The Tension of Order and Freedom in the University

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MODERN AGEA Q U A K T E K L Y R E V I E W

The Tension of Orderand Freedom in the University

UNIVERSITIESE R E FO UNDE D to sustain faithby reason-and to m ainta in ord er in the souland in the commonwealth. My ow n universi-ty, St. Andrews, was established in the fif-teenth century by the Scottish Inquisitor ofHeretical Pravity. to resist the errors of theLollard s, the levellers of t h at ag e. T h e ea r lyuniversi ties teaching imp arted both ord erand freedom to the intellect; an d that w as n oparad ox, for order and freedom exist neces-sarily in a healthy tension.B ut in ou r day, as in various earl ier t imes,ma ny universities have lost any clea r gen eralunderstanding of either freedom or order ,intellectually considered. So it seems worth-whi le to r ev iew here the r e la t ionsh ipbetween ord er and freedom, and the pa rt of au n i v e r s i t y i n m a i n t a i n i n g t h e t en s i o nbetween th e two.Indulg e m e first in som e observations con-cerning the connection between faith, order,and freedom, all of which a re inter twined inuniversity studies. In recent generations,ma ny professors have fai led to app rehe nd theconnection. Le t u s commence with th at p op-ul ar but vague term freedom.Freedom is normal for mankind. I m e a nthat ordered l iberty is natural for trulyhu m an persons. Yet hum an freedom , l ike

much else in human normali ty, is denied atleast as often a s it is affirmed.T h e word normal does not really mea naverage or gen erally accepted: i t meansendur ing s tandard. Human beings havethe power ei ther of observing the norms ofthei r nature , or of violating the m . So i t is thatthe periods of true social freedom, through-out the course of history, have been shorterthan the periods of servi tude. Men andwomen have the privilege and the peril ofchoosing the life they will lead. M u c h of the

time, in ages past as today, men have usedtheir moral freedom to choose slavery oranarchy instead of ordered liberty.Living as we Americans do in a nat ion stillsubstantial ly free, and perhaps a t th e end ofwh at h as been called the l iberal era, m anyof us take for granted a degree of freedomwhich has been bestowed upon us by thepainfu l lab ors and experiences of o u r ances-tors, over m an y generations-and wh ichma y be ruine d in the space of a few years, byfolly or neglect. Freedom al ready has van-ished from muc h of the modern w orld, an d inmany lands it never took root. Unless weunders tand the or igins and ends of ou r l iber-ty, we Americans m ay learn w hat i t is to losefreedom in a fit of absence of mind . And if the

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nature of f reedom is misun ders tood in theuniversities, it will be misunder s toodeverywhere.As I read his tory , i t seems to me that ahigh degree of ordered, civi lized f ree do m isl inked closely with rel igious belief . Mostl iberals of the eighteenth an d nineteenthcenturies we re will ing enough to agree th atthere exis ted some connection betweenliberty and property. Yet many of thoseliberals ignored or denied the bond betweenreligious fai th and ordered freedom. Welearn from history that we learn nothingfrom history, Heg el wro te, in irony. If thegreat troubles of our time teach mankindanything, surely we ough t now to recognizethat tru e freedom cannot en dur e in a societywhich denies a t ranscendent order . A univer-sity that ridicules the claims of the t ran-scendent must end wi thout in te l lectualcoherence-and wi tho ut ge nu ine intellectu alfreedom.T h e first people to be freed from thespir i tual bondage of the ancient empireswere the Hebrews. I t was consciousness oftheir duty and their hope as children of G odwhich gave them resolution to withsta nd thelife-in-death of the grea t nations that s ur -rounded them.A degree of personal freedom still higherwa s achieved by certain Gre ek peoples in thesixth and fifth centuries before Christ. Thisnoble freedom decayed when the old Greekreligion and mo rality gave way to sophistry,and the rude son might s tr ike the fatherdead. T h e genius of Socrates , Plato, an dAristotle did not suffice to restore the Gree kfreedom of spirit an d law , once belief in thedivine orderin g of thin gs ha d dissolved.Among the Romans, freedom endured solong as the high old R om an virtue prevailed:so long as the Roman piety moved men, thediscipline s of labor, pietas, fatum. Yet ou t ofthe ruins of Rome grew the highest orderof liberty man has known: Christian free-dom. T h e depressed masses of the proletar iatwe re given hope by the p rom ise of C hrist; thebarbarians were taught restraint by theWord. Humanity learnt the lesson of thesuffering servant, and cam e to know that theservice of God is perfect freed om .Medieval l ibert ies, in great pa rt , were the

