Where The Pearls, and Whence the Swine

“And Jepthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.”

-Judges 11:30-31

The question is asked often enough that it grows tiresome, but it seems to grow only more relevant as our republic ages: how much liberty ought we to sacrifice for the sake of safety? The question is absurd in that there can be no units by which liberty can be quantified, nor any scale by which its quantity could be meaningful. The question is rather a test, and the gut response which it triggers is what separates the two sides.

My gut response is what I would call a conservative one: suspicious of centralized power and wary of extremes, but, when bayonets are fixed, preferring liberty to death. Conservatism, as described by Russell Kirk, is after all not an ideology – not a set of answers to questions of policy – but rather a prescriptive foundation of tendencies and prejudices which “render man’s virtue his habit” (Edmund Burke). I would put that one of those important conservative prejudices is that which shuns the making of vows in the manner of Jephthah, ones which have not the benefit of circumspection and a full account of the possible outcomes.

It seems, however, that this is precisely what we have unwittingly done, and with out tacit consent our duly elected executive(s) and legislators have made the vow on our behalf. Liberty does indeed demand sacrifice, but, amidst the storm of the urgent, we have made promises without calmly considering the effects of keeping them.

Then, for many of us (and, despite some reservations, I include Snowden in this number), this is the moment of horror. Read the rest of Judges 11. Aside from Boston, we have on the whole avoided the tragedy which we feared, but now we have seen something that we hold to be precious come forth from the doors of our house.

The tentative comfort is this: unlike Jephthah, we have not made this vow to Almighty God, and we can thank him on this Independence Day that in our republic we still have recourse to the ballot.