, not at all, at least in the excerpts provided by Professor Smith. For instance, did he ever talk to actual workers to ask about their lives and challenges, those he supposed to be better off under the thumbs of their betters? I’m inclined to doubt it; apparently he rarely left his Batcave where he pondered Carlyle. He reminds me of those very cerebral Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg who never interacted with proles or set foot on a factory floor.
And note well, this guy wasn’t just some old coot spouting nutty rhetoric to exasperated family members. His writings had a certain resonance during the 1850s, contributing to the pernicious doctrine that slavery wasn’t merely a “necessary evil” that should be limited, but a “positive good” that should expand westward and south into the Caribbean. Lincoln among others read Fitzhugh during his law practice, and made the common-sensical observation that it always seems to be the case of men recommending bondage for others but never for themselves. With all respect to Dr. Smith, who strikes me as a good guy and obviously remarkably erudite, I can’t fathom how he can ignore this huge elephant in the room regarding a figure he wants to not merely understand historically and empathize with, but also pay homage to. For if slavery isn’t evil and wrong, then what is? (And no, we’re not talking here about the benevolent paternalism exercised by select ancient Romans and Greeks over their charges thousands of years ago.)
Thanks, Jason.
I think the broader point here is that slavery comes in many forms, that liberty can be as much of a curse as a blessing (in degrees that vary according to the varieties of our nature), and that those who cannot govern themselves according to a higher order will themselves be governed. (Or, as Bob Dylan once said, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”)
If JM Smith were to happen by, I’d be delighted to have him join the conversation.