by Dr. Winston McCuen
The words “freedom” and “liberty” are now among the most misused and abused in the English language.
Other words in the class of the most abused and misused include “racist”, “democracy”, “fascist”, “progressive”, “anti-semite” and, of course, “love.” And significantly, the worst word-abusers are typically liberals.
People use or abuse words in the same ways and for the same reasons they understand or misunderstand and represent or misrepresent reality — that is, according to their spiritual-intellectual condition.
The spiritual warfare that is Providentially endemic to fallen humanity in this earthly life includes warfare over the meaning of key words and over the nature of reality itself.
Nowhere is this warfare more intense and persisting and fateful for humanity than the ongoing warfare over the nature of freedom or liberty. And this explains why Marxists, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives of different stripes have widely different and opposing and incompatible conceptions of freedom.
John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833), the brilliant American statesman, political thinker, orator, and Virginia planter and slaveowner — beloved as “Massa John” by his Negro people — once observed how his slaves understood “freedom” to mean “living in idleness at someone else’s expense.”
And such a conception of freedom, however wildly wrong from a technical historical-political-
After all, freedom, as an Anglo-Saxon or white conception at least, is supposed to be about rugged individualism and personal-familial independence and self-reliance and eternal vigilance, and not about hypocritical material parasitism and a libertine and slothful and decadent and anti-Christian shirking of work. For as the Holy Spirit speaking through the Apostle says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
But of course, it was the white abolitionist, and not the Negro himself, who, by false religion and false philosophy, would by 1831 with Garrison’s Liberator supply the high-sounding moralistic window-dressing to “legitimate” the Negro’s claim to the right of freedom. And it was window-dressing manufactured whole cloth far away from the actual realities of Southern Christian slavery, in Boston and London and Paris.
In those distant anti-rustican hubs, imagination, fueled by envy and hatred of the South — the last Christian and non-materialist civilization of the modern world — could run wild and unchecked by truth.
But before the abolitionist’s conceptual makeover and coverup, the original conception of Randolph’s slaves, standing alone and straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth, leaves the clear and unmistakable impression that the principal objection of the Negro slave, in the antebellum South, to his slavery was not some supposed affront to high-sounding personal dignity, as Frederick Douglass and his ilk have claimed.
Instead, the Negro slave’s objection to slavery was, from beginning to end, the requirement of Southern Christian slavery that he, the Negro, labor or work at all, including to feed and clothe himself.
Indeed — it must be emphasized — the very holding of the “idleness” conception of freedom by Negro slaves was itself evidence of the need for continuing Christian tutelage by the master of his slaves, tutelage brilliantly outlined in the 1850 sermon by James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862) on the Christian obligation of masters to slaves.
Keeping more extensive freedoms, like voting and officeholding, away from people who cannot exercise them responsibly is not tyranny or “sexism” or “racism” or fascism. Instead, it is good and wise government, and specifically, it is the principle of ordered liberty.
And unlike the widely-held and dangerous and seductive fiction of abstract natural rights and universal freedom, which is a false philosophical product of man’s fallen and sinful nature rooted in a vain longing for the unmerited and the undeserved, the principle of ordered liberty is real and operates in all societies in all times as a moral-political-mathematical constant and moral-political-mathematical certainty.
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In ancient philosophy, it was the Pythagoreans who waxed poetic about the Music of the Spheres, or musica universalis. These philosophers viewed the cosmos, or all that is, as a harmonious, mathematically ordered system where celestial bodies move according to musical ratios and produce an inaudible cosmic symphony.
A century later Plato (c.425-c.347BC), who was arguably the greatest philosopher the world has known, had inscribed over the entrance of his Academy for aspiring philosophers the warning-filter, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” This expressed the Platonic principle, found in the Republic, that only those who have mastered mathematics as prerequisite in philosophy are fit to govern in society or to do true philosophy.
