Political events in the Middle East and North Africa have turned the world's attention once again to the high questions of philosophy: What is man? What does he know? What should he love? How is he free? These questions arise naturally any time serious consideration is given to the nature and function of government in human society. For weeks now, masses of protestors in Cairo and elsewhere have expressed their determination to be free from political subjugation by their leaders. Like similar protestors throughout modern history, they have voiced their desire for increased self-governance. But what form, the world wonders, will this self-governance take, and what ends will it choose to pursue? Though the future appears uncertain for the moment, one truth about freedom remains sure: securing freedom requires one sort of struggle, while guarding and keeping it requires yet another. Like their eastern and western forebears in the struggle for liberty, our friends in the Arab world will soon confront an important reality -- one that we westerns remain at constant risk of ignoring -- that beyond the initial political struggle for freedom lies an enduring moral one aimed at freedom's full flourishing.

Writing shortly after World War II, the Catholic political philosopher Yves Simon reflected on the tragic history freedom suffered in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a long essay entitled "Freedom in Daily Life," Simon recalls that his generation learned the hard way that freedom's complex nature renders it an elusive gift. Once won, he remembers sadly, freedom can be easily lost. Simon warns his readers that without a cultural formation in freedom preserved by ongoing social vigilance, political liberties can quickly become the tools of tyranny, as they did in the communist, fascist, and Nazi regimes of twentieth-century Europe. What took his generation by surprise, Simon admits, was that liberal democracy itself, hailed as the crowing achievement of the modern struggle for freedom, failed to guarantee that the political liberties it secured were embraced by its citizens and exercised properly, that is to freedom's further prospering.

Simon writes to spare new generations from making old mistakes. He offers that one of the lessons of the Second World War was a renewed appreciation for the daily struggle required to ensure a nation's freedom. It is in this daily struggle, Simon observes, that freedom enters a necessary and complementary alliance with truth. It is in pursuing true and not illusory goods that free choice finds its purpose and perfection. But before such an alliance of freedom and truth can be forged in the public square, Simon argues, it must first take shape in the human heart. Simon concludes that democracy thrives in the open spaces it creates in public life only if freedom first finds its proper purification by truth in the souls of its citizens.

At the present moment, Americans, too, are currently engaged in high debates about the proper role of government in human life. Is government too big? Is it too small? How should it best serve the nation's citizenry, who are properly conscious of their inherent dignity and freedom? These debates lie just behind the louder battles currently raging nationwide over debt, and deficits, and taxes. Simon's reflections can serve to remind us, who can easily grow complacent with our democratic liberties, that freedom's flourishing demands its alliance to truth, as well as a courageous willingness on the part of all to struggle daily to live freely.

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From "Freedom in Daily Life," first published in Community of the Free (1947), and then republished in Freedom and Community (1968, 2001):

"When I was a young student in Paris some twenty years ago, the doctrines, whether false or true, which had shaped the course of the French nation for more than a century were breaking up. Liberalism was the object of a rapidly spreading scorn. That the decay of liberalism should have brought in its train the decay of the idea of freedom is nowise surprising. The whole of liberal thought in the nineteenth century had unremittingly labored to create an indissoluble union between a divine perfection, freedom, and a false philosophy, liberalism. To accept in all its confusion the bond created by liberal philosophy, and to blaspheme the divine name at the same time that one condemned the false philosophy, was the easiest course to pursue, the course which demanded the least mental effort and the least courage. The unpardonable sin of our intellectuals is to have chosen, in that decisive moment, the road of minimum effort and minimum generosity.

"Perhaps we should not so willingly have listened to the doctrinaires who, in their arrogant criticism, confounded liberalism and freedom, had we not in the back of our minds cherished an optimistic illusion which, all consciously, we had received from that very liberalism: the illusion that the indispensable liberties would never be seriously jeopardized in our civilized societies. The history of Hitler's Germany has rid us of that illusion. The worthiest citizens in jail, and criminals in power; the innocent, by hundreds of thousands, deprived of freedom to remain in their homes and forced to stand in line before firing squads; the members of the accursed races driven out of economic life, then subjected to forced labor, finally massacred; the silence of truth, the dictatorship of liars--we know that such things can take place in countries whose culture is ancient and subtle. We have come to understand that no posture of affairs, no constitution, no culture, suffices to guarantee fundamental liberties; and that nothing can protect a people from the worst forms of tyranny when a taste for an easy life and a tendency to let things take their course carry the day over a conscious, tense, and--if need be--heroic will to be free.

