Free People's Suicide (eBook)

Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

Os Guinness (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012
164 Seiten
IVP Books (Verlag)
978-0-8308-6682-3 (ISBN)

Infos

A Logos Book of the Year 'If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.' Abraham Lincoln Nothing is more daring in the American experiment than the founders' belief that the American republic could remain free forever. But how was this to be done, and are Americans doing it today? It is not enough for freedom to be won. It must also be sustained. Cultural observer Os Guinness argues that the American experiment in freedom is at risk. Summoning historical evidence on how democracies evolve, Guinness shows that contemporary views of freedom--most typically, a negative freedom from constraint-- are unsustainable because they undermine the conditions necessary for freedom to thrive. He calls us to reconsider the audacity of sustainable freedom and what it would take to restore it. 'In the end,' Guinness writes, 'the ultimate threat to the American republic will be Americans. The problem is not wolves at the door but termites in the floor.' The future of the republic depends on whether Americans will rise to the challenge of living up to America's unfulfilled potential for freedom, both for itself and for the world.

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) was born in China and educated in England. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Call, Renaissance, Fool's Talk, Impossible People, and Last Call for Liberty. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide. A passionate advocate of freedom of religion and conscience for people of all faiths and none, he was the lead drafter for both the Williamsburg Charter and the Global Charter of Conscience. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the Washington, DC, area.

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A Logos Book of the Year"e;If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."e;Abraham LincolnNothing is more daring in the American experiment than the founders' belief that the American republic could remain free forever. But how was this to be done, and are Americans doing it today?It is not enough for freedom to be won. It must also be sustained. Cultural observer Os Guinness argues that the American experiment in freedom is at risk. Summoning historical evidence on how democracies evolve, Guinness shows that contemporary views of freedom--most typically, a negative freedom from constraint-- are unsustainable because they undermine the conditions necessary for freedom to thrive. He calls us to reconsider the audacity of sustainable freedom and what it would take to restore it. "e;In the end,"e; Guinness writes, "e;the ultimate threat to the American republic will be Americans. The problem is not wolves at the door but termites in the floor."e; The future of the republic depends on whether Americans will rise to the challenge of living up to America's unfulfilled potential for freedom, both for itself and for the world.

Autor

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Fool's Talk, Renaissance, The Global Public Square, A Free People's Suicide, Unspeakable, The Call, Time for Truth and The Case for Civility. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide from the British House of Commons to the U.S. Congress to the St. Petersburg Parliament. He founded the Trinity Forum and served as senior fellow there for fifteen years. Born in China to missionary parents, he is the great-great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer. After witnessing the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949, he was expelled with many other foreigners in 1951 and returned to England where he was educated and served as a freelance reporter with the BBC. Since coming to the U.S. in 1984, he has been a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was the lead drafter of the Williamsburg Charter, celebrating the First Amendment, and has also been senior fellow at the EastWest Institute in New York, where he drafted the Charter for Religious Freedom. He also co-authored the public school curriculum Living With Our Deepest Differences. Guinness has had a lifelong passion to make sense of our extraordinary modern world and to stand between the worlds of scholarship and ordinary life, helping each to understand the other - particularly when advanced modern life touches on the profound issues of faith. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in McLean, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.

Textauszug

2

Always Free, Free Always

In 1843, a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts scholar was doing research on the American Revolution and what led up to it. Among those he interviewed was Captain Levi Preston, a Yankee who was seventy years his senior and had fought at both Lexington and Concord.

“Captain Preston,” the young man began, “what made you go to the Concord Fight on April 19, 1775?”

“What did I go for?” The old soldier, every bit his ninety-one years, was very bowed, so he raised himself to his full height, taken aback that anyone should ask a question about anything so obvious.

The young man tried again. “Yes, my histories tell me that you men of the Revolution took up arms against ‘intolerable oppressions.’ What were they?”

“Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.”

“What, you were not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw one of those stamps,” Captain Preston replied. “I certainly never paid a penny for them.”

“Well, what about the tea tax?”

“Tea tax? I never drank a drop of the stuff,” the old veteran replied. “The boys threw it all overboard.”

“Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington, or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”

“Never heard of ’em,” Captain Preston said. “We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns and the Almanac.”

“Well then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

“Young man,” Captain Preston stated firmly, “what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: We always had been free, and we meant to be free always. They didn’t mean we should.”[1]

Always free, free always—the magnificent daring of that thought deserves thought. For one thing, it speaks volumes about the freedom that was the passion and goal of the revolution. As historian David Hackett Fischer points out, it also shows clearly that Captain Preston’s sense of freedom, a freedom for which he would live and die, was not something that can be understood only by studying great declarations, such as the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, or great ideas and books, such as the writings of John Locke and Edmund Burke. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or dusty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself.”[2]

In the term that Tocqueville made famous later, freedom for Captain Preston and countless more like him was a habit of the heart, and it was kept strong by symbols and icons such as the Liberty Tree, the Liberty Bell and later the Stars and Stripes and the Statue of Liberty, rather than simply by books and declarations. As freeborn Englishmen, the colonists saw freedom as their birthright and as natural as their mother’s milk and the New England air they breathed—even if they had to contend for it against their mother country. When Tocqueville witnessed a Fourth of July celebration in Albany, New York, in 1831, he observed, “It seemed that an electric current made the hearts vibrate.”[3]