In his brilliant work titled On Learned Ignorance, NIcolaus Cusanus, who was a critical transition figure from medieval to Renaissance thought, argued with great depth and skill — and with amazing geometric demonstrations — that the one and only true (Triune) God, being Three Persons in One, is the Great Mathematician Who made creation mathematically, by numbers. Specifically, God created a creation ex nihilo of numerical-geometric substances expressed in the world we see and do not see as both quantity and quality.
Cusa used geometric metaphors — the infinite line, triangle, circle, and sphere — to express the Trinity’s unity and infinity. The Trinity is a Maximum, the Absolute Maximum, which is both infinity and One. Cusa used these metaphors to express the Trinity’s unity and infinity (unitrinitas). The infinite triangle symbolizes the Trinity’s three Persons, while the infinite circle represents the One.
Echoing Socrates’ warning in the Apology about human finitude and limitations, Cusa wisely observed that the sciences of finite man, who is gloriously but ultimately merely an image of God, now fallen, can never grasp, by rational speculation, Infinite God. And the rational recognition of real or actual human limits is an essential kind of wisdom, and this is Cusa’s famous and important docta ignorantia, or doctrine of learned ignorance.
Later, the Reformed Christian polymath philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), inventor of the calculus, expounded a mathematical metaphysics or theory of existence whereby God’s creation may be best understood as the best possible harmonized system of fundamental substances or monads.
These monads, which make up all of creation, are substances capable of action. And whether physical, spiritual, or a combination of the two, the monads are infused with purpose (telos), and set in relation to each other in a Divinely pre-established harmony.
In truth and profundity, this Leibnizian view of substance far surpassed, for example, John Locke (1632-1704), who impotently called substance “that thing I know not what”, and David Hume (1711-1776), who foolishly dismissed the notion of substance as a fiction and supposed “philosophical superstition.”
And so ironically, human substances, including philosophers, by their finitude and fallibility, are capable of self-contradiction and self-denial, as when they mistake and deny the reality of substance. But, in fairness, substance is the reality behind or underneath appearances, the reality which also causes those appearances, and therefore is not seen by the non-philosophical many as such, as Plato would say.
And the etymology of “substance” underscores this truth, since, from Latin, “sub” (under) and “stare” (to stand) together make “that which stands under.” And what stands under us, either physically or spiritually, is not typically what we notice first or focus on.
And while Locke was deistic and Hume was an atheist, Leibniz the Christian had read, to good effect, Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, and Nicholas of Cusa. And in Leibniz we also find profound metaphysical discussions of the relationship between mathematical quantity, on the one hand, and ontic and ontological quality, on the other hand. In Leibniz in fact we find what are perhaps the most advanced speculations on the ultimate relation between number and existence and essence.
And happily, as Plato taught, true philosophy, being mathematical in nature, intersects, at various points, with music and poetry. And the Christian recasting of the pre-Christian Pythagorean cosmogony and cosmology — the sciences concerned, respectively, with the origin and nature of the universe — is well captured in the lyrics of the beautiful Christian hymn, THIS IS MY FATHER’S WORLD, by Babcock (lyrics) and Sheppard (music) circa 1910.
The hymn goes:
This is my Father’s world,
And to my list’ning ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world:
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas—
His hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father’s world:
The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world:
He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere.
This is my Father’s world:
Oh, let me ne’er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world,
The battle is not done:
And earth and Heav’n be one.
In America, in the 1820s and 30s and 40s, America’s greatest statesman and philosopher, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (1782-1850), uncovered and described certain fundamental mathematical relations wrought and established by the Lord, in His All-Wise Providence, in the human political world.
Among the great philosophers of the West, it was Calhoun who saw the math of God in politics.
These mathematic insights and others would establish Calhoun as the great modern founder of political science. Elements of Calhoun’s mathematical-political insights appear as early as his South Carolina Exposition (1828), and then later, in more developed form, in his “Speech on the Oregon Bill” (1848) and in his short treatise , A Disquisition on Government (1849).
In the tradition of Pythagoras and Plato and Augustine and Nicolas of Cusa, Calhoun, as a political metaphysician, saw mathematical ratio and proportion and quanta in the complex phenomena of human nature and public government.
