Truth, Equality, and the Ideological War on Liberty

This is the first part of a multi-part essay, Hellishly Good Intentions, by Patrick Ross. It explores issues of societal trade-offs between equality and political freedom. 

In previous generations it was always expected that as human history progressed, human societies would become more and more free.

For centuries, this seemed to be the case. As generations passed, medieval and autocratic societies seemed to be giving way to democratic and free societies. The expectations of all those generations seemed to be coming true.

However, as modernism was challenged by postmodernism, questions of what freedom precisely isbegan to confuse the issue. Conflicting ideals of liberty and freedom have frequently muddied the waters of the debate – not that freedom lacks any meaningful definition.

The criteria used by organizations such as Freedom House to determine whether a state is “free” or “unfree” are well-established. They tend to rest between the presence of positive legal protections for varying freedoms and the absence of legal restrictions on them. Human rights-respecting countries tend to be ranked higher than those that do not.

Most rational thinkers recognize this intuitively: countries like Canada, the United States and Britain (among the rest of Western Europe) are more free than countries like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

But according to Thomas R. McFaul, there’s another metric of liberty that is all too often overlooked, mostly because it’s less tangible and more subjective in nature: truth. He argues that societies can be judged on the amount of freedom one possesses to pursue truth.

For the purposes of this essay – as it was for the purposes of McFaul -- “the truth” is defined purely in the eyes of its individual beholder, but it’s important to note that any definition of truth doesn’t necessarily demand that it be factually verified, or even factually verifiable. It could exist in the range anywhere between what is demonstrably factual to what is notdemonstrably counter-factual.

Also for the purposes of this essay, no concrete truth is actually necessary; merely an examination of the means by which truth is pursued, and the extent of the freedom to pursue that truth.

An even more important concept is that of sustainable knowledge. Knowledge – and truth – is only sustainable so long as it can effectively integrate both its objective and subjective qualities, and withstand critical evaluation based on these qualities.

Truths that cannot withstand critical evaluation based on fact are not sustainable. Nor are any truths that cannot withstand critical evaluation based on interpretation. Nor are any truths that must be insulated from conflicting ideas.

As McFaul notes, sustainable knowledge is not possible without the freedom to seek new knowledge and question existing knowledge according to legitimate means of inquiry.

“Freedom is the essential prerequisite that all human communities must possess in order to examine and live by the view of truth that they believe will secure their short-term survival and enhance their long-term potential,” McFaul writes (McFaul, 2010)[1].

It’s on this note that there’s an extreme peril in protecting ideas on truth that oppose liberty. Societies built upon these ideas of truth cannot survive. Protecting them only ensures that they continue to pose a threat to the survival of the society in question. Its absurdity is tantamount to devising a medicine that protects a virus from a body’s immune system. The unsustainable knowledge generated by unsustainable truths becomes a man-made auto-immune illness, destroying society with the very institutions it created to protect itself with.

Keeping with the evolutionary metaphor, if human societies are bodies, then extreme political ideologies are like viruses; they identify a society’s weaknesses, infiltrate it, and use it to ensure their reproduction. In the process, they often destroy the societies they infect.

In order to ensure its own survival, each society must create rules to restrain those who would do it harm. This is an internal factor through which liberty is restrained. There are also external factors. In the context of truth, these external factors are matters of simple, basic fact. These factors combine to create something of an immune system through which the virulent pathologies of extreme ideologies are contained, controlled, and combated. Much like a body fighting off a disease, societies that survive find ways to eliminate extreme ideologies before they can wreak their destructive effects.

Of course, no immune system is perfect. It cannot destroy every illness it encounters. Some illnesses perfectly exploit the weaknesses of the immune system in question, almost ensuring the destruction of the body in question.

Rarely, however, does a body provide as perfect a weakness as political orthodoxies that demand equality at the expense of liberty.

The various threats to liberty come in the form of varying ideas and ideologies that hold different levels of value for liberty, ranging from functional values – valuing liberty only so far as it is a means to an end – to outright contempt. However, the greatestthreat to liberty emerges as a political orthodoxy that grants unequal truth-seeking liberty in the name of “equality”.

At the core of this orthodoxy is an idea more lethal to freedom than any other imaginable: the idea that liberty and equality are incompatible with one another, and that equality is preferable to liberty.

As it pertains to the search for truth, this idea infers that certain truths, and truth seekers, are disadvantaged, and must be granted a mandated equality that ultimately requires that something of a handicap be placed on their more contemporary competitors.

What emerges are institutions that act to benefit these truths and truth seekers at the ultimate expense of others.

According to McFaul, there’s more at stake than simply the liberty of a particular society and its people. There’s actually a social evolutionary element at play. McFaul suggests that societies that effectively contribute to the search for truth survive more often than those that do not.

“Past societies that have contributed the most to understanding and living by the truth have prevailed over those that have not,” McFaul writes (McFaul, 2010)[2].

It goes without saying that they don’t necessarily prevail in form. The Roman Empire no longer exists; nor does Ancient Greece or Ancient Egypt. But the scientific, intellectual and philosophical legacies of each, among others, rest at the very core of modern western society.

But to think in this vein casts all of the contests of history – including those of recent history such as the arms race and the space race – not only as races for political, economic, and social supremacy but also as races for survival.

Some societies out-compete others for survival in a form of cultural natural selection. When one considers the advancements of scientific and medical technology, it may be the final form of natural selection humanity is subject to.

But as these advancements illustrate, humanity has often proven entirely unwilling to submit to the rigours of natural selection. It seems no different pertaining to the cultural variant as to its biological variant.

The laudable – if naive – perspective that cultural equality must come at the expense of liberty has led to the transformation of several cultural institutions to this end. Legal and academic institutions have been molded to meet the purpose of ensuring the cultural survival of truths that are not prepared to peacefully compete with their contemporary competitors.

Legal institutions such as courts of law and Human Rights Commissions have been used to protect extreme religious ideologies from external criticism. This hasn’t merely been attempted at the domestic level; anti-blasphemy resolutions have been attempted at global institutions such as the United Nations that would make it criminal to criticize such ideologies on a global scale.

Academic institutions have become transfixed with ideas of equality. Terrified that they haven’t satisfied demands of ethnic and gender parity, they are opening the doors to extreme grievance-based political ideologies. Degradation of academic standards have offered the prospect of opening the door for theories far more damaging and potentially threatening than these otherwise-largely-benign ideas.

These institutions have thus become the perfect weakness for the virulent pathologies of extreme ideologies to attack.

Contrary to what the apologists of such ideologies would have people believe, these ideologies very much doexist. They exist in the form of religious and political ideologies that will broke no intellectual competition. In order to snuff out such competition, these ideologies have made use of such social institutions against their competitors, in the form of the arbitrary denial of merit to those that do not share a specific agenda, in the form of malicious complaints to legal bodies that utilize varying levels of jurisprudence, and other efforts.

The hijacking of these institutions has turned these illnesses auto-immune.

If this is to be stopped, the case for liberty’s compatibility and the importance of open – but legitimate – intellectual discourse must be made. Those who oppose such open discourse must be stopped at all costs. But before this can be done, western institutions must stop abetting them in the name of “equality”.

[1]Thomas R McFaul. The Future of Truth and Freedom in the Global Village.p 5.

[2]McFaul. The Future of Truth and Freedom in the Global Village. p 1.