The United States is hamstrung over liberty. It’s hard to sort out. New covid-19 regulations every week: masking, quarantines, contact tracing, banned gatherings, bars and restaurants closed. The legitimacy of the presidential election is in question.
Joseph Biden is set to win the popular vote by a 4% margin and the electoral vote by 306 to 232. Historically, this is not an especially close election. Not a landslide, but not exceptionally close either.
In the 2016 election the electoral vote went one way, the popular vote the other. The famed supreme court decision in 2000 was pronounced over a 547-vote margin. The closest margin this year is over 10,000. Associated Press has set the standard for calling election since the 1960s. Their summary is here.
Yet people are upset, arguing, misunderstanding, and talking past each other. I sense, for the first time in my life, that some people seriously question the legitimacy of majority rule. And I sense that feelings would be the same no matter which way the election went. This has sent me on a mission to examine my own feelings.
Two Years Before the Mast
With that mental backdrop, last week I read Two Years Before the Mast by a Richard Henry Dana Jr., a book I’ve known of since I was a teenager captured by the idea of going to sea, but never got around to reading. You can get it from the library.
In 1834, Dana was a student at Harvard College. He contracted measles, which damaged his eyes. He couldn’t study. He was told that a long ocean voyage might restore his sight.
His family could have sent him on a grand tour, but instead, in 1836, he signed articles as a common seaman on a merchant voyage to California on the sailing brig Pilgrim.
Two Years Before the Mast is a non-fiction account of the voyage and Dana’s experiences loading cowhides on the Pacific coast for shipment back to Boston. On his return to Harvard, he finished college and went on to a law degree and a successful career as a lawyer and politician.
A day of liberty
I highly recommend the book. Dana is an exceptionally clear and moving writer.
I shall never forget the delightful sensation of being in the open air, with the birds singing around me, and escaped from the confinement, labor, and strict rule of a vessel, —of being once more in my life, though only for a day, my own master. A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is entire. He is under no one’s eye, and can do whatever, and go wherever, he pleases. This day, for the first time, I may truly say, in my whole life, I felt the meaning of a term which I had often heard, —the sweets of liberty.
Dana’s day of liberty was spent with his friend and shipmate, Stimson. How many of us today seek escape from the strict rule of covid-19? To be our own masters, maskless, gathering with our families and friends, singing, laughing, and sharing a holiday? Ah, for a day of liberty.
The dark side of liberty
Dana and Stimson’s day of liberty was granted by Frank Thompson, captain of the Pilgrim. A 19th century sea captain ruled the ship, its officers and crew. At sea, the captain had complete liberty; he answered to no one, could do whatever pleased him, direct the ship wherever he wished.
Well into the voyage, John, a Swede and the best seaman on the crew, stood up for an injured shipmate who was about to be flogged for complaining about his injury. As Dana watched, Captain Thompson had John tied to the rigging and began to swing a rope on the man’s bare back:
As he [Captain Thompson] went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out, as he swung the rope: “If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! —because I like to do it!— It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”
The man writhed under the pain until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us: “O Jesus Christ! O Jesus Christ!”
“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain; “he can’t help you. Call on Frank Thompson! He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”
At these words, which I never shall forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick, I turned away, and leaned over the rail, and looked down into the water. A few rapid thoughts, I don’t know what,—our situation, a resolution to see the captain punished when we got home,—crossed my mind; but the falling of the blows and the cries of the man called me back once more.
Dana did not have a chance to see the captain punished, although he did stand up for seaman’s rights and started important reforms. On Thompson’s next voyage, before Dana could accuse him of wrongdoing, Thompson contracted a fever in Sumatra, died in misery, and was buried at sea.
Liberty in 2020
In 2020, how are we to treat liberty? Is the desire for liberty, a force that has unleashed the death and destruction of covid-19, like the uncontrolled brutality of Captain Thompson? Or is liberty only Dana and Stimson’s delight that we are temporarily denied by the pandemic?
John Stuart Mill
To answer these questions for myself, I turned to Dana’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, whom I recollected from first-year college humanities class as the formulator of a balanced and measured definition of liberty. Get his writings from the library.
From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:
That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
Mill is clear. Enforced wearing of masks is legitimate curtailment of liberty because it protects mankind from the virus. Enforcing masks for the protection of the wearer is illegitimate. I guess this means it is okay to remove your mask as you inhale, but you must put it on while you exhale.
This is an argument that might convince some anti-maskers.
John Stuart Mill was onto something.