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Certainly anyone in our society who seeks to measure “progress” will do so to a great degree by measuring increasing freedoms. Justice is done when marginalized and oppressed groups are given more political and economic freedom.
But today, as Bellah and company discovered, freedom has become perhaps the only publicly shared and acknowledged moral value of our culture.
Charles Taylor gives his own expression of the secular moral order: “Let each person do their own thing, and . . . one shouldn’t criticize the others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The [only] sin which is not tolerated is intolerance.”4 As Ehrenhalt notes, these slogans about freedom are today considered self-evident givens, truths that everyone knows intuitively and that cannot be questioned.
Older societies were much more religiously and culturally homogeneous. It was believed that a society could be cohesive only if it was built on the basis of commonly held moral and religious beliefs. But the wars between Catholic and Protestant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a religion-fatigue reaction among the elites of Europe.5 They began to theorize a new basis for society. All these early theorists expected that the citizens would be Christian, but they wanted a government whose laws were not tied to one Christian church or type of orthodoxy.
In this conception of society, the only ethic required was “the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit.”
Thinkers were aghast who had, both on the left and the right, thought that their respective political systems would ameliorate social problems and human suffering. Both Nazism and Stalinism were highly scientific and efficient. Both global capitalism and state socialism began to be seen as bringing about dehumanization and oppression, each in its own distinct way. This led many philosophers and thinkers to move toward making freedom the animating ideal and standard by which to judge all cultural organizations.
We are considered to be free because there is no cosmic order, there is no essential human nature, and there are no truths or moral absolutes that we must kneel to.
Nothing, then, has any rightful claim on us, and we may live as we see fit.
John Locke himself would have been astonished to see where we have come. He helped begin the process by championing political freedom and democratic self-determination, but he was a Christian who believed in moral truths and obligations that were independent of our minds and feelings and which limited our freedom.
Today we hold to a new, unqualified kind of freedom (only and exclusively excepting the impingement on others’ freedom). We understand freedom as the right of the individual to choose his or her own values altogether, s...
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In much of our society Christianity is seen as the archenemy of freedom.
Do we have to choose between freedom and faith in God? The answer is yes but no. By speaking in this way, I am not being indecisive. Rather, I want us to look more closely at our definitions.
True—the ideal of individual freedom in Western society has done incalculable good. It has led to a far more just and fair society for minorities and women.
But false. Freedom has come to be defined as the absence of any limitations or constraints on us. By this definition, the fewer boundaries we have on our choices and actions, the freer we feel ourselves to be. Held in this form, I want to argue that the narrative has gone wrong and is doing damage.
Modern freedom is the freedom of self-assertion. I am free if I may do whatever I want.
The modern definition of freedom is the ability to do whatever we want. However, how does that definition work when your wants are in conflict with each other?
This is the complexity of real life. He can accept either the limits on his eating or the limits on his health. It is impossible that he will have freedom in both areas. There is, then, not just one thing called “freedom” that we either have or do not have. At the level of lived life there are numerous freedoms, and no one can have them all.
The question is not, then: How can this man live in complete freedom? The proper question is: Which freedom is the more important, the more truly liberating?
We see, then, that freedom is not what the culture tells us. Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others. It is not the absence of constraints but it is choosing the right constraints and the right freedoms to lose.
You may grant that freedom is the choosing of the right restraints. Then you may say, “But these restraints are the ones that I have chosen. So that still makes me free by today’s definition, because I’m free as long as I am doing what I want.” That’s too simplistic. You don’t really freely choose most of these necessary limitations in life. You are just recognizing the limitations that are actually there in the world, that are independent of your desires and choices.
This is not, however, anything like the postmodern ideal of “creating yourself.” The liberating, “right” restraints we have spoken of, among many others, are not things you make up to please yourself. They are hard realities about the way we are and the way the world is. You don’t choose them, you submit to them.
If you see a large sailboat out on the water moving swiftly, it is because the sailor is honoring the boat’s design.
You are, then, not free to do whatever you choose. That is an impossible idea and not the way freedom actually works. You get the best freedoms only if you are willing to submit your choices to various realities, if you honor your own design.
The contemporary concept of freedom, which we could call absolute individual autonomy, is not only unworkable. It is also unfair because it denies what we owe others.
“I am responsible only to myself. No one has the right to tell me how to live.” These are always stated ex cathedra, as if they were self-evident truths. But they would be true only if no one had ever sacrificially invested in you, or if ...
