Scott Kamps
An important truth is freedom isn’t for everyone; not everyone can/should be free.
While this might sound controversial as we celebrate liberty this month, it’s common sense.
If you’ve ever taken a toddler to a potluck, you know this experientially. Most youngsters with liberty to get their own food will experience a stomachache from overindulgence.
As the Greeks said, “No man is free who cannot control himself.”
In the same vein, John Adams wrote, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
His point was morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and are necessary for a society to be free. This is the same logic leading Edmund Burke to surmise the French were not ready to be free in the 1700s, predicting the French Revolution would fail.
He later wrote, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
As Charles Dickens pictured the contrast between London and Paris in A Tale of Two Cities, many have discerned the stark difference between the American and French Revolutions, between Alexander Hamilton and Robespierre. The American Revolution sought to provide liberty – positive freedom for living as one ought (in conformity with the moral order/divine law); the French Revolution sought to provide license and depravity – negative freedom from moral constraint, to do whatever what one wants.
This is no minor distinction; it’s why the American Revolution included the Black Robed Regiment (influential clergymen who supported the cause for American independence), while in France there was open aggression toward Christianity (with religious practice outlawed, replaced with the Cult of Reason).
This distinction is also why the French Revolution failed miserably and the American Revolution produced a Constitution functioning 248 years later. Virtue is essential to survival of our republic. If we, as a people, think like those in the French Revolution, we’ll suffer a similar demise: if we don’t control our wills/appetites within ourselves, our passions will forge our fetters.
The freedom our forefathers fought and died for wasn’t freedom from responsibilities and constraints; it was freedom to live rightly – as the Good Book instructs.
Fyodor Dostoevsky expressed the reality of promoting license/depravity: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”
No chains within us will lead to more chains outside of us.
Good ol’ honky-tonk legend Merle Haggard celebrated true American liberty when he crooned, “We like livin’ right and bein’ free.”
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via emailed, thestableguy@frontier.com.