Liberal, Libertarian, Libertine: and Freedom (essay)

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1.  Liberal

In many political and historical discussions, one finds talk of Liberalism. The word liberal, referring to a thing (like a "liberal policy" or a "liberal opinion") or to a person,  comes from the Latin word meaning free, just as the word "liberty" comes from the Latin for "freedom." Thus, a liberal policy is a policy growing from an emphasis on freedom, and a liberal person is one who values liberty or freedom.

Since the suffix -ism means a belief in what comes before the -ism, Liberalism means a belief in the high value of freedom. To use the term liberal without understanding this fact is to demonstrate one's ignorance (which of course, we don't like to do).

For more than 400 years, the cultures of the world have been in the process of becoming more and more liberal. Countries have become independent (or "free") of colonial rule by other countries. Individuals have tended to become less imprisoned in the social status of their parents (or "freer" from the strictures of inherited social class).  Economies have generally moved in the direction of less government control (shaped more by the "free" market than by the nobility or by tyrants).

When the United States won its independence from Great Britain in 1781, it achieved all three liberal goals at once.  The United States became a free country.  Compared to people in most parts of the world, individuals in the 18th-century United States were free to rise in socio-economic status if they had the ability, luck, and drive to do so.  And the United States economy had already become more controlled by free market forces than the economies of the rest of the world. 

For the United States, from the beginning, was a liberal country, committed to "liberty...for all," as Francis Bellamy later wrote.  From what our politicians say, it would appear that we are still committed to "liberty for all" and thus remain a liberal country.

2.  Libertarian

A more modern term, a libertarian is a person so committed to freedom of the individual that he or she may advocate no social restraint whatsoever on the individual's behavior.  As a result, libertarian principles from the 19th century have been compared with those of anarchism, a belief in the value of a state in which no one is ruled by any group or by any other individual.  No one, it would seem, could oppose tyranny or a ruling class more than a libertarian. 

Libertarianism is, therefore,  an extreme form of liberalism.  In other words, a libertarian is a liberal who prefers complete freedom from any form or degree at all  of social order.

3.  Libertine

A libertine, which is usually a term of contempt, feels "free" of moral restraints.  A libertine pursues a life of gratification of every whim, free of conscience when his or her actions cause others pain or when they exceed normal social or moral standards.  A libertine feels free of tradition, free of social considerations, free of moral or ethical standards, free of consideration of others or of future consequences of her or his present behaviors.  (Historically, by the way, libertines have usually been aristocrats, "free" also of the need to work for their living.)

A libertine has no interest outside the field of his or her immediate pleasures, and so, unlike Liberalism or Libertarianism, "Libertinism" - if there were such a term - does not have any political relevance.

Yet, for the libertine as for the liberal or the libertarian, freedom is highly prized.

4.  Liberal vs. Conservative

a. 

In public discourse today, conservatism is said to contrast and oppose liberalism to an extreme degree.  One would think that a conservative sees little or no value in what a liberal considers of the highest value and vice versa.  To what extent is that true?

The term conservative may be used either as an adjective (as in "a conservative tendency") or as a noun (referring to a person with "conservative" values).  Like "liberal" (and so many other English words), "conservative" comes from the Latin, meaning to keep intact or to guard.

A conservative person, as one would therefore think, wants to keep social order, to maintain or restore traditions, and to protect established customs and practices.

b.

In any society there is indeed a tension between the individual and his or her surrounding social institutions. Sometimes and in some ways, the importance of individual freedom within the society is emphasized, and at other times or in other ways, the importance of social order is emphasized.  Most of us, of course, consider social order and individual freedom both as good things.  Since they are in tension within our culture, as individual citizens as well as a body politic we struggle to find the right balance between the value of the individual's freedom and the value of the social order.

