Freedom can be surrendered passively, and rarely won. An insightful article, “Psychology, Security, and the Subtle Surrender of Freedom”, that opines on this and both de Tocqueville and Sir Roger Scruton is well worth a full read. A few comments thereupon from your humble author.
“For Tocqueville, ‘Liberty is generally established with difficulty in the midst of storms; it is perfected by civil discord; and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.’ For Scruton, conservatism begins from the sentiment that ‘good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’
“For both, liberty has an element of fragility. It is hard to attain, established only in the midst of storms, and never easily created. Yet, on the other side, it is easily destroyed. History suggests as much: if all of human history were reduced to a single day, the appearance of free and prosperous societies would be little more than a blink of the eye. Most of mankind’s story is that of the gloomy Malthusian catastrophe, a Hobbesian world where life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But at the dawn of the nineteenth century, things began to change. Life expectancy more than doubled, per capita income grew more than 3,000 percent, and, as Hume wrote in The History of England, the government of will was replaced by a government of law.
“Was this by accident? Some think so.”
You humble author is one who tends to side with it being an accident, a happy and wonderful accident stemming from a confluence of myriad events and conditions. The “storms” only serve to clarify and focus what was already there into something more recognizably tangible.
“Tocqueville’s special contribution lies in showing us the psychology of freedom. For him, liberty was not only a matter of institutions and individual rights, but also of the deeper attitudes that hold everything together and make freedom work. On this basis we arrive at one of the most disturbing parts of Tocqueville’s thought: freedom can be lost in democracies through democratic means. It is not only overthrown by revolutions, coups, or violent movements; it can disappear in a calm, civil, and apparently legitimate way.”
Liberty, and indeed the nearly millennium long struggle of throwing off the “Norman Yoke”, in not a proscriptive idea, but a descriptive idea of a superlative anomaly that has scant few equals in the annals of human history. Freedom is not a “proposition”; it is the verified proof.
But it is true that our freedom is a fragile thing worth protecting, and if we don’t it’ll be gone forever.
“A tyranny no one wanted, yet to which everyone contributed, step by step. Freedom is lost in the same manner Hemingway’s banker went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.”
May our Constitutional order of law and liberty be resilient.
