MM&N Commentary Did anyone catch Bill O'Silly's interview with President Bush? The first thing that struck me was the visuals-- Bush and Bill strolling through the west wing. I had no idea that our president was a munchkin. He couldn't have been an inch over four feet high-- a cast member if there ever was one of "Little People, Big World." Bush is actually 5 feet eleven inches, but only looked small next to the walking abortion that was interviewing him. Bill and George chatted about culture wars and the secular progressives. But I was intrigued by one of Bush's comments regarding his first principles: "If you do not believe in what you stand for, in other words, if you're somebody that doesn't stand on principle, then all that (polling and public criticism) matters. If you believe in what you're doing and believe in the principles by which you make a decision, such as freedom is universal. It's a principle." "Let us never indulge the condescending voices who allege that some people are not interested in freedom or aren't ready for freedom's responsibilities," Dr. Rice said, perhaps a tad bit more elegantly. "That view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad. The desire for freedom transcends race, religion and culture -- as countries as diverse as Germany, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey have proved. The people of the Middle East are not exempt from this desire. We have an opportunity -- and an obligation -- to help them turn desire into reality. That is the security challenge -- and moral mission -- of our time." Let's consider the question: Is freedom a universal? Or, to put it more concretely, is my understanding of something that I call freedom identical to that same something that a North Korean would understand as freedom? Is it a notion that transcends my opinion, history, and culture into a moral imperative? Since this principle has driven Bush's decision to spread democracy in one of the most undemocratic regions in the world, I think it behooves us to ask the question whether such a notion is true or false. The problem is that we are dealing with a glittering generality, an abstraction or construct, a kind of an ink blot that allows us to read into it whatever we want. I define freedom largely in terms of my constitutional rights. A North Korean party member may view freedom in terms of housing and medical care for the masses. I arrived at my notion of freedom because I am the apex of a long chain of western thought, through the Age of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and so on. A North Korean arrives at his notion from an entirely different stream of history. If that is so, how can we compare these two abstractions? As much as I would like my notion of freedom to be a universal, I struggle to understand how this can be given, given the diversity of collective experiences from around the world. I'm not a moral relativist. I think that there are transcending moral universals that are rooted not so much in divine revelation but our own existence. Shakespeare's Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" gives, in my opinion, proof of this. "If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? If you poison me, do I not die?" It is this shared physicality and emotionality that is my reply in the negative to the question: how can you have moral law without a lawgiver? That the human condition in every land and clime is made up of people that are essentially the same mix of people you find everywhere suggests to me that there might be a universality of moral values, once we strip away the layers of culture. But this still doesn't help us when we claim that freedom is a universal. It is beyond doubt that breathing and sleeping are universals. Generally, but not always, love for children and taboos against incest and cannibalism are universals. But the uncontextualized word freedom has in my view no meaning as a universal. I once read a Chinese cookie that said: "Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness." We only need to reflect on people who commit crimes so that they can return to the routines of prison life or those people who thrive under the Catch-22 rules of the military to realize that such a statement is nonsense. The claim that people yearn for autonomy in the same way that they want safety, sandwiches, and sex does seem to meet the evidence. To the contrary, I think most people want to be controlled and dominated. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves, to find meaning for their lives by losing themselves in a crusade or a cult. Those who disclaim interest in politics or religion develop organized communities of anarchists and atheists. And it's a paradox that those who reject the prevailing faiths-- the misfits of our generation -- are precisely those people who are best able to lead the crusades or cults of the next generation. I think what Bush is really trying to do is to use a word that invokes emotions for propaganda reasons. But the word by itself is devoid of content until we give it content. Thus, I cannot agree that freedom is a universal or that the statement is even coherent. And it alarms me that the president has predicated critical policy on what may well be gibberish.