Thinking It Through: ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’
Published June 3, 2021
Thomas Jefferson has been credited most often with uttering the arresting thought about the precariousness of human liberty, but scholars are in dispute about this. Whoever said it, it is undeniably true that this precious human good, granted to us by God, according to the Declaration of Independence of which Jefferson was the primary author, is forever in need of defense. The irony is that liberty is as often in danger from its friends as from its enemies.
Partisan divisions have characterized our politics from the beginning of the American republic and even before. Whigs and Tories, Patriots and Loyalists, were divided over independence and, later, on similar lines over the U.S. Constitution, including how it was to be understood and interpreted. This was followed a couple of generations later by the bloody Civil War over slavery.
This would not have surprised the Greek philosopher Plato, who — while he valued virtue over liberty — was certainly concerned about the forces arrayed against the free, inquiring mind.
His most famous work, “Republic,” midway through its many pages, saw Socrates describe the human community as an underground cave in which darkness prevails, brightened only by images cast on the cave walls, which the inhabitants believe are real.
Lacking the natural light of the sun, they cannot see things as they really are. Only a fortunate few dare to wander outside the cave, braving the searing light that others would find too daunting to endure.
It is easy to pass this image off as a commentary on the authoritative myths of ancient Greece under the sway of the Olympian gods whose passions dominated its multiple polities, democratic and otherwise. But that is too facile. There is little doubt that Plato’s imagery was meant to describe the human condition generally, not just the Greek version of it.
In 1952, political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote a controversial work with the stark title, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” a series of essays that focused mainly on philosophers in the Jewish and Islamic world who Strauss maintained wrote under conditions of persecution, but also spoke about the modern world in which leading thinkers had concluded that the problem of persecution had long since ceased to be a major problem. The latter is my concern here.
The learned reaction to Strauss’s controversial thesis was sharp. Besides objecting to the claim that persecution was a problem even in the modern liberal democracies of Europe and North America, critics found fault with Strauss’s contention that philosophers have found it necessary to obscure their most heretical teachings under a veil of compliance with prevailing opinions. That is, Strauss claimed, these philosophers had an “esoteric” teaching beneath their “exoteric” teaching.
I believe that what most infuriated Strauss’s critics was his implicit claim that, even in the freest countries in the world, persecution has occurred. Just as ancient and medieval regimes demanded conformity to theologies or doctrines — with no little fanaticism and dogmatism — so did “enlightened” democracies display many of the same tendencies.
In the United States, the danger came from absolutizing some aspects of the regime’s principles at the expense of the others. For example, the Democratic Party that formed 100 years ago called itself the “Democracy,” culminating in Stephen Douglas’ famous argument that “popular sovereignty” was the end-all and be-all of our system, even holding that white people could take slaves if that is what they voted for.
For another example, southern politicians, of whatever stripe, faced with the task of defending the indefensible, actually called slavery a “positive good,” based on the claim that what defines human beings is not their talents or virtues but the color of their skin. One sympathizer to this doctrine actually called the proposition that “all men are created equal” a “self-evident lie.”
In more recent times, we have seen many Americans making the claim that the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech includes the “right” to advocate the overthrow of the Constitution, including free speech, a manifest absurdity. Today that argument has been discarded by the Left and embraced by the Right in a vain attempt to hold on to their own liberty to advocate the Constitution.
The lesson to draw from this is that liberty’s survival depends on more than mere passion but on a principled understanding of both its latitude and its limits.
Richard Reeb taught political science, philosophy and journalism at Barstow College from 1970 to 2003. He is the author of “Taking Journalism Seriously: ‘Objectivity’ as a Partisan Cause” (University Press of America, 1999). He can be contacted at rhreeb@verizon.net.
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