The aesthetics of freedom | GUEST COMMENTARY
Join me in a little thought experiment: Imagine yourself standing atop the platform overlooking Grand Central Station in New York City on any weekday afternoon at about 5 p.m. The scene would appear to be an exercise in bedlam. Passengers jostling to get on board their train or rushing to exit the station; each individual acting solely on his or her own behalf as they scurry through the crowd. What looks like Brownian motion, random and chaotic, is in fact as efficient a system of transportation as there is. This crowd may raise the dust and cause a racket as they zig and zag toward their destinations, but don’t let this hustle and bustle fool you. As off-putting as this mad rush may be, to get from here to there, nothing beats it.
American, British and Irish poets in the 1920s and 1930s gathered together with Ezra Pound and wrote admiringly of the fascist Benito Mussolini, of his improvements in Rome’s infrastructure and public services. Indeed, the familiar expression “He made the trains run on time,” first appeared as a caption to an editorial cartoon of Mussolini by Herbert Block in 1941. The irony was that the on-time trains were delivering to Italy Hitler’s Nazi soldiers.
In October 1957, America was chagrined to learn of the successful launch by the Soviets of the Sputnik satellite. This set into motion months of hand-wringing and soul-searching. Walter Lippmann was at the time a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Six days after the launch of Sputnik he penned a column in the Tribune, which later was cited by the Pulitzer committee as among the work that the committee considered as it awarded him a Pulitzer Prize. Here he wondered aloud as to how the Soviets had so surpassed America in the years since World War II. “It must be that there is a large body of Soviet scientists, engineers, and production men, plus many highly developed subsidiary industries, all successfully directed and coordinated, and bountifully financed.”
The Baltimore public at the time was surveyed, having been asked how the Soviets could have achieved such a feat. Twenty-five percent reported that the Soviets worked harder, and an additional 10% pointed out that the Russians are “simply better at this sort of thing.” So, who can compete with this deep pool of talented scientists working together in a system of humming efficiency, benefiting from the coherence and organization that only a socialist government can provide?
Yet here in the fullness of time, we all know what became of Mussolini and his Fascism along with the Nazis he eagerly delivered to Italy on his timely trains. Likewise, many of us are old enough to have seen Neil Armstrong walk the surface of the moon less than 12 years after the launch of Sputnik, and plant on its craggy surface the American flag. What did the poets miss in looking longingly on Rome in the 1930s? Why the fear and consternation in the late 1950s as thought leaders engaged in public handwringing on the Soviet’s early space race success?
Somehow, they looked through the essential ingredient, the sine qua non or without which there is none, of the success of nations. It is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that liberty “is the great parent of science and virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free.”
Mussolini’s Italy, for all its poetic appeal, was oppressive.
Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union was a murderous gulag.
Today we hear little about liberty. Like the doe-eyed poets of 100 years ago or the fretting journalists of 65 years ago, today the ascendant left rarely champions liberty, instead favoring the new idols of fairness, inclusion and social justice. These require an expansive government that seeps into every nook and cranny of our lives. In his Farewell Address, President Reagan warned that “man is not free unless government is limited. … As government expands, liberty contracts.”
There is no Statue of Fairness standing tall in the Hudson River and no Marine landed on Guadalcanal facing withering Japanese machine gun fire to grow in diversity. President Biden frets endlessly about “losing Democracy.” Here again is a head feint. Democracy is the pipe, but liberty is the water. It is liberty that needs preserving.
What we don’t rightly value, we risk losing. The train travelers in Grand Central Station are diverse and fair and equal under the law because they are free.
Dr. Bryan C. Donohue (donohuebc@upmc.edu) is a cardiologist based in Pennsylvania.