@ZephaniahSole
Given recent events in our nation I often find myself meditating on the “stuff” of Liberty; its RNA so to speak. The American strain of Liberty is a highly infectious and resilient meme that branched off European variants in the 17th and 18th centuries, crossing the Atlantic via the writings of suspected index carriers you’ll see to this day in Political Science 101: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. We know from historical contact tracing that these carriers’ writings were responsible for Liberty’s aggressive transmission when they infected a group of super-spreaders, many of whom have names we don’t have to wait until college to learn: Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton (this is the perfect place to quote lyrics from “My Shot,” but that would violate a copyright or two).
After these guys participated in a few superspreading events in 1776, the Liberty meme mutated in America over the subsequent two and a half centuries into a variant known for the intense sense of Individualism it induces in its host. An Individualism so absolute it often, paradoxically, threatens to tear apart the social fabric on which the host, and hence the meme itself, depend. You can see this in any news broadcast of Americans’ recent activity on either the right-wing or the left. But if you want to directly observe a more quotidian, and far deadlier sample of the self-destructive Individualism the American strain of Liberty induces, take a drive down a California freeway. It’s like Super Mario Kart out there.
I often wonder why the American strain of Liberty evolved as it did. Especially considering how other variants developed. 83 years after the superspreading events of 1776, John Stuart Mill, continuing the memetic propagation initiated by his aforementioned European forebears, published On Liberty over in England. Mill is pretty clear from the jump that he believes, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” (15) (Go easy on the man, this is way before the days of non-binary pronouns.) But Mill also strongly reinforces two conditions on the exercise of individual liberty. First, that one’s actions bring no harm to others (Mill 18). And second, that there must be consistent, open-minded discussion amongst those with differing beliefs, so that truth can eventually be revealed through rationality (Mill 27-28). Imagine that.
Mill’s utilitarian restraints didn’t quite make it into the core memetic material the dominant strain of individualistic American Liberty comprises. It’s not too crazy to posit that Liberty had some interesting interaction with other memes in the American petri dish, like Racism and Nativism, that contributed to its current make-up. (Remember, when On Liberty was published America was gearing up for its Civil War.) But it’s also helpful to return to the thoughts of the above mentioned index carriers – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau – to examine Liberty’s RNA and see why it was so susceptible to evolving into such a self-destructive strain in the first place.
In the initial variants of the Liberty meme you’ll find two fundamental constructs in its RNA: the State of Nature and the Social Contract. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau varied in their ideations on the State of Nature, but they all saw it as the original, natural condition of humanity, where individualistic people possessed a form of pure and unfettered Liberty; an unfettered Liberty these hypothetical first humans mutually agreed to constrain when they left the State of Nature to join the Social Contract that would better preserve their lives and Liberty as a whole (Hobbes 87-89; Locke 70-71; Rousseau 69-70). “…even the wise saw the need,” as Rousseau put it, “to sacrifice one part of their liberty to preserve the other, just as a wounded man has his arm amputated to save the rest of his body.” (70)
The problem is, none of these oh-so-brilliant men were very good anthropologists, so the meme they propagated had a fundamental flaw; this State of Nature they discuss never existed (Fukuyama 29). It wasn’t until 2011 that Francis Fukuyama strongly pointed out in The Origins of Political Order: “(Rousseau), Hobbes, and Locke were wrong on one very important point. All three thinkers saw human beings in the state of nature as isolated individuals, for whom society was not natural… it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history… modern biology and anthropology… suggests… there was never a period in human evolution when human beings existed as isolated individuals…” (28 – 30)
What Fukuyama does not specifically delve into, and what I wonder now, is if the index carriers were so fundamentally wrong about the State of Nature, what does that mean for our understanding of Liberty? Fukuyama’s assertion supports the idea that there never was an individualistic State of Nature to leave and that Social Contracts, to some extent, always existed. If that’s the case, then Liberty was never something humans had to compromise or constrain in order to enter the Social Contract. Social Contracts were always there, and Liberty, complete and- as Jefferson said – inalienable, was always there too. But, and this is a big but, it also means that Liberty, instead of being something that was inherently tied up with isolated Individualism, was something that was inherently tied up with the workings of society. Liberty was not something to be tailored, reshaped, or modified in its transition from some in vivo State of Nature to an in vitro Social Contract, but it did always operate within the context and constraints of social activity.
I suspect the flawed concept that Liberty’s original and natural context is some individualistic State of Nature is the source of a glitch in the way most Americans think about Liberty. A glitch that induces equating the exercise of Liberty with uncompromising Individualism when it should actually be equated with cooperative prosocial interaction. A glitch founded from a fundamentally inaccurate notion propagated over the past 400 years; that it is natural for humans to be isolated and alone. It is not. We are inherently social beings. And the exercise of Liberty is an inherently social dynamic. Perhaps we should consider what this means for our political and quotidian affairs. Perhaps we could purge Liberty of this glitch. At the very least it would help our Californians become safer drivers.
Works Cited
Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Cambridge: at the University Press, 1904.
Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. The Liberal Arts Press, Inc. 1952.
Mill, John Stuart. Three Essays. Oxford University Press, 1975.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.