Reason in Exile
By Miguel Guanipa (05/04/06)
I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I think it was Voltaire who said that, but I could be wrong.
That aside, I never cease to be amazed at how flippantly this phrase is thrown around. Especially by those who insist on patronizingly uttering its other insipid and disarming cousin: let’s agree to disagree.
The problem is, there are actually things not worth giving your life for. So called freedoms, which are not worthy of the sacrifice of another human being. There are things with which you disagree, not simply because you happen to have a different point of view on the matter, but because they are WRONG.
Case in point: I would not risk my precious life to defend the right of a member of any organization that believes in lowering the age of consensual sex. I would not stick my neck out for someone who believes the best way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is to insert a saline solution into the mother’s womb and kill the baby residing there. I would not even think of taking up arms to fight for the rights of someone to view child pornography. This does not mean that the above mentioned may or may not have a guaranteed right to do what they are doing. It means that although they are wrong, the law, stretched to its limits, permits them to do these things which in reality they shouldn’t do. But the fact that they are allowed to do it does not mean they are right. It simply means they can do it with impunity.
I think part of the confusion arises from a misguided view of what freedom means. And that is only one small part of the problem.
For some, freedom means being able to say or do whatever you want to. But freedom means more than that. If everyone was allowed to say or do whatever they fancy there would be chaos. A society filled with people who simply insist on saying or doing whatever it is they want to do regardless of the consequences to others would not survive for long. Not only that. Any individual who persists on only engaging in the behavior which brings him or her most pleasure becomes captive to that behavior to the point that they are governed by it. At this juncture those individuals are no longer free but slaves to their passions. They understand freedom no longer, for they can not make choices other than those they are bound to by virtue of the fact that these are the only choices which satiate the very monster they have created in their ill advised quest for absolute freedom. If you doubt this thesis try telling a smoker to give up his habit, or someone who has been offended to truly forgive. And how many of us have heard the refrain from an alcoholic: I can stop whenever I want to. You will find that there are very few people in the world who consistently enjoy true freedom.
True freedom means having the choice and the will to say or do what one ought to, not what one is constrained to say or do by the passions to which one has become a slave.
And one should not be surprised that freedom is merely one among many virtues which has suffered from being wrongly defined. Consider the fact that in today’s culture tolerance is prescribed only for the crudest forms of uninhibited deviance, having an open mind is usually associated with the goal of promoting the lowest standards of decency, truth is strictly pursued with the singular purpose of disgracing others, mutual consent is deemed a reliable standard for ascertaining propriety, and having the right to do something seems to automatically guarantee the legitimacy of that act.
In the current relativistic milieu most people are either shocked at hearing anyone passing judgement or indifferent to their claim. Since everyone has the right to say or do whatever he or she wants then no one can claim to have a monopoly on the truth. Supposedly, anyone who dares say that something is wrong simply doesn’t understand that what may be wrong for one person may be perfectly O.K. for the guy next door. While that may be the case, what it often really means is that the guy next door is probably not playing with a full deck. But if you dare say that, you will be immediately branded with whatever happens to be the most recent politically correct label manufactured for the occasion.
Fortunately, if you live in this country and see something which you know is wrong, you still have the freedom to express your views against it. It so happens that many of the things that are not worth fighting for are also things that we are compelled to fight against. To engage in this struggle means more than to merely exercise your guaranteed freedom to disagree; it means you are using that freedom to fight for what’s good according to the most basic universal standard everyone intuitively appeals to when confronted with wrong. This universally acknowledged standard, sometimes referred to as Natural Law, provides the basic moral framework under which every freedom known to all of humanity can flourish.
Even Voltaire would not disagree with that.
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