On liberty, from Barbara Amiel's Confessions

 

Confessions (1980, 1981) by Barbara Amiel

We Canadians take freedom for granted; unlike Americans we were never big on liberty and even less so today. I am not sure freedom was ever an issue in Canada, independence from the United Kingdom was greeted with a yawn; we have been complacent and lazy and assumed the government was benign. And now freedom and liberty have become verboten words, they associate anyone saying them with being a conservative and we all know the anti-conservative bias of the CBC. Conservatives are condemned out of hand by progressives and liberals. Conservatives are cancelled. 

Why did the parents of some of my former students come to Canada? Some were boat people from Viet Nam, some were from Cambodia, others were from Afghanistan and other places where freedom didn't exist. All of these people love freedom and came to Canada in order to be free, which means to have the opportunity to fulfill one's capacity, one's ambition, and one's intelligence; to speak freely, express one's religion freely, to buy and own property as one wishes. Most of these people have flourished in Canada which has given them a new life of opportunities in a new country. These people came to Canada for liberty and freedom but the times have changed; in Canada today, the desire is to restrict people's liberty and criticize anyone who speaks of freedom. Being safe is the priority of our federal government, and Justin Trudeau is quick to praise being safe; maybe he's right . . . but you don't build a great country by being safe.

Still worth reading over forty years after it was first published, here is what Barbara Amiel writes on liberty; from Barbara Amiel's Confessions (1980,1981), pages 118-119:

And why is liberty important? Liberty itself, of course, doesn't solve any of the problems of existence. It doesn't even address itself to their solution. All it does is to leave each person free to find an answer to a pressing human need, lack, or iniquity. It does not attempt to substitute a party's, a dictator's, a saint's, or a philosopher's view for the goodwill and ingenuity of millions of free individuals.

Does liberty have a price? It certainly does. When people are free to act well, they are also free to act badly. When they are free to hold humane and accurate views, they are also free to hold inhuman and stupid opinions. But the safety-net of classical liberalism rests on the not unreasonable belief that free people will act for the good with at least the same frequency as they act for the bad, while excesses of malice and greed can be held in check by ordinary criminal laws guarding citizens against injury, theft, fraud, libel, and the like.

Does liberty work better than the planned society? For millennia centralized kingdoms, empires, and religious states have planned diligently for prosperity which eluded them (or was theirs only temporarily as a result of bloody conquest) until the ideals of classic liberalism allowed a small part of the world in which they took hold -- North America and Western Europe, mainly -- to create undreamed-of riches. Of course, the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution played an immense part in this -- but were themselves largely produced by this freedom.

The wealth created by a relatively undirected, uncanonized, untheological, un-feudal, free-trading, supply-and-demand economy was, of course, not distributed equally among citizens, but who can deny that it was distributed more equally -- and more equitably -- than the wealth of any centrally regulated regulated system, monarchy, or dictatorship, before or since? And while justice in such free societies was far from perfect, who can deny that it was far more perfect than justice meted out in  a regulated state? 

The impoverishment of language

 

1.

Everywhere life is being reduced, flattened out, and the variety and multiplicity of life is lessened. Small communities are absorbed into cities and cities into a megalopolis; the nation state is being absorbed into larger economic and military alliances, it's only a matter of time before the nation state disappears. And what is the motivation for reducing life, flattening it out, lessening the variety of everyday life? Someone's getting rich, someone else is getting more powerful; and the rest of us are losing out. 

2.

Not too many years ago, North American workers saw their jobs moved to other countries where wages are one tenth or less of what was paid to workers here. American workers were told they would have to "recycle" themselves, but this didn't happen, it was an optimistic and false plan from the beginning. It was a flattening out of society, making more people poor, and a reduction of the number of jobs and the variety of jobs, it was a diminishment of the diversity of jobs here. There was also nothing for these people to recycle themselves to, there were no better jobs for them to move up to even if they did reeducate themselves; it was a fairly cynical move on the part of business and government leaders, they were laughing behind their hands. It was enforced poverty on a segment of society that had worked hard and in the past would have moved to middle class status. Some of these former workers ended up unemployed or homeless or on drugs. Some moved on to work for fast food restaurants and some now drive for Uber or Door Dash delivering food for these same restaurants.

3.

Political and economic changes begin with language, with words, and it can be seen all around us. Words are censored, given new meanings, or deleted from the way we speak when they challenge a political agenda that would control the population. People are now afraid to say what they think and feel and justifiably so; now everyone's concerned they aren't politically correct. Certain words aren't allowed to be said. Certain thoughts and ideas aren't allowed to be expressed; you will suffer condemnation, loss of position in society, perhaps your employment, you will be excommunicated, you will be cancelled. Better to shut up and hope for a better future or else you might disappear from your profession, your friends, your old life. The people who forbid freedom of speech used to be the people who championed free speech, now they are the most vociferous opponents of free speech. 

4.

Consider that our vocabulary has fewer words, fewer long words, than the vocabulary of people just fifty years ago; with this loss of vocabulary we lose the nuance of expressing sophisticated ideas, we lose how to describe things, whether material or emotional, we become language deprived. The vocabulary of the Victorians was more sophisticated than our present day speech; children today have difficulty reading children's books from the Victorian or Edwardian Age, everywhere people have been dummed down. We've become fat and stupid. An obvious example is the revising of Roald Dahl's books, censoring them according to Woke preconceptions which, basically, dumb people down to the same already low level. The King James Version of the Bible is thought to be too difficult for people to read, in fact the vocabulary of the 1611 translation of the Bible is fairly easy to read and is beautifully written; but read the King James Version? Read Chaucer? Read Milton? Read Shakespeare? Read Walt Whitman and William Blake? They're all by dead white men and their books are heading to the municipal dump.

5. 

While our vocabulary today has fewer words what we're allowed to say and what we aren't allowed to say has also been reduced, made subject to what is politically correct. It is made difficult because the politically correct are in the ascendant and they have become mainstream, their ideas have been normalized. I noticed a news broadcaster on CBC, only yesterday, when he mentioned President Trump, he referred to him as "Trump" and he sneered and assumed the audience agreed that Trump deserved this visual and audible condemnation; this television announcer could hardly be criticized, after all, his middle class audience most likely agree with him or why would they be watching the biased CBC news? Whether or not Trump deserves to be sneered at is not my point, it is the underlying assumption of a government employee on a national television network that is subsidized with taxpayers' money expressing a biased opinion on what purports to be a factual reporting of the news. Politically correct assumptions supercede common sense and truth. We may think that government is benevolent because Justin Trudeau keeps telling us that Canadians want to be "safe", but government's motive is power and social control. Forget about being "safe", we all know that "safe" in life doesn't exist.

Note: Revised and edited on 23 February 2023.