What is freedom?
When talking politics, or religion, or life in general, we modern Americans love throwing around terms like freedom, rights, liberty. Whether we’re right, left or center, so much of our worlds are consumed by these concepts. How do we improve civil or economic liberties for X? Doesn’t Y reduce our freedom? It’s my right to Z!
And so on.
But, what do we mean by ‘freedom?’ If you were to ask most Americans what freedom means, you would probably hear some variant of the word ‘choice.’ Freedom to us means the option to pick and do what we want; to customize our lives how we see best; to live uninhibited by the burden of being told what to do by another; to exist autonomously and liberated from the obligation to choose a given thing.
And why not? Our country (and the world order it later formed) was born out of the notion that a people might take the abstract concept of individual liberty and apply it across a society. Countless men and women from our country and others around the world have lost their lives fighting for that idea. And, in many ways we’ve been successful. To be sure, there remain many areas of modern society where individual freedoms are not respected and people remain oppressed, but the degree of justice and dignity afforded to citizens of modern western countries today is unprecedented in human history. This fact leaves many of our society’s greatest thinkers in awe of our own accomplishments, none so data-driven and articulate as Stephen Pinker in his incredible celebration of modern society The Better Angels of our Nature. Yet, with all the material gains brought about by this revolutionary transformation, we remain, as a rule, more unhappy, unequal, over-entitled, and destructive than ever.
In his fascinating new book Why Liberalism Failed, Dr. Patrick Deneen explores the consequences of our society’s guiding definition of freedom and its not pretty. From an economic system that fosters staggering inequality to a state which encroaches deeper and deeper into the lives of its citizens, our centuries-long collective obsession with individual choice as the end-all is now straining the interpersonal fibers which bond us together and the resources of a planet which must support our insatiable demand for material improvement.
The way we define and pursue the word freedom is critical and historically, I think we’ve gone off-base.
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Think way back to ‘pre-modern’ days. Before America, before the founding fathers, before capitalism and socialism, before the European Enlightenment thinkers, before the dark ages and the crusades. Pre-modern thinkers like Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle certainly didn’t get everything right, but they had a lot of wisdom about the way things are.
To paraphrase, Aristotle saw freedom as the ability to choose rightly. His definition of ‘rightly’ wasn’t based on a particular religion, worldview, etc. just that you needed some element of cohesion beyond the whims of your personal choice to be truly free. He (and many other early thinkers) saw clearly the consequences of people governed by nothing but their own desires. Such a condition, Aristotle suggested, is not freedom at all, but rather captivity to self absorption, laziness, and greed.
True freedom by this definition lies in the development of character. A coherent character will employ ‘virtues’ or principles which enable self-governance beyond mere indulgence of our base desires.
In our modern (or more rightly said, post-modern) society, the concept of virtue is 100% problematic. We no longer accept as a broader society the possibility that anyone other than ourselves is qualified to provide an overarching, universal account of right and wrong. And to be sure, people have, for millennia, been oppressed by top-down moral impositions. So, we can’t go back and most of us wouldn’t want to even if we could.
But still, we find ourselves locked in a way of viewing the world which lacks essential tools for coherent, fulfilling, peaceful, sustainable, co-existence. Ripped from the local places and communities which once helped us form meaning, we now are forced to create that meaning for ourselves as increasingly isolated individuals in a massive, impersonal society.
So, how might we move forward together? In short, I think we need to change our fundamental views about what it means to be free and how to pursue that freedom. How exactly we bring about such change in our lives and communities is a question I plan to explore here in the coming weeks.