As we have seen, liberals tend to value individual freedom more than conservatives, and conservatives tend to place a higher value than liberals do on maintaining traditional standards and social order. 

c.
However, both liberals and conservatives - like most of us - recognize the need for laws and enforcement officers when public safety is endangered or private property is damaged or stolen.  In this way, both agree that in certain instances the good of society should be emphasized over the freedom of the individual.  (A libertine, as we have seen, would not agree.)   On the other hand, both conservatives and liberals also agree that individuals have civil rights, protected by the supreme law of the land, the U. S. Constitution.  Where is the proper balance between the needs of the social order and the rights of the individual?  A conservative would generally place the balance point closer to the side of tradition and social order, while the liberal would tend to place the balance point closer to the side of the individual and free choice.


When a conservative, for example, feels a particular type of individual act is immoral, he or she often wants to prohibit all the individuals in our country - even those with opposite views about the morality of the act - from taking that action. 

When a liberal, on the other hand, learns of an effort to limit the freedom of an individual to determine her or his own actions, perhaps in order to safeguard moral or political or social interests, the liberal often resists.

Conservatives and liberals, therefore,  agree (or profess to do so) on some basic principles about opposing "good's," the individual or society.  A conservative perspective, then, is indeed distinguishable from a liberal perspective,  but except for extremists both groups seek what seems to them to be the right balance between the two positive goods for  the issue at hand and for the time.

5.  Freedom and Poverty-Ignorance-Discrimination

A current governor was recently heard boasting about all the benefits of living in his state rather than in another state in the same region.  In his state, he claimed, citizens enjoy low taxes, limited government, a large number of religious institutions, no estate tax ("None!  Zero!" he said), and - despite the global recession - a strong economy with low unemployment.

The governor's interviewer cited a recent article listing less positive features of this state, including the highest rate in the nation of school drop-outs, the largest proportion of the population lacking health insurance, relatively polluted air and water, an above-average crime rate, and a large percentage of the population living below "the poverty line."

"Sure, we have our challenges," the governor acknowledged, "but we have our freedom!"

Liberals and conservatives should be able to agree that an uneducated, poor,  ill and unsafe individual  whose mother and father were also poor and who now  lives in a crime infested environment - whatever else he or she might be - is not free.  It would appear that in this particular governor's state, the preferred "balance" between the value of individual freedom and the good of the social order has reached an extreme position on the society side of the spectrum.

The uneducated, unskilled, perhaps illiterate individual is not free to take a decent-paying or long-term job, even if he or she can find employment of some kind.  A poor individual is not free to live in a safe and pleasant neighborhood, and may not have a home of any sort.  A sick person without insurance is not free to take good care of herself or himself.  Such an individual's freedom is, at the very least, severely limited.  A state or a nation with a significant proportion of poorly educated, poverty-stricken, and insecure citizens would not seem to value freedom, except of the wealthy few.

Seeking limited government and low taxes may support the "freedom" of the lucky, the rich, and the powerful, but it also contributes to the virtual imprisonment of the majority.

6.  The Greater Good

It is a curious thing that the libertarian and the conservative today seem allied against the liberal.  Libertarians, as this label implies, claim to value freedom just as the governor of the state discussed above seems to do.  How can those who wish to imprison in ignorance and poverty many, perhaps the majority of their fellow citizens, how can they claim to value "liberty"?

All rulers, whether monarchs or other kinds of tyrant (like those today in North Korea and Myanmar), must have felt they were free to do whatever they decided to do.  Using the "royal we," such a ruler might even have said, "Though we have some challenges, we have our freedom!"  However, our perception today is that everyone else in those regimes was far from free: they had no "liberty" whatsoever, even though the social order may have been robustly fixed and protected. 

The question, then, about conservatives who claim they are champions of freedom is, "Whom do they want to be free?"  Libertines value only their own personal freedom to do as they please.  Libertarians certainly value their own freedom, but also seem to think it would be good for everyone else to be free too, although how that could come about is unclear.  Everyone with enough money, as produced by the current social order, which is dominated by rich global corporations, are those who conservatives seem to want to be free.  Liberals, unlike libertines or libertarians, or even some conservatives, claim to be working to bring a significant degree of freedom to everyone (except perhaps to criminals who threaten both individuals and society). 

The socially difficult issue of where the right balance is between the good of the individual and the good of society is exacerbated today by the morally difficult question as to whom a significant degree of freedom should be extended. 

