Varieties of Freedom

We hear much about freedom—freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, intellectual freedom, and a great many other kinds and varieties. It isn’t difficult to get men to agree that freedom, in the abstract, is a great and desirable thing. But it is difficult to get men to agree what constitutes freedom. To some men, for example, freedom means freedom to destroy the freedom of others. To some freedom means freedom to teach our children things that others would like them to believe regardless of the facts, and regardless of what we want them to believe. In some places in the world, freedom is conceded to be a desirable thing in some fields, and is positively forbidden in others. For example, a man may be given freedom to pursue scientific research for the improvement of the implements of war or for the speeding up of industrial processes, but beyond this his daily conduct, his utterances, his very life, are subjected to a relentless surveillance, so that he lives as one watched, always in fear of consequences. It is a question to what extent a man may feel free in one field of thought if his whole life is otherwise restricted. As one statesman expressed it: “You cannot paralyze part of a man’s mind and expect the rest to function properly.” If we are to have the products of freedom, we must feel free in all things. But having arrived at this conclusion, we come face to face with the fact that some men abuse their freedom to that point where it begins to interfere with the freedom of others. And this forces us back to the truth that there is no freedom in a real sense, except among those who have learned that the free agency of man must be used to guarantee the freedom of all, through self-imposed restraint. The word of scripture says: “Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”—the truth shall make you free if you choose to live in accordance with the truth and don’t expect freedom without price or responsibility or self-restraint.