[This is Chapter 9 of Murphey’s book Emergent Man:]

 

Chapter 9

 

THE APPRECIATION OF DIFFERENCE

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There is quite obviously both a homogeneity and heterogeneity about human beings. Men are alike in many ways, but they are also in other regards very much unlike. Anyone, for example, who reads about the life of Socrates must surely be impressed with the basic humanity of the man, which is so strikingly similar to the natural, everyday humanity we see about us all the time. It is easy to visualize Socrates in discussion with his friends, talking about philosophy just as we have done in bull-sessions at college when three or four college friends would accidentally fall into discussion on a Sunday night and talk about some deep subject. Along these lines, Socrates seems just like one of us.  In his ordinary humanity he is in no way estranged from you and me. And those who have read Plutarch's Lives or Shakespeare's Julius Caesar must also be impressed by the understandable gentleness of soul shown by Brutus, who so fully felt the pain that comes when a man of good will finds it necessary to participate in an act of dissection. Brutus wished he could come by the spirit of Caesar without dismembering Caesar.  And is this not the way many of us would react? I know that to myself I can see the need for violence at times if we are to establish and maintain our rights as free men, but it would always be a painful process at best, the matter of killing, and my soul would rebel against it, as did the soul of Brutus.  Therefore, it seems to me that Brutus is no stranger, and surely this is the way many other readers of Plutarch or Shakespeare must feel, too. As a matter of fact, this warm connection is perhaps one of the reasons why these writings have been so interesting to us over all these years. This common humanity would seem to lie behind the continued reverence for Abraham Lincoln, who was so expressive personally of what so many feel and would like to be able to personify as well. Lincoln is the personification of humanity in its finest and most lovable aspect. We like to feel, I think, that to some extent we are like him and have in common with him some mutual qualities.

Such reflections illustrate that we are really, as human beings, made out of a common stock, and share to an appreciable extent the same circumstances, needs, aspirations and sensibilities.

Out of this sameness, there is much to be learned that bears on the philosophy of liberty. There is a vast potential in the soul of us all, and as human beings we have each of us a little of the fire of the sublime, or at least the makings of a fire if we will but put the match to the wood. We are creatures of brain and of brawn and of feeling, and as such latent within ourselves are the means to the realization of at least some small part of the universe of possibility. The world is an empty sheet to which we can all take our charcoal pencils and draw a portrait of ourselves. And in an empty sheet and a charcoal stick there are immense possibilities for creative art. My own hobby is charcoal portrait drawing, and I am always struck at the beginning of a picture at how plain white the paper is and how the movement of my hand and pencil fills the paper with something that never existed before and that might never have come into being, one picture among an infinity that I might have drawn.  Some men, of course, will fill the paper with a picture of beauty so startling that we can hardly take our eyes off it, while others will put down an ill-shaped scrawl and consider the job finished. But there is yet the ever-fresh paper and charcoal stick and the ever-present potential to do something that is significant and worthy. This potential is the common substratum of our humanity, a humanity that if we are wise we will respect and nurture. One might say that in a way this sameness, this common humanity, is the purpose of liberty, the center of its subject-matter.

This "sameness" has its consequences in the philosophy of liberty. One of these is the principle that men are to be treated alike before the law. None are to be favored with privileges not shared by the others nor any despised by a station less than equal in the eye of the judge or the administrator. The laws are to be created and applied impartially, with an eye to providing for the common liberty of all to do as they choose and thereby

chart their own course and make the best of the humanity that they share. This means that there are to be no distinctions made by the law between men unless the distinction is made as a part of a libertarian principle designed for an even greater extension of the liberty of the great multitude. We distinguish, for example, between the murderer and his fellows, and hang the murderer, and we do this in our efforts to preserve the inviolability of life for all: and this is consistent with the equal treatment of the law, because the distinction we make here is not between men as men but rather between the manifested vices of men as they affect our social harmony and the orderly working of our human flux.

A sensibility for the common humanity that we all share and for the dependence we all have upon the creative energies of each other makes us realize that we must act to keep open the pathways of effort to all men who would make the attempt. The vast expanses of liberty must be kept open to all. To some extent this realization is one of tolerance, but it is a tolerance based on an appreciation of our common humanity. This tolerance is properly selfish in that our own well-being is tied to it and it is humanistic in spirit as being based on the appreciation I have mentioned. However we may want to classify it, it is an essential part of the ethic of liberty. Only through this appreciation will we let down the ancient barriers that authoritarian thinking of all types has set up between men. In addition to the equal treatment of the law, it is important that men generally entertain in their daily affairs a tolerant-appreciative attitude that leads them to extend fully the equality of treatment to men generally. It is important that each man be treated with equaninuty in the private lives of his fellows, who may act with appreciation of his common humanity and allow him to follow his own course. If they treat him differently, the difference should find justification in his personal qualities, not in a blanket condemnation arising out of some preconception of him as a man. This does not deny that a man's personal qualities may be the same as the definitive qualities of a group. But he is to be measured by his overall attributes as a man. To do otherwise is to deny him his humanity, his intelligence, his morality, and to penalize him despite all of these things and whether or not he has lived by the ethic of liberty. The penalty closes doors, and circumscribes the liberty of the man. Because of this, the truly free society can only be composed of people who make this the measure of their conduct and breathe the spirit of genuine tolerance into their daily lives.

