CHAPTER VII

THE FREE SPIRIT

Freedom is not as precious to the members of this postwar generation as it was to some of their ancestors. The nation which once followed the leadership of Mazzini and Garibaldi now suffers a dictatorship with apparently little protest. In England, the stronghold of liberalism, a conservative government places a censorship upon the words of the man who is probably that country’s best-known writer. Socialism has its beginnings in that passion for freedom and humanity which inspired the youth of the early nineteenth century and ends at Moscow with a constitution from which even a Bill of Rights is omitted. In America we now see that democracy does not guarantee liberty. The government shows decreasing respect for the immunities of the individual. Crowd movements spread intolerance and are ever demanding more strict regulation in matters of personal conduct and private judgment. One frequently hears the remark, “The talk about personal liberty is disgusting nonsense.”

There are various reasons for this change of spirit. The individual rather willingly permits himself to be transformed from a private person to a numerical unit in his group or mass because as part of a public he gains power through the force of numbers. Individualism in a society in which every one is chiefly interested in industrial competition tends to become little more than the stock argument of those who wish to defend economic privilege. Other privileges are lost sight of in a standardized world. Moreover, as people begin to see that freedom is not something with which all men are equally endowed by their creator, but is achieved in varying degree, there is a tendency to minimize its importance. We are naturally somewhat suspicious of the freedom of others. Those who themselves have little capacity for it would impose their own limitations upon all others. From childhood onward we wish to be able to do what we see others doing. When this is impossible, there is a tendency to restrain them from doing what we cannot do. Masterful spirits grant themselves privileges which may appear wicked to the crowd. The free mind allows too much. When on the other hand a person who has not attained some degree of mastery declares his independence, we do not speak of him as free, we say that he “takes liberties.”

Thus where the ideals of the educated mind prevail there is a general gain in freedom through increase in mastery. Where the ideals of the ignorant and wrongly educated predominate, there is a decline in freedom and an increase in the disposition to take liberties. It is the custom today to rule out of the consideration of values any reference to the things of the mind, and to try to ground all values, freedom included, on a strictly economic and legal foundation, as if they were produced by and existed only for a brainless and impersonal equilibrium of social forces. We are beginning to see that for a people which loses sight of the inwardness of the sources of freedom, constitutional guarantees do not long guarantee, and each power-seeking group begins to take liberties with the organized life of the community. The so-called liberalism of those modern writers who make apology for this sort of thing has in it little of the spirit of liberal education. It is rather the plebeianization of scholarship. I as a liberal am not obliged to throw my hat in the air over each degradation of value that marks the triumphant progress of democracy.

It is the ideal of the educated man, not the demands of the crowd which is the best guarantee of freedom. I believe we are chiefly indebted to this ideal for such freedom as we enjoy. Education when it is genuine must for its own sake move in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. It must wander where truth leads the way. It must attain independence of judgment and a certain decent privacy for contemplation. It is in itself freedom from servitude and from routine. It broadens one’s interests and hence one’s sympathetic understanding of others. Nothing human is alien to it. The educated mind, having business of its own, minds its own business. Hence it grows in tolerance. Freedom is always freedom for something,--freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom from meddlesome interference, freedom from the crushing weight of authority and tradition, freedom in matters of religious belief. Every such freedom is largely the result of the influence of education, and each exists in any community in inverse ratio to its ignorance and provincialism.

The classical tradition has its origin, as we saw, in the efforts of Greek philosophers to teach free men the essentials of the good life. It has by no means remained true to its ideal, but each rediscovery of its meaning has had a liberalizing effect. The modern sense of the worth of the individual--which is only recently on the decline--and the humanist philosophy of education alike show the influence of the Renaissance. The eighteenth century, stilted and formal as it was, could with some justification call itself the age of the Enlightenment. It was the age of Voltaire, the age of great educational advance. It was also the age from which we derive most of our pronouncements about liberty and the rights of man. I would almost go so far as to say that when education is not liberalizing, it is not really education but is a highly systematized species of propaganda. This liberalizing quality is so essential to education, and is so clearly a way of the spiritual life, that its presence determines the genuineness of any movement or philosophy that may bear the name Liberalism.

