Freedom, the Measure of Progress

On March 6, 1948, the Lebanese Women's League invited a distinguished company of ladies and young ladies, and figures of thought and letters, to hear a lecture delivered at the Officers' Club by the Honorable Dr. Constantine Zurayk, formerly Syria's Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington and at present vice-president of the American University of Beirut.

The title of the Doctor's lecture was "Freedom, the Measure of Progress." He divided freedom into four kinds:

1) Liberation from nature — the marks of this liberation being the exploitation of nature's resources on the one hand, and its subjugation and the warding off of its evils on the other.

2) Liberation from illusion — the marks of this liberation being the degree to which ordered thought prevails over fancies and illusions, and the degree to which instruction, conscious culture, sound education, and true knowledge are spread.

3) Liberation from oppression — the marks of this liberation being the degree a people attains, politically, of independence; economically, of freedom from monopolizing; socially, of release from subjection to worn-out traditions; and intellectually, of the adoption of freedom of opinion, thought, worship, and the like.

As for the fourth and most important kind of freedom, it is: liberation from passion — the marks of this liberation being man's mastery over the passions and cravings of his own soul.

The Honorable Dr. Zurayk then concluded with important observations on the subject, which he summed up in the following points:

First: that freedom is not an end in itself but a means of preserving the finest thing in existence, which is the dignity of the human personality.

Second: that all the kinds of freedom he mentioned, or others of lesser importance, involve a measure of restraint — for freedom does not come from chaos but from restraint and order.

Third: that all the kinds of freedom mentioned above are incomplete, since they are all negative — that is, freedom from something.

True freedom is a positive freedom: not from something, but for something. This positive freedom is achieved only by submission to powers higher than man. These powers may be, for example: God, or truth, or a high ideal for whose sake man strives, lives, and dies.

Dr. Zurayk chose to close his valuable lecture with a counsel addressed to the Lebanese woman through the Lebanese Women's League: that women direct their attention and devote their efforts to planting freedom firmly, in the four kinds he described, in this country, and to strengthening it and making it grow. For by this the Lebanese citizen becomes a human being in fact, possessed of his dignity and of what justifies his existence altogether.