Moral freedom, political freedom, classic liberalism, and the role churches played in a meteoric rise in literacy and opportunities among freed slaves were subjects covered in the latest Pearson-Eby Liberty Academy (PELA) lecture delivered by Dr. Rachel Ferguson, Director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University in Chicago. The event was sponsored by the Kansas Policy Institute, owners of The Sentinel, and Ottawa University. A recording of the event is also available.
“Liberalism is about having a system of government, which is set up to protect the freedom of the individual, But that’s not the only kind of freedom that there is. So, for instance, we can distinguish between moral freedom and political freedom,” Dr. Ferguson began.
“In the ancient world, moral freedom was associated with your ability to do what you ought to do. So, in another word, many of us are slaves to things that force us in some way to do things that we actually don’t want to do. We might call those things addictions, compulsions, sin, whatever you want to call it. So you lack moral freedom in that sense, but that’s an inner freedom. That’s an interesting one because the old Stoics used to say, you can be a slave, but be free. Why? Because you can control your own thoughts. You can control your own desires, your “interior” life, you’re always free. On the other hand, you can be politically free, but be a slave, morally. And we might argue that we’re all slaves to Netflix now, or to an algorithm or something like that. So I think it’s important to think about those two types of freedom, both are totally legitimate.”
Dr. Ferguson went on to define the components of the freedom associated with “classic liberalism.”
- Private Property
“You economists are going to think about “stuff” here, but your most important type of property is yourself. You either own yourself or if you’re religious, you’re a steward of yourself, but either way, you’re in charge of yourself. That means that you can sell your labor. You own your labor, you can sell your labor at some agreed-to price. That means now we’ve jumped to the second of the legal institutions, which is freedom of contract.”
- Freedom of Contract
“It’s up to me to work for you. We have to come to an agreement. However much I’m going to charge you. I have freedom to contract with you. Oftentimes you will have things that you don’t particularly want as much as the things that I have, and I’ll have things that I don’t particularly want, as much as the things that you have. And so we’ll trade. These are two fundamental freedoms. But what you also need in order to have a free society, and this is really, really central, is the equal protection of the rule of just laws.”
- Equal Protection of Just Laws
“Those of you who study international economics, you might be looking at developing nations, and we see exactly what happens when you don’t have the equal protection of the rule of just law. If I make a contract with you, but if something goes wrong and I go to court, you can just bribe the judge. Well, I don’t feel really confident about my contract with you, which means I probably don’t make it in the first place. So there’s a lot of trust that is built up between people when they have a system they can rely on to be fair. You don’t want to have any subsets of the population who are excluded from the equal protection of the rule of just laws, because if you do, you’ll miss out on everything they have to offer.”
Freedom for slaves
Dr. Ferguson is the author of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, a study of how these tenants of classical liberalism were denied enslaved blacks and how, once they were freed, they were able to take advantage of those opportunities:
“You can see how the early economists like Adam Smith were against slavery. They were against it first for moral reasons. I actually went to Scotland and I saw Adam Smith’s grave. And on his gravestone is one of his most famous quotes. Paraphrasing, ‘labor is the most fundamental form of property, because it’s the form from which all other property comes.’ On the one hand, (slavery) is just theft. You’re just stealing someone and you’re stealing their labor. So it’s immoral, but it’s also inefficient. Why is it inefficient? Because now you have a whole population who is excluded from the protection of the laws, and therefore cannot, at least in the case of our form of slavery, cannot learn, in many cases, cannot move to where their labor is most needed, are not allowed to bring their inventions and ideas to market. You lose everything you would have gained from trading with that population.
“I’m sure you’re all familiar with the term ‘The Great Awakening.’ This was a huge religious revival of kind of an evangelical nature, a lot of Methodists and Baptists, sweeping across the United States, and a whole lot of people became a lot more religiously zealous. They may have been sort of culturally Christian, but they became very, very zealous at these tent meetings. And that’s true of every ethnicity in the United States. Some of the enslaved black Americans, who attended these tent meetings, became converted.
