Freedom - A Biological Necessity; H. Elsom

FREEDOMA BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY WE FREQUENTLY HEAR the declaration that much of the contemporary political arrangement contravenes human nature. This is, perhaps, but another way of saying that legal, economic, and social relationships must conform to biologically vital principles if they are to endure to the benefit of the human species. The concept includes the idea that liberty of the individual is one of those vital prerequisites. Is there any validity to these thoughts? We may begin with an old thought, both broad and deep: liberty and growth are aspects of the same thing. Freedom begins with life-any life, anywhere, any time, under any conditions. We may say of matter that it is bound by the law of inertia; if at rest it ~ill remain so or, if in motion, it will continue in the same direction at the same rate until acted upon by an external force. Not so life. Here internal phenomena act upon external matter. The tiniest seed cracks crusted soil. Vine and trunk topple ancient stone. Life uses physical energies to achieve hidden ends, sometimes opposing one to the Mr. Elsom, an investment officer of a bank, finds time for free lance exploration and explanation of the libertarian point of view.

35 36 HAROLD B. ELSOM other, sometimes transforming them, but always recasting environment nearer to its own desire. Life began and continues as an intervention into the material order, an intrusion of choice and desire into the fixity of material cause and effect. Life was expansive and purposive from the beginning; it had irritability. It could react to healthful or toxic environment. It could pulsate or wiggle. It could ag gregate with other cells to arrive at multicellular life. It could protrude pseudo limbs, develop sensitive special organs. It demanded motility and awareness. Instead of resting in the brine, it began to swim. It crawled out of the water to penetrate swamp, forest, and desert. It leaped into the air for flight. It developed uniform blood temperature, fur, and feathers to increase its indepen dence of weather. It stood upright, enlarged its brain, formed hands to enter a world similar to the one we know today. Always the facts were the same-an enlarge ment of freedom and choice and, with the higher speci mens at least, some provision for frivolity, vacillation, and the deeper thing called enjoyment.

In the beginning, then, we have a blob of protoplasm fixed by physical law. Now the blob has become an or..' ganism straining toward the stars. Yet during every in stant life has been vulnerable and soft as compared with the crushing inflexibility of the material order. Logically, the advent of life is impossible. No mathematical pro gression or probability can account for it. Science, philos ophy, and religion comment on its development and what it means, if anything. Whatever they say, it remains as a FREEDOMA BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY 37 fact that the consistent direction of life has been toward a wider range of movement, increasing awareness of it self and its surroundings, purposive discipline of itself and the externals of matter and force. Put together, what are these things but freedom? Life force, choice, freedom - these are single, one and the same. Variety, Order, ,and Progress But life and freedom are not, of themselves, good or bad. A streptococcus vents its virulence on saint and sin ner alike. Throughout geologic time life's forms fed on each other, each free according to its own nature and its own strength. Variety, order, and progress were main tained by a self-adjusting ecology, so that the regular round of feeding, reproducing, fighting, and enjoyment went on without hazard to the species except for the providential requirements of succession and develop ment. Tyrannosaurus Rex lumbered through the creta ceous period as no more nor less than a massive saurian until the evolutionary calendar marked the time for him to give place to more sharply tuned nervous sys tems and less ponderous bodies. The built-in restraints of fear, weariness, satiation, vacillation; the interdepen dence of plant and animal, climatic and geographic lim itations, all these imposed balance to the basic propene sity toward freedom and expansion.

Man began with the same animal urges. He, however, was endowed with new organs: the hand, the more com plex brain, and sensory apparatus. So equipped, he em38 HAROLD B. ELSOM bodied a new potential. He could outmaneuver, out smart any other life form on earth. Heretofore, plants and animals had to evolve organs of subsistence over eons of time. Man could fashion things outside his own body such as cudgels, spears, fist axes and, lately, atom bombs. He could augment his senses with cunning de vices. Very early he learned that he could put other life animal, vegetable, and human-to his own uses. This ability of individuals or small groups of men to impose their volition upon others was the most ominous poten tial of all, since it meant that man could multiply his powers not only through instrumentation, but also through consumption of the bodies, minds, and spirits of other men. Ecological balance was now violated. A species could destroy itself.

Man's ability to dominate and enslave, a new power, was fed by subman emotional drives. These his refined brain and his more complex awareness converted into lusts for things quite beyond his needs: the lust for pos sessions and the lust for power or recognition. Out of these propensities, perhaps, government was born. The mightiest assumed leadership of the tribe, the tribe plundered its neighbors. Growing knowledge but led to more conquests. Military prowess, superstition, bribery, deceit, threats, these were the routines of conquest and administration. Entire peoples became chattels as did the Hebrews under Egyptian rule. Thus, the natural life urge toward freedom, newly empowered and freed of the old ecological restraints, remained wild, primitive. So long as life had been inner FREEDOMA BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY 39 directed and balanced by ecology, it was self-realizing. Creatures tended to be whatever they were to the fullest.

The upward surge moved on. But with the advent of external rule or government, the larger portion of man kind found its inner or spiritual being, the seat of free dom and the life force, more and more constricted and destroyed. Unless something new were added, man had entered a cul-de-sac. He needed a substitute for the older balances and restraints of Nature. Self-Discipline At some point in the millenniums preceding· the Chris tian era, suggestions of such a substitute began to ap pear-a new sort of inner direction. Inklings come to us from prehistory. Some part of it took the form of custom or tradition. Occasionally, an individual chieftain found himself actuated by vague and passing desire for the good or pleasure of others. In ancient Greece there ap peared new kinds of men, philosophers, theologians, who tried to see life whole, whose insights told them that new qualities like wisdom, and moral and emotional discipline were necessary for a satisfying existence. Life would be most rewarding when ordered and reasoned under the auspices of form, goodness, and restraint.

