A Free People's Suicide

Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

Os Guinness

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780830866823
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

A Logos Book of the Year

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln

Nothing is more daring in the American experiment than the founders' belief that the American republic could remain free forever. But how was this to be done, and are Americans doing it today?

It is not enough for freedom to be won. It must also be sustained. Cultural observer Os Guinness argues that the American experiment in freedom is at risk. Summoning historical evidence on how democracies evolve, Guinness shows that contemporary views of freedom--most typically, a negative freedom from constraint-- are unsustainable because they undermine the conditions necessary for freedom to thrive. He calls us to reconsider the audacity of sustainable freedom and what it would take to restore it.

"In the end," Guinness writes, "the ultimate threat to the American republic will be Americans. The problem is not wolves at the door but termites in the floor." The future of the republic depends on whether Americans will rise to the challenge of living up to America's unfulfilled potential for freedom, both for itself and for the world.

1

What Kind of People Do You Think You Are?

There is always a moment in the story of great powers when their own citizens become their own worst enemies—not so much in the form of homegrown terrorism as in the form of the citizenry thinking and living at odds with what it takes for the nation to thrive. What follows is a visitor’s perspective on how America is reaching that point today and on what can be done to restore the American republic to its vitality before it’s too late.

The Sifting of History

The day after Christmas would normally have been a quiet day in Washington, D.C., above all on Capitol Hill. But December 26, 1941, was different. It was only nineteen days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and both the Senate chamber and the overflow gallery were packed to hear British Prime Minister Winston Churchill address a joint session of the United States Congress.

With the Capitol ringed by police and soldiers, the lectern bristling with microphones, and the glare of unusually bright lights in the chamber for the film cameras, Churchill started his thirty-minute address with a light touch. “If my father had been an American,” he said, “and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own. In that case this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.”

Churchill then rose to his central theme. Britain was standing alone, but reeling. Most of Europe lay prostrate under the Nazi heel. Hitler was well on his way to Moscow. Half of the American Navy was at the bottom of the Hawaiian harbor, and there was little or no air force to rise to the nation’s defense. He therefore delivered a stern denunciation of the Japanese and the German menace, and warned about “the many disappointments and unpleasant surprises that await us” in countering them.

At the heart of the prime minister’s address was a famous question to his listeners in light of the Japanese aggression: “What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”[1]

All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis, the more serious the sifting and the deeper the questions it raises. At the very least, a crisis raises the question “What should we do?” Without that, it would not amount to a crisis.

Deeper crises raise the deeper question “Where are we, and how did we get here?” Still deeper crises raise the question Churchill raised, “Who do other people think we are?”—though clearly Churchill saw the ignorance in the Japanese mind, rather than in his or his hearers’. But the deepest crises of all are those that raise the question “Who do we think we are?” when doubt and uncertainty have entered our own thinking.

This last question poses a challenge and requires a courage that goes to the very heart of the identity and character of those in crisis, whether individuals or a nation. Only in a response that clearly says and shows who they are can they demonstrate an answer that resolves the crisis constructively and answers history’s judgment by turning potential danger into an opportunity for growth and advance.

History is asking that last question of America now: What kind of a people do you Americans think you are? We are now nearly eight decades after the Great Depression, seven decades after Pearl Harbor and World War II, four decades after the tumultuous and influential sixties, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world, one decade after September 11 and in the midst of two of the most revealing and fateful presidencies in American history. The sifting of America has come to a head, and the question “Who are you?” or “What kind of a people do you think you are?” or “What kind of society do you want America to be” is now the central question Americans must answer.

Another time of testing has come. Another day of reckoning is here. This is a testing and a reckoning—let me say it carefully—that could prove even more decisive than earlier trials such as the Civil War, the Depression and the cultural cataclysm that was the 1960s. As citizens of the world’s lead society and leaders of Western civilization, you Americans owe yourselves and the world a clear answer at this momentous juncture of your history and international leadership—a moment at which an unclear answer or no answer at all are both a clear answer and a telling symptom of the judgment of history.

There are many reasons Americans must answer the question “Who do you think you are?” The widely watched drama of the recent political crisis over the debt ceiling and the deeply felt consequences of the economic crisis, the continuing unemployment and the mounting social inequities have made them the most discussed issues at the moment—with concerns trumpeted by the Tea Party movement on one side and the Occupy Wall Street protest on the other.

These issues pale, however, when compared with the challenge facing America at the prospect of the ending of the five-hundred-year dominance of the West and the emergence of an Asia-led world. And all these issues together are just the beginning of a mounting sea of problems engulfing America from many sides. But this book addresses a neglected issue that may prove the deepest and most urgent of all, if only because it is intertwined with so many of the others: the gathering crisis of sustainable freedom in America.

At his inauguration President Obama faced a scale and range of problems that were unprecedented in recent memory. What was less noted and more important was that most of these problems raised questions that go to the heart of the American republic, and foreign admirers of America are disappointed to see America failing to live up to its past and its potential in these problem areas. In short, the state of the Union is at stake.