The term “free spirit” has been so frequently abused, that I hesitate to use it. It suggests Rousseau’s Emile, educated to obey only the benign laws of nature and his own impulses. “He follows no formula, yields neither to authority nor to example, and neither acts nor speaks save as it seems best to him.” One thinks of such phrases as Max Stirner’s “Ego and His Own,” or Whitman’s “Spontaneous Me,” or “The Beautiful Soul” of nineteenth century Romanticism. One is reminded of the young woman from Nebraska who came to live in Greenwich Village, New York City, and said her soul felt as if it had taken off its shoes and stockings. The cult of spiritual freedom had quite a vogue in New York a few years ago. I believe it originated in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The devotee of it displayed his free spirit by wearing a flowing tie and corduroy trousers, by his obvious disdain of barbershops and laundries, by his talk which was mostly about sex, socialism and the new art, and by his general air of lassitude and disillusionment.

I believe that this pose, together with much of the sentimental liberalism which passes for “emancipation” among intellectuals, may be traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau. Nearly all the basic ideas of contemporary liberalism as well as those of the “newer education” frequently associated with the liberal movement, may be found in the writings of Rousseau. It is amusing to hear liberals proclaim these old ideas as if they were the most advanced theories of life and education. And you have but to compare Rousseau with Erasmus or Voltaire or Huxley to see how far away he is from the spirit of liberal education. The latter is tender-hearted and hard-headed. Rousseau is soft-headed and hard-hearted. An emotional egoism feeds on dreams of social revolt and of an idyllic return to nature. Rousseau hates civilization, with its duties and responsibilities. He becomes romantic and sentimental about Nature. His ideal of the free man is Robinson Crusoe. “We are born sensible.” “The natural man is complete in himself; he is the numerical unit, the absolute whole, who is related only to himself or to his fellow-man. Civilized man is but a fractional unit.” “Civilized man is born, lives and dies in a state of slavery. At his birth he is stitched in swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed in a coffin, and as long as he preserves the human form he is fettered by our institutions.” Hence if you would educate, “Observe nature and follow the route which she traces for you.” “All wickedness comes from weakness. A child is bad only because he is weak; make him strong and he will be good.” “Keep the child dependent on things alone, and you will have followed the order of nature in his education.” “Do not let him know what obedience is when he acts, nor what control is when others act for him. Equally in his actions and in yours let him feel his liberty.”

“O men, be humane; it is your foremost duty.... Why would you take from those little innocents the enjoyment of a time so short and of a good so precious which they cannot abuse? Why would you fill with bitterness and sorrow those early years so rapidly passing, which will no more return to them than to you? Fathers, do you know the moment when death awaits your children? Do not prepare for yourselves regrets by taking from them the few moments which nature has given them.”

“The only habit which a child should be allowed to form is to contract no habit whatsoever.”

“It is absolutely certain that the learned societies of Europe are but so many public schools of falsehood; and very surely there are more errors in the Academy of Sciences than in the whole tribe of Hurons.”

“Happy the people among whom one can be good without effort and just without virtue.”

I trust that these passages selected almost at random from Rousseau’s treatise on education, “Emile,” do not give a wholly unfair impression of this author’s philosophy of life. Man in the state of nature is wise and good. Civilization has corrupted him by enslaving him. If he does evil it is not because he is bad, but because he is weak. We should not hang the criminal but blame the society which made him what he is.

The proper function of education is to enable the individual--the little innocent--to grow up naturally without discipline, without forming any habits, never sacrificing present enjoyment to future knowledge, inspired always by the ideal of that happy state in which one may be good without effort. The ideal education therefore is the life of the North American aborigine or what Rousseau imagined such a life to be. Freedom here is the return to nature.

From the times of Hobbes and of Montaigne onward there seems to have been a growing interest in “Man in the state of nature.” But whereas with most writers this interest was largely a matter of theory and speculation, with Rousseau man in the state of nature becomes an ideal, a norm.

