Ideas on Liberty

Why Liberty and Morality Are Inseparable

BY GEORGE C. ROCHE III

EXAMINING American culture today, one can find ample reason to despair of our future. On many sides we see the spread of false values and decadence. In too many places we see a dehumanizing impulse which cheapens the worth and dignity of life to the vanishing point. That impulse reveals a sickness in our underlying moral beliefs. Yet our headlong decline evokes only a murmur of concern and alarm. It is as if we were being fitted for our own annihilation.

“It is difficult to resist the conclusion,” says Malcolm Muggeridge, “that Western man, having wearied of the struggle to be himself, has decided to abolish himself.” He calls the contagion, with considerable justice, the “Great Liberal Death Wish.” Whatever we call it, no one doubts we have terrible weapons to finish the job with deadly efficiency. But few notice we do it just as surely—if more slowly and more painfully—through starving the spirit. Man is the one creature on earth who cannot survive by the mere satisfaction of his animal appetites. Yet on the evidence, we seem concerned with little else.

In a generation’s time we have inverted the ideals of all previous generations of Americans. We do not even understand our forefathers’ words or goals. In these few years a tide of what may be called anti-heroism, centuries in the making, reached its flood-tide and inundated us. Many of us in our middle years have watched this tide and yet not known what we have seen. Thirty years ago we had no headline drug problem. Marijuana, cocaine, and the rest were relatively unknown. Crime rates were far lower and women could safely walk the streets in most areas. Abortions were rare, illegal, and to most, unthinkable. Taxes were less than a tenth what we pay now. First-class mail cost 3¢ and was delivered promptly. Coins were made of silver. Nobody worried about inflation. The “deficit” was not an issue; the government still had occasional surpluses. The few sleazy porn parlors around could not legally show a woman topless. Nowadays, to find something morally safe for your child to read, you head for a special “family” bookstore. And on the way you might drive by half a dozen “adult bookstores” peddling every kind of filth the mind can imagine. You see such now on the outskirts of even small towns, not long ago bulwarks of sane and sensible life.

I am not idealizing, much less conjuring up a happy childhood or fictions about the “good old days.” Life always has its problems, but the change in recent years has been staggering.

It gives me no joy to review such cultural indices, to see how nearly we have squandered our estate. Heaven knows, I am no America-basher—that unctuous breed who positively relishes our every failing and distress, whose words salt and poison our wounds. (You know them: finger-pointers, cranks, sourpusses, tortured aesthetes, uglies, marchers, who demand that the world pay for their personal failure. Thoreau knew them: “If anything ails a man,” he said, “so that he does not perform his functions if he have a pain in his bowel even, he forthwith sets about to reform the world.” They are a large part of the problem at hand.) In truth, with the passing years, I love more than ever this fair land, its quiet homes, its untamed libertarian energy. Much of it remains unspoiled, and in many ways a finer, heroic spirit still moves us. Yet it must be admitted that we have changed and in the process have suffered a great loss. This is most plainly seen in the cultural decline which mirrors our faltering faith. Not until we isolate the pathogen can we attempt a cure. Otherwise, like a victim of fever, we will only slip deeper into lassitude, uncaring as the disease steals our waning strength.

Our affliction is specific. It is not as though, after two thousand years of contrary teaching, we have suddenly decided that sin is just the thing for more abundant life. The change was fostered and urged by a particular, anti-heroic view of reality. This view has historical origins in the West that can be traced. It is most readily understood (and derives its power) as a religion of Man, preaching a purely materialist interpretation of reality.

Anti-Heroism

Anti-heroism leaves clear fingerprints wherever it touches our culture. Among those fingerprints we should watch for assaults on, inversions of, weaseling about, and rationales for evading, traditional religious beliefs and a fixed transcendent standard of Good. The anti-hero does not believe in a personal God or in any spiritual purpose of men, and he finds numberless ways to say we are so many corks on the water, with no responsibility, individuality or value to our lives. Listen to all the television newscasters for a day, a week, a year. You will never hear them say the one straightforward thing: that today’s horror was wrong, an evil act. Every other conceivable explanation will be trundled out, lest we admit evil. Society was to blame. The terrorists were trying to dramatize their protest. The criminal came from a bad neighborhood. Only a psychotic would hack his mother into small pieces to collect the insurance.

