Violence in Today's World and Judge Learned Hand on Liberty

There was a car bombing last night in Afghanistan. In a remote area east of Kabul, someone drove a sports utility vehicle into a hospital compound and detonated it, causing the hospital to collapse, killing at least 25 to 60 patients and wounding more than 100 others. The details are sketchy because rescue efforts are just getting underway.

In Syria’s now almost routine Friday marches yesterday, al-Assads’ security forces killed 18 and arrested 100 others. The blood bath continues despite all the words the world can throw at Syria’s dictator.

And then, late last night I was listening to Charlie Rose’s program on TV. He was talking to a New York journalist who has written this week’s Time cover story about the American Constitution. He mentioned Judge Learned Hand, a brilliant American judge and legal philosopher (1872-1961).

That, in turn, made me think of one of Learned Hand’s addresses made in New York in 1944 during the Second World War. It is short and focuses on liberty. What Hand was trying to teach us is that liberty comes from within the soul. It joins the notion of liberty found in the souls of other people, and it is this that makes people free to govern themselves as they choose, never forgetting the rights of others among them, for whom they desire the same liberty.

Here is what Judge Learned Hand had to say about liberty in 1944:

"What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow. "

Most places in the world today, and I include the United States, most European countries and the rest of the world, such as the Middle East, where liberty is a concept that is breaking down in the violent confrontation of opposing ideas about what government should do. Extremes - left, right, anarchist, terrorist, totalitarian, fascist - all these concepts about how to govern seem today to believe that it is their way or no way at all, except in the annihilation of opposing ideas. Laws have nothing to say in such confrontations. Law governs those who want to be governed. Is there a way back to debate, compromise and faith in a people’s will to know what is best for them? Sometimes I wonder.

Keep Learned Hand’s commentary and read it often. It should be the guide for all of us.