An Essay on Liberty  

I’ve been a regular contributor to the Lew Rockwell website for a number of years, because that crowd of libertarians shares my detestation of government, and I forgive them for their unwavering adoration of the “free” market.  But this essay, which I’ve been thinking over for a number of years, appears to be too much for them, and it’s been rejected with nary an explanation.

Though I know the explanation: it hits too close to  home.

So I thought I would see what another group of government critics has to say about it, and I’ve tendered it to the CounterPunch Critical Crowd.

The fundamental difficulty with libertarianism, like other similar philosophies, is that it assumes that liberty is a value, and an unquestioned value at that.  I can see that it is a desired goal in many instances, in particular those cocooned by individualism where individual freedom is at odds with the purposes and ends of the state.  But it is a mistake to believe that liberty is desired by all, that it is a necessary condition for a harmonious society, and that a well-ordered society cannot exist without it.

The crucial point to understand is that for most of its career, the human known as Homo Sapiens did not live in settings where individual liberty was known about, much less sought after.  Tribal societies were the norm for most of the human story, from, say, 500,000 years ago until perhaps 12,000 years ago.  Those were the years when, if anything can be said to be hard-wired into the animal we are, it would be a dependence upon family, community, harmony, and cooperation, in units that for the most part did not exceed 500 people.

The family, a small group of mother, father, children, and grandparents, was the basic living unit for all tribal societies, and proved to be a successful way for people to care for one another in close proximity—around a firepit usually—and  provide food and shelter, and some measure of protection against predators.  The concept of liberty of course would have no meaning in such a setting—liberty from what?  Children at a certain point in puberty or after  might feel a desire to move on from this unit into a separate unit of their own, but the concept would be something closer to hiving, or partitioning, and the new unit would still be within the tribe and close to the original geographically.

The tribe, the next basic division of society, contained this multitude of families and would evolve some form of group governance, or mutual assistance, for simple survival and coherence in time of need. Such organization does not fossilize, to be sure, but we can judge enough from tribes that have existed in current centuries when they could be visited and studied that they were basically egalitarian, wth separate offices (chief hunter, shaman, matron, etc.) based on special merit rather than heredity, and decision-making in groups of elders. No hierarchy, no individual hoarding, no property, no violence. In size they could range from 50 to 500, with the latter number seeming to be the most common, and with an accepted practice of dividing or “fissioning” when a group became too big and disharmonies threatened.   No concept of liberty existed because the isolation and independence such a concept would convey were the equivalent of banishment and isolation, the most fearsome fate anyone living a tribal existence could imagine.

The question then becomes: if no concept of liberty attended humankind’s long centuries of existence in Africa and then Eurasia, when did such an idea arise?

The natural assumption would be that it arose in response to the collapse of  tribalization during the process of urbanization and the spread of agriculture that began in the centuries after the end of the Ice Age after 20,000 years ago.  Human cultivation of land and animals led to sedentary ways of life and the need to bring water to the fields through canal systems, both of which demanded the kind of ordered and controlled sort of organization that tribes never needed.  Sedentary living meant large numbers of people living in a single place year round, families living in effective isolation on individual plots of land with private herds and fields, and with all this new political and economic institutions had to be devised to handle complexities at these levels.

The first cities took form around 6,000 years ago, and from there but a short step to kingdoms and empires and all the trappings of state that go with them.  And where rulers and armies there is hierarchy and servitude, where autocracy and despotism there is control, interference, obligation, and restriction.  And thus there is the wish to be free of such harsh limitations: liberty.

But notice.  Not all would desire such a thing, certainly not the rulers and the aristocracy, those with power and money and the comforts therefrom.  It would be an idea that would take form only among the underclass, and even there it could not have been such a common or powerful desideratum very often, since ties to family, parish, and guild would be daily necessities. Many might have felt that they would not know how to live if they had such a thing as liberty.

There is, too, the observable fact that, at least in the modern state, liberty does not seem to be something that most of the populace has any particular desire for, whatever might be the kneejerk reaction to its expression.  In a fairly well-run society most people are content to take the comforts of regularity, law enforcement, civic order, predictable outlays of salary or welfare, and, for the most part, the comforting distractions of bread and circuses.  Very few wake up feeling that they are missing something called liberty.

It is true that people will routinely assert their allegiance to certain freedoms—“It’s a free country isn’t it?!”—and  believe they are better off because they have free speech and a free press, the freedom to bear arms,  and the rest of the perks that limit how a state can stifle individual behavior.  But to be free of the state entirely is simply not  a concept or a wish that many hold.  What liberty means in such a modern existence  is a condition I think very few would opt for.

The post An Essay on Liberty   appeared first on CounterPunch.org.