On Order And Liberty: Measures of Inverse Proportion

A white Chevy Silverado careened into my girlfriend’s black Mazda Protégé as she drove to school, ironically about a mile away from home just as the cliché demands.

It was an everyday inner-city traffic occurrence, just another random combination of blind physics and the natural human ability to misjudge. However, as opposed to accepting responsibility for the accident or even making sure the afflicted party was alright for that matter, after making his ill-timed left turn, this rather self-centered driver proceeded to reverse, finish the turn and flee the scene.

When defined as thoughtless disregard for the relative conformity and order true freedom inexorably demands, disorder is antithetical to any genuine experience of liberty in a free society. A common misconception of democracy is to view it as a particular system of governance whereby the individual is allowed to do as they please, but if any democratic nation wishes to remain democratic, independent or free, its members must go further in developing their understanding of the social contract.

This random hit-and-run accident raises profound questions concerning the balance of order and liberty in democratic societies. As a result of one citizen’s disregard for order, another undeserving citizen incurred genuine privations of liberty. In my girlfriend’s case, minor injuries, the inconvenience of being a car-less, working student for three weeks, and the loss of compensation from the Silverado’s insurance company (if he even had one) are all real damages. Even the most die-hard moral relativist would likely agree that in this particular transaction, the driver of the pick-up truck was absolutely in the wrong to flee.

In this strange cultural equivalent of Boyle’s law, we find that the measure of genuine liberty in any given society is inversely proportional to the measure of that society’s respect for order. Indeed, a few bad apples often spoil the whole bunch. Terrorism breeds increasingly invasive measures, street crime results in excessively intrusive public surveillance, and bureaucratic unaccountability erodes public respect for order at its very core. Whether via evading responsibility for an automobile collision or premeditated colonialism under false pretenses that results in senseless destruction and the taking of human life, wanton disregard for order always produces a corresponding imbalance of liberty within society.

Written primarily by Alexander Hamilton along with James Madison and John Jay, the 85 or so essays historians refer to as the Federalist Papers were published in several New York periodicals with the intent of securing support for the proposed Constitution of their day. Those who are accustomed to over-indulging in liberty are seldom willing to relent of their excesses, and over two hundred years ago the importance of balancing order and liberty in democracy was wisely recognized.

Hamilton noted,

“Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all change which may hazard a diminution of the power…”

Then, now and always, such men will surely infringe upon public liberty if it involves securing power, comfort or wealth.

America’s early settlers sought freedom from religio-political tyranny imposed by authorities with great concern for order and complete disregard for liberty, and Thomas Jefferson’s proposition that all men are created equal forms the philosophical basis of traditional democracy. By the late eighteenth century, America’s English predecessors had organized their concepts of government, order and liberty into a few key documents. The Constitution is the quintessential framework of modern democracy both in America and abroad, and it is by the Constitution that our various institutions interpret fundamental principles of freedom.

Fortunately, the Constitution and Bill of Rights contain
inherent flexibility allowing them to accommodate the inevitable cultural shifts and evolution of society. A rigid or static Constitution would confine democratic principle just as a rigid interpretation of Newtonian law confined physics and relativity until Einstein loosened them up in the early twentieth century.

In essence, the formula is simple: A citizenry of good standing, similar virtue and able mind agrees to a general code of behavior based on mutual respect, allowing for the maximum amount of freedom with a minimum amount of restriction. However, there is a latent prerequisite that each member of the system uphold their end of the agreement, and the burden of balancing order and liberty in society must be carried equally throughout the social spectrum. Unless all members of a free society agree not to discriminate, kill one another or embezzle from the public funds, the balance of order and liberty will be continually awry.

Notable imbalances of liberty are sure signs of disorder, and despite genuine expressions of John Stuart Mill’s classic autonomy, there are marked privations of liberty in modern democracy. In criminal cases, public figures often get off easy where common citizens would receive much stricter punishment. Government and the private sector increasingly push the personal envelope of freedom, even to the point of disallowing employees to smoke while away from the work place. Naturally, questions arise. What about these and other ambiguous areas where one person’s exercise of liberty conflicts with another’s, as often happens with adult entertainment content, so-called victimless crimes or non-traditional uses of public space such as homelessness and skateboarding?

Defined simply as majority rule, democracy has no intrinsic moral polarity but exists merely as a conduit for the prevailing national character of a given period. Though the Constitution and Bill of Rights present objective standards, they are inevitably interpreted subjectively, and the very malleability allowing them to breathe must also per the law of duality allow them to be choked. Like physical organisms, our legal parameters possess the capacities for adaptation, but our laws are only as good, noble or pure as the motives of our legislators. As such, freedom is inherently subjective and therein lays the danger: Whether democracy manifests as utopia or tyranny is entirely up to the will of its people.

As individuals are, society will be, and one fact will always remain: Wherever an individual usurps more than his or her fair share of liberty, privations for another individual are sure to follow. In his famous 1835 treatise Democracy in America, visiting French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville astutely observed,

“Absolute excellence is rarely to be found in any system of laws…in order to profit by the advantages of society, it is necessary to satisfy its requisitions.”

Paradoxically, freedom comes with a price tag of conformity, and true liberty implies ongoing personal accountability from every citizen. Our penchant for freedom can only be perfected as such. No tangible item or external force can dislodge the human tendency towards unchecked selfishness, and the broader effects of mass égoïsme are often underestimated. We cannot rely on arbitrary concepts such as “law” or “justice” to procure liberty in society; planetary consciousness and cooperative order based on common respect are the only solid foundations upon which liberty can stand. Without the voluntary bidding of each and every member of society, we can’t expect much.

To return to the words of de Tocqueville:

“Liberty cannot be established without morality…it depends upon ourselves whether the principle is to lead to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”