Values We Live By; No. 30; Democracy: Freedom in Many Forms; WNYC

On Wednesday, I defined for you the democratic concept of freedom. Of course, you recognize, too, that one of the ways you can define a problem like freedom is to establish its limitations. And so, in democracy, the limitations of freedom indicate to you just what is constituted by freedom. And you can distinguish this from communism by discovering what are the limitations to freedom in communism. Now, the problem of limitations of freedom in democracy has been argued about late and long. Probably the earliest form, I say in John Stuart Mill, was the fact that freedom meant the freedom to do anything you wanted, except to infringe upon the rights of others, in other words, a variation of the golden rule. But this is not indeed true. It seems to me that you can find too many objections to this kind of a thing. Most particularly in our modern world, where a man can hardly do anything that does not in some way set up a limitation of somebody else's behavior,

that when the father is free to act on what basis do you say he is free to act even though he then inhibits the behavior of children, yet most people will say that a father does have the freedom to make choices for his children while they can't make choices. Now, you carry this over into everyday life, two people apply for a job, they're both free. If one man's freedom is limited by the fact that what he does must not limit the freedom of another person, then neither of these two people can accept that job, because if one man gets the job, he has limited the freedom of access of the other man to that job. So, freedom needs a different kind of limitation. Call Becker's little book, which you really would do well to read, Freedom and Responsibility in the American Democratic Way of Life, holds that every freedom is best understood as a responsibility, that you are given the right to bear,

and that freedom does not mean the opportunity to do things. Freedom on that ground sooner or later comes to be the opportunity to bear things. And on that ground, we begin to see that the meaning of freedom in democracy is indeed a very refined concept, and also demands a very refined or educated or well nurtured individual, and that if democracy is indeed to succeed, it sets up demands on everyone who would live in this democracy. It demands of them, that they be educated enough to understand all that is at stake in every act of freedom, in every right. It demands of the individual, that he develop the ability, so that what he undertakes, he can indeed perform.

It would be a disaster, it seemed to me, that an individual, simply by the urging of his imagination or his emotions, insisted that he had an equal right to say, to run the mechanical brain. He would destroy it, and he would, in destroying it, prevent its use for that to which it could have been used. In the very same way, there is much merit in the idea that not everybody really is equipped to rule, that is, to help make the laws, to sit in judgment on his fellow men, that in principle, all men ought to have the right, but that to fully partake of the freedom in democracy demands of every individual, that he bear the freedom, that is, that he equip himself, to the best of his ability, to bear the responsibilities implicit in that freedom.

In the Soviet Union, however, the concept of freedom, as I have already indicated, is a value of a totally different kind. Here, freedom ultimately seems to mean the freedom to perpetuate the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now, just as I said on Wednesday, that any aristocracy is still an aristocracy, even if you call it the aristocracy of the intellect, so any dictatorship is a dictatorship, even if you call it the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a dictatorship means it seems to me implicitly, that the agreed upon outermost structure inside of which men live, rests in the hands of not all but a number of the citizens or inhabitants of a given region or a given place, and that the right to change this is not everyone's.

I would then, on that basis, be tempted to say that the alternative to the democratic way is that way of living in which the primary forms, structures, modes of solving problems are already established and cannot be solved or changed. Now, I'm going to get now into a very difficult aspect, because it's a very technical aspect of this problem of democracy, and yet I find that if we are going really to evaluate democracy as a value, there is no way of avoiding it. There are values that are sometimes called instrumental values, now that means that the particular value here is the means by which we achieve another kind of a value that you can call say intrinsic or inherent or consummatory or primary.

On the whole, and for a great many people, democracy is considered an instrumental value, that means that democracy has the value that a method has for reaching underlying values, which are primary in their importance. Now, democracy includes such values, or is predicated on such values, that man by his nature has certain inalienable rights, that man by his very existence must be treated with dignity and taken into consideration, that man, just because he is human, must be supported in the right to determine his own life. Make his own choices, live where he wants to live, that the civil rights that are part of the democratic forms of governing are the instruments by which these primary values are to be sustained.