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Reminiscence: Off to Grad School

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1

When I entered a large Midwestern university in 1960, I was convinced I wouldn’t go on to Graduate School. My father had an advanced degree and I respected him very much, but I wasn’t going down that path. I was going to be a writer, an ambition I didn’t really give up until much later.

I said to myself – and probably to a few close friends – that after college, I was going to live and work in New York City. That was the place for me, and if I had to work as a dishwasher in order to follow my dream, well, that’s what I would do. (Even at 18 it never occurred to me that I would ever find myself unable to get a job, and I never really believed my job would be unskilled labor… but I was ready, if it came to that.)

2

I did well in college. I liked learning all that stuff. Studying for Final Exams was actually one of my favorite parts! But even as I moved along in my senior year, I remained convinced that graduate school was not in my future. I was going to find a simple job – maybe in NYC, maybe not – and do my real work, writing, on the side… if I had to.

But as the Honors Seminar in my major moved into the Spring semester – okay, it was English – as all my Honor colleagues talked about their graduate school ambitions, it began to dawn on me that if I could get paid for it, doing graduate work would be less demanding than many other jobs, and I could still do my writing on the side. (This incidentally later turned out to be true.)

There were two good options for earning a living in graduate school (working full-time and going to grad school on the side, of course, which was not a good option since I would have no time to write). I could support myself and write on the side if I could get a fellowship that provided tuition, room, and board, or, less attractively, I could make it work if I could be hired as a graduate teaching assistant.

Everyone seemed to think I could basically write my own ticket, the really hard part being choosing where to apply. After all, I was going to graduate with honors, Phi Beta Kappa, with a Certificate of Merit, and Summa Cum Laude… Why worry?

So I applied for full fellowships at Harvard and Yale in English, at UCLA and USC in Cinematography (since I had been a film buff for years and wanted a creative career after all), at my own university for a full fellowship in Comparative Literature (since I had completed my junior year in Paris), and – in case all else failed – as an English teaching assistant at the Texas university where my Dad had taught (not English) for many years. Dad had said that the English Department hired a slew of TAs since the required two freshman composition courses were taught entirely by graduate students.

If my faculty advisors – I had gathered three or four by this time – expressed any interest in what I was hoping to do, none of them questioned my approach at all. I sent in all the required application materials, on time, and waited to see which among my offers would be the most attractive.

3

The grad school application deadline passed, and the results began to come in. I wasn’t even accepted into graduate school at Yale or Harvard. They apparently already had enough students from the Midwest. UCLA said it was doubtful they would have a fellowship available that year, and – as a new and relatively small department - they did not hire graduate assistants. USC actually offered me a fellowship worth a lot of money, but it only covered tuition. A big surprise was that my Dad’s university was suffering significant financial difficulties, and the English Department would be fortunate if they could keep employed the TAs they already had on the payroll who were only part-way through their graduate programs.

All my friends in the Honors Seminar, not knowing I had applied for the Comparative Literature fellowship, were dumbfounded to learn that a young woman whom we all regarded as fourth or fifth out of the twelve of us – in knowledge, insight, self-confidence, and creativity – had applied for and received the Comp Lit award.

When I asked one of my advisors if he knew why she had been selected instead of… well, I don’t know… me, he said, “Well, everyone knows that you’re going to California to study cinematography.”

4

Now that I had begun thinking that grad school was a better option for me than washing dishes in New York City, it was looking like dish-washing was my only possible career path!

When I sought advice from another faculty member, he said I should write all the big state universities I could think of, explain the situation, and see if they would offer me a TAship despite its being past the application deadlne. At my own university, they had awarded all the TAships they expected to have but my name would go on their back-up list in case...

I spent days and nights typing letters and resumes on my little Royal portable. I eventually sent out over thirty late applications. The Department Chair at the University of Illinois actually called to express his sympathy for the pickle I was in and to say they too had awarded all the positions they could afford in April, so long before they knew the size of the entering freshman class. But he went on to say that every year, they added a few TAs after freshman registration, so he was confident something would come along for me even though he couldn’t absolutely guarantee it. I really appreciated the straight talk, and I know now that it’s a near sure-thing that I could have gone ahead as though I had actually been hired.

