Better than the Bill of Rights?

 by Allan Levite  

| View comments |  Print This Post

Yes, two ideas protect our freedoms more fundamentally than the Bill of Rights – if we believe in them.

Probably more than the citizens of any other country, Americans know what their rights are and insist that they be upheld. However, though the Bill of Rights is a fine thing, it is still only a piece of paper, and the only amendment of the original ten that our government hasn't blatantly violated is the Third – the one that prohibits it from quartering troops in our homes. True, the document has prevented our country from becoming a police state – but still, the courts and the politicians have whittled it down considerably. They have always ignored the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

Perhaps we should discover the real cornerstones of our liberty by identifying where the greatest threats to liberty come from. In the framers' day, it was monarchy; in the 20th century it was totalitarianism. Many people think that the Deep Green movement is the worst threat of all. It generates so much nihilistic guilt (i.e., a tree is of equal value to a human life) that it may eventually cause mankind to lose its will to live. But two treacherous perils to our rights have been operating all along and may prove to be an even greater menace: determinism and collective responsibility. So let's examine the idea that their opposites – the interrelated concepts of free will and individual responsibility – are the ultimate foundations of our freedoms.

If we don't recognize free will, and assume instead that we're all slaves to such "determining" factors as our biology or our socio-economic environment, then no compelling argument for freedom of action can be made. For if our actions aren't freely and willfully chosen, the conclusion that we know what's best for us cannot be drawn. This provides a strong justification for allowing those supposedly more knowledgeable or responsible than ourselves to decide what's best for us.

Monarchy can exist without a throne, a crown, or a sovereign. These things are only its trappings. Its essence is the idea that the common people are unfit to make proper decisions; hence the presumed need for a sovereign to rule over them. In new guises, monarchy is making a comeback.

For example, tobacco companies are now blamed for smokers getting cancer, despite the health warning on the packages, as if a smoker's free will counts for nothing. (Even so, many millions of smokers exercised their free will to quit, even before the advent of stop-smoking devices.) But while smokers are seen as helpless victims, unaccountable for their choices, tobacco executives are held fully accountable. While the poor are exonerated, corporate executives are held fully responsible for their "greed," and we seldom hear that their environment "drove them to it." Ordinary crimes are explained by deprivation, but not "hate crimes," even when the perpetrators are poor or uneducated, which is often the case. We are asked to believe that violent TV programs entice children toward violence, but we are never asked to believe that the talk about the unequal "distribution" of income — and how "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" — entices any poor people to steal.

A society that divides the public into two distinct classes – those who employ genuine choice and bear responsibility for it, and those who do not – is one that has renounced the very concept of justice. By recognizing two classes, unequal before the law, this society's revered ideal of political equality becomes a mockery. True democracy cannot long endure this way. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, but if the health-police wish to remain healthy themselves, they'd better keep their damned hands off my health.

When the concept of individual responsibility wavers, "collective" responsibility takes over. It leads to more blame, not less. It's as if the country is a steamship; and violence, racism, pollution, and smoking are mere crates of undesirable cargo that can simply be thrown overboard, ending the problem. Officials decry wife-beating instead of wife-beaters, "violence" instead of violent people, and bigotry instead of bigots. "Society" takes on the blame that unruly individuals appear to escape.

Those who claim that errant individuals are blameless – passive products of their "conditioning" – should admit that there are two types of conditioning, which have vastly different effects. The first simply presents information, which the public is expected to believe or, at least, accept. "News" that supports the official line can be repeated, while unfavorable information can be played down. This form of conditioning can be quite effective. The second is the type that demands a drastic change in behavior, and is far less effective. Many people pretend to comply, but resist when out of public view — or comply only because of ceaseless indoctrination. Without it, their behavior would revert to other, less artificial forms.

The argument that interventionist conditioning can change human behavior therefore resembles the tautology that if people are brainwashed, then they will be brainwashed. This is hardly a valid refutation of free will, since the free will argument doesn't assume that rational individuals can never be misled. If people were never misinformed and always made the right choices, their actions wouldn't be choices. All choices are made with incomplete (or less than wholly accurate) information, especially about their consequences.

Nowhere is this sinister "conditioning" notion more evident than in the idea that poverty causes crime. As much as one might want to, blaming the "environment of poverty" for crime is actually impossible. This environment's admitted features include run-down buildings, empty wallets, boarded-up storefronts – and poor people. The poor people would be exonerated in any case, for collective responsibility claims that they are victims and not responsible for any anti-social acts they might commit.

This leaves only animals and inanimate objects to consider. But only human beings can bear responsibility. To cite beasts and lifeless objects as the responsible agents is the equivalent of the anthropomorphic idea that trees contain demons who cast spells on people. Collective responsibility has no choice but to blame groups of people for "creating" this environment of poverty or "allowing" it to persist. Even if a specific group ("the rich") is blamed, the inference is that because "we" have neither eliminated nor neutralized this group, we have "permitted" it to operate. Inevitably, the guilty party is "us." The guilt that wayward individuals appear to escape by the collective-responsibility argument is actually restored to them through their franchise of citizenship, for they too are citizens who comprise "society."  The total amount of blame is greatly magnified, because it now covers everyone instead of isolated individuals. And why should people who are thus guilty be allowed to think that they have inalienable rights? Don't rights exist to protect the innocent?

The ideas of free will and individual responsibility are important precisely because they nullify these arguments against freedom. The criminal may lose his freedom and go to prison, but the rest of society is not held accountable for his misdeeds. Those of us who are religious recognize a personal duty to give charity to those less fortunate, but we do not believe ourselves to be the cause of their misfortune. If we believed in collective responsibility, it would be difficult not to blame ourselves for every social problem in the world.

Under monarchy, sovereigns alone were responsible for the welfare of their subjects. Under democracy, the state has usurped this responsibility, but the government purportedly does only what the voters authorize it to do. If poverty persists, it must mean that the voters have not been generous enough. Collective responsibility is a device for escalating and disseminating blame, and rampaging blame acts as a battering ram against civil society’s walls. Where there is blame, activists will be saying that someone is responsible, presenting the state with an identifiable villain. The existence of one more evildoer gives the state another mandate to act. Our liberty is further jeopardized.

In his remarkably clear and lucid book What's So Great About America, Dinesh D'Souza names three reasons why the West became dominant in the world: science, democracy, and capitalism. I would add a fourth: self-respect, which is the ultimate source of individualism and the consequent belief in free will and individual responsibility – the foundations of our treasured liberties.

Constitutional Issues, Civil Liberty & Rights, Culture: General, Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo

Read more articles by Allan Levite