produ ct of Ch ristian belief. T h e rights of thetowns, the independence of the guilds, thecode of chivalry-these aro se ou t of faith inwhat Burke was to call the contract ofeternal society.So mo der n freedom i s not th e recent crea-tion of a few enthusiastic revolutionaries.Ra the r, it is a heritag e laboriously developedin suffering. Freedom cannot endure unlesswe are wi l l ing to nur ture that re l ig iousunde rstandin g which is i ts sanction, unlessw e main tain the springs of ordered l iberty. I ti s wor th remarking that the nineteenth-century ideology of liberalism generallyignored its religious sources. Some of these

liberals, deficient in understanding of thesources, thoug ht of freedo m as wholly secularand ut i l i tar ian, man-made. Others thoughtof f reedom a s a political abstraction, unre-lated to religious concepts or to ancientusages. Both these liberal views have beenhostile toward the Christian idea of theperson under God. Such liberalism hasdominated the universities for a century an dmore-and not sta te unive rsities merely.

In these closing decades of the twentiethcentury , when m ost of the w orld is subject toarb itra ry dominations, i t is the u rgent duty ofthe university to restore a n app rehension ofth e sources of freedom. Even a mo ng a peoplewho boast of their liberty, freedom may belost at the moment of its seeming triumph.Stand upon the Acropolis of Athens, or onthe Roman Capi tol ine, or on the Rock ofAthena at Agrigento, and look upon theruins. T h e materia l splendor of those soci-et ies was at i ts height not long before thecollapse of fai th a nd l iberty. I n the nam e ofdemocracy, of eq ua lity , of social justice, it ispossible to overturn speedily the genuineord er an d just ice and freedom of moderncivilization. And that house fell; and greatw as the fall of tha t house. T h e university-which D an te called on e of the three powersgoverning society, along with church andstate-can ignore the tru e chara cter of free-dom only at the universitys grave peril. Solet me tu rn to some brief observations on therelat ionship between freedom and order ,considered intellectually and socially.Orders and degrees, John Milton says,jar not with liberty, but well consist. I

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believe that we will be una ble, in th e unive r-sity or out of i t , to maintain any successfuldefense of our freedoms until we recognizeafresh those principles of order under whichfreedom in our heri tage acquired real mean -ing. Every right is married to a duty; everyfreedom owns a corresponding responsibili-ty; and there cannot be genuine freedomunless there exists also genu ine ord er, in themoral realm and in the social realm .I am saying this: in any just society, theresubsists a healthy tension be tween the claim sof order and the claims of freedom. Whenthat tension is well m ain tain ed, it is possibleto obtain a large measure of just ice. Thisclear understanding was the principal contr i-bution of Edm und Burk e to political theory;and the attempt to achieve such a tension orbalance is the principal problem of modernpractical politics.Or der , in the mo ral rea lm , is the realizingof a body of tran scend ent norms-indeed ahierarchy of norms or standards-which givepurpose to existence and motive to conduct.O rde r , in society, is the harm onious arrang e-ment of classes and functions which guardsjustice and ob tains wil ling consent to law andensures that we all shall be safe together.Although there cannot be freedom withoutorder , in some sense there occurs always aconflict betwee n the claims of or der a nd theclaims of freedom. Often we express thisconflict a s the comp etition between the de sirefor liberty and the desire for security.Modern technological developments andmodern mass democracy have made thisstruggle more intense. President W ashingtonobserved that individuals entering into asociety mu st give u p a s har e of the ir liberty topreserve the rest. Yet doctrinaires of oneideology or anoth er , in ou r t ime, continue tocry ou t for absolute security, absolu te order;or for absolute freedom, power to assert theego in defiance of all convent ion. Du r in g thepast two decades, this clash was readilyobserved on the typical Am erican ca mp us.I suggest that in assert ing freedom as anabsolute, somehow divorced from order , w erepudiate our heritage of practical libertyand expose ourselves to the peril of abso-lutism-whether tha t absolu tism be wh atTocqueville calls democratic despotism or