It would appear that in this dream of the return to nature, there is symbolized an infantile wish to escape from the tasks and responsibilities and restraints of adult life. Psychologists speak of such an “infantile return” as _regression_. This regressive ideal of freedom is a very different thing from the liberalizing influence of education as I understand it. I have characterized education as a victory won over one’s wish-fancies and childish egoism, as the lifting of the problems of life to higher and more significant dilemmas, as the attainment of mastery. A humanistic liberalism seeks freedom as broadmindedness; it strives for a highly civilized, urbane and sophisticated state of mind in which insight is deepened and interest is widened. Rousseauian liberalism seeks freedom in relaxation of effort, in denial of the claims of civilization, in the idealization of nature and of primitive man.

Many persons who today style themselves liberals are of the Rousseauian type. There are those who proudly call themselves rebels. A certain naturalism is carried to the point of hostility to form as such and to orderliness of any sort. There is frequently a disdain of “respectability,” and a tendency to play the intellectual vagabond. I think this is one reason why certain liberals are much taken with modern imitations of the primitive in art. The element of regression which characterizes the paintings and sculpture of certain “rebels” is patent to the psychologist. Many of these works of art closely resemble the typical drawings of dementia praecox patients. In dementia, regression, or infantile return, is complete and final. The patient is free from a disturbing world, having returned to precisely the “sensibility,” as Rousseau terms it, with which he was born.

Utopian schemes of social reconstruction, and the notion that merely changing the present system would put an end once for all to human misery, are in many cases disguised forms of the wish to return to childhood and thus escape the vicissitudes of adult life in civilized society. The burden of our industrial civilization is so great that it is no wonder many should take this path of escape. However, the utopian fantasy is by no means confined to those who have the hardest struggle. And there can be no objection to it when it inspires well-considered efforts for social improvement. There is a type of “liberal” however, who regards the attempt to solve any concrete problem of civilization as a compromise of his idealism.

Another aspect of the philosophy of Rousseau has influenced contemporary liberalism with somewhat paradoxical results. The basis of that happy state in which one may be just without virtue is elaborated in “The Social Contract.” Rousseau was not the first to hold the contract theory of organized society. Both Hobbes and Locke made use of this idea. But with Rousseau it becomes a doctrine with distinctly illiberal implications. The argument is somewhat as follows:

Man finds it impossible to continue in the blissful state of nature. In order to preserve their freedom, men voluntarily enter into a mutual agreement, according to which each gives over his individual sovereignty and receives back an equal portion of the common will, leaving him as free as he was before. Thus there comes into being a collective sovereign power. All others are of course usurpations and are destructive of freedom. This new sovereign can do no wrong, there is no need to protect the individual against it because it is made up precisely of the wills of all individuals, and the people will not do injury to themselves since each seeks happiness. Such sovereignty, which is really the absolute dominion of the mass over its members, can neither be delegated nor divided, and its exercise is _liberty_.

But is it? This tree is known by the fruit it bears. Notice that for purposes of this theory, all aspects of the individual will are now denied except those which may be pooled into a sort of group will and drawn out again in equal and identical portions for all men. That is, society is transformed from a plurality of individuals to the unity of a mass. Man acting as a mass unit takes precedence in all things over man acting as a private person. Privacy is gone. Liberty is not personal independence, but the freedom of the group to do what it wills unchecked. Mass action can do no wrong. According to the logic of this view no proper bounds may be set to the rule of “the people,” except such as the sovereign will itself chooses to set. Accordingly, liberty becomes the rule of all over each in any matter whatsoever concerning which neighbors choose to restrain or meddle with one another. This means that myself as person must in all things take orders from that attenuated public-meeting self of me and of other men which we have each received in equal portion from the mass will. Everything unique in me is whittled away from this mass-self and I count only by virtue of my membership as a numerical unit of the group. And now since any check or hindrance to the sovereignty of the mass is seen as an unjustifiable restriction upon its liberty, there is a tendency to extend the tyranny of the mass to every possible human concern. The demand for liberty is no longer the assertion of the right of private judgment for those capable of exercising it; it is “Let the people rule.” No wonder men come to distinguish between personal liberty and the rights of The People. The idolatry of the mass turns freedom inside out.