Certain doctrines are equally revealing signatures of anti-heroism. Militant egalitarianism, for one: that obsessive urge all about us to deny all individuality and reduce everyone to “social units” of statistically identical condition. Wages are to be equalized, school classes leveled to the rate of the slowest child, the successful or rich humbled. Materialism, in the philosophic sense, is another signature. This is the claim that the things of this world are all there are, and it pretends to forget who is the “prince of the world.” A collectivist bent is by its very nature anti-heroic. It is, indeed, a sign of the immaturity at the heart of all anti-heroic tenets. The anti-hero, like the adolescent, is the perpetual sucker for “group formation,” and attributes mystical qualities to the group. “Peer pressure” and the voice of the mob reduce his guilty feelings about his acts. Like a child he thinks history began at his birth, and he cultivates a scorn for the past. Like a child he is sulky about accepting responsibility and dreams up ways to blame anybody, blame the whole world, for his own shortcomings.

The anti-heroic siege of Western values is comprehensive, and we could discuss it at almost any length. For example, look for an almost clinical aversion to suffering. The modern thinks the least discomfort is the curse of the fates and proof aplenty that there is no God, never suspecting that suffering is our greatest teacher. Look for an equal obsession with comfort, possessions and, most of all, sex. These are as close to happiness as the anti-hero can get, with sex the holy of holies. Never mind that children are abused or lethal diseases spread. Watch for the urge to lay bare all things, a tearing away of all veils of decency, an obscene (in the old sense) desire to see all in its seamy “natural” reality. Watch for the related “comradely” or Jacobin denial of manners, forms, tact, ritual, piety, ceremony: the inversion of civilized community. Watch for new expressions of the immoral formula, “the end justifies the means.” Listen for adversion to science as the determinant of all truth, as if truth were bound to the material world which is the only world that science can investigate. Listen to the tireless moralizing by those who mind everybody’s business but their own and will not speak of real good or evil. When you hear or see these things, you have found anti-heroes in their chosen calling of destroying the West.

For our predicament written large, just turn on the television—which we do on average, for something over forty hours per week. There we glaze our eyes and minds with the now proverbial sex and violence, car chases, and unending inanities. We drink in the “what is” of life in great draughts, neither asking for anything uplifting nor caring that we cannot find “what should be” in network programming.

The Plight of Education

The other great transmission belt of anti-heroism, directly to the young, and through them to the culture at large, is public education. As an educator, I see its product every day, even though the young people in my charge are, in the main, the sturdiest survivors of our secondary schools—the ones who, through family or religious influence, have fought their way clear.

The problem with our schools is not want of effort or money; we have long been lavish in those regards. We falter in having forgotten what education is. Albert J. Nock argued more than fifty years ago that education had vanished entirely from America. Malcolm Muggeridge snorts that “education” today is the great liberal poohbah, a “gigantic fraud” at public expense which seems almost intended to bring down civilization. The whole point of education is to pass along civilized and moral values from one generation to the next. What is now “taught” in many schools is the opposite—a smattering of facts and “subjects” as scrupulously free of values as the anti-hero can manage. And make no mistake, anti-heroes regard the schools as their own private preserve and demand monopolistic indoctrination in their own view. Anything other than uniform standards would be “undemocratic,” you see. Meanwhile, huge bureaucracies are created to determine those standards.

Government at all levels is the purveyor of most education, and usually the worst. Degraded, anti-heroic curricula serve its purposes well and expand its power. Students trained in conformity and “adjustment” grow up to be compliant and docile taxpayers, neither mentally nor morally able to offer any resistance to growing state interventions. The state itself is the principal instrument of anti-heroism. The bloating of the federal government over the past fifty years is the most visible symptom of the anti-heroic penetration of American life. Having nothing to “render unto God,” anti-heroes must perforce render all to Caesar. They are, to a man, all junkies of statism. In the absence of divine authority over men, the State, of necessity, becomes the final authority, taking on a quasi-divine—but far from benevolent—character. The apotheosis of the State to godhood is explicit in totalitarian regimes which war against all other religious observance (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”). But all anti-heroic influence tends to the same end: the total State.

America was founded on exactly the opposite principle—another lesson taught falsely or omitted altogether in most school textbooks. The Founders agreed that government was at best a necessary evil, to be limited to a few specified functions by “the chains of the Constitution,” and never to be trusted. The goal was maximal liberty and minimal state interference, a view presupposing that men are self-controlling, moral beings. The colonists had fought for their independence from onerous taxes and “a swarm” of the king’s officers, with the slogans “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Life, Liberty and Property.” They meant to secure their liberties for all posterity with a limited, internally checked form of government and with the Constitution.

