I’ve probably written about this before. The older I get, the more I think the old French revolutionary slogan got it right: liberty, equality, fraternity. Surely for any rational and good-hearted person it must be acknowledged that at least in the temporal order, these are the great desideranda?
Everyone desires liberty, surely, as an implication of his nature? Who desires external constraint, except one greatly divided in mind, who seeks such constraint as a kind of paradoxical emancipation, and embraces it freely? One thinks of monks and nuns, especially in rather severe orders.
But this too is an exercise of liberty. The monk, at least the monk by nature or choice, likes his cell and rises, perhaps a bit reluctantly but nevertheless willingly, at three AM for lengthy Matins in the cold choir.
This is not the vocation that most of us feel, of course; for homo vulgaris, unchivalrous people like me, liberty vulgarly means the fewest possible people bossing me around in the fewest possible ways.
But not everyone desires equality. There are many people who want to be the boss: who want to be better or stronger or richer or more powerful than their fellows. I don’t suppose that there are many who want to be worse or weaker or poorer or less powerful. So the criterion of equality, unlike the criterion of liberty – at least at first glance – implies a critique of the wannabe bosses. We egalitarians need to take the bosses down and, well, re-educate them. For us, liberty implies equality.
And then there’s fraternity. Like liberty, I suppose that most of us by nature desire it, though some have cauterized this spontaneous human impulse (usually in pursuit of inequality and the deprivation of others’ substantive liberty). And without fraternity, how do we put down these bosses?
Each of the three acts as something of a check on the others. Equality and fraternity impinge on absolute individual liberty (though perhaps not on liberty in a larger sense). And vice versa. You and I are certainly equals but don’t tell me what to do unless I ask you to; I am, after all, a free man. Fraternity allows, perhaps implies, complementarity (you can do what I cannot, and vice versa; we help each other out). The sense of equality that says “every man must be his own plumber” is bad for the plumbing, and hence for people who depend on plumbing. Fraternity implies a more substantive equality, not the interchangeability of people, as if people were mass-produced widgets.
But the internal tensions, though they are real, subsist above a deeper unity. For really, none of the three is possible without the others: there’s no liberty – in the actual human world, not the desert island – without equality and fraternity. Equality is meaningless without liberty, and arid without fraternity. Fraternity is impossible without liberty and equality.
I probably should have saved this for Quatorze Juillet, but who knows, at this point, whether any of us will live so long. Thanks to our overlords, still as always deeply committed to unfreedom, inequality, and fratricide.
a tangent...https://thenewinquiry.com/commies-for-christ/
Willing to take odds on whether the quisling macron will continue his campaign of decivilisation on Bastille Day?