Earlier today on a different blog a few people raised the question (well, i'm putting it generously - a few people baldly asserted) that living under a dictator was the worst thing that they or anyone else could imagine, so bad that life could become unbearable. The dictator under the lens was this fellow, but the question is I suppose equally valid in a more general sense. Are the New Hampshire license plates correct, and is better to die than not to live free?
It seems like an open-and-shut question. A dictatorship like Saddam's was so ugly, its attitude towards human rights and dignities so contemptuous, that it's difficult to imagine how anything could be worse. And of course for the many people who were killed during this and other tyrannies, the question is moot: dictatorship, for them, meant death. But what about the majority of people who weren't killed, who only experienced the relatively pedestrian crimes of the state? Were they living in an inverted Panglossian worst-of-all-worlds? If we're going to be honest - and brutal honesty is a prerequisite here - probably not. The one thing that human beings consistently excel in is stoicism. We adapt and accept, motivated subconsciously perhaps by the hardwired genetic knowledge that species history is measured in the millenia, and that whatever tribulations we are experiencing today are scarcely the blink of an evolutionary eye.
What does it mean to say, anyway, "give me liberty or give me death"? Would you rather die than live in Stalin's Russia? Possibly. What about Brezhnev's Russia? Neither had any respect for the democratic values that we take for granted. But one was a place of messianic carnage, whereas the other was merely shabby and degrading. Would the absence of an independent media and the ability to vote for a candidate loosely of one's choice every four or five years really portend suicide?
Perhaps part of the problem is what we mean by "liberty". Because live-free-or-die rhetoric is usually employed in an explicitly political sense, we tend to think of public liberties - democracy, freedom of speech, and so on. But for the majority of us, most of the time, these are distant abstractions - important, perhaps, but hardly a part of our daily life. The freedoms that mean the most to us in an everyday sense are the personal ones - the freedom to spend time with people we like and love, to have children, to enjoy peace and quiet, to live a tolerable life. Now, dictatorship clearly does detract from these freedoms; but not nearly to the same extent as it does, say, the freedom of the press. Which suggests to me that Franklin was wrong, and that most of us would indeed sacrifice (some) liberty to purchase a little temporary security. This might not be the noblest observation to make, but I would suggest that it's an eminently human one.
Posted by Alan Allport at December 9, 2004 11:55 AMLet's just say there are three types of people in the world: the naturally brave, the naturally cowardly, and the rest of us with families.
It's easy to say give me liberty or give me death when you live where liberty is valued (and pretty hypocritical when you own slaves - but that's another tired topic). It would have been quite another thing to have said it in Stalinist Russia. That would have been brave.
What a snap it is to think you'd do the right thing when there's little danger you'll have to.
How many millions of us keep our mouths shut each day so that we might keep our meaningless (but paying) jobs?
Of course I'd give my life to save my child's. I'd surrender all my liberties so she could grow old. And I'd seriously consider forfeiting my neighbor's in the same cause.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at December 9, 2004 04:44 PMFollowing up on this, by coincidence I was reading this morning a bit about the disturbances in Britain, 1815-16. People will engage in a high degree of political docility as long as they are able to house and feed their families; take that away (or threaten it) and they get fairly hostile.
I may have to be corrected here, but didn't Sam Adams owe a lot of his success to the underemployed mobs of Boston?
Andre Dubus' A Father's Story may be sexist in that narrator confesses he would not do for a son what he does for a daughter, but the larger message for me is about the lengths the human animal will go to protect its young. After covering up a hit and run accident involving the daughter, the father later tells God that He would do the same.
Humans are capable of the most vicious behavior when the survival of the family is at stake. But if that survival can be ensured by simply keeping one's mouth shut (surrendering liberty), that's what we do.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at December 10, 2004 07:30 AMThe fact of becoming a parent has made me rethink a lot of things.
For instance, imagine the situation of a person in an enemy-occupied country. Does one resist the occupiers, or accept the situation (with the inevitable slide into some kind of collaboration)? For single, childless people, the question is fairly straightforward - are they willing to risk their own neck or not. But for mothers or fathers, that is the least of their concerns. Will their children suffer as a result of their behavior, even if only by the absence of the parents should the resistance effort be thwarted? For most parents, the welfare of their children is their paramount guiding concern - such a powerful atavistic force that almost any compromise is acceptable in its pursuit. Thinking about this, even in a very abstracted way, has made me a little less judgmental about, say, the citizens of Vichy France.
Posted by: Alan Allport at December 10, 2004 07:57 AM