All this is gone, upended by anti-heroism in a virtual revolution. The greatest political changes, most agree, occurred in the Roosevelt years, beginning in 1933. But the real revolution began much earlier with the ascendancy of anti-heroic ideas, often imported from Europe. In the new view it is the individual person who is not to be trusted and the State that can do no wrong. It is as if we inverted the Jeffersonian maxim: “That government governs best which governs most”—no matter how bumbling, wasteful, boneheaded, bureaucratic, frustrating, bossy, and expensive its actions. The traditional relationships between the people and the State have been reversed. Where once government was conceived as the servant of the people, serving with their consent and at their sufferance, it has now become the master, and citizens are called “subjects.” Cooperative society gives way to coercive rule. Equal opportunity for all in liberty surrenders to a massive maze of stolen legal privilege in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, tariffs, protectionism, legal monopolies, and so on. From a system rewarding diligence, prudence, and thrift, we turn to one of “income redistribution,” penalizing effort and rewarding the most indolent, useless, and unproductive among us (bureaucrats very much included). Said the breathless ideologue of a century ago, when the State had absorbed all social energy, it would wither away. His legacy is the Superstate that is the most characteristic mark of the twentieth century. It is the individual who has withered away. We have become so many units for government statistics, so many income-producers to be taxed, so many subjects in bureaucratic dossiers.

Deluged by Politics

Accompanying this massive reversal of the American experiment in liberty has been a great politicization of our thinking and an almost berserk reference to “democracy.” We are inundated with politics. Hardly a news item appears that is not couched in political overtones. It is the same story. Having, at anti-heroic urging, discarded any higher truth or authority over men, we necessarily turn all matters into political questions, to be settled by the councils and tribunals of men—preferably by counting heads. This elevates mere process to an absolute—another anti-heroic superstition. Follow the correct (democratic) procedure or formula, and never mind whether truth is served or the results are good. What follows is, in fact, very often atrocious: Hitler was elected, after all. But the anti-hero always has a high-sounding argument at hand, and he uses it constantly to justify his attacks on America’s heritage and to conceal his loyalty to her enemies. But it is a cheat. His theories deny a genuine morality.

From a practical standpoint, Thomas Jefferson tried to warn us, the more government undertakes, the less it can perform its basic functions of keeping order, dispensing justice, and providing for the common defense. All of these are at present in disrepair. The anti-heroes are so busy inventing new “rights” that we forget the old and fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property, with which the new conflict. You cannot, for instance, declare a right to abortion at government expense without contravening both the baby’s right to life and the taxpayer’s right to keep what he earns. Such declarations are, to my mind, a none-too-subtle attack on our genuine rights. We spend more money on law enforcement every year, and the crime rate unfailingly goes up. We spend more money on education every year and the test scores unfailingly go down. What’s going on here—other than the obvious fact that the government is the most bumbling performer we could turn to for either function? In Richard Weaver’s words, “Ideas have consequences.” The real deterrent to crime is moral law. We are to love our neighbor. We do not harm him: it is forbidden. We do not steal his property because it is in every sense his, the product of his effort, and in no way ours. No man of self-respect would touch what does not belong to him.

Before we take leave of the rude, anti-heroic intrusions of government, we must note its greatest effrontery: its trampling of the whole concept of justice. According to three thousand years of Greek, Judaic, Roman, and Christian teaching, justice means “to each his due,” equality before the law. About a hundred years ago at Harvard Law School, then as now in the vanguard of anti-heroism, the good professors decided that what was important was winning the case, not justice. And there began an avalanche of injustice.

It has long since become routine for lawyers to use delays and legal trickery to gain acquittal for crooks they know full well are guilty. This practice is defended not only as permissible but “ethical”: in the name of providing the “best possible” defense. But the tactics employed can be ethically questionable or worse, and the end served is the defeat of justice. This process has been abetted by a long series of court decisions establishing a wide array of ultra-finicky procedural “rights” for the accused. Let the police or prosecutor make the slightest error, and all the evidence in an otherwise open-and-shut case can be thrown out, and a criminal freed. Thus justice is subverted by the “winning is everything” doctrine, an anti-heroic formula. Under it criminal activity becomes more profitable and crime rates climb.

