Thoughts on Freedom and Organization
| Autor: | William F. Ogburn |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1948 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Ethics. 58:256-261 |
| ISSN: | 1539-297X 0014-1704 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/290626 |
| Popis: | W E ARE much interested, during these postwar years, in freedom, civil liberties, the bill of rights, the free-enterprise system, governmental controls, the police state, dictatorship, communism, totalitarianism, and democracy. Though these discussions centering around freedom have been voluminous, some aspects of the problem, important for public policy, have seldom been mentioned To see the issue comprehensively we need to ask the question, liberty for whom, and to inquire about the place of freedom in a highly organized society. Freedom is seen in the current discussion as something that affects us alllike the weather. As winter exists for everybody, so the climate of liberty is not for one group only. Thus the war imposed some restrictions on all of us. So in Nazi Germany the curtailment of liberty was general. But the menace of Germany has been removed. What then is it that produces the present concern over our freedom? There is fear that some of the wartime governmental restrictions of a general nature may be revived. The danger, though, to our general liberty does not seem to be sufficiently great to account for the intensity of the discussion. Perhaps the threat is only to the liberty of some group in the population, who, in their agitation, speak of it in general terms. That the problem of liberty may be local and not general like the temperature of the seasons, history testifies, as in the case of Negro slaves before the Civil War. At another time a very large segment of our population, women, were fighting for rights and liberties. The trend toward freedom for children reached its peak in the progressive edution movement in the i920's. The struggle of labor for freedom to bargain collectively and to join unions covered a long period of time up to the Wagner Act. Thus the problem of liberty may be specific as well as general. In fact, there is an advantage in clarity at the present time in thinking of freedom in concrete terms. The advantage of the concrete and specific over the abstract and general may be illustrated from another field. The Eskimos have been characterized by white missionary teachers as lacking in the ability to concentrate and are therefore said to be inferior to whites and more like children. This observation was made from watching Eskimos with their schoolbooks. If an Eskimo had been watched at a seal hole cut in the ice, where he will sit at below-zero temperatures for hours and even days, great concentration would have been remarked-more than the white man would have shown. This error could have been avoided by speaking of a trait like concentration only in terms of a specific situation. Perhaps we may be making a similar error in speaking of freedom and not of special freedoms. Speaking of freedoms in the plural, then, the issue at the present time is not precipitated by slavery, nor are we particularly concerned just now about the freedoms of women, or of children, or even of labor. The peak of interest in |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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