L is for ... Lazarus

- also, Late (which this post is); and Lie (which the timestamp on this post is).

The late Emma Lazarus lies interred in Beth-Olom Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York. A poet, she is best known for "The New Colossus," which is to be found engraved on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, on what is now Liberty Island in New York Harbor (but perhaps not in New York... boundaries are arbitrary and capricious things). The poem contains several memorable but oft-misquoted phrases:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The poem is written in a sonnet form famously associated with the Elizabethan poet and playwright known as "Shakespeare." It was Lazarus' contribution to an art auction to support the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund - this fund raised money in the United States for the erection of a pedestal to support the statue being constructed by the French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi to commemorate the ideals of international republicanism, and the American inspiration for the French Revolution. As the poem relates, this collaboration recalls an earlier statuesque harbor guardian: the Colossus of Rhodes. Bartholdi's own title for the statue was La Liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty Enlightening the World; Lazarus' poem transformed it into a symbol for the great melting pot of American multiculturalism, a welcomer of the world's "tired... poor... huddled masses."

Although the poem was provided to an auction to raise money for the Statue, and was read at the exhibition of artworks contributed to that auction, it was not present in any form at the Statue's official opening in 1886. When Lazarus died a year later, her poem seemed to have died with her. But her friend Georgina Schuyler, a descendant of the founders of New York City, found the poem and embarked on an ultimately successful campaign to have Lazarus immortalized. Her poem was installed in 1903, and the Statue of Liberty became a beacon attracting immigrants from all over the world. Currently administered by the National Parks Authority, the Statue of Liberty was originally the responsibility of the United States Lighthouse Board; incongruously, when Emma Lazarus transformed its character from beyond the grave, it was under the care of the Department of War.

Almost exactly halfway between the opening of the new Colossus and its adornment with "the New Colossus," another poem was authored, this one by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Almost certainly, Aldrich was not consciously responding to Lazarus, who had by then been dead eight years; but his "Unguarded Gates" takes an altogether more cynical view of those "huddled masses" flooding into New York Harbor:

WIDE open and unguarded stand our gates,
Named of the four winds, North, South, East, and West;
Portals that lead to an enchanted land
Of cities, forests, fields of living gold,
Vast prairies, lordly summits touched with snow,
Majestic rivers sweeping proudly past
The Arab's date-palm and the Norseman's pine
A realm wherein are fruits of every zone,
Airs of all climes, for lo! throughout the year
The red rose blossoms somewhere - a rich land,
A later Eden planted in the wilds,
With not an inch of earth within its bound
But if a slave's foot press it sets him free.
Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage,
And Honor honor, and the humblest man
Stand level with the highest in the law.
Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed,
And with the vision brightening in their eyes
Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.

Between them, these two poems give expression to a dialectic that continues to resonate today; one which, fittingly, has several dimensions and one to which I shall return otherwhen.

F is for ... Freedom.

Freedom - liberty - is a fundamental ideal of the United States, and indeed of most modern democracies. Philosophically, this reflects the considerable influence of the 17th Century English political philosopher John Locke, whose natural law arguments stemmed from the axiomatic assertion that Man in Nature is free. The preamble of the U.S. Constitution explicitly references this “self-evident” truth, and many of us today would accept it readily enough. We know, of course, that people don’t enjoy perfect freedom in the real world; but - and this is important - most of us consider this to be the result of unfair practices: discrimination, oppression, and so forth. Most of us can also readily identify persons whose liberties we feel properly ought to be infringed upon; the concept of social justice spares us the burden of hypocrisy in doing so. Locke and later social contract theorists defined social justice variously, but in each case the function of social justice is to delineate the circumstances under which freedoms can be compromised and the nature of that compromise.