This discussion of our sameness, and its consequences, leads us directly to an awareness of our multiplicity. Our "common humanity" is really the spark of common life and is thereby an energizing impulse. Through its own course it will create dissimilarities among us. Herein lies the heterogeneity that is the child of our sameness. It is true that we are alike, but it is true, too, that we are unlike. I am myself a man who deals in the law most of the days of the week, and in writing this book the other days of the week, provided I am not busy drawing a portrait. My life is very different from that of a Japanese fisherman or a Buddhist monk or a chorus girl in Las Vegas. We are as different as night and day in what fills our experience. I am not preoccupied with water and fishnets or with receiving flowers from a wealthy admirer who has watched me dance, and the fisherman and the chorus girl are no more preoccupied with res ipsa loquitur or how best to examine a witness.  But while we are different, I am enriched by the peaceable existence of the fisherman, the monk and the pretty girl. The enrichment may be remote, but I don't think it is far-fetched to say that in the complex pattern of human well-being, I am better off because they are each adding their own bit to the world and expressing in the world their own peculiar variety of personality and talent.

I am writing this essay as a prelude to discussing the principles to be applied to the discursive aspects of our affairs primarily because it is not easy for human beings really to appreciate with full warmth the value of the diversity among us. Usually our impulse is to look with suspicion on differences, or with secret envy, and this is especially true if it is a meritorious difference. Our glance is sometimes so brief that we see the harsh unfamiliarity of the scene without knowing the underlying factors that go into producing it. This harsh unfamiliarity or a familiarity eaten away by envy bring us to an inane, destructive rejection of that which is really in our own best interest.

In this sense, liberty and its spirit of tolerance is against our human nature. It supports the diversity. The envy, the distrust, the immediate dislike: all are alien to liberty. They are opposed to the heterogeneity of man. The mandate of liberty, on the other hand, is: Seek out and appreciate that which is enriching in the difference; allow the difference to exist so that this value may grow within it; encourage each man to add to the experience of the others by introducing into the world different foods, music, literature and new perspectives that lead to better ideas. Emergence, the religious core of liberty, requires fertilization.  [Note in 2001:  These pages show how much I hoped for from the people within a free society.  I had not yet experienced the 1960s, ’70s, and their legacy, which took manners and morals in a diametrically opposite direction.  This deflated my hopes and confirmed the social conservatism one finds in these pages, such as in the chapter on the ethics of sex; but it did not persuade me that there is any system better than a free society, since I would be loath to vest great power in any of the people whose manners and morals reflect the primary ethos of those years.  The disgraced presidency of Bill Clinton offers a case in point.]

The specific principles of liberty, such as the principles of freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly which I will discuss next, are all built around a positive value, which is an appreciation of what human beings can do if left free. By the widest possible latitude in communication among us, we are fertilized mentally. There are spiritual and material satisfactions in this. The great positive core of the libertarian approach is to open up every possible avenue of this exchange of ideas and thereby to encourage men to use their minds and to declare the products of their thinking. Most of the technical discussion of libertarian principles in this regard, as elsewhere, has to do with the few exceptions, or limitations on the general freedom, that may be necessary. It is important to understand the full meaning of the general freedom, though, before becoming sidetracked in this way.

This approach to freedom is radical among human beings. This is so even though in general terms there is nothing more acceptable than an expression of this point of view. The constant pressure of petty people, however, is to close the valves of the human consciousness, and they are active constantly in their little ways to suffocate the full break-through of mind and especially to make impossible the full integrity of expression. I have referred earlier to the growing obscenity of the soul, the shutting off of significant living into the four walls of a man's inner shell, and of the "beast of unreason" that stalks through the world. And too often this narrow, suffocating smallness gets outside the realm of the petty and organizes itself into something less inchoate, and in such cases we witness such spectacles as the Soviet suppression of the writings of Boris Pasternak, or such oppression as took place during the Spanish Inquisition. Therefore, it is not wise to take for granted the tolerance upon which all liberty is based and most conspicuously the liberties of speech, press, religion and assembly. The spirit of Voltaire, who said that he may disagree with what a man might say, but would defend to the death the man's right to say it, is not the spirit of all the world, not even of America. In this spirit we see a fierce seriousness about the significance of ideas, the imperative to disagree with unsound thinking, and the equal necessity of keeping open the flow.

The “appreciation of difference” is a serious perspective, not light and frivolous.  It is probably best to say that it does not really entail a love of difference as difference, but rather a love of difference as the basis for richness and the soil for development and improvement. We come closest to being able to enjoy difference merely because of its multiplicity in cultural matters, as when we enjoy the quick, muscular dancing of the Russians, the smooth glide of a Viennese waltz, the dignity of the minuet and the raucous free-heartedness of rock-and-roll.  In these things there is no real contradiction. The dances express a varying mood, just as different poems express different insights, different worlds because seen through different eyes.   And as with poetry, the varying hues of life expressed in the dancing each has its own truth, and the variety takes shape really as a variety of richness.  This is not, however, so true with the non-aesthetic, unemotional areas of the mind. Here, difference is vital so that we will not shut off truth, but a difference of opinion is of little value just for its own sake.  It is truth -- the correspondence of statements to a common reality that we all share through our senses -- that we seek in this area; it is not error that we cherish.  We would rather settle issues on an agreeable plane of truth and let our disagreements range into other realms pertaining to new issues and new perplexities, than to stay forever arguing about whether the world is spherical or flat, or whether fire is the result of the release of phlogiston. I would not say that difference here is good for its own sake.  It is to be cherished only because it is the necessary concommitant of inquisitive minds, themselves the highest value, and it is the process of discovery and the eventual reduction of truth from this process that is the positive good that we seek to protect.

By these thoughts I have hoped to have laid the foundation for a keener understanding of the importance of the libertarian theorem that will be explored in the next essay.  This theorem states that no coercion, governmental or social, is justified against the communication of ideas, except in a few narrow instances that I will examine with considerable care in order to show how the exceptions are themselves necessary as a part of the overall format of liberty. The substance of the rule is not to be seen in the exceptions, but rather in the great positive   -- “liberty” -- and it is well that we appreciate that substance before becoming involved with an examination of the proper exceptions.