Citizens are free when they see and respect their dependence on each other. They can best continue to do what they know to be the right thing if they are committed to political self-rule. Ukraine’s spirited defense of itself is a shining example of this kind of freedom. Ukrainian defiance has shaken many people across the world from their complacency and cynicism.

Last weekend, five of us from Wyoming Catholic College led seminars at the First Things Intellectual Retreat in Phoenix. The theme was “Freedom,” and the participants were of various ages and backgrounds. As the temperature outside climbed into the upper 90s on Saturday, we engaged texts from Thucydides, St. Paul, John Milton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Josef Pieper, and Abraham Heschel in four intense sessions followed by dinner and an informal panel discussion that night. At a follow-up meeting on Tuesday, the Wyoming Catholic College “tutors” (as we were called) traded stories about which groups talked the most or challenged us and which questions or discussions stood out. All of us are grateful to Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, for affording us the opportunity to revisit this perennial and timely theme with fresh eyes.

Occasions like these always bring new insights. I wrote several weeks ago about the readings from Milton and Pieper, but I was struck on Saturday by the arguments of Tocqueville in Democracy in America. His discussion of freedom did not at first register with my own assumptions. I have always understood freedom to mean that (within limits) I get to choose what I’m going to do, whereas a slave or a prisoner does not. Writers in the great tradition of the West provide a further qualifier for the capacity to do what I want. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam tells Eve that “what obeys reason is free,” meaning that free will can choose what presents itself as right and good. If a strong appetite or addiction or some other force, internal or external, compels me to disobey reason, then I have been robbed of my native liberty. I am truly free only when I can actually do what I know to be right.

At first glance, this understanding of freedom seems to make it a matter internal to individuals, but Tocqueville shows that the capacity to choose the right thing is best understood in communal and political terms. Praising the New England townships of early Puritan America, he points out that the citizens made their decisions in common, framing laws, electing those who would govern them, setting taxes, providing for the poor, and in all things looking only to themselves and their own responsibility. These physically unimpressive settlements in the New World enacted self-government in ways that monarchical old Europe could hardly imagine in the 17th century. The definition of freedom that Tocqueville quotes with admiration is from the early governor of Boston, John Winthrop, who distinguishes license from a moral or civil liberty to do what one ought.

Tocqueville’s point in emphasizing the New England townships is not that individuals were free to do anything they wanted—certainly not the image of Puritans that anyone holds. Rather, his concern is that the tendency in the love of equality is toward an isolated individualism in which people withdraw and do what they want without regard for others—an attitude of indifference congenial with despotism. Tocqueville consistently reserves the word “freedom” for active engagement in public life and a concern for the common good that counters isolated self-interest. Citizens are free when they see and respect their dependence on each other. They can best continue to do what they know to be the right thing if they are committed to political self-rule.

Ukraine’s spirited defense of itself is a shining example of this kind of freedom. Ukrainian defiance has shaken many people across the world from their complacency and cynicism. The bold example inspires us here in Lander. Wyoming Catholic College is not an institution with great financial resources, but for the past month, we have been working on plans to help three students at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv come to our campus in Lander for a year. (I will have more to say about this effort in the weeks to come.)

I thought of Tocqueville early Tuesday morning when several of us had a video call with one of UCU’s representatives, a young woman addressing the details of making the announcement to their students. She needed to ask about such things as our English language requirements and the kinds of majors most compatible with our curriculum at Wyoming Catholic. At the beginning of our conversation, she apologized for being a minute or two late because there had just been Russian missile attacks on Lviv, and she had been in a bomb shelter. Earlier that morning, as part of my Lenten reading, I had come upon a sentence about prayer that applied here to freedom: “Mere verbal information is no substitute for what we might call tasted insight.” We think we know something about Ukraine from our reading. But in that young woman’s brave and lovely composure, her deep concern for her students, and her wide smile of gratitude, we saw what a real taste for freedom looks like.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

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