Freedom to gather and ventilate is a good exhaust pipe

The constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly were called into question when the government appeared set to proscribe a public Cord rally. Once again, the opposition’s intellectuals rigidly opposed “total liberty” to any official ban.

Yet all properly educated individuals should know that society is not possible except as a proper balance between freedom and gags. Society is possible only when individual freedom is measured against objective collective needs. In non-human social species, this is assured through a repertoire of instinctive impulses.

Individuals “know” instinctively what they owe to the collective. Automatically, too, the collective instinctively knows what it owes to the individual. The need for this balance between freedom and duty imposes a sanction on both sides which, among humans, makes freedom an acutely relative concept.

Why? Because the evolution of acute intelligence has rendered unnecessary a whole set of inborn instincts in favour of neotenous learning after the birth of every individual – which is why human children require such an extraordinarily long time of bodily growth, mental development, parental nurture and formal education.

As a technique of specific survival (of survival of a gregarious species), what the individual learns – what we call moral knowledge – should consist almost entirely in the do’s and don’ts of social living. That is where the liberal goes wrong. He wants all the “don’ts” to be done away with in order for the individual to enjoy all the “do’s”.

The ancient Nilo-Egyptian teachings – which were what the Israelite slaves of the Pharaoh borrowed and later reproduced as the Ten Commandments – are a good example of social do’s and don’ts. Any intelligent reading of them shows that they both protect the individual and yet slap a ban on anything that might injure collective interests.

Extreme intelligence

The authors seem aware of two apparently contradictory needs. Extreme intelligence tends to stimulate individual enterprise. But extreme gregariousness tends to heighten awareness of collective needs.

Proper social education is that which consciously seeks to marry the two trends at a highly auspicious social point.

In short, because we are both intensely social and extraordinarily intelligent, we cannot afford to absolutise both trends. For to do so is to automatically plunge society into an Imbroglio. English has borrowed that Italian word with the meaning of total confusion. An Imbroglio – the “g” is silent in English – is a higgledy-piggledy Hobbesian “war of all against all”.

That is why, in the constitutions of all states, including the most liberal ones, the “guarantee” attached to every freedom is immediately followed by a long list of provisos (“... provided that”) – which either annuls the “guarantee” or, at least, makes all constitutional freedoms dependent and painfully relative.

For instance, what would you say is absolute about your freedom of movement after a constitutional “provided” has banned you from loitering in somebody’s private property? How can your freedom of expression be absolute in the face of all our rubrics banning libel, defamation, perjury and “hate speech”?

But only a dyed-in-the-wool liberal can condemn such barriers on an individual’s “liberty” to indulge in any whim. Only the anarchist – an identical twin of the liberal – can demand absolute freedom of the individual to stand up from his cinema seat and shout “FIRE!” where there is no fire. For the consequences of such licentious frivolity are too ghastly to contemplate.

In short, insistence on absolute freedom of thought and action is what is responsible for such a surfeit of libertines, libertarians, cranks, criminals and bigots in all liberal societies. That is why gun-happy mass murderers are rampant in the United States, which is probably the most liberal system that mankind has ever devised.

What our government may have learned last week is that freedom to gather and speak is a good exhaust pipe. To ban it completely is to force public discontent to accumulate to the point of explosion and risk social disintegration.

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