Among the most pressing questions we face as a civilization is the meaning of freedom and how it applies to our everyday lives: Is freedom merely the license to do as one pleases, or is it something more complex, an idea interconnected with virtue and responsibility? Can freedom exist in a vacuum?
The answer to these questions will direct the course we take as a culture and shape the type of society in which we will live. It is among the fundamental questions of our age.
Because we are often able to discern principles more clearly through parable, allow me to recount, in brief, G.K. Chesterton’s short story “The Yellow Bird.”
Some time ago, a Professor Ivanhov, a Russian scholar and author of the book “The Psychology of Liberty,” was a guest at a grand English house. He was a zealot for the ideas of liberty and emancipation – he was an avowed enemy of all limits and constraint.
In that ancient house lived a yellow canary, whose sound filled the halls with beautiful melodies. Discontented to see such beauty confined to a cage, Professor Ivanhov liberated the delicate creature from his abode. Once free, the canary fled to the forest where the wild animals reduced him to feathers and bones.
In that same grand house lived several goldfish. They happily swam in their bowl, content with their existence and the space they occupied. But the wise Professor Ivanhov, disgusted by their confinement, hurled the fishbowl to the floor, liberating the goldfish from their glass dwelling. The poor creatures flopped at his feet until they perished.
But that was not enough. Professor Ivanhov’s dedication to freedom knew no bounds. He could not endure the necessary limits of human existence. Constrained by the sky above him, he endeavored to free himself, which he did by blowing-up the old house, taking himself with it. Freedom as last!
“What exactly is liberty?” asks Gabriel Gale, a witness to Ivanhov’s madness, and the character who represents Chesterton’s narrative voice.
“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage. It was free to be alone. It was free to sing. In the forest its feathers would be torn to pieces and its voice choked forever. Then I began to think that being oneself, which is liberty, is itself limitation. We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.”
Chesterton believed that unrestrained freedom was not freedom at all, but itself a form of servitude. Does that make freedom and liberty a bad thing? Is all liberty the equivalent of licentiousness?
To James Fitzjames Stephen, the great English jurist and legal scholar, “the question whether liberty is a good thing or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing. It is both good and bad according to time, place, and circumstance, and a complete answer to the question, in what cases is liberty good and in what is it bad?, would involve not merely a universal history of mankind, but a complete solution of the problems which such a history would offer.”
The lessons of the past century have taught us that it is ridiculous to tolerate every opinion in the name of an amorphous, abstract conception of liberty.
Should discussion on the merits of antisemitism or radical Islam be treated with respect or accorded the weight of reasonableness? Hardly.
But despite the knowledge that some ideas and activities are existentially wrong, this does not mean that there must be fixed boundaries by which freedom and liberty ought to be judged. Liberty is not an abstract principle, but, as Aristotle and Aquinas believed, something that must be ordered to appropriate ends.
When we indulge in limitless freedom, when we confuse liberty for license, when we consistently act upon our impulses with no fear of reproach, we unwittingly enable the construction of our own psychological and spiritual prisons. Whether it is overeating, drinking in excess, sexual permissiveness, taking what rightfully belongs to others, obsessing over material things, or engaging in any type of behavior without the slightest care of the consequences for ourselves or others, we ensnare ourselves in the shackles of delusion and self-destruction.
Such debauchery invariably leads to torment and loneliness. This is the reason why so many celebrities, the very people who seem to have it all, are plagued by self-inflicted tragedy.
Freedom and liberty are important aspects of our humanity, but when they are viewed as abstract rights and utterly divorced from the realities of social, political, and economic circumstances, they become dreadful things. As the French Revolution taught, despotism is nourished in the soil of unlimited freedom. We embrace freedom as an abstract principal at the risk of perpetual serfdom.
Just as the yellow canary was happy doing what he was made to do, so should we. Aristotle believed that men are social animals, and as such, must live among others in mutual cooperation. Our actions affect others; our ideas have far-reaching consequences. Thus, to be free, we must have structure, understand our duties, and seek the virtue that is to be found in everything. We exist for certain ends (the Greek telos), and the more we understand those ends and direct our lives to them, the more we can know true freedom.
Glen Sproviero
Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York. Read his previous columns here.
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