PHILOSOPHY

JOHN MACMURRAY AND THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM

Philip Hunt, Chairman, Macmurray Society, on 6 February 2001

"No man can compass his own freedom for himself. He must accept it as a free gift from others; and if they will not give it to him he cannot have it. This is the law of freedom." The quotation comes from Macmurray' s Chancellor Dunning Lecture delivered at Queen's University Kingston, Ontario in 1949, and published as Conditions of Freedom. This Law of Freedom implies that we cannot fight for freedom without risking the loss of initiative to our adversary and thereby putting our own freedom at risk. "We of the West, who have advanced so far and grown so powerful, often at the expense of the rest of mankind, have now to learn that freedom is not our private possession. .One thing we need. is the ability to see ourselves as only a part of a society which is universal, and, in our freedom, as the trustees of a possession which belongs of right to all men. We can preserve our freedom now only by sharing it."

Freedom is also put at risk when we allow the craving for security to dominate our action. "At every crisis we are faced with a free choice between freedom and security. If we choose security, and make that our aim, we lose freedom, and find in the end that security eludes us. ..If we choose freedom, we may find the security we do not seek, though of this there is no guarantee; yet it is the only path that offers promise of security." The speaker himself found these arguments convincing; but recognised that the Law of Freedom appears to be advocating a course of action that the more sceptically minded might find too good to be true. To strengthen the case, he sought two further arguments from other sources: one from history, the other from Games Theory.

History. What was needed was to examine cases in which the Law of Freedom (or something similar) had been applied, and to appraise the result. He suggested that what was wanted might be found

in the early history of the Quaker settlement in Pennsylvania from 1675 onwards. Penn's Liberty of Conscience was, in several respects, similar to Macmurray's Law of Freedom. Both were reciprocal and open-ended, in a way in which the Puritan concept of ordered liberty, for example, was not. Consequently, Penn was able to conclude a peace treaty with native Americans on terms of equality and mutual trust. According to Voltaire, it was the only treaty between Indians and Christians which was never sworn to and never broken. Secondly, the Quakers realised early on that slavery had denied to others the personal freedoms which they themselves had left for America to establish for themselves. It took time to bring everyone in the colony round to that frame of mind; but in 1751 they celebrated the Jubilee of their Charter of Privileges by commissioning a Great Quaker Bell, with an inscription (drawn from Leviticus) "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof" In 1758, Yearly Meeting recorded a `unanimous concern' against the `practice of buying, selling, or keeping slaves for term of life.' This was the first success for abolition anywhere in the Western world.

Games Theory. The speaker then discussed the computerised Games Theory tournaments devised by the University of Michigan in the 70s, to determine what happens when two or more egotistic participants compete for scarce resources. The results showed conclusively that one strategy, TIT FOR TAT, came out the clear winner over the long period. It was also the simplest, consisting of two rules only: (1) for the first move, apply the Golden Rule; (2) thereafter, repeat your opponent's last move. A noted scientist said of TIT FOR TAT: "once established in a sea of competitors, it emerges as the only strategy in town. It is the kind of biologic logic that one might expect to emerge by natural selection in the course of evolution." TIT FOR TAT was founded on the real experiences of the combatants in the trench warfare of World War I, where each side, wholly independently of the other, devised a method of reducing casualties by ritualising warfare. Freedom for both sides was thereby hugely increased. However, it cannot be claimed to have substantiated the truth of the Law of Freedom. For that, much more research needs to be done. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

Philip Hunt