[This is Chapter 8 of Murphey’s book Emergent Man:]

 

Chapter 8

 

ALL LIBERTY IS INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY

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If a farmer can decide what he is to plant and how much, to whom he is to sell and for what price, when he is to get up in the morning and when he is to go to bed at night, what sort of breakfast cereal he wants to eat in preference to several other brands, whether to go to a movie in town or buy his wife a new hat for Easter, whether to leave his farm and join the army or stay out of it, whether to join a farm organization or remain completely independent or form a new one of his own: if he can do all these things according to his choice, as well as choose between a wide variety of alternatives in every other aspect of his life, then we say that he is free. He is free because he lives among people who do not presume to decide these things for him. His is the liberty of decision. He is secure in his property and his person because he and his fellows support a government that uses its power to maintain inviolable a man's opportunity to exist in peace and self-determination, and because he and the remainder of society hold fast to an ethic of liberty.

In this freedom that a man can enjoy, is there any ground for separating off his "intellectual" freedoms and somehow considering the others to be non-intellectual? I do not think so. It is true, certainly, that the man may, as one of his areas of choice, decide between reading a book or going pheasant hunting, and if he decides to read a book, that he will have to choose which book to read, and that, having read it, he will become involved in judgments as to its literary merit, the truth or falsity of what it says, and so on. This area of choice may involve more of the "intellectual" qualities of a man than his choices as to what to buy and what to produce. But while this is undoubtedly so, is it not true, too, that every choice a man makes has an "intellectual" quality to it, in the sense that he is using his mind to determine the content and nuances of his life? He may or may not use his mind well in this process of choice. This is beside the point. The point is that "choice" inevitably involves the application of mind to possibility. This is true, we might say, by definition. And this definition is true as regards life because we know that human beings do exercise choice in the sense that we mean the word. Where a man is involved in deciding from among alternatives, his mentality is an integral part of the decision.

Liberty, then, in all its phases, gives expression to mind. And this is so in the most significant way possible. The free man uses his mind constantly, in both his small and his large decisions, to answer for himself the basic questions of human existence: Where am I going? What am I? How am I significant?

A man may or may not consciously ask these questions of himself. But there can be no doubt but that he must answer them, because they are there whether he ignores them or gives them his fullest attention. They are implicit in the human circumstance. At the end of a man's life, he has, by his choices as a free man, filled the years in a way that cannot be retracted. His one chance has been lived, and it must be said that he made it what

it was through his choices, or at least that he could have made it something quite different even though his own choice was not the sole determiner of his fate.

I would have us consider carefully this religious perspective of human choice. It is a perspective that gives us a very real appreciation of the role mind plays in all of liberty. Through it, we can see what so many have overlooked, that the whole process of human choice inherent in liberty is concerned with religious, moral and intellectual issues, and that there is no part of it that can be separated off and considered as insignificant so far as a man's use of his mind or his intellectual responsibility is concerned.

Of course, in speaking of liberty it is often useful or necessary to speak of just some aspect of it, picking out some area of human life that we are concerned with most particularly for purposes of the discussion we are making at the time. It may be necessary to speak of those parts of life that are generally thought of as "intellectual," since they involve the passing back and forth of ideas through the use of words, as in speaking and writing, conducting classes, and meeting together in assembly. When, however, we are selecting out this phase of men's activities for consideration, it is important that we be careful to preserve the appreciation we have for the intellectual-religious significance of all human choices. It is probably wisest to speak of the "freedom of speech," and of the "press," and of "assembly," without going a step further and classifying these together as being the "intellectual" freedoms. This latter classification may seem to have some justification, since we do not usually think that deciding whether or not to buy a new pair of shoes is an "intellectual" decision, but even though it has this justification, it is a dichotomy that ought to be avoided. It is more destructive than it is useful. It lends itself to overlooking the very vital insight that all of a man's choices, taken together, bear directly on the whole of life and involve the application of his intellect to his existence. What we need most is an analysis, a use of words, that highlights, rather than obscures, this fact.

All of this is of no small importance in the contemporary struggle between liberty and the philosophies of coercion. The present-day "liberal" orthodoxy in America accepts as one of its premises the idea that "civil liberties" are separable from economic liberty based on the market economy. "Civil liberty" has reference to certain rights in political, social and discursive affairs. The orthodoxy considers economic liberty as of little significance, if not positively to be opposed. One cannot help but feel that this view has come into being very largely because there is so little sensitivity to the complex and integrated nature of a man's life, so little understanding that a man's reading about philosophy, for example, is tied in closely with his subsequent desire to give the philosophy a visceral expression through action in the world. The dichotomy that splits "civil liberties" apart from economic liberty is philosophically shallow and does not look deeply enough into the psychological and poetic subtleties of life. This shallowness is closely related to the inability of all authoritarian philosophy to appreciate the underlying dynamism of human energy and the fact that the spiritual-material well-being of men depends most on giving expression to this energy. The most omnipresent facts of life are overlooked and the most glittering and obvious are taken up instead.

It would be humiliating to give a man the freedom to think, and to receive and impart ideas, without letting him have as well the liberty to act upon his ideas according to his best judgment. To encourage a farmer to think, so that he may sit up the long winter nights consumed intellectually with a new conception of how to make his fields more fertile and his crops more abundant, and then in the spring to tell him what and how and when to plant are simply not consistent. Mind cannot be said to stop with a book, with academic discussion. Ideas are important to men not only as polemics but also as sources of desire and ambition and consequent adventure. All of this, not just polemics, is a part of mind.

And what if some types of liberty were truly intellectual while others were not, and there were not this inextricable connection between mind and all aspects of human choice? Could we then accept the thesis that the "civil liberties" are worthy of defense while economic liberty is not?

The answer must surely be "no."  Liberty is integral and consists -- as has been so truly said in the past -- of a "bundle of rights" that can exist only as a bundle. If the power exists to coerce a man in one facet of his life -- that is to say, to manipulate his choices to his detriment -- this power may be used as the means of bringing under control all other parts of his activity. If power exists to tell a man what he is to produce and what and how much he is to consume, this control over his material wants (which I have emphasized cannot be separated from his spiritual needs) is a lever by which the man may ultimately be told what to write, what classes to attend, and what to say. To believe that such power as would attend the serious deprivation of economic liberty would long exist without its non-benevolent use for the suffocation of other liberties is to indulge in a supreme act of faith, a faith that ignores the worst aspects of "human nature" and naively expects that the holders of the power will remain "responsible" and stay men of good will. The danger is so apparent to any realist that a realist must surely appreciate that economic liberty must be preserved or no liberty will be preserved. We cannot long maintain a civilization that is only half free.

Of course, this is not the principal defense of economic liberty. It is not justified merely on the ground that it is a necessary condition precedent to other liberties. Liberty of any type is always its own justification, because liberty per se is a matter of the highest value, as well as a setting for the attainment of other fundamental values.

And liberty is by itself a very high value mainly because it is mated so closely to the mind and soul of a man. The full breathing of intellect and sensibility into one's life requires that a man be free, that his choices be open and not closed off. In  this sense, which is the sense we should most appreciate, all liberty is intellectual liberty; all choice is the expression of a man's progress through life.