Freedom, Authority, and Resistance (Vol. II)

This volume presumes that citizens are more effective if, from time to time, they take a mental step back from the controversies of the day and develop their own sense of the deeper questions of political life. Propagandists and campaign managers do not care for this, because the practice of having second thoughts leads to independent thinking, and independent thinkers are not predictable. Those who have second thoughts may come to require good reasons for things and evidence to support the reasons. When thinking starts, slogans lose their force, and propaganda has to give way to evidence, arguments, and responsibility. The selections made here are intended to encourage such independent thinking, with the conviction that learning to think through and to make one’s own decisions is the evidence of being liberally educated.

The mass media present democratic politics in terms of campaigning and elections. Elections are indeed the indispensable element of representative democracy, so it does make sense to cover how office seekers compete for the approval of the voters. But in our time, this is done in fast-breaking, up-to-date (and rapidly outdated) stories that follow each other in dizzying succession. Only alert and focused observers can keep up with them. Most of us are familiar with at least the broad order of presentation: the emergence of potential candidates, the nomination struggle, fund-raising efforts, polling to keep track of the course of the campaign, the personalities and statements of the candidates, and election results. Then, when the results are announced, the attention drains away, replaced by isolated speculation about the next round of elections. Concerns about politics are put away for a while.

Within its own frame of reference, this rubric appears coherent enough. However, it is not a complete view. It fails to connect elections to daily life or to create a sense that there are public things for which we are responsible. Though the practitioners of this style of democratic politics do not realize it, what they do undercuts key elements of democracy. Though year after year more and more money is spent on campaigning, fewer people vote. Politicians are held in low esteem. Short-term expediency outweighs longer-term considerations in the formation of even the most far-reaching public policy. Governmental decisions seem either hopelessly routine or idiosyncratic, if not corrupt. In these frantic contests for electoral success there is little place for the individual citizen and his or her reflective thought. Similarly, there is little time or place for informed deliberation among citizens about the possibilities and purposes of public life and how the preferences of the moment fit with them. The price we pay for being excited by up-to-the-minute campaign dramas is giving up a thoughtful, shared sense of the meaning of politics.

Paradoxically, without some such sense, democratic governance is even more difficult. Good leaders need followers who are responsible and capable of independent action. But to develop this, citizens need the capacity to put the anxieties of the moment into a broader context. They need to be invited to have second thoughts about public life and a chance to think about the choices before them and what is at stake in the long run. And because leaders are more likely to be fallible, citizens with second thoughts are essential to democracy.

Governance is always with us, whether in the form of a modern nation-state with representative democracy in a world with other such states or whether we live, like Antigone, in the city of Thebes in archaic Greece, ruled by a king like the other cities of that place and time. Most people take the arrangements under which they live for granted and live in obedience, submitting to power. But if we want to live in a democracy, where power is to be exercised by citizens, we must obey each other. How do we come to follow one apparently reasonable course of action and not another that is different, but also apparently reasonable? In dealing with our representatives, how do citizens establish a stopping point: the capacity to say, "this is too far," or "this is not enough," or "this is what we should accept," or "not accept"?

Asking and answering such questions is not only a matter of private values. Each of us deals with private matters every day. Public values are what we accept jointly. Most of the time, we accept these tacitly. What we expect of others and what they expect of us are not matters for discussion; we take them for granted so we can get on with things. But in times of crisis, public values may become explicit and subject to debate. The reader of this volume should note that the selections here are not academic exercises, undertaken to demonstrate a detached understanding of affairs. Quite the contrary, they were made to cut through the tangles of voices and arguments of turbulent times. They can be seen as efforts to constitute or re-constitute public values. The best of these seem to have the capacity to address times and circumstances far removed from those which compelled them to write in the first place.

For example, Hobbes and Locke wrote during the successive crises that were fought out in seventeenth-century England. We can still understand why the killing of the king, the civil war, the takeover of government by militant Puritans, the imposition of military dictatorship, and the restoration of the monarchy were matters that cut deeply. The ultimate outcome of this was the establishment of a representative democracy with a constitutional monarch and enormous economic and military power for the United Kingdom in the century that followed. Those controversies and their resolutions lie at the foundation of the English-speaking approach to politics. The arguments that Hobbes and Locke worked out still contain relevance for our circumstances. More important, their reflections provide food for thought, prisms through which we can try to see political life a little differently, to see how things look in their view, and enrich our own perspective by being better able to understand what distinguishes it from others.

Classical Greece is even farther from us than seventeenth century England, but the writings of Plato and Aristotle have an uncannily modern feel to them. Plato’s account of Socrates’s defense of his questioning of the Athenian political leadership is essential reading. Aristotle was the director of a research institute that gathered extensive information on the democracies and oligarchies (and tyrannies) that governed the Greek city-states, without removing politics from its broader context. Like Hobbes and Locke, Plato and Aristotle wrote about politics in a time of crisis–the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War and the rise of Alexander the Great. Diderot and Rousseau are regarded as contributors to the French Revolution, which developed its own understanding, different from Locke and Jefferson, of what democracy is and how one makes it work. Havel describes the moral and existential bankruptcy of the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe shortly before they collapsed under the weight of their own cynicism and incompetence.

America’s best political writing came at the time of the War of Independence and the consequent struggle to establish a government strong enough to do its job, but limited enough to not endanger basic rights. The extension of those rights, and the failure to extend them, are the subjects of the selections from Martin Luther King and Chief Joseph. Thoreau was concerned about how to give substance to freedom in daily living.

Not all of the selections are from authors now regarded as philosophers, or at least political thinkers. Hitler and Lenin are included as bad, though instructive, examples. The personal account from the writings of Frederick Douglass is a good story with a powerful moral. The Holocaust documents are similarly personal accounts that speak for themselves. Sophocles’s play Antigone was, in its day, an entertainment. Nearly all of the selections are from readily available literature. The reader who may wish to consider more than these short selections can easily do so.

This replacement volume for the Lynchburg College Senior Symposium volume Tyranny and Freedom expands the themes of the volume to freedom, authority, and resistance. Of the political ideals that have caught the human imagination, few are more powerful than freedom, the idea that command and obedience can somehow be transcended, so that people might live as they wish and do what they want. The excerpts here are not a survey of the topic. They are only a few indications of the historical range of the idea, its variation over time and circumstance, and a reminder that there have always been careful and humane opponents of the claim that self-realization can be achieved through complete freedom.

Similarly, the selections on authority demonstrate the range of thinking on public power and its use. The continuing gift of the American founders is the explicit attention they gave to the question of how the desire for freedom can be balanced with the need for government that has enough power to accomplish its purposes. They are heavily represented in this section. But there have always been those who have seen the question differently, as well as those who seek power merely to abuse it.

Authority can go wrong and turn into oppression. When should one resist authority? The question has both moral and practical dimensions, and this necessarily limited number of selections cannot be taken as anything more than an introduction to the issue. The selections on resistance were chosen to give a sense of how broad a question this is in practice. The selections from Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King will strike familiar chords in the American reader, but the fundamental question is both deeper in time and broader in reach. Along with freedom and authority, resistance has become a universal question.

Joseph F. Freeman III, Ph. D.