Ideas have consequences

And with that advertisement for the sovereign importance of his own trade, that of the intellectual, Isaiah Berlin begins his inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty.

But while ideas have consequences in the logical sense they are wholly without efficient causality.

It is what men do with ideas, it is human action that makes, or rather is, history.

A point worth remembering, since more than a few of those who uncritically accept the intellectuals' assessment of their own importance draw the obvious practical lesson that it is prudent to police ideas - meaning, of course, to police speech, the press, and thought and so to police men.

But then the reputation of liberals as defenders of freedom of thought and expression was built by their centuries-long fight for their own freedom.

Most contemporary liberals, admittedly or not, favor and often actively seek punishment of speech and belief they disapprove, in Europe by law and in America by orchestrated loss of employment.

And in both, as well, by campaigns of public harassment and opprobrium often intentionally involving the threat of violence.

Blessed few agree, and many loudly deny, that freedom of thought and expression, more central to liberty than democracy and as crucial to democracy as the franchise, require at least as much protection from private coercion as we provide the vote by the device of the secret ballot.

But ensuring people can believe and express their beliefs in complete security and confidence is not at all what liberals want.

Of this you can be sure.

Liberals would nowadays oppose any construal of the Constitution protecting speech and belief from punishment by employers, though the shoe was quite on the other foot during the era of the Hollywood Blacklist, loyalty oaths, McCarthyism, and the Red Scare.