So much for theory. In common practice each majority tends to regard itself as the sovereign will and play the tyrant, all in the name of liberty. Each militant minority and struggle group in society seeks by hook or crook to capture the machinery of law and force its will upon the public, and in the effort to make its own group will the sovereign will, the members of each group persuade themselves that in thus resisting restraint upon their particular mass movement they are fighting for liberty. A spirit of factiousness spreads through the community, restriction and regulation increase and multiply, all in the exercise of crowd-liberty. If your crowd is now in possession of social power, you are called a conservative. If it is still struggling to make its will supreme, you may call yourself a liberal. It is an ironical turn of history that brings it about that many restrictions upon the freedom of the individual are advocated in the name of liberalism. Liberalism shades off into a form of radicalism which would set up a dictatorship to accomplish its ends. Many people use the terms interchangeably. Radicals in recent years, as the illiberal aims of the movement unmask themselves, tend to repudiate the name liberal, and to denounce the liberal as one who having started out along a certain road, hesitates or turns back at the last minute. Such liberalism finds itself in the difficult position of having proposed measures which it hesitated to carry out. It is embarrassed by its own radical offspring.

Such liberalism has little in common with that which is the aim of liberal education. As it appears in contemporary America, it is a sort of abortive mass movement caused by the mingling of two social philosophies which for want of better terms I will call the Lockean and the Rousseauian traditions.

John Locke wrote his essay on Government at the close of the seventeenth century. This book together with his “Essay on the Human Understanding,” did much to shape the thinking of the eighteenth century, and made a strong impression upon Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Jefferson and other leaders of the American Revolution. The “self-evident truths” set forth in our Declaration of Independence clearly reveal this influence. I do not wish to imply that Locke was the author of American liberalism. He merely has his place in a tradition which goes back to Magna Charta and is essentially British. The quarrel between the colonies and the ministers of King George was a phase of the greater struggle between Parliament and the crown. For centuries the Englishman has stood up for his individual rights, has stubbornly resisted any attempt of the sovereign to invade his privacy or to seize his property without his consent. The Englishman is naturally jealous of his government. He looks upon it with suspicion and seeks to limit its exercise of power. He gives it no peace until it guarantees him security from interference with his personal freedom. Jefferson’s remark that that government is best which governs least is typical of the spirit of British liberalism. It was this spirit which inspired the revolt of the Puritans against both the King and the Church. The same sentiment is expressed in the petition of Rights which was presented to the throne about the time that Locke wrote the essay on government. And it was in this same spirit that the founders of the Republic framed the Constitution of the United States. They rather grudgingly granted the government certain specific powers, and sought by means of various checks and balances to limit the exercise of them. Even then the public was so alive to the dangers of the new sovereignty that it refused to adopt the constitution until it was amended by the addition of the Bill of Rights.

There were added to this assertion of the inalienable rights of the individual in opposition to the sovereign power the deeper sense of the importance of the individual gained in the Reformation, and the insistence upon the right and duty of exercising private judgment which came with the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, with its “appeal to reason” in opposition to the authority of priest and Bible, was in fact an intellectual declaration of independence which became for educated minds an essential part of the liberal tradition. Liberalism owes much to the Deists and men like Hume. It is not a mere coincidence that a large number of the leaders of the American Revolution were “freethinkers.” Thus liberalism became something more than a political movement. It became a philosophy of personal liberty, of independence of authority, of tolerance. The rights which the liberal claimed for himself he was--at least in theory--willing to grant to others. He took the side of the “under dog.” The tradition is best represented in England by such men as Priestley, Martineau, Kingsley, Cobden, Bright, Morley, J. S. Mill, Huxley, and in America by Paine, Jefferson, Channing, Emerson, Theodore Parker, Lincoln, and Ingersoll.

