The Swans Were Not Saved by Their Cries
by Donavon L Riley
Freedom, in its abstract form, is a distant god, cold and indifferent. It makes a very stupid god. In our progressive cities, heroin addicts are free to spend their days shooting up in the squalor of homeless encampments lining the urban streets. But who, with eyes open to the world, would dare call this a blessing? It is a sad mimicry of liberty—a parody of the human spirit shackled by its own desires.
The old poets and seers understood that man, left to his own devices, is like a river unbound, rushing toward annihilation. Remember what happened to Lir’s children. In the ancient story of The Children of Lir, a father heavy with sorrow saw his children transformed by envy’s hand into swans. They drifted, wings clipped by the curse of another’s desires, their songs filling the air with a haunting lament. This is what freedom without virtue looks like—a wandering without destination, a soul severed from its true form.
Our age loves to chant the mantras of rights and freedoms, yet we do so without whispering the necessity of virtue. And so we have become a nation ravenous for the fruits of a tree left to wither long ago. The progressive error is glaring: it denies the tragic nature of man, assuming that all suffering stems from some faulty system, some external chain binding the free spirit. But even if we strip away every tradition, every religion, every tie to the past, we find ourselves not liberated, but lost, much like the swans, adrift on a cold and indifferent sea.
The swans were not saved by their cries, but by the sound of church bells—a symbol of the divine order breaking through the chaotic waters. It is a reminder that true liberty is not found in the endless pursuit of desire, but in the discipline of the soul invigorated by a higher truth. The children of Lir, restored to their human form, found peace only after enduring their long exile, much like the human spirit finds true freedom only through the cultivation of virtue.
In a republic, unlike a monarchy where a king’s will holds sway, the people have a voice—a voice that can either build or destroy. But if that voice is weak, if the people lack the strength of character, they will cry out for the state to provide what they cannot secure themselves. The founding fathers knew this well. John Adams reminds us: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It is a warning, much like the song of the swans, that without a shared moral vision, without the discipline of virtue, freedom becomes a hollow and dangerous thing.
Ordered liberty is not the freedom to chase every fleeting pleasure but the rare and delicate fruit that grows from a life rooted in the good. Machiavelli, Aristotle, and the old poets alike knew this truth: that virtue cannot be cultivated in isolation. It requires the fertile soil of community—friends, family, faith. Without order, the community withers, and without community, the soul’s pursuit of virtue falters. Liberty, then, is not the starting point, but the blessed result of a life lived in harmony with the divine order.
The Children of Lir were bound by a curse, but it was not a lack of freedom that enslaved them—it was a lack of virtue in the heart of the one who cast the spell. Their salvation came not from breaking the chains of tradition, but from returning to the heavenly order that had been cast aside. Their story, much like ours, is a reminder that true freedom is not an escape from the past, but a return to the wholeness that comes from a life lived in harmony with the divine.
And so, as we contemplate the state of our world, it does us no good to seek freedom in the abstract. It is in concrete acts of virtue that bind us to one another and to the divine. For in that binding, we find not chains, but wings—wings that carry us not into the cold abyss of self-destruction, but into the warm embrace of true liberty.
adapted in part from Freedom Without Virtue Leads to Ruin, by Auron MacIntyre