Is Freedom More Powerful than Fear?

Obama addressing the country on Jihadist terrorism

Monday

In addressing the country’s anxieties about terrorism following the San Benardino massacre, President Obama assured the country that “freedom is more powerful than fear.” He was, of course, attempting to counter the Trumpian fear mongering and resistance to Syrian refugees. Obama’s assertion was powerful but is it in fact true? In one of literature’s most powerful counter arguments, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor states that people like Obama demand too much of people.

Obama was deliberately echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 assertion that  “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Note that Roosevelt was speaking at a time when the world was locked in a Great Depression and when fascism was on the rise in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. Our current fears are paltry compared to that.

Blogger Paul Waldman of The Washington Post makes this point, noting that, with increased vigilance following 9-11, 45 Americans have been killed in jihadist terrorist attacks. (Compare this with 48 killed in right-wing terrorist attacks.) The deaths are unfortunate but not of a magnitude that should prompt us to start abandoning our values and trashing our Constitution. As Waldman concludes, “[R]ight now we’re acting like a bunch of cowards. It’s long past time we got a hold of ourselves.”

Part of the problem is that people have worked themselves into a state of hysteria. Obama, recognizing this, said something fairly close to what Auden writes in a poem I discussed two weeks ago. Obama talked about how, in the past, we have always risen to meet such challenges as war, depression, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks. Auden, who sets his 1942 poem in the year of Jesus’s birth but aims it at the present, similarly writes:

Flood, fire,  
The desiccation of grasslands, restraint of princes,  
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,  
These after all are our familiar tribulations,  
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.

And further on:

To practice one’s peculiar civic virtue was not
So impossible after all; to cut our losses
And bury our dead was really quite easy:That was why
We were always able to say: “We are children of God,
And our Father has never forsaken His people.”

But if Americans in the past thought they were children of destiny, they have begun to have doubts now. Auden detects a new “Horror” creeping into the public consciousness, which he refers to as “It.” We see something comparable creeping into the American psyche today, especially on the Right:

But this Horror starting already to scratch
Its way in? Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:
We can only say that now It is there and that nothing
We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,
For nothing like It has happened before.

Obama, knowing that he was dealing with a rising panic, essentially said a secular version of “We are children of God, and our Father has never forsaken His people”:

I am confident America will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history. Even as we debate our differences, let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional: We were founded upon a belief in human dignity — the idea that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.

And then his conclusion:

Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear. That we have always met challenges — whether war or depression; natural disasters or terrorist attacks — by coming together around our common ideals. As long as we stay true to who we are, then I have no doubt that America will prevail.

I would like to believe that Obama is right but feel compelled to imagine how the Grand Inquisitor would respond. The episode is a parable set forth by Ivan Karamazov, the reasoning brother who is, at the same time, Reason’s greatest skeptic. Jesus has returned during the time of the Spanish Inquisition and has been imprisoned by the Grand Inquisitor. The man tells him that he was wrong to reject Satan’s three temptations in the desert. The Church, the Inquisitor says, has accepted those temptations and, as a result, the world is much happier than it would have been had it followed Jesus’s lead.

The issue is human freedom. Human beings don’t want freedom, the Grand Inquisitor says, and Jesus’s big mistake was thinking that they did. Rather than giving people bread, dazzling them with miracles, or asserting worldly power over them, Jesus said that people should consult their hearts and freely follow him only on that basis. To which the Grand Inquisitor asserts,

Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though Thou didst not love them at all- Thou who didst come to give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings for ever. Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.

And further on:

Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, “Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He.” Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. 

The Grand Inquisitor would say that Obama is making Jesus’s mistake of believing that people will embrace freedom rather than their baser instincts. Freedom is very hard work, and it’s much easier to run to versions of the Grand Inquisitor’s church, which claims the authority to lead people and to think for them. In our case, to some it seems easier to follow politicians who claim that the world is black and white and who tell us to put all our trust in them. Donald Trump promises to save us from our free-floating anxiety with his confident claim that he will defeat ISIS.

Is this what separates liberals from conservatives? Do liberals overestimate the ability of people to rise to high ideals while conservatives have a more realistic vision of human capacities? While I realize that, in light of Ivan’s parable, this makes liberals Jesus and conservatives the Spanish Inquisition, the Inquisitor actually gets the better of the argument. Jesus is seen as a naïve idealist, not to mention an elitist, whose faith in humans’ ability to transcend their frailties and prejudices does more harm than good. Better, the Inquisitor says, to take people as they are and proceed from there.

While I can’t abandon my faith that people will rise to the occasion and use their freedom to overcome prejudice and fear, I can see why Burkean conservatives think differently. Ideally what we want is a continuing dialogue between idealism and realism where each reins in the excesses of the other.