But that’s just the start. Having bitten the apple, the legal profession and “public interest” groups have in recent years engineered what has been called the “tort revolution.” What it amounts to is a system of legal theft, aimed at the rich, but affecting us all by making fault irrelevant in most liability suits.

Hostility to free markets is also a general and clear signature of anti-heroism. This, in part, reflects the lingering effects of Marx’s primitive “economic theories”—if they may be so dignified. These were so crude as to be demonstrably false before the ink was dry, and embarrassed even socialists. (Some future student will find Marx’s flighty assumptions, abstractions, and tortuous arguments the very model of anti-heroic thinking—the sort of thing that led Marx to insist wages must fall to subsistence levels smack in the middle of a century of rapidly rising wages.) However absurd the theory, all its prejudicial conclusions were retained and are still widely expressed in hatred for, and attacks on, a free economic order, i.e., “capitalism.”

In another sense, Marxist theory did not and does not matter. Its real purpose was to turn envy into righteousness and to justify the immemorial resentments of weaklings and failures toward more successful men. In envy, Marx’s followers already clung to the ancient fallacy that “wealth” was static, not constantly created. It follows from this blunder—despite the fact that it had been exploded by Adam Smith a century earlier, in Wealth of Nations (1776)—that to acquire wealth you had to steal it from somebody else. All they wanted was an excuse to unleash their envy and hatred with moral righteousness, and Marx gave it to them: “capitalism is theft.” With this they could claim justice while revenging themselves on their “bourgeois oppressors” with merciless class war and extermination. No demonstration in this century has been more overwhelming than the folly and brutality of such thinking on the one hand when compared with the moral and economic superiority of free markets on the other. Yet the anti-hero nurses his old fallacies and false righteousness to vent his grudges against “the rich.” Deep down he says, “It’s not my fault I am not more successful. It’s theirs, it’s the system’s, it’s the world’s.” Deeming himself to be sensitive and superior, he reasons that if the world does not recognize it, the world is not good enough for him. He will punish it. If the system doesn’t put him at the top of the heap, nobody else can be, either. He will level it. If he is not financially successful, he will turn up his nose at “grubby materialistic commerce.” If he inherits wealth, he is commonly filled with guilt, and often uses his money to advance “the cause.” He gravitates naturally to bureaucratic or tenured academic positions, where advancement is by seniority and success is not measured in dollars. There he can nurse his brooding grudges and form cliques with others of like mind, to get mutual support and to rail against the injustice of it all. From this cesspool of whiny self-justifications, anti-heroic posturing, and venomous envies springs the modern’s loathing for free markets in a free society. America, symbol of freedom and success, is for that very reason the quintessence of evil in the eyes of the anti-heroic intellectual—here as well as abroad. We do not understand anti-heroism adequately until we see its roots in envy and its motivation in revenge.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman has remarked that “all interventions [in the market] are counterproductive.” This is true, and once it might have alerted us to the cost of political meddling: it could harm our standard of living. This is no longer enough. The ascendancy of anti-heroism, especially in the last two decades, has lulled us into believing that our vaunted standard of living is all there is, and that a perpetually rising Gross National Product is our promise of heaven on earth. In this we forget our higher purposes in life, and make ourselves accomplices in our own execution. The anti-hero knows, if only instinctively, what we are forgetting, that the marketplace has more and higher purposes than money grubbing. Markets reflect our spiritual values as well as our free economic choices. They are a bulwark of life, liberty, and what Weaver called “the last metaphysical right,” property. If in nothing else, we can at least see that economic freedom gives us the surplus we need for charity and philanthropy, for caring for the needy, for building synagogues and churches. We err greatly in separating things into neat little categories: commerce here, charity there. As Ludwig von Mises showed, they are all part of an interlocking system of free choice. Recent scholarship by George Gilder and others has established the moral and altruistic basis of entrepreneurial capitalism. Lord Acton used to be fond of saying that the tenets of modern economics could all be found in the Gospel. We have always been able to see the difference: not only the obvious economic superiority but the moral health on this side of the Iron Curtain.

