Statement by Dr. Mary Ann Glendon

Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University

My assignment to discuss the passages of the Holy Father's speech dealing with freedom and moral truth is something like the task that a history teacher once gave to little Linus in the comic strip Peanuts. Imagine Linus staring at a piece of paper that says: "Explain World War II. You may use both sides of this page." So I beg your indulgence in advance for certain sacrifices of nuance.

In the speech we have gathered here to discuss, Pope John Paul II pays eloquent tribute to the "quest for freedom" which he describes as "one of the great dynamics of human history." He affirms "a legitimate pluralism of forms of freedom," yet cautions that the banner of freedom is often raised over activities that are destructive of the liberty of individuals and nations.

The question arises, then: how can one recognize authentic forms of freedom? In the paragraphs upon which I have been asked to comment, the Pope suggests that one hallmark of genuine freedom is that it has a "moral structure," and "inner 'logic'" that is "ordered to the truth." But we moderns know that freedom and truth are notoriously elusive, so that leads to another question: how does one reconcile plurality of freedoms with the notion of objective truth?

Let us begin with the idea of legitimate pluralism. The existence of multiple conceptions of freedom is a fact that often escapes notice in international gatherings. It was quite striking at the recent Beijing Conference, for example, how many of the participants seemed to believe they were communicating with one another in a kind of Esperanto of human rights -- as though by divine dispensation the ordinary obstacles to cross cultural communication had been somehow suspended for two weeks. But if one listened closely, it was clear that words like "rights" and "freedom," were being used in vastly different senses by various participants.

It is easy to see how the illusion of a universal language takes hold. In the contemporary world, the "longing for freedom" most commonly finds expression in the language of rights. And since 1948, the nations of the world have been committed to the idea that certain basic rights are universal. But now that idea has taken root, we seem to be in the presence of a phenomenon something like what language teachers call "false friends." All of us can remember when we began studying foreign languages how grateful we were for the existence of cognates. But no sooner does one discover those friendly words that mean the same thing in two languages, than one encounters the treacherous "faux aims"--words that sound the same, but have different meaning (sometimes quite embarrassing to the speaker!).

Not only do parties to contemporary debates often mean quite different things by rights, but they often have very different understandings of what freedom is. And if you dig a little deeper, you will usually find different assumptions about the nature of the human person.

Take the two main forms of political discourse that are currently used at the transnational level in the world today. We may call them the libertarian and the dignitarian dialects.

As early as the 18th Century, there was already a discernible divergence within the common horizon of modern thinking about rights. The Anglo-American tradition has long emphasized political and civil liberties, framed as "negative rights" (i.e. restraints on governments), while countries influenced by the Romano-Germanic tradition have typically accompanied those political and civil rights with certain positive obligations on the part of the state toward citizens, and on the part of citizens toward each other.

In the wave of constitution-making and international human rights activity that followed World War II, there were marked differences between older, more libertarian ideas about rights, and the way rights were formulated in the newer post-1945 national constitutions and supranational instruments. To be sure, these differences are ones of degree and emphasis, but that does not diminish their importance. Indeed, the spirit of these differences penetrates every corner of the respective legal systems and infuses the surrounding cultures.

The main points of contrast can be briefly summarized. Rights discourse of the type commonly found in countries influenced by Anglo-American traditions confers its highest priority upon individual freedom from governmental constraint. In these systems, rights tend to be formulated without mention of their limits, their relation to responsibilities, or to other rights. Freedom, in such a context, has a procedural framework, but lacks an explicit normative structure. I emphasize "explicit" because much was left unsaid in older constitutions. Eighteenth century statesmen took much for granted. That left legitimate libertarian freedoms vulnerable to deformation when what was left unsaid began to be forgotten.

The dignitarian rights language that one finds in, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in several postwar constitutions, and in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, is characterized by a more nuanced treatment of freedom and responsibility. Rights are envisioned not only as protected by fair procedures, but as grounded in a normative framework based on human dignity. Specific rights are typically formulated so as to make clear that they are related to one another, that certain groups as well as individuals have rights, and that political entities, as well as citizens, have responsibilities.

Underlying these different concepts of rights and freedom are somewhat different notions about the person who is endowed with rights and freedoms. Within the libertarian tradition, the rights-bearer tends to be imagined as an independent, autonomous, self-determining being. Dignitarian personhood also pays tribute to the uniqueness of each individual, but recognizes that we are constituted in important ways by and through our relations with others. As the Second Vatican Council put it: "By his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential" (GS, 12).

Let me give you two examples of these contrasting anthropologies. U.S. Supreme Court justices have said on more than one occasion that the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men" is "the right to be let alone." That idea, which would sound very strange in many parts of the world, belongs to an entirely different universe of discourse from the German Constitutional Court's repeated emphasis that: "the image of man in the Basic Law is not that of an isolated, sovereign individual. On the contrary, the Basic Law resolves the tension between the individual and society in favor of coordination and interdependence with the community without touching the intrinsic value of the person." Many practical effects of these contrasting anthropologies can be traced in the day-to-day workings of the respective legal systems, especially where laws and policies relating to the family, or to religious associations, are concerned.