On that basis, the value of democracy is that it is a method and not a set of principles or of goals. If democracy has any principles at all, it only has principles of activity, of ways of doing things, and not the principles in terms of the conclusive values that men cherish. Democracy is a method, not a set of conclusions, but derives its conclusions from other sources. Traditionally, here in America, our democracy has been held to be a method by which the values which are identified as the basic principles of Christianity are to be attained. The concept of human dignity, the concept of the brotherhood of man, the concepts of liberty and equality, these are all basic Christian principles it is held, and democracy is the best possible method of achieving these principles which are external to it.

And indeed, it is argued, democracy comes into existence because the Christian principles that men long cherished could best be secured by this instrumentality called democracy. Now this gives rise to a very interesting problem in values. If democracy is predicated on the notion of the right that each man has to his own individual value beliefs, then he doesn't need to stay with the Christian beliefs, he can accept say Buddhist beliefs or Confucian beliefs or Muslim beliefs. If democracy is a method, then there is no right that any man has in principle even to say that all of the beliefs here in America must be Christian beliefs.

Because the method, if it indeed is a method, is equally applicable to any set of beliefs. That's one point. Secondly, democracy is a way of promoting such individualism and yet demanding that every individual remember that he must develop a sense of unity or fraternity with everyone else around him. That the method which is democracy will not work unless in addition to the diversity there are also is a spirit of unity. So that if it is a method, it does as a method make its demands. But you know something, if you have followed these two questions, you will begin to suspect, as I do I think, that maybe democracy is more than just a method. Or that if it is a method, there is more to method than meets the eye. I think the second is the one I believe. That indeed democracy is a method, but there is more in method that meets the eye.

Two questions come up. One is a practical one and one is a logical one. Let me ask the logical one first. When differences can prevail, only on the basis of some common agreement, which is the primary one, the differences or the agreement. Most people it seems to me who argue in favor of democracy as being a very limited method. That only happens to be the most desirable one now, but could easily be substituted for a totally different method to reach the kinds of principles we want to reach. Those people say that the primary importance here is that men have the right to differ with one another in the most basic of principles. So long as they admit that on the level of practice, they will come together in some form of unity. In other words, a Catholic can believe as a Catholic believes at his most basic conviction.

And say a Methodist believes something rather different at a very basic conviction. And a Jew believes something quite different than from each of these two and a Mormon from each of these three and an atheist from each of these four. In other words, what we call for a moment, the basic principles of each of these groups is completely different at the primary level. But all of them, as long as they reside in a nation, nearly constituted as democratic, recognize that at the further level, that is at the higher point of practice, they are willing to agree to work together with others with whom they are in basic disagreement. Now, that means, if it is true, that every particular group, such as Jew, Catholic, Methodist, Episcopalian, Mormon, and atheist, if the atheists are organized, has a right to veto the action of every other member or all of the others together if they have agreed.

The fact of the case, it seems to me, is quite different. That when a principle of unity is legally constituted, then no particular group has a right to violate the agreement. In other words, once a law is promulgated, no particular group has a right to violate this even if it is contrary to their so-called deepest primary basic belief. So that when the State of Utah came into the Union, one of its primary beliefs had to do with the relationships among the male and female members of the group. But when the United States government, duly constituted, said to the State of Utah, that you can become a member of the Union only on condition, that you abrogate this conviction.

Whatever objections the State of Utah may have had, it complied with the request and entered the Union. I wonder if this suggests to you that usually those who charge democracy with being only a method, do so in the hope that they will establish the priority of their own special groups under that of democracy. And that democracy depends upon them rather than they depending upon the prevailing democracy. I suspect that the unity is primary and that whatever your personal basic private deepest beliefs on the theoretical level may be, they are finally to be measured by the deepest basic primary theoretical unifying conviction that makes of democracy one instrument that promotes a way of living that could not be promoted in any other way.

Now that's the logical problem. Another way of suggesting the same thing is that you must remember that every means that you use has an influence on the end that you reach. You cannot use a method called democracy if you're interested in achieving the goal called communism. You cannot use the methods called fascism if you're interested in reaching the goals which are what we call democratic goals. To say therefore that democracy that logically democracy is only a method is to fail to recognize the full scope of method that method already in a sense entails if not the specific goal to be reached but qualitatively the kind of goal that will be reached and the kinds of goal that will not be reached. In principle you cannot use the methods of democracy which are freedom continuous openness to choice and to rejoice and to recall the right to dispute in public and so on.

