Some thoughts on liberty

There is currently a lot of hubbub surrounding "governmental overreach," what it means, and whether it is in fact happening. I'm talking specifically about many government officials requiring citizens to wear face masks in public. The examples people point to tend to be Michigan, New York, and many places in California, but it's also hit quite close to home for me in Houston. The worry is that requiring people to wear face masks--sometimes even under threat of fine or jail time--is too much for the government to demand, even at a time like this (though, many are suggesting that things are not nearly as bad as they seem). It is too much, they say, for the government to mandate how a citizen ought to behave, for that is to take away his rights and liberty.

The concern is summed up well in the following quote from a 1917 speech by Robert LaFollete, an American Senator at the time. He writes,

"I have in my possession numerous affidavits establishing the fact that people are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, held incommunicado for days, only to be eventually discharged without ever having been taken into court, because they have committed no crime. Private residences are being invaded, loyal citizens of undoubted integrity and probity arrested, cross-examined, and the most sacred constitutional rights guaranteed to every American citizen are being violated.

"It appears to be the purpose of those conducting this campaign to throw the country into a state of terror, to coerce public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion of the great issues involved in this war.

"I think all men recognize that in time of war the citizen must surrender some rights for the common good which he is entitled to enjoy in time of peace. But sir, the right to control their own Government according to constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this country are called upon to surrender in time of war.

"... In time of war even more than in time of peace, whether citizens happen to agree with the ruling administration or not, these precious fundamental personal rights--free speech, free press, and right of assemblage so explicitly and emphatically guaranteed by the Constitution should be maintained inviolable" (522-530).

LaFollette refers back to constitutional rights as what are being encroached upon, but those rights--especially the ones he lists (e.g. free speech, free press)--are all founded on the notion of liberty, as was, in a way, the United States as a whole. It is the liberty of the citizen which must be respected, or at least, if it must be surrendered, only to some extent, and only if absolutely necessary. As LaFollette notes, when circumstances are dire, the citizen must surrender some rights for the sake of the common good. But not all of them.

Why is this so important? Why is it so exigent that a government not overextend its authority? Why must a citizen's liberty be preserved, at least at some level, at all times?

I think the best answer to this question can be found in the following quote from Aquinas:

"Yet man differs from irrational creatures in the fact that he is master (dominus) of his own acts. For this reason, only those actions of which man is called master are properly called human actions. But man is master of his own acts through reason and will. This is why free choice (liberum arbitrium) is called a faculty of reason and will" (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 1, corpus).

That is, among all earthly creatures, only humans are properly said to be truly free, because liberty belongs to rationality as such. To respect someone's liberty is to recognize his humanity, that he is a rational creature, above the other animals. To unjustly disrespect someone's liberty--that is, to take it away when it is uncalled for--then, is an insult to his humanity. It is like saying that he is a lower, irrational animal, needed to be guided by some higher intelligence because he's not capable of deciding for himself what path he ought to take.

To be sure, there are times in which we treat other human beings this way. Children, for instance, must be dictated how to behave by their parents under threat of punishment. Those with mental deficiencies too must be guided by another. But in both cases, it is precisely because their rationality is either not yet fully developed or suffers from some defect that they must be told how to act in a given circumstance.

This is why many conservatives say that when the government requires masks, it feels as though the administration is attempting to establish a parent-child relationship between itself and its citizens (e.g. Michael Knowles jokingly calls California Governor Gavin Newsom "Daddy Newsom"), as if to imply that citizens are incapable of taking care of themselves in this time of need, so the government will take care of them instead. Indeed, this is the very mentality of socialism (and communism, for that matter, which might as well be the same thing). It sees the disparity between the wealthy and the poor and concludes that simply by amassing wealth, no good is being done to another. Only with complete and utter economic equality among everyone will "everyone be happy." Thus, the government must take over the entire economic system to destroy such disparity.

But the consequences of this are horrific. Giving so much power and wealth to the government inevitably leads to corruption. As Plato says in The Republic, one man, a clever man, will eventually see all that wealth and power and use his cleverness to exploit it and make it his own. The result is tyranny. We have seen this happen too many times in the past hundred years. It is a shame that many in the United States are now turning a blind eye to history.

Someone may point out that parents still tell their adult children what to do. But an adult must obey his parents not because he lacks a fully developed intellect, but because he ought to recognize--by his intellect--that he owes his parents honor for giving him life (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII.14), an honor which no one owes the government.

Now, I want to be clear: I am not advocating the idea that the government allow total, unrestrained license among the citizens, such that they may liberally behave according to their every whim. Since free choice belongs to rationality, it must be used according to reason, and reason can determine that there are actions which ought not to be chosen, namely, those which are contrary to the human good, those which are morally evil. In other words, one must use one's liberty according to natural law. If one fails to do so, say, by murdering another or stealing from a bank, there is nothing wrong with the government taking away some of one's liberties for the sake of the common good. If the crime is severe enough, such that the common good is put in serious enough danger, it even belongs to the government to put the criminal to death--which, in a way, is the only way to ensure that all of his liberties are taken away. This would be an instance in which the government justly takes away one's liberties because such governmental action is still ultimately ordered to the common good.

So what about mandating that everyone wear face masks? Isn't that ordered to the common good too? For one thing, it is the responsibility of the governmental officials to not only decide that this is necessary, but to show it to the citizens, on whom their jobs depend. It does not belong to the citizens to figure it out. For another thing, it's extremely difficult to tell because we've been told contradictory things. In early April, the World Health Organization told us that it was better not to wear face masks. Now government officials are telling us that we must, and sometimes, if we don't we must face punishment. I think it's a safe bet to say that no one really knows whether wearing a face mask is beneficial or not. But even if it were, it would need to be shown that it is absolutely necessary and worthy of being mandated as well. And as I said, that is not for a citizen to determine.

It is one thing for a government to strongly encourage its citizens to wear face masks in public; it is another thing to require them to do so. The former acknowledges that there is much uncertainty about face masks, let alone the coronavirus as a whole, and it seems like wearing face masks is a good idea, so we'd prefer if people wore them--but it also acknowledges that citizens are capable of being responsible human beings possessed with reason and will and trustworthy enough to take this particular matter into their own hands, and it seems like the situation has not gotten to the point where going maskless means certain death not only for oneself but for everyone in the nearby area. The latter, on the other hand, denies all of this. It takes the citizens not to be responsible adults, but children who must be taken care of by the government, who simply cannot be trusted in this matter, even though the evidence that such a mandate is necessary is controversial at best.