"Today we frequently hear it remarked that the privilege of freedom has to be rewon once in every generation--or, say, three or four times a century. Even that is too much optimism. Freedom is impregnably assured only by an effort to conquer it which is renewed every day. In the course of the great series of catastrophes which resulted in the re-enslavement of peoples who had been amongst the first to shatter the ancient despotism, we had numerous opportunities to observe the functioning of the secret complicities which made victory for the enslavers possible and inevitable. All around us, mingled with us in our daily life, people reputedly honorable showed by their words, their attitudes, their silences, their resignations, that they had not the souls of free men. In these cases it was not a question of a philosophic attitude, as it was in the case of the intellectuals just mentioned; only a moral attitude was involved. More or less consciously, but always with a terrible consistency, these people gave the enemy the most precious of all information--the revelation of their indifference, not to say their hostility, towards that which the enslavers wished to destroy. They did not want freedom for others; nor did they want it for themselves. They wanted money, security, consideration, power, and also the cherished satisfactions of arrogance and vengeance. They believed, fundamentally, that one can live very will without freedom. One can also live without dignity, if one has a liking for baseness. As St. Bernard has it, freedom and dignity are one. Dignitatem in homine liberum arbitrium voco. There, precisely, is the thing in which the enslavers are interested, and more especially those consummate masters of enslavement, the Nazis. As material for their enterprises, they must have men who have lost their self-respect.

"In observing those anonymous accomplices of tyranny, those ordinary people, those honorable people, those decent people who had never committed murder or stolen, but who did not have the souls of free men, we were often struck by one paradoxical characteristic: a systematic hatred of truth. Not only did they delight in falsehoods which flattered their passions, they also reached the point of preferring falsehoods in trivial matters. It sometimes seemed that, if the choice were to be made, they would have preferred an unpleasant falsehood to an agreeable truth. Their entire behavior suggested that the poor devils were well aware that opening the door to truth is a rather disquieting operation; that once truth is brought into our dwellings, she is likely to conduct us where we do not want to go; that if we let truth take possession of our minds, we run the risk of having her drag us out of our decadence and carry us towards a destiny not of comfort but of greatness.

"Between the spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom there is a relation to which liberalism has made us insensitive. Yet it is a relation declared by the Gospels. It is a perfectly intelligible relation. Freedom is the power to make a choice between the means offered to our activity. Now, there are authentic means, those which lead to the end, and illusory means, those which lead us away from our end. Freedom to choose illusory means is itself only an illusion of freedom, for a means which does not lead to the end is not a means. But how should my will be protected against the fearsome possibility of choosing illusory means, of making wrong choices, if my intellect is in error? All of our real freedom is contained within the limits of our knowledge of truth. Outside of those limits, in the field of error, there is room for no operation but the disastrous one of choosing a means which is not a means. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32). The spirit of freedom has no worse enemy than falsehood. The conquest of freedom in daily life implies above all else a daily fight against falsehood, a daily fight for truth.

"We shall have not the slightest chance of fighting this fight successfully so long as we have not comprehended what a difficult fight it is. It is comfortable to believe what is affirmed around us, what is currently said in our family circle, amongst our friends, amongst our companions at work and in our leisure hours; what is printed in the newspapers which respectable people like ourselves are in the habit of reading; what is officially declared by the social authorities who are as it were the conscience of our group. Yet it can occur that the milieu in which we live is given over to the powers of falsehood. It occurs very often. To a certain extent, it always occurs, for there is no human society (I say, no purely human society), however restricted and privileged one may suppose it to be, which is devoted to truth totally and with no admixture of error.

"But let us keep in mind the present situation of the societies in which we live. I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include amongst its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life. Let us understand that it is hardly possible to ask of a man a harder sacrifice than this: for love of truth, to say No to what is thought and said every day by 'his brothers and fellows'; ready to discover the ravages of falsehood in the souls of those who are dear to him, and to continue to cherish their souls whilst he hates their lies; ready ceaselessly to unveil the lies of his own conscience. Negation and revolt are attitudes which have a certain charm, provided that the attitude which I reject and against which I revolt is voiced at a comfortable distance from my own person. But if I adopt the attitude of saying No to all falsehoods, including those which are manufactured and propagated around me as well as those which I feel welling up in myself, I know that I am setting out into a fearsome solitude, into a desert country, without roads and without water. There my dearest companions will fail me. My habits, my tastes, my passions will abandon me. With no support but truth, I shall go forward, stripped and trembling.

"One thinks twice before making such a decision. Furthermore, it is a decision that will never be made once and for all, because the seductions of falsehood will never disarm. It will have to be repeated, all the ruptures that it implies will have to be accepted over again, each time that the wish for an easy life makes itself heard. Reflecting upon this program for life, we feel ourselves overwhelmed with agony. The real problem is now propounded: we must learn whether we love truth so much that we are willing to live with it, if need be, in agony, or whether we wish to avoid agony at all costs, even at the cost of truth."