“It was really interesting to hear the tent preachers describe how the reaction of the black enslaved members of the audience was different from the reaction of the free white members of the audience. They said that the white people would feel terrible, terrible remorse for their sins. And they would want to be saved, wanted to give their lives to Jesus and be saved. They were often crying and even almost beating their breasts in repentance. The black enslaved people also felt repentant for their sins. That was part of the process. But often upon conversion, blacks experienced ecstatic joy, and would do traditional African ring dances, things like that, kind of an ecstatic experience. The tent revivalists loved this. They thought it was amazing. But they started to reflect on why, and there seemed to be two reasons. One was that for many of those who were enslaved, they were hearing a certain idea for the first time. And the idea, in Latin, is Imago Dei. Imago Dei means “the image of God.” The idea comes from Genesis 1; that every human being, no matter what color, no matter what ethnicity, is made in the image of God.
“So that sense of value, the idea that maybe as a human person, they had inherent dignity and value, was conveyed through the message of the tent revivals, and for many of those people, maybe the first time they’d ever heard that idea. The same sort of value, even as the person claiming to be their master. That’s revolutionary right there. There’s a kind of equality there. And then the second thing they heard was the story of Exodus, where you have a God who wants to free the slaves. And so now is born two ideas. One, I have inherent dignity in value, and two, God wants me to be free. And so thus is born the dream of freedom. Many Black Americans formed private little churches, they were called ‘hush harbors.’ They had to actually sneak away at night in order to worship because their masters were often very unchurched Anglicans, who didn’t actually care a lot about their religion. They would persecute them for their faith. So, they had to do it in secret. And in secret, they reminded themselves of these teachings over and over and over again. And, of course, if you know anything about black gospel music or black spirituals, you’ll know that the story of Exodus is extremely central for many of those songs as well as their concern, really, for each person, whether or not they’re socially important or not.
“I think once again, that Black America gives us a really, really amazing history here, of seeing how people who are literally fighting for freedom take advantage of civil society in order to move forward under extremely difficult circumstances. So, for instance, the minute that emancipation became known to enslaved people, there were two institutions they ran out and joined, and I mean RAN to join. Number one, marriage. You know, we can sometimes forget that enslaved people were not allowed to actually marry. They married informally, but they weren’t actually allowed to be legally married. So many couples ran out and got married. The second thing they did is they ran out and became church members. They established official membership of their churches. What happened? Well, those institutions became the basis for the greatest leap forward in literacy in the history of the world thus far, from almost 0 to 80% by 1930. You know where everybody was working on their literacy? Sunday School! They had to read the Bible, they wanted to be successful.
“Then what do you get? You get men like Booker T. Washington, starting the National Negro Business League. What’s the idea? We’re going to cross-promote. Yes, I’m going to lift myself up by my bootstraps, but we’re going to lift all of us up by our bootstraps. Washington understood that this was a long game, that people needed to build up their skills in the trades, build up their education, build up their ability to stand up for themselves financially, and then they would be able to fight the fight. Because once they established the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) they needed lawyers, and they had them. Because they worked so, so hard on education.
“Some of the greatest soldiers, I guess you could say, for civil rights, were business people. John H. Johnson, who started Jet and Ebony Magazine. He was the one who published the pictures of Emmett Till in his coffin. That was a huge turning point for the civil rights movement. He couldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been a huge publishing magnate. So he was able to get those pictures out overnight, like that. It made such a big difference. Madam C.J. Walker, who became the first female self-made millionaire in the United States, based on her black hair care products, with door-to-door sales. She was able to give the founding gift to the NAACP. T.R.M. Howard, the man who built black hospitals. He was able to host some of the first civil rights meetings. By the way… protected with lots and lots of guns! He was a big gun enthusiast. Moving forward economically, they were then able to fully get their civil rights. This is a really important, long story to tell, because all of that came out of some of the thickest civil society institutions in the history of the United States, institutions like the Black Churches.
“I know we think in terms of individual rights, and that’s correct. But individuals flourish in good societies. And so we need those thick institutions of voluntary cooperation that stand. I’ll end with this point, they stand as a competitor with the power of the State. I can say to the State, ‘Hey, you can’t tell me to do that. Because that would violate my religion.’ Look at the history of Catholic schools. They took people to court all the time. ‘You can’t make me do it this way, because of my religion.’ What does that mean? It means that my civil society institution competes for authority. with the State. It humbles the State, in terms of how it can come in and just simply crush me and make me conform. I can go, ‘No, no, no, no, no. I’ve got all these other things that I owe allegiance to, not just you.’ That has to be acknowledged.”
The PELA lectures on various aspects of liberty and constitutional principles are held regularly around Kansas. The next lecture is on March 21 in Overland Park. Dr. Dave Hebert, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AEIR), will speak about the principles of limited government in the U.S. Constitution.