what recently exis ted in Germany and nows tands t r iumphant in Russ ia , China , andother countr ies . TObegin with unlimitedfreedom, Dostoevski wrote in The Devils,is to end with u nlim ited despotism.When some people-E. H. C a r r i nEn gla nd, for instance, or David Lil ienthal inAmerica-talk of freed om , they seem tomean, really, material prosperi ty for themany. Now material prosperi ty, pure eco-nomic security, is not the same thing aseither freedom or order . N o r is i t the s amething as happiness . An A thenian s lave mightbe more comfortable than many a freeman,but he was not free.It is quite possible that the person whodesires freedom and the benefits of ordermust be prepared to sacrifice a degree ofsecurity . A slave, in A ristotles definition, is abeing w ho allows others to ma ke his choicesfor him. It is quite possible for a man to bema terially prosp erous, freed from th e neces-sity of choice, and yet servile. It also ispossible that such a man may suf fer nooutrageous personal oppression. But h e mu st

always lack one thing, this servile man, andthat is t ru e manho od, the dignity of man . H eremains a child; he never comes into mansbir thright , which is the pleasure a nd the painof ma kin g ones own choices.Some of these problems of freedom uponwhich I have touched glancingly here areexamined by John Stuart Mill in his essayOn Liberty-a little treatise that ha s don emuch to confuse universities discussion offreedom, from his day to ours. Th er e may befound value in that essay, but I th ink therealso is weakne ss in i t , and peri l ; an d adula-tion of Mill tends to confuse serious discus-sion of th e difficulties of liberty in th e cu rre ntyears of O u r Lord . W e l ive in the twentiethcentury, not the nineteenth, and we nowexperience distresses to which Mill neverwas exposed. Yet Dr. Henry Steele Com-mager, not man y years ago, informed us th atwe cannot too often repair to John StuartMills On Liberty, im plying that this essay,l ike the laws of th e Medes and the P ersians,is immutable. Mill was un aw are of anydifficulty in closely defining liberty--unlike Cicero, who saw the necessity fordis t inguishing between libido a n d voluntas.

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TOM ill , l iberty might m ean doing as o n elikes or pursuing ones own good in onesown way or acting according to ones owninclination and judgm ent.At present, Mills arguments are beingemployed interestingly by persons who pre-tend to believe in an a bsolute freedom tha t n osociety ever has been a ble to maintain-andthis in an age which requires the highestdegree of cooperation, when the great w heelof circulat ion upon which o ur economy ando u r security de pen d necessarily is mo re to ustha n ever before. S uch use of the writing s ofMill-or tho se of a diffe ren t sort of philoso-

p h e r , R o u s s eau - m ay b e en co u n t e r edam ong enthus ias ts of the New Lef t , an d alsoamong some zealots of the libertarianRight. Some of these persons-curiouslyarcha ic in their opinions, al thoug h they pridethemselves upon their preoccupation withrelevance-are oldfangled Be nth am iteliberals, dedicated to economic individu alismin the age of the atomic pile; others (andthese the more ominous) ar e the newfangledcollectivistic liberals, desirous of receivingeverything from the s tate, but insis tent thatthey ow e nothin g in return-not even loyal-tY.So my general argument is this: liberty,prescriptive freedom as we Americans haveknown i t , cannot endure wi thout order . O u rconstitutions were established that ordermight make possible true freedom. Despiteall ou r American talk of private jud gm ent,dissent , and individualism, s ti ll o ur nationalcharacter has the s tam p of a respect for orde ralm ost superstitious in its pow er: respect forthe mo ral order ordained by rel igion, an d forth e prescriptive political form s tha t we , mo rethan any other people in this twentieth cen-tury, have ma intained l i tt le al tered. W ewould work immense mischief to our free-dom i f we ceased to respect our establishedorder , runn ing instead after an abstract ,Jacobin liberty.W h a t is deficient in the thought of Milland his disciples, it seems to m e, is a nadequate understanding of the principles oforder . Firs t , any coherent and beneficialfreedom, surely, must have the sanction ofmoral order: it must refer to doctrines, reli-gious in orig in, that establish a hierarch y of

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values and set bounds to the ego. Second, an ycoherent and beneficial freedom must knowthe check of social ord er: it mu st accord witha rule of law, regular in its operation, thatrecognizes and enforces prescriptive rights,protects minorities against majorities andmajori t ies against minorit ies , and givesmeaning to the concept of h um an dignity.Freed om a s an abstraction is the l iberty inwhose na m e crimes are committed. But free-dom, as realized in the separate, limited,balanced, well-defined rights of persons andgroups, operating through historical devel-opment wi thin a society moved by moralprinciples, is the quality which makes itpossible for me n an d wom en to become fullyh u m an .T h es e things have been said often before.But every grand question has to be arguedafresh in every generation-especially in th euniversi ties . W e need , I repeat , to refreshthe und erstandin g of freedom even amo ngthe learned, o r perh aps especially am ong thelearned.

