A Poet’s Plea: Love Liberty for You and Your Fellows

Before politics, we must first love liberty as a hopeful virtue burning within each of us

by Joey Clark

[dropcap size=small]L[/dropcap]iberty is a labor of love; an integral part of the pleasurable pain one finds when struggling for the best life has to offer unencumbered by the arbitrary whims of authority. That is, liberty is an innate part of our individual existence, antecedent to any community or its government. We are each faced with the prospect of choosing our life’s course no matter our given station.

But this is not to say we enter into the world on a thoroughly equal footing. We, of course, each have our own unchosen abilities and maladies–in many ways inequality is the rule of human existence–but once our stories begin we are, indeed, all equally called upon to face our life’s realities through the strength of our focus, the prudence of our decision, and the fire of our passion.

Alternatives are bountiful. There is no need to actively go down to the crossroads or constantly search out forking paths; given our volition, given that we seem to have no choice but to choose, they present themselves to us every day unsolicited. The shadows of an uncertain future come to darkly adorn the light’s edge of our consciousness. And into these shadows we must carry forth not only the light of our logic but our burning passions, hoping our heat will create more light.

Thus, simply acknowledging the fact of our innate liberty is not enough. No, our future liberty cries out from the shadows for more than our logic in defense of its rule or our propitiation in service to its ideal.

It cries out for creative action. It cries out for self-leadership and innovation. But mostly it cries out for our love–for a love of life whose zeal will make most earthly authorities blush in the wake of our impudence as we seek out our happiness and fight to enshrine our natural liberty as law.

I say this rather than simply define liberty in the negative–as “non-aggression”–because I prefer to express outright what the principle of non-aggression presumes: liberty is a positive attribute, an innate part of what it means to be human.

Your life is, indeed, your life.

“Non-aggression” most certainly is the correct position given the question of what standard should govern relations between free peoples. But do we not already find our liberty beating in our chests as we hope to achieve this standard in law? Do we not already hold fast to our liberty as something real and enduring in spite of the world’s all too real tyrannies? Do we not already carry our liberty as a mighty shield of justice in spite of a maelstrom of fear, envy, and coercion promulgated by governments and domineering people? Do we not already love liberty even in the face of a salty sea of political heart breaks sweeping over the shores of our communities?

In a word: yes!

I do love liberty and will continue to do so even at my own peril.

As the song says, “there comes a time in every man’s life when he gets tired of fooling around” and my fooling around–at least in terms of my political philosophy–ended five years ago when I became a fool in love with liberty, devoted to the principle that each of us possesses that anarchic spark of life known as our individual freedom.

But being in love–whether with a person or an idea–is not without its agony. Once devoted to a person or a cause you become vulnerable, blinded in a way to the perils of one’s leap into the unknown, or if not blinded, resolved that the journey is worth the perils, worth any potential heartbreak.

And in my darkest hours, when forlorn in the face of the heartbreak of our American politics as I watch people in the name liberty trample upon liberty right and left, I can only think of music and poetry to sooth the seething caged animal of my pain and disappointment. As the last lines of Wilde’s “Roses and Rue” say:

Well, if my heart must break,

Dear love, for your sake,

It will break in music, I know,

Poets’ hearts break so.

But strange that I was not told

That the brain can hold

In a tiny ivory cell

God’s heaven and hell.

I allude to this not in a sappy way, not simply as a means of sweet solace, but as an alternative to politics, as a means of sharing the spirit of liberty without the specter of passing political power struggles destroying our hopes for the future. Christopher Hitchens once took it upon himself to remind us of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s claim:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

What Hitchens meant by this reminder was to celebrate the power of poetry to influence world events and foresee “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present” in opposition to the banality and violence of tyrants. As Hitchens puts the matter in a lecture on the subject:

“Now the sword, as we have reason to know and it’s an old cliché, is often very much mightier than the pen…in a real fight you’d rather have a sword than a pen. However, there are things that pens can do and that swords definitely cannot. And every tank, even every tank…has a crucial flaw in its design: its driver is the crucial flaw in that design. And suppose we imagine that that driver has recently read something good or has a decent song or a good poem in his head. Imagine that and everything becomes imaginable and not just romantically.”

Hitchens is right to say the pen can do what the sword cannot. He who speaks to the enlightened heart of man may very well win the day against he who speaks to the glands, the stomach, or the libido for power over others. And in the context of loving liberty, the key here is appealing to spirit of man’s liberty just as preachers appeal to the spirit of man’s religion, as Alexis de Tocqueville might say, by speaking to man’s hopeful virtues. Now, in this theme of poets being “hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration” able to inspire or at least foresee the calamity of losing hope in man’s better nature, allow me to turn to another work of poetry by Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach.”

Bemoaning the loss of faith in the world, Arnold paints a picture of the future without such a hopeful virtue. However, I believe Arnold’s portrait applies not just to the loss of faith but also to the loss of another hopeful virtue, liberty. Let it be said, without liberty we must admit to each other:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Without a love of liberty and laws to respect it, the world is a heavy lift. A power struggle of all against all where “ignorant armies clash by night.”

You see, though “liberty lover” is a term often bandied about in the political area, allow me to suggest it as more than just a political label. We can have hope in man’s spirit if not man’s politics. For, liberty is latent and waiting to bloom in each person, and to love one’s life begins with seeing the immense potential our natural liberty provides us, especially separate from the trappings of the given day’s politics. Imagine again, a tank operator or head of state or the average voter who has heard a good song or poem instill with a hope for man’s freedom. More than any appeal at the ballot box, such music can soothe the savage beast and knock him off his feet with the power of the pen.

Liberty is a cause much bigger than Ron or Rand Paul or any other political leader. Liberty is even more important than regurgitating the arguments of the great intellects that came before us–Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, etc. Though I, of course,  think the liberty movement would be much better off if people could somehow download an understanding of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State overnight rather than simply donning a “Stand with Rand” t-shirt, I now believe the task of moving liberty onwards and upwards has less to do with downloading content and more to do with uploading the poetic, “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”

To love liberty is a way of life that seeks more than merely following this or that politician, this or that movement icon. No, to be a liberty lover is to truly love your fellows just as much as your ideals–even those fellows who may spit in your face, mock you, or stamp the boot of power on your neck.

So, join the world family of brothers and sisters bound by our equal cause of advancing liberty. My suggestion: look to fall in love and inspire hope more than looking to win an argument or a political contest.