July 24, 2020 – Ammon Hennacy, Catholic Worker, b. 1893-1970

After five months the United States is still knee deep in the coronavirus pandemic, while other countries that were beset at the same time have found a way to beat back the worst of the virus and protect lives.  The U.S. response to simple measures such as stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and mask wearing has been predictable.  Rather than tending to these basic public health measures, we have chosen our individualism over the common good.  Gathering under the banner of freedom, protesters have taken over state houses armed in paramilitary gear and demonstrated outside the house of Dr. Amy Acton, the former Ohio Department of Health Director.  Under such pressure, states have opened up too soon or took preventive measures too late.  The results have also been predictable – coronavirus cases have skyrocketed and deaths are on the rise.  This opposition appears to reveal a conflict between the common good and freedom.  When a republic finds itself in such a predicament, it is a clear sign that something has gone terribly wrong.

While these protesters certainly have the right to publicly assemble, their actions, nonetheless, reflect license not liberty.  Their demand to go about without a mask reflects an individualistic strain of freedom that works well on the frontier but poorly in communities to serve the common good, particularly in states that strive and claim to be republics.  Other hard hit countries have responded with uniform national policies that have proven effective.  In the United States, we are seeing the virus jump from place to place and state to state because we have not put in place uniform policies even at the state level.   Our lack of a national approach to combatting the virus reflects our individualism.  In a republic, liberty is freedom in the service of the common good, not everyone for themselves. In times like these, it seems America has lost, if it ever possessed, its value of republican liberty. 

In the United States, we typically describe our form of government as a democracy; in casual usage this is fine, but more precisely, the United States is a republic.  The citizens of the United States elect representatives to serve and make decisions on their behalf.  In a pure, direct democracy, such as classical Athens, the citizens vote directly on laws and collective political action, and political offices are frequently determined by lot.  Absolute freedom and direct democracy may sound appealing to those disillusioned with our elected politicians, and it may be a preferable option, but republican forms of government have their virtues too.  Most of all is the sense of service that is required for a successful republic.  Ideally citizens seek office so that they can serve and represent their fellow citizens.  This is a laudable ambition as it has the potential to call us beyond our own immediate self-interest, which can be a weakness of a society that seeks the absolute freedom of the individual.  The common good represents an important concept for republican forms of government.  This is more than an abstract idea; the word republic – Latin res publica – literally means “the public thing, the common thing, the common good.”  For a republican form of government to function as it should, it needs by definition to have a robust sense of serving the public good over pursuing private gain. 

The liberty of a republic surely insists on the idea that citizens are free from masters, but it also insists that we are not free from each other.  We are free citizens in a community of other free citizens.  Within such a community, liberty needs to be a virtuous mean of behavior.  The excess of liberty is license, which we often mistakenly believe is true freedom.    But license is not liberty; license culminates in behavior that disregards the common good and seeks to master and dominate one’s fellow citizens by seeking for oneself freedom from all public constraint, including reasonable demands of wearing a mask or physical distancing during a pandemic.  We are seeing now how license is destructive to a community.  Citizens who pursue license over liberty become tyrannical.  The refusal to wear a mask in the name of individual freedom has endangered us all.  The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that domination and autocracy are never established without the appeal to freedom (Histories 4.73.3).  Autocrats and authoritarians are perfectly at ease with the rhetoric of freedom and eager to convince you that what they are trying to establish is your liberation rather than your servitude. 

Equally destructive to republican liberty is the weak form of freedom, that is, freely choosing servility and flattery rather than liberty and its responsibilities.  Such passive citizens ostensibly make the free choice to enable the violence and tyranny of the domineering citizen in the service of short-term benefits.  In the end, such citizens surrender their own freedom and become more like subjects than fellow citizens.  The Athenians called such citizens “idiots”, literally idiotes.

Our inability to sort through these matters in a way that seeks to maintain republican liberty – freedom for the common good – has compounded the economic impact of the coronavirus.   A society with a strong sense of republican liberty would value the common good by providing people in need with essential resources such as job security, unemployment pay, and a basic income.  People who do not work still need to pay their bills, and societies that make demands on people in the name of the common good without providing public support are hypocritical and doing nothing more than asking the many to sacrifice for the privilege of the few.  Neither freedom nor the common good is being served in such circumstances.

The lesson is not to give up on liberty or the common good.  Liberty is rightly the foundational premise of all our national documents.  We narrate our history as an expansion of freedom: the search for a more perfect union is in essence an attempt to perfect freedom.  Everyone appeals to freedom as the underpinning of their political beliefs and motivations, but we need a responsible understanding of liberty which avoids the extremes of domination and servitude.  We would do well to remember President Lincoln’s words on maintaining the mean of liberty: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.  This expresses my idea of democracy.  Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”^[1]

Resources

Ammon Hennacy, The Book of Ammon.

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[1] Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln’s Selected Writings.  Ed. David S. Reynolds.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015, 143.