Knowledge And Decisions

Hobbes defined freedom as the absence of opposition or impediments.²⁸² Freedom may be constrained by political power or informal influences, but as long as diverse human beings constitute a society, their disparate values must somehow be reconciled and therefore someone’s — or everyone’s — freedom must be curtailed. When these mutual reconciliations are affected through informal channels, reciprocal advantages may be traded off, so that the disparate values of individuals permit them to incrementally relinquish what they value least for what they value most, even though physically what one relinquishes is identical to what another receives. When reconciliations are made by the decisions of formal hierarchies, one scheme of values is offered, and if the hierarchy is a monopoly — such as government — imposed. A choice among hierarchies (churches, employers, associations) preserved freedom through the inevitable differences among human beings as individuals or groups.

Where the differences among people are least — in the desire to be safe from violence and secure in their possessions, for example — there is less sacrifice of freedom in assigning to a monopoly the power to punish individual violence or robbery. Were the same monopoly to determine the “best” size(s) or style(s) of shoes, the result would be mass discomfort, and were it to determine more and weightier matters the results would be even less satisfactory in terms of the differing values of individuals, however “better” it might be in terms of the particular values of the monopoly.

This brief summary of various “efficiency” arguments already elaborated in earlier chapters is relevant here to freedom as a separate value in its own right. It is the difference between the preferred and the imposed values that necessitates the use of force — the curtailment (or extinction) of freedom. In this context, an ideology of categorically transcendant values — whether religious salvation or “social justice” — is an ideology of crushing power. The logic of transcendant values drives even the humane toward the use of force, as those not imbued with the same values prove recalcitrant, evasive, or undermining — provoking indignant anger and confronting decision makers with a choice between accepting defeat for sacred causes or applying more power. This systemic logic rather than intentional design drove Robespierre — “a man of great sweetness of character”²⁸³ — to mass executions as flesh-and-blood human beings repeatedly acted at cross purposes with the ideals of the French Revolution. “Moralism is fatal to freedom,” wrote a former friend of Robespierre, while awaiting the guillotine.²⁸⁴ It was not a principle unique to the French Revolution. Much milder political changes have been driven by similar logic to exert far more power than originally contemplated in pursuit of a transcendant goal. No one expected Brown v. Board of Education to lead to federal judges taking over local school systems and ordering the massive busing of children, in disregard of both initial opposition and subsequent consequences. Indeed, no one expected the humane social programs initiated by the New Deal to lead to bureaucratic empires issuing their own laws — more laws than Congress — unilaterally, outside the constitutional framework, and almost immune to either electoral correction or judicial oversight. Where, whether and how we can build a roof over our heads is determined by an anonymous zoning commission; whether we dare walk the streets near our home is determined by decisions of equally unknown parole board members; and how long we can live in our neighborhood depends on the grand designs of urban redevelopment administrators.