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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
For civil libertarians -- like myself -- war is a time for some harsh reevaluation.
Nov 2, 2001 | Civil libertarians can be so smug. I should know. I am one. Or, I have professed to be one until now. Proudly, as it happens. Haughtily even. "I'm with the good guys," I told myself. "Not the theocrats. Not the anarchists. Just the right on, straight shooting, Bill of Rights toting crowd."
Not anymore. Now it seems I'm with the sticklers, the devils who revel in the details, the litigious brake-slammers every American is learning to hate. That is to say, I'm still a civil libertarian, but I'm not always so proud of it anymore. And, if we're honest with ourselves, none of us should be.
The reason is very simple. Freedom begets evil.
They didn't tell you that one in civics class, did they? It's not exactly the sentiment you feel when you're standing on the field of dreams, or in the bleachers -- as so many (including President Bush and Mayor Giuliani) were Tuesday night at Game 3 of the World Series -- listening with rapt joy to the chorus of "God Bless America" being sung by one of New York's finest on behalf of New York's bravest. It's not the visceral charge that stiffens the proverbial hairs on your neck, or the throat-lumping gratitude that jerks a few unwitting tears from your peepers. Nope. In fact, the flip side of freedom, or as Henry James might have put it, the figure buried in freedom's carpet, never even occurs to you at times like this. Probably never at all. It certainly didn't to me.
That is, until things got critical in the last two months. Now the question of civil liberties has run smack up against that other vexing national concern, public safety, in very much the same way that it did during World War II with Japanese-Americans, and during the red scare, with communist Americans. But this time we're determined to have learned our lesson.
We're not going to turn into a police state overnight just because there may actually be terrorists lurking under any bed. We're not going to haul people off the streets never to be seen again. We're not going to shirk due process in the name of operation expeditious justice, just so that we can keep our paranoid hands on more than a thousand of those supposed material witnesses and immigration violators we've rounded up (but still haven't been able to finger) since Sept. 11. We're not going to pass an anti-terrorism bill that allows the government to do practically everything from analyze our excrement to voyeurize our epistolary romances via the lovely euphemistic "emailer daemon."
But, of course, we already have. And noted civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff have been right to object.
But, in times like these, it isn't quite that easy -- which, indeed, is what brings us back to the question of how it's possible for a patriot like me (yes, I'm not afraid to admit it) to say, in all honesty, that while lady liberty might have a nice Roman nose, she's also got a little pointed tail concealed beneath her cloak.
As any of you who took Philosophy 101 will remember all too well, there is a famous "problem" that thinkers throughout the ages have sought to solve rhetorically, if not practically: The problem of evil. You'll also remember that it presents the inquiring mind with the seeming paradox that if God is omnipotent as well as benevolent, how can he allow evil to exist in the world?
Now, you can see, I expect, why this question may be cropping up in the agora these days, especially since the terrorists, with whom we are presently confronted, claim to be doing the will of God when they murder people. Now the most common solution to this problem offers free will as the explanation for why and how evil could persist in a benign creation. God gave us free will, and sometimes we choose to do evil instead of good. And this, alas, makes freedom and evil into bedfellows. Free will is what makes for evil in the cosmic sense, but, as it turns out, it's also what makes for evil in free societies.
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