Law, Liberty and Language, by Bert Lorenzo

Occasionally I ask my students to describe humanity’s greatest achievement. I give them this topic when I want to really challenge them because of its difficulty. With so many things that humans have accomplished how do we arrive at the most important or greatest?

To my students’ credit they all do the exercise but when I read their compositions I get a lot of the same descriptions. I read a lot about computers, cars, television, the internet and such. Just a few write about government, medicine or science and technology in general. I discovered many of my students think invention when I ask about achievement and few think of innovation.

Perhaps due to youth or human nature I read almost exclusively about 20 and 21st century achievements. Do humans as a group think them best those things achieved during their lifetime? The new achievements we enjoy today come out of achievements made before. All invention comes from innovation-an evolutionary process. Look at the history of any invention and you’ll see all the work and products that came before it.

Every invention we enjoy today, every innovation that has given us a standard of living in the United States that kings 100 years ago wouldn’t have imagined stem from humanity’s three greatest achievements law, liberty and language.

Law allows civilization. Of course even tyrannies have laws. I refer to just laws the way Moses, Madison, Gandhi and King Jr. defined them. Just laws protect the rights of individuals and minorities against the whims and biases of majorities. Democracies don’t function well without just laws. Many countries have democracies but certain groups in those countries live in tyranny because laws protect the majority only. Minorities can’t own property, businesses nor attend colleges and universities. In democracies individuals and minorities need laws to protect them from the tyranny of majorities. In a truly free society individuals should freely discriminate against each other if they so choose but laws must exist which treat all equal. In a civilized society elected officials must write laws that protect everyone’s right to life, liberty, property and to be left alone. May 1st we marked the fiftieth anniversary of Law Day. President Eisenhower signed the proclamation as a way to celebrate justice, individual rights, individuality and government by law not by the whim of man. It contrasts with May Day which celebrates tyranny and collectivism.

Without law we have no liberty and without liberty we have no human achievement. Humans need liberty to pursue their causes. Enslaved societies stagnate. Chinese society has evolved in the last 20 years to the degree that a select few in that country now enjoy more freedom to pursue their interests but the vast majority still live enslaved without opportunities to innovate, create nor invent. Without just laws or liberty the Chinese have reduced themselves to theft of intellectual property. People in North Korea, other parts of Asia, most parts of the Middle East, Africa, Cuba, Haiti and South America live a horrible, backwards existence because they lack liberty. While in free societies people travel to the moon, in tyrannies people can’t travel within their own countries. In tyrannies people toil to survive. In civilized societies people strive to achieve, to create a better future for themselves, their children and for humanity and to advance civilization the way Aristotle defined it. Without the liberty we enjoy today in civilized societies that evolved over 5000 years of struggle, war and justly written laws we couldn’t enjoy the inventions my students write about today.

In order to achieve or invent anything: law, liberty or computers we need concepts and the tool we use to conceptualize-language-our greatest of all human achievements. Language makes us human. We use it to think, reason and create. Could you love without language? Think of the love letter and the poem and their sophistication and how they separate us from the rest of the animals. Language moved us out of the trees and into palaces. You can thank language for that algebra class you dread. To create computers inventors first had to create computer language- a replica of human language. Will we some day see computers think and reason? I don’t know but I do know that they (computers) would first have to create their own language. In 1999 a group of experts voted Gutenberg the most important person of the last millennium. With his press he started the literacy revolution. Without the spread of literacy we wouldn’t have seen the evolution of civilization i.e. law and liberty and without language we wouldn’t have had Gutenberg. To call yourself educated you must master language. You must understand its history and evolution. You must learn to use it precisely and, I hope, appreciate its beauty and flexibility. You must learn how to recognize and defend yourself against those who use language to manipulate.

Last December I again watched The Miracle Worker the story of master teacher Ann Sullivan and her famous student Helen Keller who wrote the story. When Sullivan first met her student, Keller lived like a savage because she couldn’t see nor hear. Her disabilities locked her out of the world. Sullivan found creative ways to teach Keller words. Without language Keller couldn’t conceptualize water much less love. Sullivan taught Keller language and helped her break out or her psychological prison. Keller went on to earn a college degree and write, lecture and promote just laws and liberty for all including minorities and the disabled.

Copyright Bert Lorenzo, 2008