April 22, 2013
The Great Surrender
By Daren Jonescu

Those who have been forcibly divested of their natural liberty by tyrants must be pitied. They have been coerced into accepting lies of security and state beneficence as paltry compensation for the loss of their birthright of a life worthy of human beings. And yet such wretchedness of external conditions, though destroying a man's practical life, does not destroy the man. More wretched than this is the spiritual self-destruction of one who would freely sell himself into tyranny in exchange for that very same subhuman compensation.

Western politics has fallen under the domination of progressive authoritarianism. The press, once perceived as a safeguard against government corruption and overreach, has become an almost monolithic mouthpiece and apologist for oppression. Art, long modernity's bastion of moral questioning and humane doubt in the face of materialist reductionism, has finally reduced itself to dogmatic nihilism, collectivist amorality, and court jesterism in the service of power.

These nightmarish degradations are often cited as causes of our decay, as though they were abstract realities controlling civilization's fate as the laws of physics control the fall of a stone. The most nightmarish fact of all, however, is that these conditions were not imposed upon us by force. The modern West's demise was chosen. Generations of men walked into this of their own volition. They voted for it. They purchased it. They chose to believe in it, defying the evidence of their own eyes and common sense. They willingly surrendered themselves to slavishness and its diminished moral horizon.

For thousands of years, men fought for a breath of freedom while struggling against the shifting currents of irrational governance imposed by brute force. Modernity promised a reasonable way out of all that, producing the theory and practical conditions of political liberty, elevating the individual human being above all coercive power, and hence allowing men, to a greater degree than ever before, to choose their own social conditions, and to project their choices into the future with some measure of solidity. But modern men, given that choice, have -- gradually but consciously -- forsaken all of it to return to the conditions from which men strained to extricate themselves for millennia: fleeting flames of hope capriciously snuffed out in sudden storms of power lust.

Is it time to ask whether we flatter ourselves when we imagine that Western modernity will be remembered by future men as the age of Shakespeare, Mozart, the Industrial Revolution, rationalism, science, and political liberty? As things now stand, it is difficult to see how Time's dust storm will not settle to reveal this epoch as that of man's ultimate shame: the moment when men walked freely into hell, merely for the sake of a little rest from the trials of living as men. Modernity may be on the verge of obliterating its own great promise and achievement, and revealing itself at last as The Age of the Great Surrender.

Man is a rational and moral being, living in accordance with his nature by exercising his reason in the name of choosing well. This means that he can live specifically as human only within the range of his freedom to make practical choices concerning what is best. This is the primary meaning of the modern notion of freedom as a natural right: a man cannot live as a man without the condition in which his definitively human faculties may be exercised, namely freedom from irrational constraint.

To choose to tie one's freedom to social conditions in which it may best be preserved -- to choose political community over anarchy, for example -- is rational. To choose political conditions in which one's natural freedom itself is relinquished by degrees is irrational, in that it entails choosing to give up the practical condition that makes the reasoned moral life possible.

Virtue (literally "manliness") simply means life lived according to our nature. And this requires the capacity to choose; a man who physically does what a man ought to do, but who does so involuntarily, through external compulsion, is no more living as a man than would be a machine that performed the same actions. Giving up one's realm of choices (and their consequences) to the state means giving up to government all that was one's birthright.

A standard moral puzzle used in political philosophy classes asks whether a free man may sell himself into slavery, i.e., whether we may freely choose to surrender freedom of choice. Logical implications aside, it is now all too clear that in practical terms, the answer to that question is a resounding "Yes we can." Mankind has made precisely this exchange. Everywhere on Earth where people with free electoral choices select the path of greater state control, greater state beneficence, and greater domestic security at the price of their natural liberty, they are selecting slavery, and voluntarily sacrificing freedom.

But sacrificing freedom means surrendering more than "mere individual liberty." Liberty is not an abstraction; it is man's nature manifested in society. Freedom is the arena of nature's test of a man's virtue. "Am I a good man? Am I living according to human nature, or at odds with it? Am I of sound character, and able to follow the demands of that character in a moment of challenge or hardship?" These questions comprise the fundamental imperative of human life, i.e., the innate demand to live up to something.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/t...l#ixzz2RCkAlMtn