The decline of liberalism to the level of Bryanism, the betrayal by “One Hundred Percent Americanism” of the spirit in which the Republic was founded, the spread of bigotry among the masses, the prevailing partisan spirit and the illiberalism of professed “liberals,” the changing of our constitution from a guarantee of personal liberty to the authorization of Federal interference with the daily habits and customs of the individual--these are not matters for which we may hold recent immigrants responsible. They are, I regret to say, symptomatic of tendencies which are most commonly manifest among Americans of British descent. They show how far the spirit of a nation may drift in one hundred and fifty years when it renounces its intellectual leadership.

Liberalism as a political movement was early divorced from liberalism as an intellectual movement. The former became Andrew Jacksonism, “shirt-sleeve democracy,” free-soil-ism, abolitionism, populism, the Single Tax movement, opposition to big business, Progressiveism. Ever since the time of the settlement of New England the pioneer and frontiersman, the “debtor class,” the town laborer and the farmer, have had to carry on a struggle against the “money powers” of the large industrial centers. The conflict of “the poor against the rich”--generally characterized by a demand for governmental regulation of industry and cheap money--reached its culmination in the “Free Silver” issue of 1896. Of this “battle for humanity,” the author of “Our Times” quotes William Allen White.

“It was a fanaticism like the Crusades. Indeed, the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy. Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold--and all its symbols, capital, wealth, plutocracy--diabolical. At night, from ten thousand little white schoolhouse windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars. For the thousands who assembled under the schoolhouse lamps believed that when their legislature met and their governor was elected, the millennium would come by proclamation. They sang their barbaric songs in unrhythmic jargon, with something of the same mad faith that inspired the martyrs going to the stake. Far into the night the voices rose--women’s voices, children’s voices, the voices of old men, of youths and of maidens, rose on the ebbing prairie breezes, as the crusaders of the revolution rode home, praising the people’s will as though it were God’s will, and cursing wealth for its iniquity. It was a season of shibboleths and fetiches and slogans. Reason slept; and the passions--jealousy, covetousness, hatred--ran amuck; and whoever would check them was crucified in public contumely.”

The demand for governmental regulation has been on the increase since 1896 and has almost worked a revolution in our form of government. I will not discuss the degree to which such an extension of the powers of the central government is desirable. I am aware of the fact that the motive is largely that of protecting the economic independence of the average individual. The point I wish to make is that the methods advocated reveal the change that has come over liberalism. Notwithstanding Jefferson’s statement about the government which governed least, the extensions of the powers of government have not ever been limited to matters industrial, and we find men calling themselves liberals accepting all sorts of restrictions upon their liberty without complaint. Liberalism has taken on a partisan spirit with all the intolerance, hysteria, and coerciveness that usually characterizes crowd movements. The same elements that voted “liberal” with Mr. Bryan thirty years ago, later supported Bryan the fundamentalist, and today are staunch prohibitionists. I cannot help feeling that something of the fundamentalist was lurking under the skin of the American liberal all along. The tradition of personal independence derived from our British ancestors had about reached this stage of decline, when efforts were made to supplant it with a very different type of liberalism from continental Europe.

The “old liberalism” was in theory individualistic; the “new liberalism” was socialistic. It brought with it such ideas as “the class struggle,” “mass action,” the “cooperative commonwealth.” Freedom was to be gained for all in the form of the “emancipation” of the working class. Youthful intellectuals idealized the proletariat, organized socialist locals, talked about the “materialist interpretation of history,” denounced “the capitalists,” addressed one another as “comrade,” closed their letters to one another with the words, “Yours for the Revolution,” and a few took the trouble to study the writings of Karl Marx. The old liberalism was seen as mere “bourgeois idealogy,” mental slavery, a system of ideas fabricated by the master class in order to keep the working class in perpetual wage slavery. The new liberal felt himself intellectually emancipated. If he was very, very liberal, he styled himself a radical. The movement reached its maximum strength about the year 1910, and then began to decline. It appealed to some who had been liberals of the older American type, but the response of labor was negligible. Radicalism professed to be a spontaneous revolt of oppressed working people. In fact it was a cult, with its dogmas about labor, which existed chiefly among middle-class intellectuals. Its leaders--and it consisted mostly of leaders with very little rank and file--were seldom working men.