F o r w h e n m a n y p e o p l e , p r o f e s s o r sinclud ed, employ nowad ays this word free-dom, they use it in the sense of the Fre nchRevolutionaries: freedom from tradit ion,from established social institutions, fromreligious doctrines, from prescriptive duties.O n e think s of Rob ert Lo uis Stevensons littleexercise in mockery, The Four Reform-ers: Four reformers met under a bramblebush. The y were all agreed that the worldmu st be change d. W e m ust abolish prop-erty, said one.We must abolish marriage, said thesecond.W e m ust abolish G od, said the third.

I wish we could abolish work, saidthe four th .DO not let us get beyond practicalpolitics, said the first. T h e first thing is

to reduce men to a com mo n level. T h e first thing, said the second, is togive freedo m to th e sexes.The first thing, said the third, (is tofind ou t how to do it. T h e first step, said the first, is toabolish the Bible. T h e first thing, said the second, is to

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abolish the laws.abolish mankind. T h e first thing, said the third, is to

This mood is what Santayana mordantlycalled freedom from the consequences offreedom, confo undin g nihilism with libera-tion. For we do not l ive in an age that isoppressed by the dead weight of archaicestablishments a nd obsolete customs. T h eperil in our time, rather, is that the founda-tions of the great deep will be broken up , andthat the sw ift pace of alteration w ill ma ke itimpossible for g enera tion to link with gener-at ion. Our era, necessari ly, should be whatMatthew Arnold called an epoch of concen-tration. Or, at least , the thinkin g American,in the university as ou t of it , needs to tu rn histalents to concentration, th e reconstruction ofour m oral an d social her i tage. T h is is an agenot for anarchic freedom, but for orderedfreedom.T h er e survive older and s tronger conceptsof freedom than th at proclaimed by the Jaco-bins; and more consistent concepts than tha tof Mill. I n Christ ian teaching, freedom issubmission to the wil l of G od. T h is is noparadox. A s he wh o would save his l ife mus tlose it, so the person w ho desires true free-dom must recognize an order that gives al lfreedoms their sanction. Th i s lacking, free-dom becomes at best the liberty of those w h opossess power at the moment to do as theylike with the lives and the property of per-sons whose intere sts conflict wit h the irs.In the Chr is t ian unders tanding, as in theJudaic tradit ion and the Stoic philosophyand in Indic thought, there subsis ts also theconviction that freedom may be attainedthrough abstinence. Not to lust af ter thethings of the flesh, or af ter power , or afterfame: this is true freedom, the freedom ofStilbo confronting the conqueror , or ofSocrates before the A thenian jury . T h is i s thefreedom of Diogenes asking Alexander tos tand out of t h e s u n . T h e m an wh o h as m ad ehis peace with the universe is free, howeverpoor he may be; the m an bent upon gratify-ing his appetites is servile, however rich hemay be. This f reedom f rom des i re , oncetaugh t w ithin universi ties , has a s t range r ingin un iversities of o u r d ay .

