Essays in Idleness

One should be careful with the word “freedom.” It is full of mischief. Is it freedom for? or freedom from? or the freedom that is the opposite of freedom, adored by our progressives, who use old words with nice associations whose meanings they have gratuitously inverted.

If you hear a word like “tolerance,” run for your life (often it is used with the qualifier, “zero”). “Diversity” means punishment for those who deviate from the current party line. “Racism” announces an attack on white people; “sexism,” an attack on males; “gendered” means de-sexed. A “homophobe” is a person who disregards the demands of ruthless, aggressive, homosexual activists; and likewise, an “Islamophobe” disregards their Mussulman equivalents. Freedom, in each case, is identified with slavery; as war with peace; and among the “radicals” who populate our universities (the opposite of radicals because they are incapable of thinking anything through), ignorance is strength. Take almost anything coming from the mouth of, say, a “feminist,” or a “socialist,” and one may be reasonably confident that the opposite is true.

But gentle reader probably knows this already; and will know from experience if he is “on the far right” (i.e. endowed with sane judgement, moderation, and candour), that freedom is something that gets you in trouble, and therefore ought not to be casually indulged. It is a “human right,” but has become the freedom to be mobbed and persecuted by savage political hyenas.

Whereas, my idea of freedom is old-fashioned. Had I been around in the age of the great weasel (Eleanor Roosevelt), I would have been among those who ineffectually opposed her use of such phrases as “freedom from hunger.” From the founding documents of the United Nations, the list grows of “freedoms from” to justify bureaucratic intervention in every aspect of normal private life. Indeed, what I call Twisted Nanny State (the collective matrix of regulation) goes back to Bismarck, and to tyrants long before; though the inversion of evils to goods, and goods to evils, is a product of the modern imagination, detached as it has become from common sense and reason. It will recognize nothing holy: as of intrinsic value, divine and untouchable by the dirty hands of men.

The “freedom from” we need involves poverty, and abstinence from mad earthly schemes. It requires us to live not in a progressive, but in a timeless space, working for what one can know will be good at several complementary levels, but shy of all material ambitions and public awards. Confucius in his “Book of Songs” quotes an ancient Chinese lamentation (Waley’s translation):

Don’t escort the big chariot;
You will only make yourself dusty.
Don’t think about the sorrows of the world;
You will only make yourself wretched.

Don’t escort the big chariot;
You won’t be able to see for dust.
Don’t think about the sorrows of the world;
Or you will never escape from your despair.

Don’t escort the big chariot;
You’ll be stifled with dust.
Don’t think about the sorrows of the world;
You will only load yourself with care.