One by one, these big universities wrote more or less the same thing: they couldn’t hire me yet but almost always had open positions at the last minute. Could they enroll me as a grad student now, hoping for the best?

5

As I mulled over my uncertain options, one of my Honor Seminar colleagues came into class one day and said he had a dilemma and wondered what the rest of us would advise him to do. F----- explained that he had been offered a graduate teaching assistantship at a fairly large private university in the Northeast, and he had also been offered a full fellowship in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He was actually undecided which offer to accept, perhaps because he was originally from the Northeast. Anyway, seeing how unanimous and animated our advice to him had been, he announced at the end of that day’s class that he was going to accept the Chicago offer.

Here was my chance! I asked F----- not to respond to the private university in the Northeast for three days, and I went right home and wrote to the Department Chair saying, “My friend F---- is going to turn down your generous offer of an assistantship… Why don’t you hire me instead?"

It seemed like it was by return mail that Dr. E----- sent me a contract. In the Fall when I arrived and went by to thank him, he seemed glad to see me and mentioned that they had never received one of the several recommendations for me that they needed. When I said that without delay I would call the professor in question – could it be the one who told me I was going to California? – Dr. E----- - whom I had never met before - said: “Oh, don’t worry. I wrote you a recommendation myself!”

[to be continued]

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Media Coverage and Elections

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1

In a democracy, what is the responsibility of the public media in relation to elections?

During the run-up to the mid-term elections earlier this month, it would seem that the media all thought their responsibility was to tell us who was going to win. Partisan and biased media (the majority of our national media, unfortunately) emphasized the disadvantages of the other side and, occasionally, the advantages of their side. They quoted, edited and broadcast, and summarized – unfairly – what the candidates said.

Because they were biased, the media routinely claimed that what their candidates said was true, and what the other candidates said was untrue … was, in fact, often laughable. They also scoffed at the criticisms of their own candidates from the other side and from the other side’s biased media. Some or many of the most powerful partisan public affairs media are large and powerful corporations, a fact that was not acknowledged even when corporate power was identified as an issue in the election by one or more candidates.

On the other hand, explicitly or implicitly the apparently less partisan and less biased media nonetheless called attention to the potentially baseless claims of the partisans and usually attempted to inform the public accurately and truthfully, based on facts (such as polls and more or less fair summaries of candidates’ statements) about who was leading and who was falling behind, and by how much, and even tried to analyze why that was so.

The candidates were identified, as well as the election dates and the particular offices for which they were running (senator from Arizona, governor of Louisiana, etc.). That’s the Who and What of the story, the Where and the When, and even the Why. Good journalism, right from the textbook, right?

Well, no. That might have been true if the real story, the one that in a democracy matters, had been an answer to the question, Who is going to win the election?

But the fact of the matter is that the question the media has the responsibility to try to answer - truthfully, factually, and honestly - about any democratic election is not Who will win? The key question is What is at stake for the public?

2

To inform the public about what is at stake for them in an election, the media must strive to report accurately and without distortion what the candidates claim is at stake (as they would probably claim they did in this last election campaign). AND, critically, they must go on to state as completely and as impartially as possible – even when their corporate owners’ and sponsors’ interests are in play – how factual these candidates’ claims really are. And they must inform the public of the short-term and – especially – the long-term consequences that would result from implementing each candidate’s position on the facts and on relevant policies.

It may be worth the media’s mentioning secondarily who appears to be leading in each race, but that is FAR from the most significant story.

3

Why is it so important in a democracy for the media to inform the public not so much about who will win the election and the likely political consequences of that result, but primarily about what is at stake in the election?

Citizens who do not have a comprehensive understanding, based on facts rather than competing assertions, cannot vote responsibly. They will not be able to gauge what is at stake for themselves individually, short-term and long-term, or what is at stake for the country as a whole. They will be vulnerable to manipulation by others and to their own inherent prejudices.

Thus, the media’s concentration on “Who will win” rather than on “What’s at stake for the public” subverts the value of democracy itself.

