The recent Supreme Court decision involving the Hobby Lobby company has sparked a lot of commentary. With lots of friends and acquaintances all over the political spectrum, it has been interesting to read everyone's varying reactions. This has got me thinking about freedom on this day where we celebrate our freedom. The famous quote by the less-famous judicial philosopher Zechariah Chafee is a common refrain: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
Some days it seems like everybody is worried about freedom. In the Hobby Lobby case, for example, those with a conservative viewpoint consider it a victory for religious freedom. Many people who identify with the liberal perspective see it as an ominous precedent, ultimately detrimental to personal liberty. To name another perennial hot-button topic, the debate about gun control is often phrased in terms of rights and freedom. On one side, people want to be free to carry a gun while others are concerned about how firearms will detract from their freedom. On the subject of abortion, we debate endlessly and passionately about whose interests takes precedence, the mother's or the unborn baby's or society's at large.
It is not my goal to talk about any of these hot-button topics. Rather, I just want to muse a bit on the subject of freedom and the consequences of our actions.
My freedom ends at the end of your nose. That's nice and simple and it seems to work pretty well for interactions that involve just you and me. But what happens when we multiply that by one hundred million?
Suppose that people consider it their inalienable right to throw their trash away anywhere. If I throw a gum wrapper out of my car window, as long as it doesn't hit you on the nose or land on property that you own, have I harmed you or abridged your freedom in any way? No court would say so. But what if everybody throws their trash all over the place? How does it affect you when 200 million people throw trash out their window? That does affect us all, in a big way. It creates a huge mess that affects everybody. So we as a society direct our representative government to enact laws that prohibit littering and we authorize our law enforcement agents to stop people from doing it. We are abridging peoples' freedom to litter. There's no outrage about that loss of freedom because we all realize that it's in everybody's best interest if nobody is allowed to litter.
Here's another, slightly different example: let's say there's a fantastically useful substance buried underneath the ground. At first, everybody is free to take all they want and use it for their own purposes. This thing transforms society and allows them to rise out of a barbaric state. Everybody's quality of life is hugely improved. They grow accustomed to it, needing more and more to support their improved lifestyle. Then somebody discovers that there is only enough left to last 100 years at the current rate of consumption. What then? Some people think that everybody should sacrifice some of their quality of life now to conserve the substance so it will last longer. Others think that their own quality of life is too important to them and reason that they'll be dead by the time it runs out, so it's really not their problem. Somebody, they argue, is going to have to have a reduced quality of life either now or in the future. And who knows what they'll find in the future to replace the substance, so why should we lower our quality of life now?
The Conserver faction and the Use It Up faction are at odds with one another. If the Conservers get the upper hand and enact laws to forcibly lower the standard of living, the Use It Uppers will be able to claim that their freedom is being taken away. And if the Use It Uppers get their way, the Conservers will be thwarted. The Use It Uppers argue that the Conservers are free to use less if they want, but they firmly hold that the Conservers cannot be allowed to trample on the Use It Uppers' freedom to have a better life. The picture is not clear cut and both sides have valid concerns. This is usually how it is in real life scenarios.
Whose freedom is more important? It's all very well to say that my freedom ends where your nose starts. But what if, in a particular area, our freedoms are mutually exclusive, where my exercise of freedom necessarily takes away yours? What then? Do we simply revert to the law of the jungle where might makes right? In a place where there is Rule of Law and the sides are about equally matched, do we simply live forever with spending all our energy trying to thwart each other and doing our best to make sure the others don't get their way?
Do we resolve this in the Vulcan way where the good of the many outweighs the good of the few? In the cases of littering, air quality and water pollution, that is what we have tried to do and everybody has benefitted. In the case of useful substances buried underground, such as oil and water, many current lives and livelihoods depend crucially on an uninterrupted supply now. But the future will be very grim indeed for our progeny if we work those golden geese to death.
The same quandaries apply to all of our pressing problems now. My point is that the exercise of our freedoms always carries with it consequences, some serious, both for ourselves and others here and now, and for our future progeny. We spend too much time and effort in posturing and sound biting, so absolutely certain that we occupy the moral high ground. Let us be more aware of our limited perspectives and actively seek to understand where others are coming from. Remember that nobody's out to get you and everybody's doing the best they can, given the cards they've been dealt by life. I firmly believe this.
Let us be grateful for our freedom to act, but let us also question, always, what we think we know. Often, a mile walked in our "enemy's" shoes can alter our whole viewpoint forever and make us realize he is not really an enemy at all, just a person with the same needs, the same fears as ours.
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