[This is Chapter 5 of Murphey’s book Emergent Man:]
Chapter 5
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Liberty is the necessary precondition if
emergence is to be possible on more than an isolated and individual scale. And
emergence, in turn, is the culmination of the ideals inherent in the philosophy
of liberty. The two are complementary parts of a single whole.
Liberty is life in society based on a morality
(and consequentJy on law and mores) that seeks the utmost reduction of coercive
power by one man over another, together with the encouragement of such creative
activities as are based on the noncoercive foundation of contract and voluntary
association. Politically liberty is manifested in the existence of a government
to punish and inhibit the predatory coercions of some men against others and in
the constitutional limitation of such power as is vested in this government, so
that the government will continue to serve the purpose of liberty rather than
to become its destroyer. Economically it is manifested in the act of exchange
as the basis for production and eventual consumption, and an alienable private
property as the basis for the act of exchange. Intellectually it involves a
willingness to accept the existence of minds with diverse ideas, though the
thinker may nevertheless stoutly assert his disagreement with some or all of
the ideas he hears. Religiously it expresses the dignity of a man in the very
potentiality of his life, the right of a man to exist for his own sake, and
looks to the creative heights to which a man might rise. It says to a man:
"Life is yours; make of it something good and great."
It is commonplace in the middle of the 20th
century to think of liberty as a rigid inflexibility, full of negative
restraint and lacking an understanding of
the needs and aspirations of the people.
"Liberalism" [in its contemporary meaning], in contrast, as a
doctrine of governmental interventionism to perform what are considered to be
needful social functions, is looked on as flexible and far-seeing.
This conception astounds me. The error in it
is so simple and apparent as to seem naked to the view. Liberty is a rigid
framework for infinite flexibility.
Interventionism is a flexible framework for a growing rigidity and
inhibition.
In this sense liberty is not unlike a brick or
steel building. Its walls are sturdy and rigid; its windows are inflexible. A
change in them may not be needed for a millennium. But there will undoubtedly
be a great flexibility in the lives that course through that building during
the millennium. In fact, prostitutes and scholars, magicians and physicists,
faith-healers and doctors, any of these, or all in turn, may live in the
building, accommodated by its inflexible walls. An endless spectacle of human
personality may be allowed to exist by its shelter. To call this
"inflexibility" is a curious perversion of language and an equally
curious inability to see the nature of the thing about which we speak. Liberty
is concerned solely with the preconditions of flexibility and expansiveness.
When it favors the voluntary act of exchange as the basis for economic life it
favors something that allows a never-ending progression of production and
development, beginning with a caveman's exchange of an artifact for twenty
apples and continuing until, and beyond, the exchange (probably through the use
of money) of a home on a space platform floating fifty miles above the earth
for a rocket trip to the planet Saturn.
If liberty does not allow flexibility, what does?
In like manner, the philosophy of emergence,
which is merely the religious expression of liberty, calls for a morality that
is the substratum for emergence. Any inhibitions proposed by its ethic must be those that are necessary for
liberty, and hence for the least inhibition when looked on intelligently. Such
inhibitions would hold back some action so as to foster that sort of action
that allows the indefinite growth of human beings. Libertarian ethics has as its purpose
stimulation, and this stimulation comes best from allowing men to be free from
coercion, so that their own energies and insights may spark in them the will to
emergent life.
The free society (which is just another name
for liberty itself) is founded on the whole of libertarian ethics, law and
mores. Because of this, the soil for emergence is there. But emergence, even
though it is involved in the very purpose and conception of liberty, is not an
automatic product. In this sense, liberty must be thought of as merely a
plateau, a stepping-off point, which may produce either emergence or sterility.
I have no doubt but that even a sterile, highly extroverted commercial
civilization is much to be preferred to any non-libertarian system that might
be conceived. But this type of civilization is not the ideal that liberty
seeks. It is emergent man -- the man of intellect, integrity, pride and
sensuality -- who is the epitome of liberty. A free society producing many such
men has kept in view its spiritual roots; one that does not has not really
understood liberty in its religious aspects, and this failure to appreciate the
fact that liberty is a philosophy of virility must inevitably threaten the
continued existence of the institutions and mores already established. The
ultimate insight is not there to stimulate that "eternal vigilance"
with which libertarian institutions must forever be guarded. If Americans are losing
their liberty, it is because they are forfeiting it, and a man will not forfeit
his liberty if he both understands it and has the virility with which to desire
it. Manliness is the key.
Much of what follows in this book will discuss
the principles involved in the
morality of liberty. In this discussion I would not have us lose sight of what I have stressed so much in this first
part -- the central importance of the heroic impulse. That is the heart of
liberty, just as surely as are its political and economic principles. Men must walk proudly in their manliness.
They must nourish as precious that liberty that recognizes their right to be
men in the full bloom of life. They can avoid both dullness and slavery through
the intensity of their own self-esteem. Only such men are the safe custodians
of liberty and only such men are worthy of liberty itself.
[Note in 2001: Since the mid-1970s, Americans have stopped
referring to masculinity as a value, and have even stopped using the male pronoun
when referring to people in general (i.e., to both sexes). It is apparent that Emergent Man was
written prior to any such feminist influence.
The reference to “man” in these pages needs to be understood in the
context of each particular use: sometimes it refers to men only; other times it
is used in the general sense as referring to people of both sexes. That I should have spoken most especially of
the role of men, as men, is consistent with my continuing support over the
years for differing role assignments for the sexes (a view that places me at
odds with fashionable opinion during the past thirty years). I have not thought it a good thing to
homogenize their natures and functions.
It does not seem to me that the differences are entirely a cultural
artifact; or that, even if they were, it is desirable to design a culture in
which differences are denied.]