“It Takes a Village”—Another Look

Passionate, well-informed people differ because we are human. We deal with differing interpretations of history, we emphasize different facts, we have differing needs we use public dialog to support and re-enforce. One hesitates, as one should, to swing around absolutes like “truth” and “evil” as clubs against those who think differently. As humans, we can guarantee ourselves to be mistaken, ill-informed, and blindingly biased some of the time. Humility is in order.

My way of looking at the world is the way of Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958):

Pluralism, with the measure of “negative” liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of “positive” self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind.

“Negative” liberty doesn’t say people are equal. They are different. They should be free to realize their full potential, insofar as one can without taking away from someone else’s full potential. In politics, recognizing “negative” liberty means one person, one vote. In economics, it’s the capitalism that frees each to build one’s own business. Billions with the power to act freely makes the world prosperous and peaceful.

“Positive” liberty begins with wrongs the collective must right on behalf of classes of sufferers. It’s what kings and popes did then. It’s what ruling elites do now. Parents don’t raise children. Villages do. Recognizing the right of outsiders to play a role in raising the next generation—a role possibly outside that which the parents themselves want—is the key first step to collective rule, to elite rule on behalf of us. “Villages” may seem benign. They aren’t always so.