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Though Western people like to think of themselves as mainly the product of their own decisions and choices, such is not the case. You are the product of a family and a community of people who invested massive amounts of time, industry, and love in you, much of it happening before you could speak and before you can now remember.
It is hypocritical to claim that today we grant people so much more freedom when we are actually all fighting to press our moral beliefs about harm on everyone.20 So freedom of choice cannot stand alone as a guide to behavior. We need some kind of moral norms and constraints on our actions if we are to live together.
Freedom, as it is widely conceived in our society, is corrosive to community in general and to enduring, committed love relationships in particular.
An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.
The more personal individual freedom is emphasized, the more all these democratic institutions erode.
This necessitates the “soft despotism” of a growing bureaucratic state, before which individuals are powerless. So ironically, the growth of freedom would lead to the loss of freedom.
In their book Bellah and his colleagues show that much of the health of a society depends on voluntarily unselfish behavior. Being honest, generous, and public spirited—being faithful to your spouse and children—regularly infringes on your personal happiness and freedom. If people stop doing these things and (as Haidt says) put personal fulfillment above commitment and relationship, the only alternative is a more powerful and coercive government.
Your friend or mate will be crucial to helping you achieve many of your goals in life. In all these ways love is liberating—perhaps the most liberating thing. But the minute you get into a love relationship, and the deeper and the more intimate and the more wonderful it gets, the more you also have to give up your independence.
We should hasten to say that both persons must be mutually giving up their independence or the relationship will be exploitative. If one or both parties say, “Me first. My needs before yours,” then the relationship will struggle and die.
If, however, both parties habitually say and think, “You first. I will adjust for you. I will sacrifice my needs to meet yours,” then there will be no exploitation and a relationship of great richness is in store. This mutual sacrifice of autonomy leads to the variegated, wonderful kind of liberation that only love can bring.
You can be in love or you can be free and autonomous—but never both at the same time.
I believe she, and the culture that shaped her, is seriously wrong.
but what is the environment in which you feel the most free, the most fulfilled? Isn’t it in a love relationship, where people are not exploiting each other but serving the other’s needs and giving themselves to the other? Here we see the cultural contradictions within the modern ideal of autonomous freedom.
that freedom should not become an excuse for selfishness. Freedom should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.
When you love someone, you lose control because you want so much to please the other person. His or her displeasure is unbearable, it is punishing, and it makes you a kind of slave. But what Sagan doesn’t admit is that, even if you are not in a love relationship with a person, you have to live for some thing. Or, to connect to the last two chapters, everyone looks to some thing for their meaning in life and whatever that is becomes their supreme love.
And those facts show us that no one is free. Everyone needs love, meaning, and satisfaction in their lives, and so everyone is under the control of something.
to make “external success” into his main source of satisfaction was to turn it into a kind of master that enslaved him. It demanded increasing success and punished him internally if he failed to achieve it.
Someone may object that freedom should be doing what we really want to do. The Christian offer, however, includes this. It is not merely complying with the proper regulations of our creator; it also consists of a new, growing, inward passion to love and know our redeemer.
You are “doing their will” rather than your own, but you gladly accept the new limits on your behavior. Why? It is because you have put your joy and happiness into the joy and happiness of the other. You are happy to the degree they are. You have come to discover the pleasure of giving pleasure. You don’t follow their will as a means to get other things you want. Their love and joy are main things you want. They are ends in themselves. This is how Christianity says our ultimate relationship works with God.
are enabled to see the will of God not as a crushing, confining burden but as a list of God’s loves and hates by which we can please him and come to be like him.
want you to consider that God is our creator, and so his commands are never meaningless or arbitrary ‘busywork.’ His obligations are always in the end our liberation.”
What is your identity? It consists of at least two things. First, it consists of a sense of self that is durable.
To have an identity is to have something sustained that is true of you in every setting. Otherwise there would be no “you.” There would be only masks for every occasion but no actual face behind them. What about you does not change from place to place?
Besides a sense of self, identity also includes a sense of worth, an assessment of your own value. “We each want desperately to matter, to feel a sense of worthiness.”1 Self-knowledge is one thing, but self-regard is another. It is one thing to know what you are like; it’s another thing to appreciate it.
If you ask people in a traditional culture, “Who are you?” they will most likely say they are a son or a mother or a member of a particular tribe and people. And if they fulfill their duties and give up their individual desires for the good of the whole family, community, and their God, then their identity is secure as persons of honor.
