Then and now: not all of FDR’s Four Freedoms are actually freedoms
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms are famous mainly because of the Norman Rockwell art that illustrated the concepts. I wrote about that art in this post from fifteen years ago (my, my, how time flies). But today I’m writing about the ideas behind those four freedoms that FDR listed – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear – and in particular their relation to each other.
As Sesame Street used to say – and for all I know it still does – one of these things is not like the others. Actually, two are not like the others. You can notice it first linguistically: two are “freedom of” and two are “freedom from.” But this isn’t just a matter pf prepositions, of course. The first two are liberties and the second two are protections which can often be diametrically opposed to liberty. The question for every country on earth is how to balance these opposing forces.
FDR delivered his Four Freedoms speech on January 6th, 1941, exactly 80 years before the Capitol incursion that is being used now by FDR’s even-more-leftist heirs to curb liberty. His goal was to drum up support for the Allies in the war in Europe, which America had not yet entered, as well as for his New Deal programs.
Today’s left only supports those first two liberties in situations where it is to their benefit – that is, they support their own free speech and their own favored religions (which, as far as I can tell at the moment, consist mainly of those “progressive” Christian denominations that are fully onboard with the left, Islam, and the anti-religion of atheism). Otherwise, they are actively working against those things for the right or for anyone who would disagree with them. So freedom of speech and religion are merely tools for them, means to ends, and the goal is to protect whatever supports power for the left and to squelch anything that does not.
The two “freedom froms” are their statements of protective goals with the idea of getting people to give the left more power. “Freedom from want” is the government largess that guarantees government assistance in nearly every facet of life. Who will pay? Why, the corrupt and undeserving rich. “Freedom from fear” – which FDR explicitly linked to freedom from wars – has now been expanded to something approximating “no hurt feelings for minorities and other designated victim groups,” a policy to be instituted even (or maybe especially) at the expense of the first two freedoms on the list. With COVID restrictions, we can add “freedom from risk of disease, even if the risk is small that the disease will be serious for healthy individuals under 70.”
I will add a third “freedom from” that suits our times: freedom from knowledge, particularly knowledge of history. The left counts on that lack of knowledge in order to get people to swallow their promises as well as their reframing of history as a tale of white badness and uniquely American evil.
Equality of opportunity isn’t at war with liberty, but once you introduce the goal of equality of outcome into the mix, liberty must go out the window. That one fact should be taught to children everywhere, but I don’t think it is anymore. I don’t even think that I learned it, at least not in school. I only internalized the idea many years later.
I’ll close with some words by the poet Robert Frost, with a tie-in to FDR again (in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense):
Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…
With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:
“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”
The Left twists freedom of speech and freedom of religion into positive rights, by saying the government has to spend time and money to make these things possible.
The traditional understanding is that the government need only refrain from imposing limits on speech or religion, but the Left says that the government needs to provide a civil order that allows those rights to be exercised and that’s no different from providing health care or income security in principle, because it needs taxation and monopoly of force.
Which reduces the Bill of Rights to “nice little freedom you have there, shame if something happened to it”, which I can’t help but think is the intended message.
Daniel Moloney offered about 20 years ago a treatment of ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’ in First Things. It’s quite worth reading and quite incompatible with Frost’s understanding.
Art Deco:
Link to Daniel Maloney? Search of First Things archive gives hits from 2015 (justice) and 2009 (poverty and children) for Daniel Maloney.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/03/the-tribunal-of-mercy
He was ordained some years ago.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/06/20/crucify-him-the-will-of-the-mob-and-fr-daniel-moloney/
Truth is a powerful thing. The left and progressives hate it and any who speak it.
The FDR of history and influential speech-giving is such an odd, quaint notion. The young know only that it was a March of leftist triumphs, always opposed by the evil Right.
Context contrary to such conveniently decorous themes and deeper context is not what animates them. They are armed with The Truth!
The Truth of injustice. They have cartoons proving it!
https://medium.com/mlft-the-ministry-of-left-field-thinking/equality-v-equity-tree-cartoon-how-about-the-roots-748e006f5575
The point is to change it, to borrow from Marx. There’s no need for subtler meanings and to make finer distinctions.
One of the problems in this justice vs mercy business is the complication unnecessarily added by the melding of the religious and the secular into one unified care institute. It is a pollution that has crept into policing as we see from recent court cases covered by some favourite resources on Neo’s blog.
But it is preposterous to introduce concepts such as “love” into discussions of public law, as that sagging faced son of a bitch Rorty does according to the Mahoney link. As the famous saying goes, “What’s love got to do with it?”
But Mahoney himself – insofar as I was able to bear with him – falls prey to the error of not keeping the realms sufficiently separate. Unless you are the bishop he seems most concerned with, we don’t need a way out of this through some thesis, antithesis, and mirable dictu, a “synthesis appears !”, resolution.
The state, unlike the bishop, need not dispense a perfectly tailored ” justice” to the individual, because the business of the state is only to deal with broad categories of more or less universal competence covered by public and promulgated and knowable law covering limited areas.
Those who participate are accountable on the theory that they are not helpless waifs with no choice in the matter.
The law, especially American style law, i.e., secular law, is based on the presumption of voluntary citizenship. What kind? A citizenship exercised by life competent persons in the age of their majority and who are capable of acting reasonably and responsibly and prudently in return for the privilege of being denominated and accounted a political peer accepted into the community of liberty with full rights and privileges ON CONDITION.
Otherwise, they are either aliens or someone’s wards. Herd animals may apply elsewhere.
The secular law in a libertarian aimimg state can be calibrated well enough by taking into account major category distinctions. No principle other than the raw desire of some persons to have an all enveloping nonjudgmental god as their secular master and cushion, prevents the maintenance of a dual system of private mercy and public justice. They wish to be shown the mercy of wards, but accorded the respect and privileges of peers.
But in a dual system you will be continually judged as part of the price of maintaining your secular peerhood, or of obtaining private – including religious – mercy.
For the unreconstructed peasants among us, programmed, possibly, by millenia of “by your leave” breeding in systems of forced obedience and guaranteed social ” places”, this freedom is too much to bear.
As a progressive disputant retorted during an exchange when I pointed out the liberty and choice killing and extortionate predicate of Obamacare as objectionable, “People don’t want that much freedom”.
The sad fact is that this question arises in our society, because large numbers of persons now inhabiting it, are not fitted by nature, temprement, or desire, to live in a regime of liberty and responsibility.
They are, whatever their level of material accumulation and social purchasimg power, the collective-focused grazing animals described by Aristotle. Fully human, taxonomically speaking, of course. Possibly even with souls, if you admit such things. But herd members all the same.
They wish to make us all one too.