The desire to live free of despotism is a deep human yearning. No written constitution can secure it, no government can create it, but constitutions, governments and education can help to nurture and protect it.
When asked the question “How can people secure their personal and public liberties?” – the instinctive response is to say that we can do it with constitutions, democracy, the separation of powers, and many other mechanisms that have, over millennia, allowed us to shore up and buttress the conditions for freedom. But ultimately, as Ukraine shows us, the only sure guarantee is that the desire for liberty burns intensely within all of us.
When French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the U.S. in 1831 to study the American prison system, he got side-tracked and fascinated by the wider political system. Something then perplexed him. The Mexicans had essentially copied the Constitution designed by America’s founding fathers, but nothing like the free republic that the Americans had founded had emerged. Why was this the case? He wondered about the climate, the geography, and any number of factors that might account for the difference, but none of them seemed consistent enough to explain it.
Tocqueville realized that the answer to his conundrum lay in the minds of the Americans themselves. When the colonists had boarded ships to escape persecution in Europe, or just to seek a new life, they had emigrated with a spirit of independence of mind, a hard-working ethos, the desire to achieve freedom and an interest in religious liberty. “But although [the Mexican Constitution] had carried over the letter of the law,” observed Tocqueville in his famous work “Democracy in America,” they “could not carry over the spirit that gives it life.”
One of America’s founders had already noticed this. John Adams, who became America’s second president, had read the observations on the French Revolution by England’s pioneering women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft. He subsequently scribbled in one of his books: “A constitution is a standard, a pillar and a bond when it is understood, approved and beloved. But without this intelligence and attachment, it might as well be a kite or balloon, flying in the air.”
Tocqueville and Adams recognized that instruments such as constitutions are helpful, but not sufficient. Tocqueville was not claiming that a written constitution was ineffective at helping freedom, just that it could not do the heavy lifting on its own.
Throughout human history there are innumerable examples of constitutions and laws being interpreted by the despot to support their aims. We have a tendency to think of autocratic power as arbitrary, but of course tyranny also flourishes under an extensive legal system, particularly when those laws are aligned to the whims of a powerful executive and a legislature that has become the executive’s docile lapdog. Written constitutions are always ultimately corruptible to the ends of tyranny.
The American founders knew that the people they sought to bring together under their new constitution had a yearning for liberty. They had of course, with great effort and sacrifice, thrown off the yoke of British monarchy that had attempted to tax them without their say, as well as advancing numerous other transgressions of their freedoms. To attempt to secure their new freedoms at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, they went to great lengths to consider the structure of every branch of government and the checks and balances between them. What resulted was a republican blueprint for government that was unique as much as it was remarkable. Although the ancient Athenians had built a society founded on early notions of liberty, for the first time a document outlining how to build such a society through methodical rational thought had been authored.
The U.S. Constitution continues to guide decisions in the U.S. government. There are endless legal cases, and academic books besides, that ruminate over what the founders really meant in this or that paragraph. Indeed, the document has become a powerful guiderail, a reference if you like, for decision-making. But as Tocqueville himself recognised, impressive though the document is, its guiding light is only useful if people are willing to embrace the more nebulous spirit of freedom that it embodies.
Over the years, the use of the U.S. Constitution has not solidified American liberty into something indefeasibly permanent. It has remained a fragile thing that depends on the people who use it. In the Second World War, when freedom was under threat across the world, Judge Learned Hand reiterated this essential truth: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.’
It’s interesting to note, consistent with Hand’s remarks, that some countries that have a strong modern heritage of democracy and individual liberty have no written constitution. Britain’s constitution relies primarily on custom. There is no central document to which the government refers when issues of freedom are center stage, although of course past legal precedents play an important role. Such examples provide some further proof that the strength of liberty does not primarily reside in governing documents, but it is embedded within the culture and historical experiences of people.
Given this sort of evidence, we might feel a sense of disappointment. Does this suggest that liberty is a unique product of historical contingency? There is no escaping the truth that people who have had their liberty threatened or denied to them feel its loss more intensely and yearn to protect it more ferociously. Ukraine shows us how history and the circumstances of our current time can mobilize these urges in abundance. However, equally I don’t think that Tocqueville’s observations should be taken to mean that liberty can only exist with the right historical circumstances. That would be to suggest that it cannot be encouraged and expanded in its influence by deliberate rational effort, and that we must surrender to the idea that parts of humanity, must, by historical necessity, always live under the yoke of tyranny.
I think it is possible to “teach” liberty. Education has a role to play in teaching children and adults the basis of freedom of speech, assembly, religion, equality before the law and the other facets of societies in which leaders are accountable to their people and the people themselves enjoy freedoms within the rule of law. There have been enough egregious tyrannies in the ancient and modern world to provide the material to convince even the most disinterested person of the consequences of despotism to their own lives and future generations.
Across the West at least, we do a bad job of discussing these matters in schools. History lessons should focus less on the facts of the past and spend more time discussing the consequences of human social order. General study classes should also encourage vibrant and open discussion among our youth on the political and economic systems available to humanity and which of them deliver greater human flourishing and why. The rich global canon of political philosophy should be compulsory reading in secondary schools with no restriction, censorship, or manipulation. Above all, an education system should seek to encourage a vigorous independence of mind in its children and a willingness to healthily question authority and its motives.
I also believe that those who seek to nurture liberty should feel no reticence or embarrassment in encouraging and propagating the arguments and discussion of freedom abroad. There is a fashion in the modern world to claim this as cultural arrogance or even imperialism. Convincing our fellow human beings to establish free government, and sometimes to fight to ensure that they are not subjected to the single-minded political creed of the autocrat, is no form of imperialism. The notions of freedom of expression, religion, the democratic accountability of government, the freedom to voluntarily assemble with fellow human beings to achieve common interests and aims are all things that most self-respecting humans should desire – the spirit of liberty is beneficial to us all.
With the technology of today, which allows global connectedness, there is no excuse for any retreat from liberty. Ukraine has reminded us that, from day to day, we can renew our appreciation of freedom across nations and remain forever jealous and ready to defend it from encroachment, at home and abroad. As we expand our human vision to a global and greater scale, addressing challenges such as climate change, the exploration and settlement of space, and more besides, then so too, the raging fire of liberty must continue to burn in the hearts of people across Earth and eventually beyond.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
