The Challenge of Freedom

...All men were born, it is true, with equal dignity...

...It must be sought, by this same token, in the avoidance of abrupt and bewildering changes in the social and technological environment of people's lives...

...This means that one must not make a fetish of technological innovation, and must not permit it to alter the conditions of existence too suddenly and violently, lest the true sources of self-discipline and good behavior be carried away, together with familiarity of environment, the power of habit, and the sense of inner security...

...But they are far from equal in their powers of insight, their strength of conscience, and their ability to contribute usefully to the processes of civilization...

...Our world is replete with compulsions and necessities, some occasioned by the concessions and compromises necessary to live side by side with other people, others of an immanent quality, flowing from the imperfections of our own nature and the battle we must all conduct to overcome or restrain them...

...The United States is sometimes reproached for its failure, in comparison with the Communists, to present to the world some sort of a cause or a comradeship, which one could join and in which one could have a sense of belonging...

...Wherever change proceeds so swiftly that the experience of the father becomes irrelevant to the problems of the son, with the result that the family relationship-the natural and fundamental source of all social discipline-loses its validity and power, there one may expect a loosening of the structure of society by which personal liberty can scarcely fail to be endangered...

...Unless the legal guarantees are anchored in the assumptions and the prejudices-if you will-of the average citizen, and unless they are associated with some subjective sense of moral duty and obligation to others, they will never suffice to protect mankind from that sizable portion of its own membership who seem to be by nature the enemies of freedom and who never fail to take advantage of any moment of uncertainty or bewilderment in the affairs of people to persuade their fellow-citizens that freedom is not worth holding and should be quickly surrendered to some one person who claims to have discovered the demons of the time and who promises to deliver us from them all...

...and even here freedom is still not lost, so long as the compulsion is not arbitrary and the public has some reasonable part in the legislative process...

...But it need not be only in formal religious belief that this missing sense of commitment may be found...

...I cannot accept this reproach in this form...

...And to those of my countrymen who are so zealous in their defense of egalitarian principles, I should like to say: God forbid we should ever be without an elite-an elite not of wealth or of birth but of mind and character-and God forbid that we should ever fail to honor it...

...More recently the author of two vital books on American diplomacy, Mr...

...This being the case, the protection of individual liberty must be sought, it seems to me, in even thing that tends to inculcate the taste for it in the human heart...

...To be sure, one can adopt constitutions and laws guaranteeing civil liberties: all this is useful and in the legal sense, no doubt, indispensable...

...Where people are not capable of the insight and the power of will for this self-imposition, as many of us are not, then restraint may come through the gentler forms of compulsion-through such things as religious belief, tradition, custom, habit and unwritten law-and men may still be said to be free...

...It must he sought, first of all, in respect for those forms of custom and tradition that have this effect-not all do...

...Freedom lies only in the greatest harmony between obligation and will and reality...

...Secondly, one must be concerned to guard and preserve whatever one can of variety and plurality in the make-up of society...

...Kennan's closing address to the Milan Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...But if freedom rests on institutional devices alone, it will never be safe...

...I think that we should all note with respect the services that have from time to time been rendered to the cause of human liberty by those forms of religious belief which, while permitting effective tolerance of the beliefs of others, bring to their bearers the qualities of courage, self-discipline, sense of duty, and modesty of secular purpose...

...Kennan is now at the Institute for Advanced Study...

...This seems to me to mean that the preservation of freedom, where it already exists, is a moral and social rather than a political problem...

...Freedom, then, is not the absence of obligation...

...Man's respect for himself will always be measured by his capacity for respecting others...

...Kennan, of course, is the former Slate Department Counselor and Policy Planning Chief who was expelled from both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia...

...It is a relative state...

...This is a delicate subject and one on which it is easy to be misunderstood...

...But where, as in the totalitarian state, formal compulsion becomes ubiquitous and all-pervasive, where no room is left for the spontaneous self-discipline of the individual or the natural social discipline of people accustomed to living together, there freedom, as we are concerned to preserve it, exists no longer...

...Unless these disparities be in some way taken account of, societies may lose the greatest sources of their strength...

...Men are not all strong in the same degree, and there is danger in the effort to arrange society on the fiction of human equality...

...This article is adapted from Mr...

...In the standardized and egalitarian society, these inner sources of regulation tend to disappear, and society becomes vulnerable to those great, externally-induced spasms of illusion and hysteria and destructiveness that have caused the greatest tragedies of our time...

...But I do accept the reproach that in our own American society of today there is indeed too much of selfishness, of purposelessness, too much of an empty moral drifting, for the good of our own freedom...

...There is, as a German writer once put it, only "eine Freiheit woher und eine Freiheit wohin"-a freedom from anything and a freedom to something...

...And that brings me to the last of the points I have in mind, which is the inner sense of duty...

...From all these things, it seems to me, one should be able to distill a firmer sense of purpose and obligation than that which has marked our Western world in recent years...

...Thus, the freest man is not the most unrestrained, but the one whose disciplinary regime, so constituted as to acknowledge and include his obligations as a citizen, is in reality self-selected and self-imposed...

...I think we should all beware of causes for causes' sake, to say nothing of causes manipulated for the sowing of hatred and delusion and suspicion...

...Nor must one hesitate to let the principle of plurality find its expression, where this is natural and right, on the vertical as well as on the horizontal plane...

...All that equalizes, all that levels, all that standardizes is the enemy of freedom...

...On the contrary, the attempt to find freedom by avoiding obligation only ends, invariably, in some new enslavement-in compulsions more hideous, more anarchic and more fateful than those from which we sought to escape...

...But even a democracy may be properly concerned to guard the dignity of public and private office, and to prevent a jealous gnawing away at the very principle of distinction...

...It may even come, and must in many instances, through the formal compulsion of the state...

...To be safe in freedom, peoples must have the courage to differentiate where nature has differentiated-the courage to identify their best, to lean on it, to respect it...

...A healthy social organism depends on a great complexity of inner tensions, so that the restraints of life may proceed from many and small causes, the reasonableness of which people can easily recognize...

...There are such things as compassion for other people, consciousness of the brief space of time it is given us to function here below, consciousness of how little there is that we can really do for ourselves, realization that our children are also going to live on this earth...

...I do not mean to plead for the restoration of outgrown hierarchies or for the artificial creation of new ones...

...and all enjoy an equal right to respect in their quality as citizens and in the protection of the law...

...It is not the fact of change, but the pace of change, that is important...

...it lies in the acceptance of that system of restraints most closely in tune with our own nature and with the order of this world, most conducive to the dignity of our relationship to others and to the self-respect and humility with which we contrive to accept ourselves...