November 5, 2007
by Clay Barham

Every time I write about the subject of liberty, some critic always stands ready to tell me the source of liberty is the enlightenment, of Rousseau or Marx, or some speculator.  I see it this way.  There are two sources cited by most and one source cited by a few, like myself. 

There is what I call the Bumbling source, Britain and her institutions rising from wars and rebellions, falling into a system that accidentally gave liberty to many as a benefactor would feed his neighbors. Then, there is the Fumbling source, France, where a revolution placed the population into a headless rush to find itself through the efforts of numerous enlightened speculators playing the role of social philosophers. 

The Stumbling, to me, is the most interesting view because it starts out with a new beginning, absent government, enlightened by John Calvin's Geneva rulebook, wherein a corner of the world stumbled into individual freedom and not just limited versions of liberty. 

The stumbling, as Tom Paine suggested, would be, ".a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world.  In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought.

A thousand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in turn requires the same."  The intelligentsia, lacking suitable scientific and social sources, will reject the stumbling into a free society.  The stumbling has only its own empirical success to prove its case.  It grew from its own experience, without government planning or intervention.

In Britain, government intervened and bumbled its way into its current form.  It was the form cited most by the speculators and enlightened philosophers of France, as they sought to describe, circumscribe and even circumcise what Britain had produced, to form their own speculative and experimental approaches to human liberty.  In all their approaches, they included intervention and manipulation by government.

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The Abbe' Sieyes suggested to the revolutionary assembly, ".to act like men just emerging from the state of nature and coming together for the purpose of signing a social contract."  This was exactly what the people of America had done, except they did not need to design it or sign a social contract. They were busy stumbling and growing their own form of liberty from the bottom up without help from the learned speculators busy fumbling in France.  It went unnoticed until King George saw his colonies slipping off the royal manifest on its own course and decided to intervene.

The stumbling Americans proved that experience makes the discoveries of inconvenient and convenient behaviors apparent, rather than what is possible for the wisest speculators to foresee.  It is only necessary that the institutions be evident to us and sufficient that formed behaviors give us certainty.  Speculators aside, America gave the world a model for human liberty that grew from experience, from trials and testing that shaped a system far beyond the capacity of enlightenment speculators.

This is what is so difficult for the critics of America's system of individual freedom, and its great success in the development and sharing of prosperity, to grasp and applaud.  It is not the result of speculating philosophers and intellects that made America, but Americans doing their own thing.  It is not sourced, cited, described in texts and models before the fact.  It is simply seen by the uninfluenced naked eye.  How can such a miracle occur as not the product of precise engineering by the wisest, most enlightened among us?

What the world needs now is fewer intellects and speculators and more observers of what has grown and flourished in America.  What the world needs now is a way to by-pass the world's rulers and present the case for the American experience to the world without all those critics who believe only a few elite should rule the many, and that America should be quarantined until it is changed to reflect the bumbling or fumbling social systems of the Old World.

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Clay Barham [send him email] has been a candidate for the California legislature and a stand-in talk show host for ABC.  He was educated in physical and behavioral sciences, with a Ph.D. in sociology.  He is the author of five books, with his latest being Foundations of Modern American Conservatism and Liberalism: The Roots of Freedom and Tyranny.  Visit his website at http://www.claysamerica.com.