Negative liberty

...Far from it...

...Our freedom is not one of the interior and philosophically subtle freedoms spoken of by St...

...One of the hardest things in the world, it appears, is for a society to escape the intellectual confines of what may be called its "foundation myth...

...Paul (freedom from sin) or the mystics (the freedom from self which is equivalent to oneness with God) or Kant (the autonomy that consists in obedience to nothing but the voice of reason within us...

...Negative liberty is a magnificent thing, a thing well worth defending, a thing so magnificent in fact that it justifies our looking with pitying condescension on lesser breeds without the law who fail to appreciate its immense worth...

...If a nation has been founded (or re-founded) at a more or less definite moment in history, as the United States was in "that moment" called the American Revolution, the popular interpretation of that moment (which is what I mean by the foundation myth) permeates ever after that society's institutions and group memory...

...Freedom of religion — including freedom from religion, if that's your cup of tea — is a striking instance of this don'tpush-me-around type of liberty...

...NEGATIVE LIBERTY CHEERING FOR THE GOOD OLD CAUSE THERE IS something wonderfully quaint about the enthusiastic reaction with which many freedomloving Americans greeted the recent 5 to 4 U.S...

...On questions of constitutional law I confess to being a functional illiterate...

...All the same, I'm willing to stipulate that the decision was a legally sound one...

...Although the American Revolution was not immediately concerned with religious liberty, it is little wonder that the event produced a great expansion of it, so similar in structure are political and religious freedom...

...Those who believe in freedom of conscience and the wall of separation can begin, once again, to breathe easily...

...What I'm suggesting instead is that a nation which is so preoccupied with the "good old cause" of negative freedom (our conservatives laying special emphasis on freedom in business affairs, our liberals in cultural affairs) is little equipped to understand much of the rest of the world — especially that portion we most urgently need to understand — the poor and developing nations...

...Supreme Court decision outlawing the Michigan and New York City practice of sending public school teachers into the classrooms of churchrelated schools to give remedial instruction...

...It may well be true, as romantically inclined Frenchmen have long believed, that nations have historical vocations...

...6 September 1985: 455...

...Nor is it any wonder that Americans two hundred years later — our political sensibilities still under the sway of this powerful foundation myth — feel a thrill of excitement when the Supreme Court solemnly declares that it is repulsing the latest assault on the "No Establishment Clause" — even though the villain of the piece turns out, on inspection, not to be Torquemada lighting fires of persecution, but the school board of New York City sending remedial reading teachers into Catholic schools...

...The shadow of religious tyranny, it seems, which loomed large only last year as a result of the Pawtucket nativity scene decision, has receded...

...It is what Isaiah Berlin has called "negative freedom...

...Three cheers for Justice Brennan...

...Yet to judge from the reaction of the liberal press and other defenders of freedom, you'd think the Court's decision was a triumph on par with the blooming of Ethiopian deserts, the conviction of Pol Pot for crimes against humanity, the spread of literacy in Central America, or the dramatic reduction of infant mortality rates in lowincome sections of American big cities...

...I don't want to challenge the constitutional propriety of the Court's decision...

...The American foundation myth has to do of course with freedom — but of a certain very limited kind...

...But it isn't the only good thing in the world...

...It isn't the only yardstick for measuring the merit of nations...

...What intrigues me is not the lightness or wrongness of the decision but, as I said, the enthusiasm with which it was received...

...We live in a late twentiethcentury world in which the danger of religious oppression in the United States would rank, if we could create an objective ranking system for the planet's ills, in about 2,349th place...

...If so, it is probably the American national calling to carry the old-fashioned banner of negative freedom in a world that increasingly shows scant concern for it...

...While individuals in the society may be able to analyze the world and its problems in terms other than those provided by the foundation myth, the society in its collective capacity finds it nearly impossible to do so...

...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...

...No, the freedom our American foundation myth upholds is the simple and straightforward kind which exists when, in matters which don't immediately jeopardize public order, A abstains from imposing his or her will on B, or B successfully refuses to obey the will of A. Our founding fathers and their brothers were able to get terribly excited about this sort of freedom in the 1770s, and Americans ever since have found it relatively easy to get worked up about it...

...Nor is it the Marxian concept, so popular today in the third world, which holds that liberation is achieved only when we have escaped from a hundredand-one nearly invisible chains of economic, social, and cultural bondage, including above all the ideological chain of false consciousness, which is responsible for making all the other chains so difficult to discern...

...I am somewhat literate, however, on the significance of close votes, and I suspect that the 5 to 4 split indicates that something over and above the transparent constitutional merits of the case led to the decision...

...I'm not suggesting that we Americans ought to renounce our disproportionate devotion to negative liberty...