The Freedom to Choose Freedom

This topic has gotten a bit of attention from some bloggers, and I can see why. A publisher's book blurb has summarized an important argument that is rarely spelled out in black and white, but is often assumed. By putting it in the light of day, they have given us an opportunity to think a little more clearly about some beliefs that divide us as a country.

Look, here's Amazon-dot-com's blurb on Dinesh d'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home:

Book Description

In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.

D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

Terrorist attacks happen because liberals abuse their freedom.

You can run so many different directions with this.

First of all, of course, there's a core of truth to what he says. We can all see what people hate about America. We're trashy, rowdy, provincial, rude, not to mention fat. We have no breeding, no taste, no manners. We like our women sexy and half-naked and our men burly and macho -- at least on television and in the movies. Our mass-produced commercial culture is lacking in quality, personality, nuance.

I mean, c'mon, that's easy.

But, uh, what does that have to do with "liberals?" Like, Red Staters don't shop at Wal-Mart and eat at McDonald's?

Here's the money quote from this blurb:

He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The whole thing turns on the distinction between the "exercise" and "abuse" of freedom.

To tell you the truth, there are lots of times I wish I was different. I wish my thoughts were clearer and more logical, that my mind was more disciplined. I wish I didn't get distracted when a pretty girl walked by. It would be good if I listened to more classical music and less blues. I should be forty pounds thinner. It would be better if I drank less and exercised more. These are all choices I make, given that I have the freedom to make them; I make bad choices.

But, dude, that's no reason to blow yourself up in a crowded place.

See, the problem with this freedom stuff is that we are just as free to make bad choices as to make good ones.

And so some people -- and I am using myself as an example, but you're just as bad -- make some bad choices. I chose to pick up a piece of cake after the going-away party at work Friday: bad choice.

Now, I am trying to imagine a "freedom" where people are only allowed to make good choices. I'm sure, as Mr. d'Souza is saying, that if America were The Land of Good Choices Only the terrorists wouldn't hate us, we wouldn't have been attacked five years ago, and the USA wouldn't have to cower in constant fear as we do now.

But you notice I had to put the word "freedom" in quotes. Because ... that wouldn't be freedom, would it?

That's the paradox. It's the exercise versus abuse thing. If you can't abuse your freedom then you ain't got none.

Exercising freedom is, by some standards, identical to abusing it, and that's really the problem, if you ask me. You will choose to do something different from what other people are doing, and lots of times they have chosen to do what they're doing because it's a good thing to do. People who think perfectly logically are doing the right thing. Classical music is better than blues. It's usually better to keep your mouth shut and go along with things, better for you of course, but it also turns out people often know what they're doing and you don't. Conformity serves an important function, and generally it will serve society well.

We really should be more logical and listen to better music (he said, with Dylan's new CD blasting in the background).

Of course that would be a boring nightmare, you're thinking. Life would hardly seem worth living.

So which is it? What do you want? Freedom, and the mistakes and the danger that come with it, or totalitarian uniformity and safety?

What we have to do is to model good choices and allow bad ones. There are a million reasons why it is necessary for people to learn by trial and error, to learn by doing, why people need to be allowed to make bad choices. Besides making life, y'know, "interesting," people need to try things in order to innovate, to make life better. Any inventor, any artist or musician, any creative person will tell you they get it wrong a lot of the time, a lot of the things they try don't work out. A country where everybody only did what was perfectly acceptable to everyone would be a country of such incredible wimpiness that it would be unable to defend itself, a country of such blandness that nobody would want to live there, and country that would go to the back of the line where innovation and entrepreneurship were involved.

So we've got this freedom thing, thanks to Founding Fathers and subsequent diligent custodians. People like d'Souza want to give it up so the terrorists won't hurt us. People like the President and the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense want to accuse those who exercise their freedom of abusing it, they want to assert that we're traitors or worse for expressing opinions that deviate from theirs. It seems that there's a lot of pressure for everyone to walk the same straight-and-narrow.

The choice seems obvious to me, but obviously I'm just one guy. We could use the power of our government to ensure that Americans make only good choices, and after a while I'll just betcha that, like Mr. d'Souza is saying here, the terrorists would stop bothering us.

Or ... we can go on being the regular slobs we are, each of us in his or her own way trying to figure out what works and what doesn't through a chaotic cacophony of mass blundering trial and error, exercising and maybe abusing our freedom in the hope that maybe there are better ways to live.

That's easy. I choose blunder.