Positive and Negative Liberty, and Stunt Journalism

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep”—Isaiah Berlin.

Reading this morning from Berlin’s essay, Positive and Negative Liberty as presented in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I couldn’t help but wonder that what’s now happening politically in the USA is actually happening right in front of my eyes: that this pack of Republican wolves who go on and on and on about the complete sanctity and worth of their Christian program, subsuming first, then devouring anything human in their path, as if there’s some God-given right to be Christian regardless of one’s political affiliation or religious beliefs …

…as a staunch half-hearted Christian, but Christian nonetheless, I feel left out, excluded from virtually all Republican conversation as well as most of the discourse presented by Democrats. “As Berlin showed, (acc.Stanford), negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.” * Therefore, each has the right to exist in the hypothetically pluralistic governmental construct we’ve created in this country, all of us already identified as citizens, as called out in the US Constitution, allowed to enjoy all the rights and privileges of our beliefs or non-belief.

I am aware that Berlin’s elegant definitions of both types of liberty, positive and negative, eventually lead either one or the other to bump into either one or another, as Flannery O’Connor’s felicitous phrase suggests, that ‘Everything that rises must converge’ Flannery O'Connor 

 I will, then, rise and converge! (Isaiah Berlin) Once in that orbit I’ll be in complete agreement with smiting all self-righteous Christians (Negative Liberty) as well as all Stunt Journalists (Positive Liberty), like the American buffoon who flew all the way to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin.