On Ordered Liberty

Any discussion of what makes for a virtuous citizenry, and thus the well-being, of a country necessarily entails a conversation on the purpose and function of freedom. The word “freedom” and its companion term “civil liberties” are bandied about in America as often as the sailor blasphemes. People talk all the time about “the freedoms granted to us in the Constitution” and “the civil liberties our soldiers have fought and died for.” But no one ever says what freedom is good for. Anything can be used for either good or evil means, depending on what the person who possesses something chooses to do with it.

The overarching concept of ordered liberty contains the ideas that true freedom adheres to an agreed upon moral order; that freedom combined with relativism is a deadly combination for any society, and that the mark of a virtuous citizen consists in his ability to freely and prudently choose and act upon what is good. The person who believes in ordered liberty does not think that freedom and absolute personal autonomy are one and the same. Rather, he knows that the liberty to do what is wrong is not liberty at all; but that freedom has dissolved into license. He understands that he is born into a community and that what he does affects those around him, both for the better and for the worse. If the culture critics among us wish to speak of a moral collapse in contemporary America, I’m sure some might say that much of it can be attributed to a lack of a proper understanding of freedom’s purpose.

Consider what happened with the sexual revolution. I don’t know who started that debacle, but it was a disaster from the get-go. Less than 100 years ago, it was common sense that the well-being of families and communities depends largely on the strength of the relationships between men and women; and it’s not a good thing that this has been forgotten. In fact, I would invite any of you to tell me how our civilization has benefited from the lie that what two people do to each other in private has no repercussions in the larger realm of society. Feel free to contact me at brianagrzy@comcast.net or leaving me a comment below. I look forward to reading your remarks.

No one would say that it’s a good thing for roughly 40% of children to be born out of wedlock, for more than 54 million lives to be taken through abortion in less than 40 years (most often because a man’s and woman’s sexual license take precedence over a baby’s chance to live), for the countless lives damaged by STDs and broken hearts, or from the definition of love changing from “willing the good of the beloved” to it all being about lust and sex.

Or think about how the right to bear arms has been perverted. It’s one thing for someone to want to use a gun for hunting purposes, or to protect himself, his family, and his property from intruders. But news stories come up all the time about shootings on school campuses and fights that went overboard and became deadly. Or look at what happens when “free speech” includes the right to say whatever foul thing that comes to one’s mind. Or consider all the regulations the EPA has had to set in place to keep people from littering and polluting the water and air.

You will first notice that in all of these cases the state necessarily has to intervene to keep chaos from breaking loose. The implication of this is that a nation cannot be free and wicked at once. True communities are built upon a shared expectation of virtue. A society where every person fends for himself is no society at all. A narcissistic people loses its political freedoms because they are too concerned with satiating their every desire to be expected to care for the people among whom they live or to put the long-term interests of their fellow human beings above their own selfish whims.

Furthermore, a wicked nation will not just have lost its political freedoms. The people are not free in another sense: they are bound to their vices. To put it simply, a wicked nation is a nation that has lost its conscience. Its citizens don’t answer to the calls of what is objectively good, what is just, or what is true; but to whatever appetite they want to indulge at the moment. They fall into, I daresay, animalistic behavior, with their bellies serving as their masters. Such a chain of command is not a good one, as it inevitably leads to self-destruction. In Greek mythology, the story goes that Narcissus died because he could not pull himself from his reflection to pursue his love, the nymph Echo. My wish is that this is not our fate.