On Liberty
"If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:31
liberty(n.)
late 14c., "free choice, freedom to do as one chooses," also "freedom from the bondage of sin," from Old French liberte "freedom, liberty, free will" (14c., Modern French liberté), from Latin libertatem (nominative libertas) "civil or political freedom, condition of a free man; absence of restraint; permission," from liber "free" (see liberal (adj.)). At first of persons; of communities, "state of being free from arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic rule or control" is by late 15c.
“The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define.” ~ GK Chesterton, Liberty, The Daily News, 1909-08-21
In Chesterton’s essay on liberty, he describes two main senses or aspects of liberty. First, that the moral substance of liberty is that man is a creator - that we do not receive liberty in a passive fashion from the State, but that we create and select conditions which foster liberty in our own lives. Man as a creator is most free. “In its primary spiritual sense,” Chesterton says, “liberty is the god in man, or if you like the word, the artist.” This religious sense is foundational, and the one which Chesterton argues we can affect most.
The secondary political sense is the influence of the citizen on the State. This political liberty is directly related to the ability of the citizen to criticize the State. As he says, “The idea that the State should not only be supported by its children, like the ant-hill, but should be constantly criticized and reconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than any other part of the planet; stronger in Western than in Eastern Europe.” Free speech, and in particular the ability to criticize the government, is the cornerstone of political liberty.
Chesterton’s essay on liberty provoked a response in Kenneth Richmond, who wrote a letter to the editor in which he describes the vote as a direct expression of political liberty. He accuses Chesterton of hypocrisy for being opposed to woman suffrage while advocating for liberty for men.
What follows is an interesting series of letters back and forth, which I have attached to this post. While the matter of universal suffrage has been decided, these letters and supporting essays provide good fodder for a discussion of the nature of liberty, and what it means to have freedom. While Richmond suggests that votes are an expression of liberty, Chesterton argues that “liberty is. Esprit, without which votes are useless; as they are useless in England today.” He points out that “the trouble with modern England is not how many or how few people vote; it is that, however many people vote, a small ring of administrators do what they please.”
Wow! Once again, Chesterton the prophet causes me to think about these words in the context of our current society. We have been told that the vote is the great equalizer, that it is an expression of our freedom; that it preserves democracy. Oh really? Tell that to folks who voted for Bernie in the primaries in 2016. Over a hundred years later and across an ocean, the small ring of administrators who run things while we are assuaged by our “vote” remains a constant truth - one which seems inescapable in this fallen world.
Chesterton’s most compelling defense of his position on women’s suffrage is when he points out that the suffragettes, in order to make the case that women need the vote, paint her as “a wheedling slave, a soulless chattel, a servile beast of burden, [and] a painted toy.” Feminists then did what feminists do now, disparage all that is distinctly feminine in favor of those things which men can also do. Earn a paycheck, cast a vote, run a company, sex without children? Check, check, check, check! For feminists, freedom isn’t found in the home, but in the outside world. Chesterton would argue that shifting the locus of power outside the home enslaves rather than frees a person. I would agree.
The home is the place where all of us, men, women, and children alike have the most freedom. A movement that expresses contempt or indifference for the role of the woman in the home is working towards her enslavement, not her liberation. What many of us have forgotten, and Chesterton reminds us, is that the home is the normal place for men, women, and children, not the exception. The external focus of the modern age is an aberration, not the norm for human existence. The dissonance and conflict we feel is a natural reaction to an unnatural situation.
The pernicious lie that freedom and liberty are to be found in the public sphere creates chains which enslave us even as they are imperceptible. As our cultural focus has drifted more and more outside the home, and even our children spend most of their waking hours outside the home, we have to ask ourselves - Has this shift increased our liberty?
If liberty is related to independence, then I would argue, no. We are not most free when we are working for others, but when we are in our own homes, serving the ones we love. We are free when we are in our own gardens, cultivating our own environment regardless of the outside world. In the end we realize that the question of suffrage becomes moot. We might have one vote among millions in a State ruled by committee, but we are absolute monarchs in our own domestic sphere.
I’d love to hear what you think! Check out the attached essays and letters and leave a comment - was Chesterton just a crazy old coot? Totally detached from reality? Was he a misogynist trying to keep women down? What, if anything in his arguments compels us today, even though the question of suffrage has long been settled?
