The two reasons you haven’t heard from me yesterday are: 1) I have a really bad cold/flu thing; 2) I spent a couple days at a great program put on for high-school teachers at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga’s Center for Reflective Citizenship.

One of the speakers at UTC was the leading historian Walter McDougall. He explained that the independence and Constitutions things just wouldn’t have worked out had not the relevant deliberations taken place in Philadelphia. He brilliantly deployed Philly as a kind of focal point to tell the teachers with great candor about both the greatness of so many of the Founders and the role of luck in transformative political change. I would like to talk more about this “teaching method,” but . . .

I can’t help but think you would benefit greatly if I opened with some stuff about my presentation. I actually thought some about what a conservative account of American liberty would be these days. I begin with saying that liberty is best understood as a privilege, a point of honor, an unbought and unearned gift. Privileges have corresponding responsibilities. Americans have every reason to be grateful for having been given complicated and diverse understandings of what the privilege of liberty is.

1. Intellectual liberty (Socrates) — The privilege of living in the truth has the corresponding responsibility of preferring the truth to self-interest and prejudice, not to mention ideology. This liberty of mind is somehow indispensable but insufficient in understanding who we are.

2. The liberty of the citizen (the polis) — The privilege of ruling and being ruled in turn has the corresponding responsibilities of loyalty and serious deliberation. It is a liberty that is, in its nature, territorial, as opposed to global. Global citizenship is an oxymoron. It’s in a particular political community that your rights are secured and that you experience yourself as being at home. This liberty is typically called republican liberty, perfecting itself in selflessly thinking of yourself as a part of your country. Spartan liberty. No American is a citizen and nothing more or even maybe a citizen deep down. But lots of Americans worry about the atrophying of civic virtue as America morphs from a republic to an empire and especially in the direction of apolitical and post-political fantasies promoted by libertarian futurists.

Generally, we Americans don’t think that the understandings of liberty we got from the Greeks are enough about personal freedom. They seem to depend on understanding oneself as part of a whole (nature or the city) greater than oneself. American bumper sticker: “I am not a part.”

3. The liberty of the Christian. The freedom of the person from nature and the city for religious community. The equality of all men and women under God. The unique irreplaceability of every human person. The virtue of charity

4. Puritan liberty — or a kind of Christian republicanism. The abolitionists, MLK, and the generous liberalism of Marilynne Robinson, which basically makes charity into a political virtue. Being a Puritan does mean being too judgmental and too intrusive politically, usually. Our puritanical impulse today has morphed away from sex and drinking and toward health and safety. Well, more precisely, it has changed it’s concern about sex — chastity has been replaced by safety. And about drinking — drunkenness remains bad but red wine does fend off those risk factors.

5. Individual liberty — which has the corresponding responsibilities of protecting the rights of others and working to provide for yourself and your own. Depends on the Christian insight that each of us is free from nature and civic determination. Government is a contract. The source of our prosperity and much of our dignity. Still, not enough: Mr. Jefferson’s eloquent anti-slavery words (derived from Locke) weren’t matched by anti-slavery deeds. Something irreducibly Puritanical about the American devotion to the proposition that all men are Created equal.

6. Stoic liberty — the liberty of rational men and women who have self-possession or moral virtue and refuse to compromise themselves in particular relational situations. The liberty of Southern gentlemen, Atticus Finch, Marcus Aurelius (philosopher-emperor) and Epictetus (philosopher-slave), Tom Wolfe characters, Admiral Stockdale, and George Washington. (GW is the founder with the most perfect anti-slavery record in practice, as well as the one most attuned to the generous and magnanimous duties Americans have to the Indians.) Atticus as superior to Socrates because he doesn’t use the privilege of ”being a rational man” as an excuse to shirk civic and familial responsibilities. In his case, magnanimity is detached from the “common” or vulgar experience of racism. The various efforts to democratize Stoic virtue and the indispensability of the comparatively honorable and violent South in sustaining our all-volunteer army of citizen-soldiers who really don’t understand themselves deep down as merely citizens. But not only that: The current paranoia on college campuses today about the “rape culture” shows that American men and women can’t lived together securely in freedom without some reliance on honorable self-possession. It’s possible to be virtuous without being puritanical, and the virtue here is not necessarily confined to race, class, gender. (President Obama praised “the proud men of Morehouse.”) This part of the talk, by the way, is the one the teachers liked the best, and one of them told me about her efforts to get her students to taking on the privileges and responsibilities of being specifically ladies and gentlemen.

7. Much of American political deliberation is about balancing individual liberty, the liberty of the creature, and the liberty of the citizen. See, for example, the compromise that is the Declaration of Independence. Things get unbalanced when civic deliberation is displaced too readily by the imprudent judicial imposition of high principle.

8. The problem with the two comparatively untraditional understandings of American liberty (which are, I emphasize, not all bad) — both called progressive — that they tend to be about privileges with responsibilities. Well, that’s obvious in understanding liberty as freedom from fear, want, and so forth through bigger and better government.

9. The other kind of progressivism is described the Justice Kennedy as the evolution of the meaning of constitutional liberty over time. Laws thought necessary and proper to one generation of American government seem pointlessly oppressive to the next. This basically anti-puritanical evolution is to allow the particular individual to define oneself without the constraints of thinking oneself as a citizen, creature, or even a biological being. This kind of libertarianism has become, truth to tell, a kind of libertarian securitarianism (which is rapidly displacing liberal securitarianism), where freedom becomes the techno-pursuit of autonomy in the sense of safely detaching all human experiences from the relational constraints associated with love and death. I’m not taking some kind of Southern stand against techno-progress here, but it has to be chastened with the thought that privileges have their responsibilities. It really is true that we have the responsibility not to trash the planet. But techno-progress also gives us the responsibility to escape the planet should we trash it or it turn sour on us on its own. Those responsibilities are not to be confused with the thoughtlessly headlong project to impose total control on our “environment” at the expense of all that’s good about relational life. If we going too far down this “autonomy” road, freedom easily becomes another word for nothing left to lose, and American liberty becomes unsustainable. We can’t forget out dependence on those citizen-soldiers. But not only that, our future is also imperiled by the “birth dearth” or not enough kids. Where would we be without all those observant religious believers (and not, of course, only Christians) would believe what the Bible says about being fruitful and multiplying and who are free enough to relax enough to have unprotected relational sex and hope and pray for the best?

Next time, I’ll talk about what I learned from two of the other conference presenters, the great teachers Bill McClay and Patrick Allitt.