It is an obvious truth that political liberalism supports
the concept of individual freedom, since that is the very core of its ideology.
Few people would disagree with such a notion and we might therefore suppose
that the whole program of liberalism poses few real problems. But this is
manifestly not the case and many of the social and economic problems we face
today in Australia are directly related to forms of unrestrained liberalism
which, though proudly advanced as emancipation, actually enslave us in more
subtle ways.
It was Edmund Burke who famously wrote that ‘liberty must be
limited in order to be possessed’. It
was also Burke who pointed out the nexus between individual liberty and moral
restraint:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to
their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion
as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their
soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;
in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise
and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless
a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of
it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the
eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot he free.
Their passions forge their fetters (Letter
to a Member of the National Assembly).
This passage from Burke is extremely important for it
exactly nails the truth that, if the ‘controlling power on will and appetite’
does not come from within the individual (in terms of a personal code of
conduct), then it will be imposed from the outside, in the name of civic order. For our ancestors, near and remote, such an
‘internal’ moral code was contained within one or other of the great religious
traditions, to which the great majority belonged. In the West today, such a
situation no longer obtains and, increasingly, we see the State stepping in to
assume the ‘controlling power’ that once resided within the individual. Whilst this process, touted as ‘liberation’,
may have begun in the Enlightenment of the 18th C, it reached its
zenith in the 1960s with the counterculture revolt of the young. The jettisoning of traditional moral
restraints has been accompanied, in direct and opposite proportion, by a huge
rise in state laws and regulations, and by ever increasing surveillance. We have, as Burke says, ‘forged our own
fetters’. What was once left to an
individual’s sense of truth, honesty, compassion and trust now requires a
stifling miasma of petty laws and regulations. If James Bond was licenced to
kill, we must be licenced to live. Business contracts that once might have
involved little more than a handshake, now require reams of paper with
ever-widening stipulations, qualifying clauses, etc. The same lack of trust
fuels a huge litigation industry where a sort of Hobbesian ‘warre of everyone against everyone’ sees
a veritable army of predatory law firms touting for business. An evening’s
television viewing on the commercial channels requires that you endure seemingly
endless advertisements for such firms, broken only by other advertisements for
‘debt consolidation’ or quick cash loans.
All of these are symptomatic of the same disease – the end product of
unrestrained liberalism coupled with the near absence of the traditional
notions of personal responsibility.
As the state moves to take control in this way, we often
fail to understand just how much we have surrendered. When traditional moral truths are abandoned,
legal truths often take their place. Here, I would like to quote from an
article titled The Proliferation of Legal
Truth which appeared in the Harvard
Journal of Law and Public Policy in 2003, and which was written by
Professor J.M. Balkin, of Yale University.
My point …
is that law creates truth – it makes things true as a matter of law. … Law’s
power grows organically and relentlessly out of law’s colonization of social
imagination. Legal power is ramified and spread through its ability to make
things real and to make things true. … (I)f the law says that a fetus is not a
person, then it does not matter that religious faith tells us that the law is
wrong, and that the law is effectively legitimizing murder. A fetus is simply
not a person in the eyes of the law. This has obvious political ramifications,
for it places the power of the state behind a certain conception of how the world
is and what is true and false within it, whatever one's views to the contrary
might be and no matter how vociferously one expresses them. … (T)he
proliferation of legal truth is also important because law does shape what
people believe and what they understand. Law has power over people’s
imaginations and how they think about what is happening in social life. Law in
this sense is more than a set of sanctions. It is a form of cultural software
that shapes the way we think about and apprehend the world
To gain some idea of just how much freedom we have lost, you
could start by looking in your own wallet or handbag. An ever-increasing wad of permits, licences,
passes etc. now require a major card shuffle every time you want to use your
credit card. Permits or licences are required for more and more aspects of
daily living. In criminal law, the situation is even worse. In America, the first federal criminal statute,
signed into law in 1790, included only a handful of offenses: treason,
counterfeiting, piracy, and murder, maiming and robbery. It fitted onto two
sheets of parchment. Today, the best
estimate puts the number of criminal laws at about 3000 or so. In fact, such is the complex maze of
legislation that it has proved impossible to provide an accurate figure. Hobbes ‘warfare’ has become ‘law fare’.
There is also a subtle form of oppression contained within
that informal system of social power which is best described as ‘political
correctness’. Is it not strange that, in
an age when freedom of expression is touted as a great benefit, we are
constantly subjected to what the American author Marilynne Robinson once called
‘the tyranny of petty coercion’? It is
increasingly the case that zealous liberals force us to conform to their notions of equality and our liberty suddenly disappears. And
sometimes the oppression is not subtle at all. Witness the Catholic Church in
Tasmania where, currently, the freedom to proclaim a traditional notion of
marriage held for over two thousand years, is now under attack.
If we move from the realm of human social relations to that
of economic activity, the application of unrestrained liberalism has likewise
turned in upon itself in a destructive way.
Thousands of small businesses, corner shops and family farms have been
sacrificed at the altar of laisse faire
economics. Readers of News Weekly will, I am sure, have been
as bemused as myself to learn that the Coles Supermarket people recently
announced a $50 million “nurture fund” to “help
small Australian food and grocery producers, farmers and manufacturers to
innovate and grow their business”.
Is it not arguable that such mega-companies are themselves responsible
for the demise of huge numbers of small businesses? It is difficult in the extreme not to see
this move by Coles in anything but a cynical light.
Just as Burke’s ‘controlling power upon will and appetite’
is needed in the social sphere, so is it needed in the economic one. This is why News Weekly and its parent organisation have always advocated the
principle of distributism, where the focus for all economic policies revolves
around the social unit of the family, not the share market or the profit margin
of mega-companies. Hand-in-hand with the notion of distributism is that system
of power sharing (including economic power) known as the principle of
subsidiarity. It ought to be the case that small businesses and family farms
have some power over their own short and long-term economic survival. Instead, we
see that they are at the mercy of that nebulous entity called ‘the market’
whose daily heath depends, in very large measure, on the confidence level of
big investors. These latter are themselves entirely remote from, and
unconnected with, the actual processes of production. And so, it comes about
that the average worker, farmer or small business owner, far from being free to
work or trade in the manner envisaged by well-meaning liberal philosophers like
Adam Smith, is wholly at the mercy of indifferent market forces. Smith’s
‘invisible hand’ of unrestricted commerce, has forged our fetters for us.
Our task, like that of Odysseus, is to steer the ship of
state between two opposing evils – the Scylla of tyrannical socialism, with its
gulag society, and the Charybdis of
unfettered liberalism.
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