As its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those - whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors - who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our libery in a positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and subsidiary values that help realize opportunity - all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first popularized in Poor Richard's Almanack and that have continued to inspire allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.
These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will - a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstance of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so long as individual men and women are free to purusue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-market economy depend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to these values. The legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which these values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination complement rather than imping on our liberty.
Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communial values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives of family and the cors-generational obligations that family implies. We value community , the neighborliness that expresses itself through raising the barn or coaching the soccer team. We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty and sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves, whether that something expressess itself in formal religion or ethical precepts. And we value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another: honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy and compassion.
In every society (and in evey individual), these twin strands - the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity - are in tension, and it has been on of the blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation's birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its fuedal past. Our passage was eased by teh sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.
But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling parternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of other to do for themselves.
When this happens - when liberty is cited in the defense of a company's decision to dump toxins in our rivers, or wehn our collective interest in building an upscale new mall is used to justify destruction of somebody's home - we depend on the strength of countervailing values to temper our judgement and hold such excesses in check.
Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, that society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to others. . . . .
More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values id difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. . . . But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. . . . .