Somewhere between 1500 and 1300 B.C. the evils and superstitions of primitive religion were surpassed. Ikh naton, an Egyptian pharaoh, in some unknown manner, lost himself in a vision of the One God whose principle was goodness, and who required virtue of men.

40 HAROLD B. ELSOM With the Hebrew lawgivers and prophets the One God found a tongue. These men observed most acutely the destructive carryovers from primitive men and called them sin. They insisted that men should recognize and obey the new inner direction (the One God) or perish. To protect the human potential, the Decalogue was given, a body of basically negative law designed to pro tect the newly mutated minority of the species. Here, then, somewhere in prehistory and early history, began an evolutionary cleavage between the mass of men whose intellectual and physical capacities were still mo tivated by primitive emotional drives, and the micro scopic proportion of mutants who had acquired con sciousness of God as the directive force of life. Every thing hung upon a different order of volition and con sciousness. For the latter, the mutant element, those who could see and feel the wakening spirit, Christ carried the de velopment further by substituting love or good will for hate, the -Golden Rule for the debit and credit system of human relations, and redemption out of sin and pun ishment. Above all, he made man aware of God, lifted him from pawn to son-ship, stressed that man could com· municate with God and God with man. God had pur poses which were beyond. sense and reason; therefore, man should confidently accept God's lead without fear.

Doing so, he would have life more abundantly; he could become a new creature-something more than man had been. But to do so, he must slough the old animal ten sions. Otherwise, they would enslave and kill the life FREEDOMA BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY 41 urge to freedom. If he were incapable of taking the new step, he would join Tyrannosaurus Rex and the saber toothed tiger. The wages of sin would be death. On the Useful Scope of Government Seen against this panorama of evolution and history, what is the useful scope of government, then? Should it determine man's purposes, that is, what his social and economic objectives are, and see to it that he achieves them? Is it proper for it to take a great part of his wage by force to spend for these objectives? Is it proper for the state to attempt to determine what man should be; that is, to dominate the communications media and the educative process? Should it take John Doe's earnings and give them to Richard Roe? Are men to be leveled and equated economically, politically, and socially? Some men lack the sensory apparatus to perceive the immoral ity of these things. In their eyes such meddling is no more than a "positive approach." As a real clincher, they ask the question, What is it that you wish to conserve?

implying that only selfishness and perversity impede the achievement of their drafting board utopias. The conservative can very well answer, Life. If any pattern is clear from the evolutionary and historical processes, it is this: volition, consciousness, and spirit are the objects of the struggle. Life assaults limita tions through the individual will. Fin, leg, wing, wagon, automobile, rocket; fur, uniform blood temperature, clothes, space suit-all steps toward greater choice of 42 HAROLD B. ELSOM place, more independence of environment. Sensitive cells become eyes and ears, rulers, microscopes, tele scopes, radar, and oscilloscope, all pressing against the outer limits of awareness. In the realm of morals and the spirit we observe first fang, claw, hunter and prey ascending to murder, cruelty, ignorance, rapine, super stition, hate, slavery, obligatory vengeance, reverence for the dead and the unknown, knowledge, morals, mercy, justice, generosity, art, religion, and love.

Each new attribute arrived packaged in an individual -a mutant minority of one, inner directed, and entrusted with the future of the species. This is what the conserva tive knows, either consciously or in his bones. He knows that new attributes and true progress come from the deep, not from the state. He knows that the brain evolved to serve the will and the conscience. It is to be viewed as an organ, not a superior replacement for God. Man himself is more than brain. In the more than 1,000 million years of life on earth no step in the upward trek was intelligently engendered, not even with the brainiest specimen of the lot, homo sapiens. The inner drive to ward freedom, awareness, and conscience accomplished these things-whipped the mind when it was weary, con trolled the legs that would run away, fought the pain that spelled surrender, ignored logical doubts that meant defeat. It is not likely that the professional liberal, through theoretical draftsmanship in economics and sociology, will ever be able to reorder our inner selves. His methods and his ends are contrary to the providential direction FREEDOMA BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY 43 of life, since it is by multiplicity and mutation that life progresses; man was not intended to be, nor ever can be, homogenized. Further, the liberal disdains and opposes himself to the latest and best evolutionary gifts: the moral and spiritual attributes. Moral man cannot take another's property without his consent and without exchange of value. Moral man cannot utilize the cov etousness, greed, envy, and aggressiveness of the many to overpower the few. Moral man cannot resort to positive law to diminish and inhibit the life-urge to freedom, to substitute the amoral social conscience for that of the real, pulsing, individual human.

Governnzent's Limited Role With this background we can define the beneficial scope of government in more fundamental terms. True liberty lies in recognizing that each man's vital force is his own, that it may not be impinged upon by any other man or any government. His volition, his awareness, his conscience are areas of personality where the individual must fight his own battles, where he becomes master through discipline or slave to primitive impulse. It fol lows that the whole chore of government is to protect the human personality, not to control it or to coerce it against its nature, to protect it from all sources of physi cal violence, to insure the execution of serious agree ments, to adjudicate wrongs, and to provide a mechanism for its own limitation. Men may yet generate profound, hitherto unknown, enjoyments and satisfactions. If they 44 HAROLD B. ELSOM do, they will do so in and of themselves, under the pro tection of government conceived and administered in harmony with biological and spiritual requirements.

The conservative desires to preserve the possibilities and the enjoyments of life. Volition, choice, awareness, conscience-these are the sweetest, most promising at tributes the conservative knows. If their promise is to be fulfilled, government must be protective and sub servient to them. Expansion of government beyond these limits literally renders the life stream noxious and un healthy.