Making Freedom a Living Word
We cannot achieve liberty or find our humanity by compelling others to live as we choose.
Helen Keller lost her ability to hear and see before she was two years old. In her autobiography, she recounted that water was one of the first words she learned. She wrote, “I continued to make some sound for that word after all other speech was lost.” Keller’s “desire to express” herself remained strong despite her disabilities.
Just before she turned seven, Keller’s capacity for expression experienced a giant leap forward with the arrival of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Keller recounts a significant day that would shape her future. Frustrated by Sullivan’s persistent efforts to teach her, Keller smashed her new doll. In Keller’s reality, after her outburst, there was no “tenderness” and no feelings of “sorrow or regret.”
Sullivan brought Keller outside to the well and “placed [her] hand under the spout.” According to Keller, the turning point occurred when Sullivan spelled water in her hand:
Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
At that moment, everything changed. She cried and felt “repentance” for the doll she had broken. She rapidly learned many new words and “for the first time longed for a new day to come.” Keller called that day in 1887 her “soul’s sudden awakening.”
Is freedom a living word for you and people you know? A “living word” set Keller free; can it do the same for us? How do we make freedom a living word, rather than a mere slogan to be cast aside when inconvenient? Before I explain, let me share one more relevant story.
Noted economist Russell Roberts, in his latest book Wild Problems, tells the story of Charles Darwin’s decision to marry. Darwin’s decision process is familiar to most of us. He created a list weighing the pros and cons of marriage. Roberts shared the mundane catalog and observed the “list tells us more about Darwin than it does about marriage. His list of pluses and minuses — especially the pluses — is the list that someone would make who has never been married and has no access to the upside of the inner life of a married man.”
In his imagination, Roberts pondered how he might gently inform Charles Darwin that his pros/cons list is insufficient. Like all of us, “Darwin was in the dark about the future… Darwin was also in the dark about how much darkness surrounded him.”
When we are filled with faulty ideas, we can’t know what we don’t know. Such decisions as marriage, Roberts writes, “will change you in ways you can’t imagine, including what you care about and what brings you joy or sorrow, sweetness or sadness, sunshine or shade.” Yet, Darwin was seeing his decision through a what about me lens.
Roberts reported, “there’s nothing in Darwin’s list about devotion to another human being or love.” Roberts would have Darwin understand that marriage will transcend and enrich his daily life. Darwin was “ignorant” of this potential.
Roberts challenges his readers with two profound questions: “Which ‘you’ should you consider when deciding what’s best for you? The current you or the you you will become?”
The Darwin story is relevant to our current situation. When the concept of freedom lacks personal meaning, its benefits are beyond our grasp.
Like Darwin, we could find ourselves stuck if we solely concentrate, from our limited perspective, on the pros and cons of freedom for me. While we appreciate some of the advantages of freedom, we may worry about what will happen if the government doesn’t use its power to coerce others on our behalf.
Is freedom alive in the hearts and minds of employees or shareholders of Pfizer? Pfizer’s business model depends in part on the government promoting its products and shielding the company from liability. Here, I’m using Pfizer as a symbol of cronyism.
If school choice poses a risk to their profession, what purpose does freedom serve for a member of a teacher’s union in an underperforming school?
I could continue, but you get the point. Through what about me eyes, freedom will seem to have pros and cons. Like Darwin, we may be concerned about what we sacrifice without grasping freedom’s transformative benefits.
If we nudge ourselves from the fog of ‘what’s in it for me‘ might that make freedom a living word?
For a larger perspective, we need moral philosophy to imbue our understanding and experience of freedom.
In his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King drew on philosopher Martin Buber to explain why segregation “is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful.”
In his renowned book I and Thou, Buber outlined two mindsets that guide our human interactions: “I-thou” and “I-it.”
Buber’s dichotomy is instructive because we instinctively comprehend its meaning. Seeing people as “its” they are objects to us, only assisting us or impeding our progress. How do we treat people when they do nothing for us in return? An object is not seen as living. In contrast, when we see another as thou, we respect their humanity as we do our own.
Applying Buber’s moral philosophy, King wrote, “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law… that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”
King provided a concrete rule: “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself… A just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself.”
King explained segregation was morally wrong because it “ends up relegating persons to the status of things.” When King wrote, “segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality,” he was not just writing about segregation’s victims. King explained how segregation “gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
C. Terry Warner, a contemporary American philosopher, was also greatly influenced by Buber. In his book Bonds That Make Us Free, Warner wrote, “The kind of people we are cannot be separated from how we interpret the world around us… Who we are is how we are in relation to others.”
We will find our humanity or lose it depending on the values we use to see others.
The Buber/King/Warner lens provides an instructive lens through which to understand an outcome of politics. The use of coercive power harms both the coerced and the coercer.
Keller’s awakening occurred when she transcended her narrow outlook. Only then did she find her purpose in life. Darwin did marry, marriage came alive for him, and he and his wife had ten children.
Does freedom come alive when we let go of our list of pros/cons and fully embrace it for the sake of our soul? Merely relying on economic benefits won’t be enough for liberty advocates to convince many that imbued with freedom, their lives will be transformed and enriched.
Warner wrote, “Our inherent goodness — has something to do with our capacity to respect and revere others.” When we revere others, we stop coercing others; as we do, we find our own goodness. Finding our goodness, freedom becomes for us a living word.
This essay was originally published at the American Institute for Economic Research.
Coming soon to Mindset Shifts U, Seneca’s “On Anger.”
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