In particular, Calhoun, like Plato, saw how the ordering or the private (internal) government of the individual soul lies on a continuum with the laws and public government of the polity. And this continuum is a moral-spiritual continuum.
The polity is the human soul writ large. And within both the soul and the polity, as Plato wisely taught, there are rational and spirited and appetitive (or desiring) parts.
And so, for example, those persons who are unable to govern themselves properly from within, for the sake of public order and national survival, must be governed by private masters or public magistrates from without. And in the spirit of Plato, Calhoun saw this continuum of private and public government in essentially mathematical and geometric terms.
Indeed, most errors about the nature of liberty and about its right allocation in a given social and national context may be traced to a prior failure on the part of governors and political thinkers and other influencers to understand how the private government of the individual lies on a moral-spiritual continuum with the public government of his country.
And so as political metaphysician, Calhoun would spy out the ultimate relations between government power and personal liberty, as we shall now see.
So if and only if, and after and only after, a society’s government achieves its primary end, its secondary end is to perfect society. And to accomplish this, “it is necessary to develop the faculties, moral and intellectual, with which man is endowed.” And here, at this critical causal juncture, is where our discussion of the proper relation of liberty to governmental power must focus.
We note how, in Calhoun, the liberty (of individuals and groups) within society is mentioned only after the preservation and protection of society or of the community has already been secured and assured by government. So human survival or continued existence must precede improvement, else there is nothing to improve.
But as we proceed into Calhoun’s account, we find that the relation between government power and liberty, which first appeared as a simple hierarchy wherein power precedes and takes clear precedence over liberty, gets more complicated. And the relation between power and liberty ends up being a relationship that is interdependent and dialectical and, most of all, profoundly Providential.
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Liberty first appears on the human political scene as a protective zone or defensive perimeter around each individual’s freedom of thought and speech and action to better his condition.
Calhoun says: “The main spring to [the development of man’s moral and intellectual faculties], and through this, to [his] progress, improvement and civilization, with all their blessings, is the desire of individuals to better their condition. For this purpose, liberty and security are indispensable. Liberty leaves each [person] free to pursue the course he may deem best to promote his interest and happiness, as far as it may be compatible with the primary end for which government is ordained (that is, the protection of society) — while security gives assurance to each, that he shall not be deprived of the fruits of his exertions to better his condition.”
So man by nature wants to survive and desires to improve his condition, but his prospects for survival and improvement, apart from society, are on par with society’s prospects for survival and improvement, apart from government.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his Leviathan, famously and correctly observed how life for man without society protected by government — assuming its possibility — would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In the brutal anarchy of Hobbes’ “state of nature”, each man is at war with every other man, and this is so, at root, because of man’s fallen and narrowly selfish nature — including his sinful willingness and inclination, not to love his neighbor as himself, but to sacrifice the interests of others to his own (narrow and wrongly conceived) interests.
And then, while all men agree about the need for survival, and about what that is, not all men will agree on particulars about what constitutes improving one’s condition. For most men, improved condition means improved material condition, as compared, for example, with improved moral and intellectual and spiritual condition.
But for Calhoun, the perfection of society and the improvement of condition for individuals, while they include material and technological advances, such advances are always in the service of and therefore subordinate in the scale of importance to moral-intellectual or spiritual progress.
Calhoun makes this very clear on the first page of his Disquisition, when he speaks, in Aristotelian fashion, of man attaining “to a full development of his moral and intellectual faculties”, and of raising himself, by good government, “in the scale of being, much above the level of the brute creation.” And, since grace perfects (and also provides) nature, this Calhounian eudaimonia is wholly commensurate with Christian sanctification in the earthly life and then with the final Bonaventurian consummation of the elect in Christ.
But human conditions, both internal and external, can affect the desire of individuals to improve their condition. Conceptions of improvement can differ widely and the drive to improve, even, can wax and wane. Still, however, the basic human desire for improvement of condition is universal, and it therefore exists and persists Providentially as an internal causal dynamo or driving motor and force in every person and in every society.
