You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.
Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Hollywood lobby group, gave his rendition recently in an interview conducted by Tony Snow on Fox News Sunday.
Valenti argued that, even though certain Hollywood productions may offend us, it is contrary to American values to censor the film studios because “America stands for freedom;” that freedom is what “distinguishes us from the Taliban” and that the struggle in Afghanistan is bringing the difference between a free society and despotism into high profile for the world.
Well, not quite. The Taliban made a mess of life in Afghanistan. No doubt about that. They are tyrants and butchers and ignorant yahoos. But what makes our way of life preferable to their regime is not that we are freer than the Afghanis who lived under their rule. It is what Americans have done with their freedom that is critical, not the degree of freedom we enjoy. Our constitutional liberties provided a framework within which the American people built a society that is the envy of the world. No need for false humility, folks. We are. There isn’t anyone freezing and hiding out in the hull of smelly cargo ships to find a way to sneak into China or Cuba.
But that was not the way it had to be. Americans accomplished great things with their freedom because they were a moral people, a virtuous people. (Whether they still are is another, and serious, question.) Because they were a Christian people. Political liberty permitted the American people’s basic decency, their sense of social justice and entrepreneurial self-discipline to come to the fore. But these character traits were not inborn. They were taught to Americans by their families, their churches and schools, and through a morally uplifting national literature. It is true: there was a time not that long ago when the trashy novels of today would not have seen the light of day. Take a look at Peyton Place, the novel that shocked Americans in the 1950s. Go ahead. You will be surprised. Its sexually explicit scenes are almost – not quite, but almost – mild in comparison to the material that can be found in the book section of the local supermarkets these days.
Without this moral heritage, freedom would have brought an ugly chaos to the United States. Liberty did not lead to license here because Americans were shaped by the values of the Christian West. No one would call for more freedom in a society made up of large numbers of predatory villains. And a look around the world today makes clear that it is not impossible to find oneself in such a society. Consider Rwanda, Haiti and Kosovo. International authorities are seeking a way to bring order to these hot spots, not more freedom. The authorities correctly understand that these countries lack the moral consensus, the inner disciples, upon which a free society must be based.
This is the insight that Chief Justice Story advanced in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), wherein he stated that the “promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being and attributes, and providence of an Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded on moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues; these never can be a matter of indifference in any well ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive, how any civilized society can well exist without them.”
It is what John Adams meant when wrote, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge … would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” And Edmund Burke when he warned, “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
It is what John Courtney Murray meant in We Hold These Truths, where he wrote, “Part of the inner architecture of the American ideal of freedom has been the profound conviction that only a virtuous people can be free. It is not an American belief that free government is inevitable, only that it is possible, and that its possibility can be realized only when the people as a whole are inwardly governed by the recognized imperatives of the universal moral law.”
It is why Murray quoted Lord Action: Freedom is “not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought”; why Murray insisted that “democracy is more than a political experiment; it is a spiritual and moral enterprise. And its success depends upon the virtue of the people who undertake it.”
Jack Valenti should spend some time reading Courtney Murray. It might lead him to consider how the industry he represents is weakening the “moral and spiritual enterprise” that makes the freedom he extols possible.