Personal freedom mu st be found within amoral order . And publ ic f reedom must befound wi thin a well-maintained social order;i t m ust be the produ ct of a common historicalexpe rience, of custom, of convention. W e livein a n ag e which, for good or ill, ha s come todepend upon the highest degree of coopera-tion an d discipline ever known to civilization.O u r economy, ou r very poli tical s tructure,might not abide for twenty-four hours thetriumph of that absolute liberty of theindividual preached by Lam ar t ine and otherpolitical enthusiasts of the nineteenth cen-tu ry . As S h o n e W eil put i t , Order is thefirst need of all.Within todays university, collectivisticprejudices and libertarian prejudices fre-quently coexist within the same professor,insane conjunction. Both collectivism andlibertarianism are the enemies of orderedfreedom.Once upon a time, the university main-tained authori ty ; indeed, the universi ty wasauthori ty. But today a great many peoplewithin the Academy will submit to noauthori ty, temporal or spi ri tual . T he y des i ret G be diflerent, in m ora ls as in politics. I n o urhighly tolerant society, such ex trem e individ-ual ism seems an amusing pose. Its conse-quences may become unamusing.Against license, anarchy, and chaos, theuniversity w as raised u p , to restrain passionand prejudice through r ight reason. Whatth e university offers to in tellects is disciplinean d order . Thr ou gh such intel lectual orderand discipline, rational liberty of the persona n d of the society is mad e possible. T h i s ist rue of the hum ane an d the social studies; i t isqu ite as tr ue of the physical sciences. T h euniversity is one important response to theuniversal menace of chaos. I think of somesentences written by an English biologist,Lyal l Watson.Chaos is coming, Dr. Watson r emindsus. It is writ ten in the laws of thermody-namics. Left to itself, everything tends tobecome more and more disorderly unti l thefinal an d na tura l sta te of thin gs is a com-pletely random distr ibution of matter . Anykind of order, even that as simple as thear rangement of atom s in a molecule, is unn a-tural an d h appe ns only by chance encounters

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that reverse the general trend. T he se eventsare statistically unlikely, and the furthercombination of molecules into anything ashighly organized as a living organism iswildly improbable. Life is a r a re and unrea-sonab le thing.The continuance of l ife depends on themaintenance of an unstable s i tuation. I t islike a vehicle that can be kept on the roadonly by continual running repairs and byaccess to an endless supply of spare par ts .Life draw s i ts components from the e nviron-ment. From the vast mass of chaotic proba-bility flowing by, it extrac ts only the distinc-tive improbabilities, the little bits of orderam on g the gen eral confusion. Som e of thoseit uses as a source of ene rgy , wh ich it obtain sby th e destructive process of d igestion; fromothers , i t gets the information i t needs toensure cont inued survival . This i s thehardest part , extracting order from disorder ,distinguishing those aspects of the environ-ment that carry useful information fromthose which sim ply contribu te to the overallprocess of decay. Li fe mana ges to do this by asplendid sense of the incongruous. So Wat-son puts this truth in his chapter entitledCosmic Law an d Order .T h e university is m ea nt to assist in lifesstruggle for survival, by extracting orderfrom disorder. Studies in seventeenth-cen-tury l i terature and ancient his tory and q ua n-tum mechanics all are paths to order . Andalso they a re path s to freedom: for the unex-amined life is a servile existence, not worthliving. Th e university is not intended to be astaging-g round for the destruction of or de r inpersonality an d ord er in society; on th e con-trary , the universitys mission (to p ara ph ras eJohn He nry Newm an) is to impar t a philo-sophical habit of mind.M en and women of a philosophical habitof mind are free intellectually. If thei r

influence upon a society is strong, that soci-ety is free politically. Su ch p rivate an d publicfreedom is ma de possible by the o rdering ofmind and conscience. For the university, asfor society gen erally, freedom an d order ar eends of equ al im portan ce, existing at once insymbiosis an d in tension. So it is that w hen auniversity forgets the orde ring and integrat-ing of knowledge, i t impairs the freedom ofthe mind. And then chaos rushes upon us. I nour campus disorders of the Sixties andSeventies, graduate students in the disci-plines of philosophy, humane letters, andhistory were interestingly active in the dis-ruption of classes, the burning of books, andthe harassing of professors-which suggestsou r degree of success, in the typical Americanuniversity, in this ent erp rise of developing aphilosophical habit of mind. Intellectualchaos prom ptly brings on social chaos.O ut of fai th ar ises order; and once orderprevails, freedom becomes possible. Whenthe fai th that nu rtured the order fades aw ay,the ord er dis integrates; an d freedom no m orecan survive the disappearance of order thanthe branch of a tree can outlast the fall of thetrunk. Doubtless there will be technicalschools called unive rsities, in the twenty-firstcentury. Bu t whe ther an y inst itut ions resem-bling genuine universi t ies may be found ahundred years from now-why, like muchelse, that will depend upon whether fidelityto a m un dan e order is sustained by renewedbelief in a t ranscendent order . Meanw hi le ,variou s eminen t professors ar e cleverlyengaged in sawing off the p art icular l imb ofthe tree of learning upon which they areperched; while a few scholars , aw ar e that thedead tree gives no shelter , have grown con-cerne d for the trees pa rched roots.*

*Based on an address at Pepperdine University

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The Tension of Order and Freedom in the University