And this innate or natural desire in the individual to improve his condition can be enabled or impaired by two great outside social and political forces, which are government power and liberty, depending on their mathematical ratios or proportions.
Hence, says Calhoun: “[Liberty and security] combined, give to this desire [for improvement] the strongest impulse of which it is susceptible. For, to extend liberty beyond the limits assigned, would be to weaken the government and to render it incompetent to fulfill its primary end — the protection of society against dangers, internal and external. On the other hand, to extend the powers of the government, so as to contract the sphere assigned to liberty, would have the same effect, by disabling individuals in their efforts to better their condition.”
So, in every society, there is a sphere for liberty and a sphere for power, and the sizes of these spheres are inversely proportional, one to the other, depending on the moral and physical circumstances of the community that we will consider below.
So the Providential principle of ordered liberty “… assign[s] a larger sphere to power and a more contracted one to liberty, or the reverse, according to circumstances.” “To [power], there must ever be allotted, under all circumstances, a sphere sufficiently large to protect the community against danger from without and violence and anarchy from within. The residuum belongs to liberty. More cannot safely or rightly be allotted to [liberty].”
But here, at this critical causal juncture, is where nearly all men, including most political thinkers, have become confused and erred. And it is at this point, as on many other points, that we see Calhoun’s superior philosophical strength and depth:
“But some communities require a far greater amount of power [that is, external, public government] than others to protect them against anarchy and external dangers; and, of course, the sphere of liberty in such, must be proportionately contracted. The causes calculated to enlarge the one and contract the other, are numerous and various. Some are physical — such as open and exposed frontiers, surrounded by powerful and hostile neighbors. Others are moral — such as the different degrees of intelligence, patriotism, and virtue among the mass of the community, and their experience and proficiency in the art of self-government. Of these, the moral are, by far, the most influential. A community may possess all the necessary moral qualifications, in so high a degree, as to be capable of self-government under the most adverse [physical] circumstances; while, on the other hand, another [community] may be so sunk in ignorance and vice, as to be incapable of forming a conception of liberty, or of living, even when most favored by [physical circumstances], under any other than an absolute and despotic government.”
And so: “The principle [of ordered liberty], in all communities, according to these numerous and various causes, assign[s] to power and liberty their proper spheres. To allow to liberty, in any case, a sphere of action more extended than this [principle of ordered liberty] assigns, would lead to anarchy, and this, probably, in the end, to a contraction instead of an enlargement of its sphere.”
So too much liberty leads, in the end, to an overall contraction of liberty. And the moral foundation or causally -supporting buttress of liberty is virtue, and without virtue as moral support, liberty is unsustainable and collapses into anarchy, which for Calhoun was “the greatest of all curses.”
And anarchy would, by its inexorable effects, preclude both human improvement and human survival, but for “the constitution of man” which, by God’s Providence, continuously generates and sustains both society and government.
But this critically important truth, highlighted and brilliantly described by Calhoun, about the fundamental causal connection between liberty and virtue, is now most unwelcome, for example, among our libertine and hyper-abstract “natural-rights” libertarians.
But the chain of Calhounian logic continues on, inexorably and relentlessly, smashing myriad errors left and right with a mighty cascading enthymeme. And so, at yet another critical juncture, Calhoun arrives by flawless logic at conclusions that nations and peoples now poisoned and deranged by false egalitarian philosophy would never accept — without prior Providential chastisement.
Calhoun says: “Liberty, then, when forced on a people unfit for it, would, instead of a blessing, be a curse; as it would, in its reaction, lead directly to anarchy — the greatest of all curses.”
Indeed: “No people … can long enjoy more liberty than that to which their situation and advanced intelligence and morals fairly entitle them. If more than this be allowed, they must soon fall into confusion and disorder — to be followed , if not by anarchy and despotism, by a change to a form of government more simple and absolute; and therefore, better suited to their condition. And hence, although it may be true, that a people may not have as much liberty as they are fairly entitled to, and are capable of enjoying — yet the reverse is unquestionably true — that no people can long possess more than they are fairly entitled to.”