One of the major philosophical divisions regarding the proper limits of the social contract hinges on the definition of liberty. One camp focuses primarily on positive liberty - that is, the “freedom to” perform some action. Another emphasizes negative liberty - the “freedom from” restrictive influences. Both aspects were represented in the famous “Four Freedoms” enunciated by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, freedom from want.” It can be seen that the positive liberties thus identified are far more modest than the negative liberties. The positive freedoms are limited to what people can say and believe, liberties that prove in practice very difficult to infringe upon in any case - easier, perhaps, to criminalize and punish after the fact, although in practice such an approach generally only draws attention to its own inadequacy, as with the fatwa declared against Salman Rushdie for his authorship of The Satanic Verses. By contrast, the negative freedoms outstrip the scope of those freedoms guaranteed U.S. citizens under the Bill of Rights, and purport to promise the supply of every human need - an aim that could fairly be described “ambitious,” and one which led to the drafting of a far more sweeping assertion of rights: the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) that was Eleanor Roosevelt’s lasting contribution to global society. Whether the existence of UDHR makes the negative liberties invoked as rights more achievable or reasonable is, perhaps, a valid question. Regardless, the emphasis on negative liberty is a hallmark of modern liberal political philosophy - the focus on positive liberty, by contrast, is the cornerstone of libertarianism and associated with the minarchist tendencies of the political Right.

My own approach to the question is along libertarian lines, and takes a lead from Locke’s own emphasis on property rights - the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution slightly bowdlerizes Locke’s original triad of “life, liberty, and property,” perhaps unsurprisingly given the sensitivity of the slavery issue as evidenced by the abhorrent “three-fifths compromise.” I’m also much influenced, here as elsewhere, by the pragmaticism of Charles Peirce: in the context of personal freedom, this manifests as a requirement that any freedom I claim be a freedom I can actually meaningfully enjoy in the context of my everyday life. Along these lines, I define freedom to be, specifically, the freedom to dispose of property according to my own will. The implication of free will is another nod to Peirce: if everything I do is predetermined, then I have no freedom in practice; I can only do what I am ordained to do, and whatever property I have is an accident and no more mine than I am mine own. I find this a miserable as well as an unnecessary philosophy, and have besides several reasons for believing that I, as a rational actor, make praxeological choices with my life.

Freedom should not be something that is given to me by somebody else: if I am free on sufferance only, then I am not free at all. Therefore, freedom must start within me - within my own willed actions. The first thing I am able to influence by my own will is my own body: thus, the beginning of property is the physical self, and all other property is obtained and secured through that self. Everybody who has a physical self that they can subject to their will is thereby made free to that extent; insofar as there are variations in the amount and security of property in each individual’s possession, there are also degrees of freedom individuals can enjoy. The person who controls most property - by which I mean, a person whose willed interactions with the world influence the most material entities in that world - is, by this measure, the most free. I’ll explore the implications of that argument, particularly in the context of the conflicting views of property expressed by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx, in a future blog.

This conception of positive liberty sets the stage for a vision of society compatible with the one laid out by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan - bella omnium contra omnes, a “war of all against all,” in which each individual strives against his fellows for a greater share of finite resources in the pursuit of greater personal liberty. Hobbes’ gloomier perspective on the natural state of Man, compared with that of Locke, provides a different rationale for the social contract: rather than being a natural expression of freedoms that Man enjoys with or without that contract, for Hobbes the social contract is an essential tool for protecting the individual from his society. In this way, it can be seen how unchecked positive liberty creates a need for negative liberty; there is, in fact, a dynamic between the two. At one extreme, positive liberty is unfettered by any structural constraint: de facto anarchy obtains, and the strongest thrive - a scenario Darwinians should find familiar. At the other extreme, the totalitarian state protects the citizen so thoroughly from the expression of their neighbor’s willed desire to curtail her freedom that she is left with no freedom to curtail. Neither extreme is stable - the powerful establish order out of anarchy, and the totalitarian state destroys its own legitimacy as it disempowers its citizenry. Each state of affairs - each thesis - creates an opposing condition - an antithesis. The tension between positive and negative liberty thus constitutes a Hegelian dialectic, in which the embrace of one idea cultivates a contrarian embrace of the other.

Equilibria can be envisaged, and indeed examples of such can be found in the real world, wherein either positive or negative liberty has the ascendancy. It is in the nature of a Hegelian dialectic that no equilibrium remains in perpetuity; the balance is constantly, if gradually, shifting. Giambattista Vico proposed a view of history as cyclical that is consistent with Hegel’s dialectical materialism, and consistent with a view of liberty as the product of competition between evenly-matched actors for finite resources.

Where exactly the equilibrium is now; where it is trending, and how fast; and what this might mean for us as citizens, are all questions worth considering.