Although its economic creed is the product of the nineteenth century, a study of the history of this movement would show it to be in direct line of descent from Rousseau. Many of the basic ideas are distinctly Rousseauian. Civilization, which Rousseau hated, is now the wicked capitalist system. There is the same emphasis on the collective will, on mass action, on the idea of revolution, the same belief that The People is the only rightful sovereign, that society exists by virtue of a sort of covenant among men which can be altered at will, and that universal happiness may be attained by changing the system which is responsible for all misery and misbehavior.

Radicalism, carried to its logical conclusion, is Communism, in which there is no pretense of liberalism, no place for freedom. It has greatest appeal for a type of mind which is by nature doctrinaire and inelastic, and its propaganda tends to fixed opinion and to illiberalism. A generation ago Nietzsche said of it,

“In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at present something which makes an abuse of this name: a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt.... Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the _levellers_, these wrongly named free spirits--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its modern ideas: all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honorable conduct ought to be denied; only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost _all_ human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for everyone.”

The word liberal is commonly associated with that extension of democracy which the crowd thinks is progress. If you favor this progress, you are said to be a liberal. If you doubt that it is progress you are thought to oppose progress as such and so are a conservative. If the progress of democracy were accompanied by a corresponding advance of culture and gain in wisdom and broadmindedness, this use of the term liberal would be appropriate.

Men become free only as they achieve self-government. I take it that a man governs himself to the degree that he acts upon his own judgment. Freedom thus presupposes first that people are capable of judging things for themselves, and second, that they are permitted to do so. If the progress of democracy resulted in fewer laws and wiser laws, we should in time have self-government. But the reverse is the case: the extension of democracy brings about an extension of the powers of government and the multiplication of foolish laws. It does not follow that people’s judgment is improved because they can vote about more and more things. Nor is there any assurance that they will not begin voting about things that are none of their business and thus destroy the right of private judgment, which is the exercise of freedom. You do not decide things for yourself when everything is submitted to a referendum or regulated by the legislature. If the people or their representatives should vote to establish a censorship of books, or to prohibit smoking tobacco, or to compel church attendance on Sunday, that would be democracy; but it would not be a gain for freedom. Self-government is impossible when every private matter is turned into a public question. Men with third-rate minds--and there are enough of them once they get together to constitute a solid majority--shrink from the responsibility of exercising private judgment, but are prepared and eager to decide any matter whatsoever once it becomes a public issue. They are, moreover, disinclined to allow a large measure of personal freedom to one another or to any one. Self-government in a democracy therefore means not private judgment but national independence, universal franchise, and no constitutional restraints upon the will of the majority. In common practice, “liberty” is the legally recognized right of the crowd to tell the individual what he may not do in matters which concern only himself. Any man has _liberty_ when he has a voice in the government of the land. He has _freedom_ when he governs himself. His freedom may be prevented either by lack of judgment or by outside interference. The effect of education in the community is to improve judgment and lessen outside interference with the exercise of it. Properly defined, a liberal is a person who strives for precisely these results. Liberalism, in this sense, and education are the same.

I said that a man is free when he acts according to his own judgment. This does not mean that the free man is able to choose anything he wishes. Necessity constrains him just as it does the unfree. It means, however, that his assent or dissent in any matter follows from his personal insight into the implications of the situation. He does the required thing even when he does not like it, because he has the intelligence to see that it is required under the circumstances. He is not compelled to take some other person’s word as to what is required. He is free not only because he is independent of the will of another in reaching his decision, but primarily because he knows what he is doing and why he does it.

There is a very old, extra-canonical legend according to which the Lord Jesus, passing by, saw a man digging in the field on the Sabbath day, and he said to the man, “If thou knowest what thou doest, blesséd art thou; if thou knowest not, curséd art thou.”