Equality versus freedom
It’s been said many times by many people.
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
And then there’s Robert Frost (in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense). That link I just gave is now dead, but I used the quote and the link in this post from 2016:
Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…
With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:
“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”
From Milton Friedman:
A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
Thomas Sowell says it in his book The Quest For Cosmic Justice:
Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured to fit the vision of the power-holders. Merely the power to select beneficiaries is an enormous power, for it is also the power to select victims—and to reduce both to the role of supplicants of those who hold this power.
And yet we find ourselves in a society in which the idea of an elite group dispensing “justice” – as in social or cosmic justice – and creating “equality” has been in the ascendance, especially among the young. As Frost also wrote (from that same post of mine in 2016, with its dead link):
In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”
The appeal to the young is always present, unless it is strongly countered.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a great read in prison. I never read so much as I did in prison – it’s a way to totally escape confinement, at least briefly. 🙂
Can’t recall my favorite quote of his, but it was something like – ‘the only difference between America and Russia is that Americans can change things with the vote.‘ Long time ago, but he still said it better than humble me…
Things we share with our wider brethren: de Vaals’ CapuchinTest
FDR sent representative to Rome to study Mussolini’s fascism. They then used it as a framework for the New Deal. Later they fought against the same fascist in WW2
Wow – points to Solzhenitsyn for efficiency.
Concerning “the only difference between America and Russia is that Americans can change things with the vote”:
That’s a foolish, ignorant, and preposterous thing to say. If Solzhenitsyn actually said and believed that, then he was, at least in this instance, an idiot. The differences (plural) between America and Russia are incalculably vast. For reasons too numerous to cite, America is and always has been a far better place, and a better country, than Russia.
Mike Plaiss:
I thought so, too. He says it quite succinctly.
@ IrishOtter49: It was a long time ago – seems it was in an interview, and he said something like that. Solzhenitsyn probably knew what he was saying… 🙂 and made sense to me back then.
IrishOtter:
Solzhenitsyn was a very interesting guy. A lot of what he said was correct. Some was not. He returned to live in Russia from 1994 till his death. My impression is that the US was quite an uncomfortable place for him and he didn’t fully understand it, although he was spot on in many of his observations and warnings to the US.
neo:
Agreed. His grasp of Western civilization in general, and America in particular, was imperfect. He was cursed to see them through the prism of the Russian experience. Sometimes his vision was very clear; sometimes clouded — distorted — by being Russian.
I stand by what I said concerning the quoted passage above.
But he was a great man.
The sad thing about today’s political environment in the US, is the E in DEI.
In what neo has written and throughout most of my adult life, the socialists have pushed a certain self-serving confusion between the two notions of equality. The equality of treatment and the equality of outcomes. “We demand equality!” they say; meaning equality of outcomes. Whereas the Constitution demands equality of treatments, at least by the government.
I think we’re past that stage. Now they demand equity. They acknowledge and intentionally demand very unequal treatments to obtain outcomes that are also biased towards the protected classes and equity privileged. Now they effectively tell us that unequal objective outcomes are needed to offset those mysterious and ever-so-subtle nearly hidden privileges that many of us are born with.
This is an absurd and thoroughly corrupt scam.
Neo, never forget the Wayback Machine…
😉
https://web.archive.org/web/20130202140511/http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2012/04/rehabilitating-robert-frost-unity-of.html
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Amusing… I’m curious if the piece-mentioned “William H. Pritchard” is who they were riffing off of in Dead Poets Society’s diatribe against “Mr. J. Evans Pritchard” (that seems an unusual name):
“Milton Friedman isn’t in charge anymore”, said Biden. Yeah, and the results show.
Let’s listen to Uncle Mitie explain it to Phil. (h/t Instapundit)
https://twitter.com/ian_mckelvey/status/1779292299102453961?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1779292299102453961%7Ctwgr%5E08ba3e087795d56280afe22cc7859700515b2896%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F641848%2F
Then there’s this anecdote: (also from Insty)
When Stalin allowed the film version of the Grapes of Wrath—retitled The Road to Wrath—to be seen in the Soviet Union because it was a searing indictment of the failures of capitalism. Soviet citizens saw it and were like, “Holy crap! The peasants all have cars and pickup trucks in America? Man, we’re poor.” Stalin quickly yanked it from theaters.
How much of the fruits of your labor should someone else have a right to claim? Think that through and you begin to understand the issue of equity.
The issue of social justice/poverty is best left to the churches and other honest charitable organizations. The government is too divorced from the real issues of poverty. If they were competent to deal with poverty, we wouldn’t have homeless encampments in most major cities. They can’t even run a competent education system, which is the best path to success in life.
When someone decides to enforce equality of results, it requires force (laws/police/army/thugs) to achieve it. It eventually morphs into a system whereby the elite enforcers live well, and the “equal masses” are equally miserable. It’s called socialism, communism, fascism, a royal kingdom, kleptocracy, theocracy, autocracy, etc. but in the end, it boils down to the feudal system of royals/nobles living well while serfs just get by.