And reach if that method be continuously employed and people begin to develop the habits of that method you couldn't possibly hope to reach a goal where man at a given point suddenly now give up all their rights freely. That would be hard to envision in exactly the same way you could not expect to to employ the methods of communism which is strict adherence to certain principles of conviction according to the to the official party decree. And by learning how to obey orders and to read directions and obey them you cannot do that for 20 years and then suddenly end up with the capacity to make judgments of your own. One is a direct negation or denial of the other one by the continuance introduces to you unbreakable habits of being obedient and the other by its continuance introduces into you unbreakable habits of making up your own mind increasingly refined ways.

And so on that sense method alone means nothing and is to say of democracy or of communism that it is a method only is to as I say fail to understand what really is encompassed in the idea of method. I wonder if Christianity or could in all sincerity and critical examination admit that you can become a good thoroughgoing Christian say in a fundamental sense by employing the methods of fascism. Barring this we're going to have to recognize that if democracy is a method far more is included than one suspected to begin with now on the practical level the second question that I would like to raise.

There are certain value beliefs meaning that there are certain ways of looking at the world and certain grounds for activity that on the whole a democracy cannot tolerate not even as a cordial disagreement. Part of the principle of democracy also includes the idea that there will be in any given nation a great many points of view or opinions that we disagree with but we defend the right to have people express these disagreements that democracy is indeed diversity and unity. Nevertheless if the concept of unity is primary and I think it is now that doesn't mean monolithic it means a basic agreement from which disagreements are tolerable and understandable and cherishable but certain kinds of disagreements it seems to me are not.

Is it unreasonable for example to hold that in our democracy any well organized fascist group is actually a threat to the continuance of the democracy. If we can make a distinction between democracy and and communism and you know I have a great suspicion that most of the time our insistence that we ought to be able to tolerate communism in America is only an indication that we don't really know how to distinguish truly between communism and democracy but if you read Karl Marx and you read Lenin and you read Engels you begin to discover that the modes of thinking that produce communist decisions and conclusions is so completely alien to what we call the scientific mode of thinking which democracy is committed to.

That it now becomes possible to say that within a democratic nation a strong communist organization cannot be permitted to coexist because in principle what we must begin to recognize is that any organization that exists within this democracy and that has the quality the quantity of being a minority if grown into the position of being a majority would not do violence to the basic unifying concept which is democracy. It seems to me that this becomes a very good test of the kinds of organizations that should be permitted or should not be permitted to be among the diversities or disagreeing groups within the democratic unity.

In other words the full test turns out to be what happens if this particular group gets to become a majority group what happens to the nation as a whole and what happens to the spirit of democracy. With fascism it was quite evident no one had any doubts everybody recognized that if the fascists in this country and there were a good number of them I'm sure you know if they had reached the point of a majority then America would have ceased to be a democracy and would have become a completely fascistic nation on the model of Germany and Italy and Spain. That sufficient grounds it seems to me to employ as criteria for the values inherent in such a group the same question should be put to every single organization that demands the right to express its sense of difference.

Now if you listening to this then say but then you are demanding of democracy that it be just as critical just as oppressive as the forms that you disapprove of a fascism and communism I can only say that democracy was never intended to be. An organization of sweetness and light this is a very familiar statement that democracy is a hard working principle whose concern it is to permit the basic conviction which is individual welfare the individual growth the individual rights of choice the individual freedom of movement the individual's freedom to continue to learn is the only thing that it is important as a value to cherish and that the whole of this value given political now in the widest sense political social quality or form must protect itself against any organized effort to limit the growth of an individual

at any given point if you have a disapproved of my argument it would be as if you disapproved of my struggle against disease that cancer is the kind of a growth which ultimately destroys the rest of the body in democratic principles do we mean that any group of people has the right to grow in any direction that it wants free and clear of any intrusions but the problem of responsibility is one of the basic modes of evaluating the values and the problem of responsibility here when examined in the light of communism and fascism reveals that in both of these organizations a very limited number of people sees a responsibility upon themselves in such a way that no one can challenge them so it becomes a freedom without responsibility

and a great many people have no responsibilities at all and for them freedom is really tolerance or the kind of the freedom of the prison they don't have to worry about a thing now when we talk about democracy as value seems to me that we are talking about democracy as the method which reaches the democratic values of self-determination, freedom, growth and increasing thought why don't you think about this for a while?