So Providence works spontaneously toward placing an increasingly vicious people under a more simple and absolute form of government, and it works spontaneously toward placing an increasingly virtuous people under a more limited and constitutional but also more complicated form of government. So the moral and intellectual and spiritual condition of a people is reflected in the structure and extent of their public government.
And so, as different governments and peoples go, one type or one size, as Rousseau (1712-1778), a Platonist, wisely observed, does not fit all. Specifically, because people differ morally and intellectually, they also differ in their governmental needs and therefore in their public governments.
And for these reasons, says Calhoun, in climactic and crowning political-philosophical wisdom:
“… it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. [Liberty] is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike — a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving — and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. Nor is it any disparagement to liberty, that such is and ought to be the case. On the contrary, its greatest praise — its proudest distinction is, that an all-wise Providence has reserved it, as the highest and noblest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving — nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule.”
Amazing.
And then comes the powerful and revelatory culmination and mathematical-geometric conclusion of Calhoun’s brilliant enthymeme about liberty and government power:
“This dispensation [of rewarding the deserving with liberty and of punishing the undeserving with its withholding or denial] seems to be the result of some fixed law (emphasis added) — and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive, and end in disappointment. The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the scale of liberty, is necessarily slow — and by attempting to precipitate, we either retard, or permanently defeat it.”
And here, by “precipitate”, Calhoun means, to hand liberty out prematurely, or without moral warrant, by arbitrary fiat, in inhumane and sinful and impious disregard of the Providential principle of ordered liberty.
Finally, the great fixed law to which Calhoun refers is as real and as present in our lives as the law of gravity. It is the great Providential geometric principle of true or ordered liberty that our All-Wise God placed at the very center of our lives as subjects and citizens under government in this earthly life.
A native South Carolinian and proud son of Confederate veterans, Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar He is the son of Dr. William Garrison McCuen, Sr. and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.
I of course agree with the thesis that “rights and obligations are correlative.” -Albert Taylor Bledsoe, ‘Liberty and Slavery’.
I was surprised though that you cited Rousseau as being one who didn’t subscribe to a one size fits all idea of government, since I’d always thought he was a father of enlightenment egalitarianism.
Rousseau, after his death in 1778, was appropriated by the French Revolutionists.
At the time he was Europe’s most popular and exciting thinker, a kind of celebrity or philosophical superstar.
Most secondary sources on him are inaccurate, and many of them are even silly.
You should read him firsthand.
Rousseau was NOT an egalitarian, at least in the modern Marxian sense. Far from it
In On the Social Contract, see Bk. III, Ch. 8 titled, “That Not All Forms of Government are Suited to All Countries.” See also Bk. III, Ch. 3, where he says “There has always been a great deal of argument over the best form of government, without considering that each one of them is best in certain cases and worst in others.”
See also Bk. I, Ch. 12, where he addresses the inequality of different countries and peoples.
Rousseau was deeper than the Enlightenment philosophes, who were men of letters and not philosophers. He was heavily influenced by Plato and by the Calvinist experiment in Geneva, forces that atheistic and libertine folk like Voltaire and his atheistic ilk would reject.
Reading Rousseau is not easy, but, done rightly, it is rewarding.
At one point in the SC, he says he does not possess the skill of being clear to those who do not pay attention. I love the humor. He was a sharp intellect and has been greatly misunderstood. A bit like Nietzsche in that regard.
Best to you,
Winston McCuen
Just, wow
Great essay! This part is gold for its depth and simplicity:
“So Providence works spontaneously toward placing an increasingly vicious people under a more simple and absolute form of government, and it works spontaneously toward placing an increasingly virtuous people under a more limited and constitutional but also more complicated form of government. So the moral and intellectual and spiritual condition of a people is reflected in the structure and extent of their public government.”