Defenders of liberty are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty Gods or no God.” But, while liberty has never had as great a champion as Jefferson, this statement misleads us about the price of freedom and why it is worth paying. For the truth is that liberty and freedom can injure us both as individuals and as a political community. Those who are willing to support freedom only when the costs are low, are just fair weather friends of freedom.
Consider some of the burdens of freedom. First, there is the expense of protecting the exercise of liberty. Unpopular groups engaged in political protest require police protection and make demands on sanitation departments as well.
Second, our security is, on occasion, compromised by the exercise of free speech. The invocation of national security as a means of restricting civil liberty is more often than not a refuge of politicians seeking to hide misconduct of one sort or another. But there is no reason to doubt that our security is, on occasion, really compromised by the exercise of free speech. International terrorism and street crime are easier to control where there is no freedom.
Third are the political costs of liberty: Freedom makes for political conflict. And political conflict sometimes makes it hard for our government to quickly respond to domestic and foreign problems. Moreover, the political conflict freedom allows sometimes turns violent.
Fourth there is some reason to think that restrictions on liberty can sometimes aid economic growth, too. That, at least, is the claim of many East Asian critics of Western liberty.
Fifth are all the injuries we do to one another by disparaging remarks and discriminatory views. In a free society that has not cured itself of bigotry, books and articles will be written about the superstitions of Catholics, about the inferiority of African Americans , about the perfidy of the Jews, about the evils of gays and lesbians, and about the sins of every other group that has, at one time or another, been the target of bias and malice. And, people who, by their own efforts or by happenstance come into the public eye will have to bear with books and articles that, out of envy or spite, invade their privacy and hold them up for ridicule.
We tend not to think much about the costs of liberty I have just listed. But they are real. This is a pretty worrisome catalogue of the costs of liberty. I do not raise them to call liberty in question. Rather, I wish to remind us what living in a free country means. Freedom rests on our willingness to ignore certain costs. We can rightly complain when our neighbor directly hurts us or our property. But, , A free people will not infringe on the right of people to speak their mind, express their thoughts and ideals or practice their religion freedom, regardless of the costs. In a free country we have no recourse to the injuries that result from our neighbor’s exercise of freedom of thought, speech and conscience. To live in liberty, then, is to accept the burdens of liberty.
Why accept these burdens? In part, because we believe that, over the long term, the benefits are worth the costs. Freedom allows us to choose the path best suited to our own ends and ideals. And it enables us to discover what ends and ideals to embrace. Freedom, however, is important for more than its results.consequences. For we believe, with Jefferson, that human beings are endowed by “nature and nature’s God” with the right to liberty. Our right to freedom follows from the fundamental features of our nature: our free will and our capacity to act on the basis of reason. A free society is one which each person is thought capable of listening to argument and responding in a rational way. It is a society that counts not on censorship but on the reason and good will of everyone to limit the costs of freedom.
Recognizing that freedom has a price, will help us deal with another cost of liberty: the effect of the free circulation of ideas on the character of our people. Most of us are concerned with the possibility that bad and evil speech will lead some people to threaten our rights and the rights of our children. But, even more, we want our children to choose well for the sake of their own happiness, not to mention for the sake of their souls. So we worry about the effects of the low, vulgar and materialistic of life portrayed in the. media. In this way, what our neighbors say about God can injure us..
These costs of liberty explain the efforts of conservatives like the Reverend Joseph Chambers to stamp out pornography in Charlotte. Many liberals ridicule these efforts. But, liberals often express concern about the impact of the sexist images of women portrayed in the media. And both liberals and conservatives decry violence on TV and in the movies.
Some defenders of freedom today follow the Jefferson who wrote the lines at the beginning of this essay. They deny that what our children see, hear and read will sometimes lead them down the wrong path. But this flies in the face of common sense. And it is not a good strategy in defense of freedom. For if we are willing to defend freedom only when it is cost free, there will be very little freedom left for us to defend. And, if it really does matter what we believe or what our aims are in life; if there are no truths of religion, morality and virtue, then why have freedom at all?
So what are we to do about the effects of freedom on the character of our children? There are many ways to minimize these costs. We must be vigilant in guarding what our children see, hear and read. And we can and should expect government to help us do this by, for example, requiring all televisions sets to have a V-chip. But what we cannot do, without betraying our principles and our heritage, is to call for censorship. We must pass on to our children two most precious gifts: a free country and the character to withstand some of the dangers of freedom.
Despite the sentiments expressed in the quotation with which I began this essay, Jefferson certainly knew that freedom has its burdens and that we had the responsibility to accept them. He once wrote that “The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.” Riding those waves is the price we pay for the glory of being in the open sea that is freedom.