Even more extraordinarily, Captain Preston, along with the leaders of the revolution and many others in his generation, clearly believed that freedom could last forever. The realism that is more normal to human experience was stated bluntly by Machiavelli: “It is impossible to order a perpetual republic.”[4] Yet only a century later and more than a century before the American Revolution, Hobbes spoke of building a country “as immortal, or long-lived, as the world.”[5] And James Harrington, in his fictional Oceana, had written of a republic that was an “immortal commonwealth.”[6]

But that was literature and those were words. The revolution’s project was the real world. Nothing—absolutely nothing—in the entire American experiment is more daring than this, the conviction that a free people can become free, live free and remain free. They can be free forever.

But can freedom truly last forever? Americans in this generation may take freedom for granted, glorying in how they have become free and basking in how they enjoy freedom today. But they need to see that their nation’s superpower status creates the illusion of invulnerability that is the core of hubris. Of all times, times of dominance are the most dangerous in which to be complacent about freedom, for in the life cycle of great powers only one thing finally follows dominance: decline. Dominance eventually leads to decline as surely as day ends in night. Thus dominance is precisely the time to think through whether a free people can remain free forever, why the founding generation dared to believe in such a history-defying feat and what the present generation is doing today to ensure that they play their part in this magnificent venture.

There are three tasks in establishing a free society that hopes to remain free—winning freedom, ordering freedom and sustaining freedom—and each was a prominent consideration to the American founders. Yet such a simple statement is beguiling, and masks a myriad of deeper issues, beginning with the sad fact that as time goes by, free people take freedom more and more for granted. Then, as they progress from the first task to the second and third, they increasingly relax, even though the last task raises the stiffest challenge of all, a challenge that stares every generation of free people in the eye: Are we sustaining the freedom of which we are fortunate to be heirs?

Winning Freedom

The first task, winning freedom, is understandably considered the noblest and most glorious of the three, and it easily overshadows the others. As such, it becomes enshrined as the core of a nation’s identity and its founding myth, and is passed down from generation to generation and celebrated in a thousand stories, symbols and toasts. In this sense Americans celebrate 1776 as the English celebrated the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as the French 1789, the Russians 1917 and the Chinese 1949. In each case, a revolutionary party, fighting in the name of freedom, overthrew some form of an ancien regime or foreign control and successfully declared independence.

No country celebrates its revolution like the United States and feels closer to its spirit. Winning freedom is the glory of the American Revolution, of the Declaration of Independence and of the War of Independence—and of 1776 and July 4 (though the date should really be July 2, the actual day when the Continental Congress voted to “dissolve the connection” with Great Britain). Americans will therefore always thrill to the recounting of how “the glorious cause of America” was won, of how a small, ill-equipped and untrained band of freedom-loving patriots prevailed against the most formidable force sent out by the most formidable empire of their day.

Lasting more than eight years, the Revolutionary War was second only to the Vietnam War in length, though now eclipsed by Iraq and Afghanistan. And with twenty-five thousand killed, it was proportionately one of the bloodiest of all American wars. But it was victorious. “The British were completely disgraced,” the New York Constitutional Gazette trumpeted after George Washington’s success at Boston in 1776. “Free men under arms had triumphed, with all the world watching.”[7] The “Sons of Liberty” had proved that they were neither “summer soldiers” nor “sunshine patriots.” They had pledged their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor,” and had won the day and secured their cause: freedom.

In countless speeches, the point is made rightly that nothing is more powerful than free men fighting for their freedom and defending their own land and homes. As General Washington declared to the Continental Army, “Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men fighting for the blessings of liberty.” Or again, “Remember . . . what a few brave men contending in their own land, and in the best of causes can do, against base hirelings and mercenaries.”[8] As if to support the point, the Hessian officers hired by George III as mercenaries were heard to remark that they had never considered it their duty to inquire which of the two sides in the American controversy was right. They were simply doing their job.

This truth highlights a key feature of how America won freedom. Lexington and Concord were not the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Nor was the Revolutionary War like the Long March of Mao Tse-tung. Unlike the French, Russian and Chinese, who all fought for freedom from a position of abject oppression and tyranny, the American colonists fought for freedom as some of the freest and most prosperous people of their time.

The American revolutionaries were born in freedom, schooled in freedom and fought for a heritage of freedom they had grown to know as theirs. In Lord Acton’s summary, “No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew.”[9] After all, in Montesquieu’s famous compliment, the English loved liberty “prodigiously,” and England was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.7.2012
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Schlagworte: challenges • Christianity • Constitution • consumer • Corruption • critique • economy • Empire • Experience • Fall • History • Liberty • Logos Book of the Year • Morality • national • Patriot • People • Politics • Potential • Power • Religion • Republic • Revolution • Rise
• ISBN-10: 0-8308-6682-5 / 0830866825
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8308-6682-3 / 9780830866823