4

Why do so-called news media today emphasize Who’s leading and trailing in elections rather than in what matters most, What is at stake for voters?

There are quite a few interrelated reasons, none of them compelling:

a.
The current media in America see their primary responsibility as serving their corporate owners, rather than serving the public.

Until recently, public media – like other businesses - used to be confident that serving the public was the surest way, in the long run, to serve corporate interests. If you in truth had a better product for sale or provided a better service, consumers would choose you over your competitors, thus making money for your owners (or stockholders). This was well known to be the surest way for your business to succeed, and keep on succeeding long-term.

Today, it seems, public media – like all businesses – are focused on making the biggest profits possible, right now, even if they do not in truth offer the best products or services possible but are only able to make people buy their goods and services with appeals to their vanity, their lust or greed, and their desire for instant gratification, rather than their long-term best interests in fact.

b.
It requires less time, effort, experience, and knowledge - not to mention courage – for public media to merely pass along claims of others about what’s at stake for our futures, rather than putting their own reputations on the line in an effort to inform us themselves about the significant facts and long-term consequences.

For a newspaper, blog, magazine, or broadcast to meet its obligations to the public in dealing with elections, reporting what the relevant facts are, it must stand behind what it reports. If such media discover that something they have passed along – either from their own staff or from others – is inaccurate, they have a responsibility to make a public correction. This takes both integrity and courage.

Trying to be a source not of competing viewpoints but of accurate information without which voters cannot make responsible decisions is a significant commitment, and a public media outlet must invest not only in skilled writers and reporters but also in researchers and investigators, rather than in merely popular public performers.

A big corporation – even a public media corporation – whose primary goal is to make its owners a fast profit is not likely to make that necessary investment.

c.
Contemporary American media is afraid of alienating those who are biased and seek only reinforcement of their already-fixed worldview.

Thus, the public media ignore their journalistic responsibility to challenge previously held convictions in order to correct misapprehensions and dispel false claims because, seeking immediate reward, they want to please the largest audience possible, every day.

d.
The main efforts of the public media today are designed to titillate, enflame, and/or to entertain their audience, rather than to inform the public.

For an entertainment program, such designs are of course appropriate and necessary. Corporate media managers invest heavily in achieving their goal of providing much sought-after emotional stimulation. It matters little if their results in their audiences are temporary and superficial rather than deep and long-lasting.

But for a news program, whose purpose is supposed to inform (no matter what emotions the facts reported may provoke), such designs are far less important.

e.
In order to make it easier to achieve their goal of providing entertainment, today's media in America has chosen to treat all events – even those with the potential to make history – as though they were athletic contests.

Sports programming stimulates the emotions desired: hope for victory, fear of defeat, suspense and surprise, camaderie, and general excitement. Sports as an industry is highly profitable for this reason.

If a news program’s goal in reporting about elections is primarily to provoke vivid emotions, then we should not be surprised to see that news programming today seems more and more like a sports report. One feature of a sporting event, however, is that the outcome of a sports contest does not matter for the general public in any meaningful sense. It is a game after all.

No matter what else it is, a public election is not merely a game, although it seems to be possible to make it seem that way.

and

f.
Informing the public not only about competing opinions of others but also about facts of long-term importance (as determined by the media outlet itself) is often seen today as contrary to large corporations’ best interests, including the interests of the big corporations that own most of the largest media outlets.

For example, if a candidate or many candidates’ party is determined – schooled by the “too big to fail” predicament – to limit the size of any one corporation (as Theodore Roosevelt once wanted), it would not be in a media corporation’s own self-interest to make those candidates or that party look attractive or to report on the basis there may be in actual fact supporting these would-be reformers’ position.

Or if a candidate wanted to make it clear by formal legal action that corporations are not individual people and therefore rights guaranteed to individuals – such as free speech – are not guaranteed to them (corporations), it would be in the best interests of a large media corporation to make that candidate less attractive than she or he might seem based on the relevant facts.

5

For all these reasons, it is difficult for large media outlets to focus their reports on what’s at stake in an election really, truly, and accurately, taking upon themselves responsibility for the facts they report.

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