Restoring the Heroic in Our Lives

Unfortunately, the anti-hero is especially crafty in persuading us that money, not morality, is all there is to markets. That opens every door to his attack. Heavens! He does not want to kill the goose, no sir. He just wants to regulate the market, tame it, tax it, suppress “greed,” prevent “fraud,” stop pollution, correct market inefficiencies, and blah blah. We’ve all heard it. And in his sway we think, “he’s just fine-tuning; let the experts keep the GNP rising, do the planning, improve our standard of living.” But he is destroying our markets, our freedom and, what matters more, our moral capacities. The economy is not a “thing”; it is ourselves exercising our free and moral choices. Markets—“people power”—are strong and resilient, but cannot withstand indefinitely an anti-heroic siege that brings grafters and politicians into the service of anti-heroic ideologues, do-gooders, and “public interest” busybodies. We have lost a sizable fraction of our freedom and rights to this weird coalition, and notwithstanding a few successes with deregulation of late, stand to lose much more—or all. There’s nothing between us and Soviet-style bread lines except restoration of the heroic, religious basis of life.

We must, in short, keep our balance between the worldly and spiritual sides of our nature. The former, carried to its extreme, its reductio ad absurdum, by anti-heroism, produces what I think is the ultimate temerity of the modern world: central economic planning. It sounds so cool and scientific and rational that we are easily seduced by the idea. But what it amounts to is the imposition by force of the notions of a few government whizzes in place of and overruling the infinitely better informed choices of all of us in the market, each of us informed by our own circumstances and ever-changing scale of virtues and preferences. The presumption that the central planner can do better for us than millions of us can do for ourselves is monstrous. Our “unplanned” open market is the reason our stores overflow with luxuries while workers stand in line for necessities in anti-heroic utopias.

With what incredible gall, then, are we to claim to “plan” the doings of that most complex creature, moral man? In this regard, “I have an earnest proposal to make,” said the biologist Lewis Thomas. “I suggest that we defer further action until we have acquired a really complete set of information concerning at least one living thing. Then, at least, we shall be able to claim that we know what we are doing.” For that simple organism, anyway. “The delay might take a decade; let us say a decade. We, and the other nations, might set it as an objective of international, collaborative science to achieve a complete understanding of a single form of life. . . . As to the subject, I propose a simple one, easily solved within ten years. It is the protozoan Myxotrichia paradoxa, which inhabits the inner reaches of the digestive tract of Australian termites.” The idea, of course, went nowhere, and we still know little about M. paradoxa. But the anti-hero, in conscienceless cruelty, goes on advocating more creative “five-year plans” to dictate the lives of all.

But it takes nothing more than waking up to end a nightmare. Our bad dream will end as soon as we see what it is. I believe that it is already ending, and that the worst is behind us. but we are barely past the crest of the anti-heroic tide. There is much peril before us, and much to do.

We Americans have always known something the world sometimes forgets: that the right tree bears the good fruit. We can judge anything by results. If our machine doesn’t work, we know we botched the design. If we put water in the gas tank, we know that’s why our car doesn’t run. The same for the philosophic schemes of men. If the results don’t live up to the promise; if we are not happier and morally healthier for them, we know beyond any doubt they are wrong.

We still have a choice. Anti-heroism has no irresistible claim on us. We can dump the whole reeking works over the cliff with no more than a decision to do so. Its claim to make a full and true accounting of the whole cosmos is just ludicrous. It is literal madness. It is our best scientists who tell us how little we know of even the material world science can study. It is our wiser philosophers who remind us how little we have unraveled of the mysteries of life. Who, but the anti-hero, is so presumptuous and proud as to press a claim for governorship of the whole cosmos when we cannot govern nations or even ourselves?

Let’s use our American sense. It is anti-heroism that flunks the test of truth. If it could have made us happier and better, it would have long before now. Instead it makes us miserable. If it were true, it would always have been true. There could never have been any dispute about our way of life at all, nor any arguments against it to beguile us today. We would always have been what the anti-hero says we are now, mere beasts of the field, more intelligent than the others perhaps, but literally unable to do or see more than beasts can do or see. We would never have had any great literature or art, not to mention entrepreneurial success. There would never have been such a thing as America. The nature of reality has not changed. We have changed, because we have been suckered: and we can change right back again by seeing through the lies and saying no to them. Or we can sink deeper into the come-lately grunts of the world. The one thing no man can do is stand aside.

These collected essays are written with affection and respect for one man who has chosen not to stand aside. In a long career at The Foundation for Economic Education, Paul Poirot has consistently reflected the values, the dignity and the commitment to individual freedom which must be defended if we are to restore this country and this civilization. No one knows better than Paul Poirot what the stakes are in the battle, and none has fought harder for those things in which we all believe.

Dr. Roche is President of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan. He was Director of Seminars at The Foundation for Economic Education from 1966 to 1971 and is currently a member of FEE’s Board of Trustees.