At our recent family reunion my family and I discussed the
correlation between liberty and morality.
As my dad pointed out, John Adams famously argued that “[o]ur
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of
any other.” Similarly, Benjamin Franklin
is attributed the following: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As
nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Madison once wrote that “[i]f men were
angels, no government would be necessary.”
Certainly, the founders’ words were founded in sagacity, but
I questioned the causal link between freedom and morality. In other words, while Adams and Franklin
suggest that morality permits liberty, I proposed that it was actually the
other way around. Liberty promotes morality.
That morality permits liberty certainly fits a common sense
narrative. As Franklin says, an immoral
people need more laws to protect each other from their immorality. So as nations become immoral, it stands to
reason that, for survivability, they would forfeit their freedoms to protect
the peace and promote civility. But as
individuals are increasingly moral, they govern themselves, such that “no
government would be necessary.”
History, however, paints a story of reverse causality, that
freedom begets morality, and that socialism begets immorality. American values took a sharp turn for the
worse around the time of the Great Depression.
Traditional values of hard work, close-knit family ties, religious
faith, and general integrity began to slowly erode. Beginning with that time, each subsequent decade
takes a step away from traditional moral values and toward the glorification of
immorality. Today, promiscuity, dishonesty,
and laziness are not only condoned but largely promoted by society. We are taught not only to look with tolerance
on others who behave indecently, but to condone their behavior.
Why the decline?
Arguably, it’s because of our political turn toward socialism. In the 30’s, and in response to the ongoing depression,
FDR implemented the New Deal, a socialist program that forever turned America
away from the freedom it once held sacred.
A wildly progressive income tax (which reached up to 92% at the top
levels), social security, Medicare and Medicaid, price controls, regulations, and
other government involvements in the economy were pushed on the population to
try to stem the low economic performance.
Of course, the effect was only to prolong the depression an estimated 8
years. But with this policy change, the
socialism which we watched corrupt the nations of Russia, China, Cuba, and
others slowly took root in our own society.
You might argue that moral conditions took a turn for the
worse before these policies gained favor, and that it was the moral decline
which allowed them to take root. But a recent
study supports my story of causation.
Participants from both West and East Germany, who arguably should have
the same moral background up until the establishment of the separate nations,
were set to play a game for some reward in which it was notably easy to cheat
in. Those who lived in East Germany were
twice as willing to cheat as those who grew up in West Germany. The conclusion the authors made is that it
was the communist system which promote unethical values in their citizens.
But why does socialism promote immorality? To answer this we can turn to Friedrich
Hayek. When people are free, the process
of survival becomes an evolutionary one.
So -called natural selection (although Hayek doesn’t like to use this
term because it refers to biological evolution, which he argues was derived
from social evolution theory) pits the different social values against each
other in a market of ideas. Those cultural
and social values which produce positive social and economic results outperform
those which promote social decline.
Observant societies will turn toward the more successful values. Those societies which stubbornly persist in
their failing policies will eventually die off naturally because it cannot
support their lifestyles. In the end,
the best social values emerge as popular and the poorest become despised. Of course, evolutionary history suggests that
traditional moral values are the highest performing, which is why they became
(and remained) the traditional values of society. Freedom, then, begets morality.
On the other hand, when governments seek control over its
population, that power is eventually corrupted and turned toward
exploitation. Even those rulers with the
best of intentions eventually give way to power-driven narcissists who drive
society into corruption. History is full
of such examples. Hayek argued that it
is natural in systems with centralized power for the scum to rise to the top,
for those who should be leaders are
those who do not want or seek the responsibility. What’s more, even in those cases where a good
ruler emerges, centrally directed morality cannot succeed as intended, as I
have argued in earlier posts.
In sum, it is not morality which begets freedom, but freedom
which begets morality. If we, as
Christians, seek to better the world, to turn our fellow man toward Christ and moral
values, we should first seek to free ourselves from socialist policies and its corruption. Until we are more free, we have little chance
of driving our society closer to morality.
Fight for freedom, and morality will naturally result.