Let me introduce the claim that America’s deepest crisis is the crisis of sustainable freedom by setting out a number of simple points that have converged to make it urgent.

America’s Glory and
Supreme Love

First, sustainable freedom is urgent for America because freedom is, and will always be, the issue of all issues for America. In today’s world, it is customary to assess nations in terms of the size of their population, the strength of their economy, the power and reach of their armed forces, the state of their information technology, the prestige of their research universities and so on. But there is a deeper classical way to see things: it was once understood that every nation has its own special character, its own animating principle, and can be understood and assessed only in that light.

Augustine of Hippo argued that the best way to define a people is by their “loved thing held in common,” or what it is they love supremely. A people can be judged as better or worse according to what they love, and their nation can be assessed as healthy or unhealthy according to the condition of what they love. Freedom is unquestionably what Americans love supremely, and love of freedom is what makes Americans the people they are. Thus the present crisis of sustainable freedom raises questions about the health of the American republic that must be taken seriously.[2]

Freedom is so central and precious to Americans that it might seem odd, and even outrageous, for an outsider to challenge Americans over their freedom. But this book is not a sour foreign attack on American freedom. I am a long-time admirer of the American experiment and of the place of freedom in America. Unquestionably freedom is, and will always be, America’s animating principle and chief glory, her most important idea and her greatest strength.

But unless sustained, freedom could also prove to be America’s idol—something trusted ultimately that cannot bear ultimate weight. Assessing the condition of freedom is therefore central to the promise and peril of America in the advanced modern world, just as it was to the success of the American Revolution.

For one thing, freedom is the special glory of America, the chief boast of Americans and the central reason for the importance of America for the democratic project, for the modern world and for humanity. From its very beginning, the United States was blessed with a sturdy birthright of freedom. It was born in freedom, it has expanded in freedom, it has resolved its great conflicts in a “new birth of freedom,” it has won its spurs as a world power in defending freedom, and it now stands as the global colossus of freedom offering its gift to the world and announcing that, as freedom spreads, it will herald an era of peace between freedom-loving nations on earth.

Due largely to America, freedom is at the very heart and soul of the modern world, especially in its Western forms. In all the world’s free-thought, free-speech, free-choice, free-vote, free-market societies, freedom is today’s highest virtue, its grandest possibility, its last absolute, its most potent myth and—with the power of love limited to the private world—its only self-evident public truth. How else are modern people to be themselves other than to be free?

Freedom as the dream of ever-expanding emancipation, ever-multiplying liberation movements and ever-deepening fulfillment is being pushed from behind by the memory of a thousand oppressions and pulled from ahead by the promise of unrestrained choice and unhindered creativity leading to unlimited possibilities (“infinite in all directions,” as the futurist cheerleaders say). Unfettered freedom could prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the modern world, dissipating into license, triviality, corruption and a grand undermining of all authority, but for the moment the world is still both thrilled and enthralled by the great Age of Freedom. It is the Western world’s most stunning success, and the United States is its proudest exemplar.

No self-respecting American will ever be opposed to freedom any more than to love. And it is incontestable that, in American history, whoever represents “the party of freedom”—sometimes the Democrats, as under Franklin Roosevelt, and sometimes the Republicans, as under Ronald Reagan—has always prevailed over any who appear to be standing in its way.

The Grand Paradox of Freedom

Second, sustainable freedom is urgent for America because freedom is far more difficult to sustain than most Americans realize. We live at a time when words such as freedom, progress and values are bandied around endlessly, yet few people stop to ask what they mean, now that the last generation has seen them emptied of almost all content.

Needless to say, America’s espousal of freedom has never been pure and undiluted. Jefferson hailed the United States as the “empire of liberty” or an “empire for liberty such as she has never surveyed since the creation.”[3] Yet from the start, the empire of liberty was built at the expense of African slaves, American Indians and American women. But the perennial challenges to sustainable freedom go well beyond these long-standing contradictions so amply explored by historians since the 1960s.

The glory of freedom should never blind anyone to its immoderate nature and therefore to the stern requirements that surround it. For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. Throughout the course of history, freedom presents an inescapable and tightly coiled conundrum that sums up the challenge of why it is so difficult to sustain. Stripped to its core dimensions, the conundrum may be stated as follows:

For a start, freedom always faces a fundamental historical challenge. Although glorious, free societies are few, far between and fleeting. In the past, the high view of human dignity and independence that free societies require was attained by only two societies with world influence: the Greeks with their view of the logos, or reason within each person, and the Jews with their notion of the call of God to each person. The Roman ways owed much to the Greeks, of course, just as contemporary humanists owe everything to the Jewish, Greek and Christian ideas from which they come and on which they depend.

Today’s worldwide explosion of freedom is therefore rare and cannot be taken for gran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 What Kind of People Do You Think You Are?
• 2 Always Free, Free Always
• 3 Using History to Defy History
• 4 The Golden Triangle of Freedom
• 5 The Completest Revolution of All
• 6 The Empire Worthy of Free People
• 7 The Eagle and the Sun
• Grateful Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author
• Endorsements