One might view both the libertarian and dignitarian traditions as legitimate paths on the journey toward freedom. But each, in its own way, is subject to deformation. As we look around today, skimpy, debased versions of libertarian freedom seem to be advancing at the expense of more complex dignitarian ideas. Among the factors that promote this development at both national and international levels, is the fact that libertarian ideas are so easy to sloganize. They are, one might say, "built to travel" and tailor-made for the "sound bite." Their individualism appeals to men and women "on the way up" in business and government -- the mobile, modernizing, energetic elites who predominate in the "First World" and who constitute a kind of "First World" within the "Third World."

It is cause for concern, I believe, that the ideas about freedom that travel fastest are mere abstractions -- little more that slogans -- that have been detached from the social and political contexts that moderate them in the countries where they have traditionally had their homes. In the United States, for example, a variety of political checks, positive laws, and social customs can and do limit individual liberties. Without such cultural checks, libertarian freedom can quickly degenerate into mere materialism, self-indulgence, and the crudest of power politics.

That unhappy prospect brings us to the Pope's admonition that: "The basic question which we must all face today is the responsible use of freedom, in both its personal and social dimensions." The danger of confusing freedom with the absence of restraint has been known since ancient times. In its personal dimension, it has been nicely captured in the old saying: "A man has as many masters as he has vices." In public life, when freedoms unravels into license, politics becomes a war of all against all.

But legitimate forms of freedom can also be derailed in ways that are more modern. The Pope mentions, besides utilitarianism, the spreading influence of extreme forms of skepticism and relativism. By denying the existence of any common truths to citizens of all nations can appeal, these belief systems corrode the very foundation of universal rights.

At the core of each of these counterfeit freedoms is a false anthropology. As John Paul II has emphasized from his early philosophical writings on "the acting person" to the present day, it is helpful, when evaluating competing ideas about politics and culture, to search for the conception of the person that underlies them. That search, in the case of debased libertarianism, leads to "radically autonomous man;" in the case of utilitarianism, to "economic man;" and in the case of relativism to "plastic man" -- who, having no nature of his own, can morph into an infinite variety of forms. If you met these people in real life, you would recognize them as a collection of sociopaths, persons suffering from a character disorder!

These newer types of threats to freedom help us to understand why John Paul II stresses that responsible use of freedom requires a concern for truth. As he pointed out in Evangelium Vitae, when freedom is detached from truth "it becomes impossible to establish personal rights on a firm rational basis; and the ground is laid for society to be at the mercy of the unrestrained will of individuals or the oppressive totalitarianism of public authority" (EV, 96).

In other words, if freedom is disconnected from truth, we can no longer have an intelligible cross-cultural debate about how we are to imagine our freedom together on planet Earth. Human rights deliberations would degenerate into cacophony. Human rights declarations would become mere bulletin boards where this or that interest group strives to post its favorite "right "-- with little concern for how it may undermine the conditions for effective freedom. Universal human rights would dissolve into scattered rights of personal autonomy. It does not seem fanciful to think that if these trends prevail, a range of novel sexual liberties might one day become the bread and circuses of modern despots -- the consolation prizes for loss of effective political and civil liberties, and for the denial of economic and social justice.

But the question persists: how can one tell if the quest for freedom is on the right path, given that human access to truth is imperfect, and nearly every proposition about truth and freedom is vigorously contested? By stating that "the inner logic of freedom is fulfilled in man's quest for truth," Pope John Paul II reminds us that truth, like freedom, is the object of a continuing search. It follows that cooperation among the participants in the quest is of crucial importance. Hence the Pope's stress on "the politics of persuasion" and on the notion of a common moral order to which all can appeal. Hence his description of his speech as a meditation on the role of the United Nations. How ironic, if in our age of unprecedented ease of communications, deliberation about the most important questions were to break down? How tragic, if, at the end of this violent century, men and women of different nations were to deny the common humanity that makes it possible to deliberate about the human future?

But dialogue does have conditions. Hence the Pope's insistence on the importance of culture: the moral traditions, the communities of memory and mutual aid, where we first learn self-restraint and respect for others. Hence the Pope's stress on the human person as a creature "endowed with the ability to reflect and the ability to choose" (par. 4). In that vision of the person, there is a strong echo of the American Founders, who in Federalist No. 1 posed the fateful question of whether good government can be established by reflection and choice, or whether the political fate of humanity must forever be determined by force and accident. 

Like the architects of the American democratic experiment, Pope John Paul II puts his faith in the God-given capacity of human beings for reflection and choice. But in the speech we ponder today, he makes explicit what friends of liberty in former times thought they could take for granted: that authentic freedom cannot be uprooted from culture; it cannot be detached from the quest for truth; it cannot be lived without solidarity. As our own troubled century draws to a close, who can doubt that we need to be reminded from time to time of the "eternal golden braid" that links freedom to truth, and all human beings to one another in the family of man and the city of God?