Capitalism and democracy are relatively new and rare in the world. Too many people don’t get that.
JJ
Brilliance. Friedman. And you for raising here, and wherever you can. I’ve watched that clip dozens of times and my hope, and maybe our only hope, is for as many people as possible to watch it, especially young people. Not to diminish the othergreat thinkers and writers Neo and commenter cite above.
History and cemeteries are full of the ones who placed their political fortunes in the hands of the young. In the end they were fools.
With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics.
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No, it’s just wrong. The New Deal was a jumble of policies and implementing agencies, some of them salutary, some not.
You’re right Neo on how hard it is to change, part of it is your beliefs are who you are, generally change comes from the outside ( whether we like it or not), I believe great change is coming again whether we want it or not.
Soltzhenitsyn was an iconoclast in many ways, the libertine ways of American culture didn’t seem to appeal to him, so did the branded liberty that came to be associated with penury in Russia, in August 1916, he seems to suggest that the Okrana, the late Czarist deep state organ was at odds with the reformist impulses of Stolypin, he doesn’t go as far to suggest that he would have prevented the Revolution, but certainly attenuated some impulses, the great maelstrom to the West and South, seems to have delivered the final blow,
Capitalism and democracy are relatively new and rare in the world.
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They aren’t and they aren’t.
Art D. “They aren’t and they aren’t.”
Democracy was first tried in Greece about 2500 years ago. It didn’t last. Again, in Rome the same thing. The Magna Carta was a charter of freedoms in 1215. It took another five hundred and sixty-one years before democracy and free markets were instituted here. Democracy was nearly non-existent before 1786.
Modern humans have been around for 125,000 years. 118,000 of those years were spent as hunter-gatherers in small tribes. About 7,000 years ago the development of agriculture gave rise to cities and nations. Until about 2500 years ago humans always lived in societies governed by a “big man or men.”
Democracy was tried in a few places (Greece, Rome) but always fell to authoritarian governance. About 1.3 billion people now live under democracy of some sort. That’s about 17% of the world. And many of these democracies have been formed since Great Britain became democratic in 1832. I call that both rare and recent in human history.
Capitalism is even more recent and rare. YMMV
Mercy may have played some role in the New Deal. So did political considerations and the hunger for power. Yes, there are justifications for social welfare policies, but politicians like Biden forever telling us how compassionate they are have become a sickening spectacle.
They are buying votes, and it’s more the votes of those who administer and supply the system than those of the supposed ultimate beneficiaries. I might feel a little better about this if I weren’t always hearing someone whose been feeding at the public trough boasting about how empathetic and compassionate and caring he is.
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E.E. Evans-Pritchard was a famous anthropologist, and once upon a time a lot of public figures liked to use their first name as an initial followed by their middle and last names (J. Edgar Hoover, J. Parnell Thomas, etc.). The targets of “Dead Poets’ Society” were assumed to be R.P. Warren and Austin Brooks, the authors of “Understanding Poetry,” or more accurately, Laurence Perrine, author of “Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry,” who asked of a poem (without graphs) “How fully has it accomplished its purpose?” and “How important is its purpose?” I wouldn’t want to graph that, but was he actually wrong? Surely Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating loved poetry because it had a high purpose and achieved it.
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Even after 1832, British politics were far from democratic. That required further reforms: 1867, 1884, 1918, 1928.
IrishOtter49 on April 15, 2024 at 4:58 pm said:
Thread’s so old you’ll probably miss this reply. I have searched ‘n searched for what he actually said, and am sure I butchered his words.
During the search, I became quite sure that the ‘Americans can change things with the vote’ portion of my misquote was very close. When I read whatever his words were – it was long before I became political in 2002, but something like the ‘Americans can change things with the vote’ stuck.
Ditto on having searched ‘n searched for what he actually said—this time coming across his 1978 Commencement Address @ Harvard University: A World Split Apart. In it he warned of:
• The Direction of the Press
• Socialism
In the context of where America is in 2024, I would politically guess that he was talking about two governments – one being almost impossible to change, and the other having the possibility of being changed by the citizens being able to vote.
Maybe that makes better sense than my idiotic first attempt at trying to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn…
OK – hopefully I have ‘Cleared’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s name because this search is ending today! 😉
of course Russia has little experience with representative government, the Duma arose in the aftermath of Alexander 2nd remarks, the Socialist part, gave way to the Communist bifurcation of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries had a strong Anarchist orientation, and well the Constitutional Democrats, the Kadets were as close to a classical liberal faction as anything else,
of course Lenin shuttered the Menshevik dominated assembly from the get go, and ruled by decree, because reasons, the uneasy peace with the German viceroy, Count Mirbach was broken by the social revolutionaries, apart from the schemes that Savinkov and Reilly had formulated against Lenin, as was Fanya Kaplan’s move that led to the Terror under Dzerzinsky