[Written in June 1997.]
Liberty is almost always associated with groups of people who have more resources than they might expect. With more than expected resources, people feel they have the freedom to focus on `the higher things in life' since they do not feel as constrained as their parents. The `higher things' encompass religion, political idealism, antinomianism in general, and libertinism.
This is an hypothesis advanced some years ago by an ecologist named Paul Colinvaux1. He wrote a book on history in which he advanced an ecological metaphor for human actions. One of his theses is that elites feel both liberty and constraints sooner than others.
In an agricultural, preindustrial society the poor stay poor. But increased resources, be they from trade or conquering one's neighbors, translate to more slaves or servants for the rich. There are more opportunities for a man (and even occasionally a woman) to concern himself with non-tactical things. Moreover, it becomes feasible for the society to create a few more high status, resource consuming jobs, such as that of assistant chief priest, or equivalent (bishop, chamberlain).
These people don't care to give liberty to others -- certainly not to their slaves or tenant farmers; but they are interested in their own freedoms.
However, in the usual course of history, a group more than reduplicates itself. There comes a subsequent generation in which the number of elite children more than match the resources. Each child has fewer material resources. Incidentally, this is why second and subsequently born boys were forbidden to inherit a part of a landed estate in England.
Similarly, a society can only create a few new high status positions; otherwise the positions become common, and lose their status. As the number of elite children increases, it gets harder and harder to gain a `place'. So it makes sense to be more tactically oriented, more survivalist, less keen on freedoms for others like oneself, more keen on getting ahead.
We who live in the advanced industrial societies are in a similar kind of world, except there are vastly more material resources and considerably more status resources: multiple companies, multiple non-profit organizations, and multiple government bureaucracies mean more respectable positions, like that of a vice president, than ever before (although the number of very top positions remains the same-- there is only one Prime Minister or President per country, only one president of the `largest manufacturing corporation').
So the Colinvaux model applies to us as well as to people in the past.
Eventually, of course, people get used to the level of resources they have. But this takes some time. Perhaps two generations.
During a transition period, people would consider themselves richer or poorer than they expected. And eventually act accordingly.
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