According to the Preamble of the United States Constitution, one of the purposes for which that document was ordained and established was to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Few things are more cherished by Americans than our liberty. Indeed, perhaps there is nothing more cherished by us. We claim our liberty as one of our inalienable rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and rightly so.
In my experience, though, it is something many of us misunderstand as much as we cherish. That’s what I’m writing about today.
What is liberty? The answer may surprise you.
Many of us think of liberty as “my prerogative to do as I wish.” And for many, that prerogative is sacrosanct. Lord Acton, an English historian, politician, and philosopher who wrote on liberty and its relationship to both the individual and society, thought quite differently. He wrote that “liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.” For Lord Acton, liberty and the fundamental, inalienable dignity of the human person are intimately bound up together. In a free society, people are not coerced by the government or privately owned entities to violate the dignity of others. They are free to do what is right. Any notion of liberty that allows for a violation of that dignity isn’t really liberty at all because it infringes upon the liberty of others to live with the dignity to which all people are entitled.
I agree with Lord Acton.
So, liberty is not the prerogative to do as we wish. That is what is called “license.” Many, unfortunately, confuse license with liberty. Here is an example.
I belong to a lot of Facebook groups. In one such group, about two months ago, another group member who lives in a small town in Michigan was talking about how his local grocery store was requiring anyone who wished to shop there to wear a face mask. If you didn’t have a face mask, he said, a store employee standing at the door would give you one free of charge. Most people who didn’t have a mask, the Michigander said, would accept one without incident and go on inside to shop. About one person in ten though, he said, would refuse to accept a mask and then be informed that they would not be permitted to enter the store and grocery shop. Such people, I was told, would immediately throw a tantrum right there in front of everyone else and get to hollering about how their rights were being violated and how their being denied entry to the store without a mask was not less than tyranny.
These were grown folks, mind you.
According to my acquaintance, that was the word that was frequently used to describe a private business refusing someone entry without a face mask during a global pandemic. Tyranny.
Such people, obviously, feel that their liberty has been lost. But such people do not understand liberty. They have confused it with license. Specifically, the license to enter a store over the objection of whoever owns it and possibly expose others to a virus you don’t know you’re carrying during a global pandemic, just because that’s what you want to do. They are being denied that license, and that makes angry.
Well, they’re going to be angry and hungry at the same time. Or “hangry”, as some call it (I like that word), because the grocery store has the liberty to refuse them entry for the safety of its workers and customers. That is the right thing to do, and doing the right thing is what liberty is there to protect. The liberty of the person refusing to wear a mask remains quite intact. They are simply being denied license, but they don’t know the difference.
Our Constitution guarantees us liberty, not license. It is a framework designed to ensure that the government does not have the legal power to deny us a life lived in such a way that the dignity of everyone we meet is acknowledged and respected.
It is not, in fact, a single piece of parchment with “WHATEVER! I DO WHAT I WANT!” scrawled hastily upon it.
‘Till next week.
Caleb Baumgardner is a local attorney. He can be reached at [email protected].