Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Modernising the two ideas of liberty part 3: the idea of freedom we need

By George Weigel - posted Friday, 17 May 2002


In addition to illuminating a crucial episode in the history of ideas, this tale of two monks also sheds light on grave public issues today. And in doing so, it reminds us that a "clash of civilizations" is being played out within our own society, as well as between ourselves and hostile forces bent on our destruction.

In the aftermath of the communist crack-up in 1989–1991, there was a tremendous amount of euphoria in what was then rightly called the "free world." This euphoria went far beyond the undeniable satisfaction of seeing a great evil overcome, and more than one otherwise sober-minded observer was heard to propose that the democratic project— the great carrier of the modern quest for freedom—was now inevitably and irreversibly triumphant. In the first year of the new century, we have been abruptly reminded of the fragility of freedom—of the hard fact, chiseled in stone on the Korean War Memorial on the National Mall, that "freedom is never free." Which is to say, we have been re-minded of the fact that democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.

The first wake-up call came in the aftermath of dramatic advances in genetics, including the decryption of the human genome, and the bio-technologies that this new knowledge rapidly spawned. Suddenly, Francis Fukuyama’s image of the "end of history" seemed overrun by Aldous Huxley’s "brave new world." Human beings, it became clear, would soon have the capacity to remanufacture the human condition—precisely by manufacturing or remanufacturing human beings. The new tyranny on the horizon was not the jackbooted totalitarian state of Orwell’s 1984; that was the tyranny that had haunted our dreams during what Jeane Kirkpatrick once aptly described as the "Fifty-Five Years’ Emergency"— the civilizational crisis that ran from Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Advertisement

Rather, the new and ominous possibility on the near-term horizon was something quite different: the happy, if thoroughly dehumanized and massively coercive, dystopia of Huxley’s brilliant imagination. Do I exaggerate? I think not. Scientists and biotech industry executives now talk freely of what Leon Kass has called the "immortality project." Here, they confidently tell us, is a possible future world without suffering, even without death—except perhaps death freely chosen as a remedy for terminal boredom. But as Huxley presciently discerned decades be-fore the unraveling of the DNA double helix, such a world would ultimately be an inhuman world: a world of souls without longing, without passion, without striving, without surprise, without desire—in a word, a world without love.

And here, too, we can find long-term radioactive traces from Ockham’s "atomic explosion" in the fourteenth century. For Ockham’s was a world without purpose, a world of willful means detached from ends. But so is the brave new world as Aldous Huxley described it. As one of the World Controllers muses in Huxley’s novel, Once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the results would be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition some of the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them . . . take to believing . . . that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refinement of conscious-ness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstances, admissible.

Tyranny thrives in a world in which means always trump ends. The freedom of indifference cannot sustain a truly free society.

The national debate over cloning and embryonic stem cell research over the past year ought to have given us pause, and precisely on this point. With rare exceptions, the first great public debate of the biotech era was conducted in almost exclusively utilitarian terms (when it was not reduced to appeals to compassion that did not constitute anything resembling a serious argument). What can be done to put this urgent and unavoidable debate onto more secure moral-philosophical ground?

I suggest that doing so will require a rigorous reckoning with the degree to which the freedom of indifference has become the operative notion of freedom in much of our high culture, in the media, among many political leaders, in considerable parts of the mainline Protestant religious community, in the sciences, and in the biotech industry. Challenging the freedom of indifference with freedom for excellence is essential if we are to deploy our new genetic knowledge in ways that lead to human flourishing rather than to the soul-less dystopia of the brave new world.

There will be—there already are—appeals to "pluralism" in these debates. Pluralism, however, is not mere plurality, as John Courtney Murray never tired of repeating. Plurality is sheer difference: a sociological fact, a staple of the human condition. Pluralism is a civilizational achievement: the achievement of what Murray called an "orderly conversation"— a conversation about personal goods and the common good, about the relation between freedom and moral truth, about the virtues necessary to form the kind of citizens who can live their freedom in such a way as to make the machinery of democracy serve genuinely humanistic ends.

Advertisement

That kind of orderly conversation cannot begin with the radical epistemological skepticism and moral relativism that inform today’s Ockhamites and their defense of freedom as willfulness. It must begin, as Jefferson began the American democratic experiment, with the assertion and defense of truths. As Father Murray once wrote, "the American Proposition rests on the . . . conviction that there are truths; that they can be known; that they must be held; for if they are not held, assented to, worked into the texture of institutions, there can be no hope of founding a true City."21 It must begin, in other words, and to return to the wiser medieval monk, with a reaffirmation of freedom for excellence as the freedom to which we, like the Founders, can pledge our lives, for-tunes, and sacred honor.

The second challenge to what many commentators are now calling America’s "holiday from history" came, of course, on September 11, 2001, a day of infamy that in a very real sense marked the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. The world has changed, and the change seems irreversible. The holiday from history is over. The Republic and the freedoms it embodies are in grave peril from a new form of irrationalism and nihilism that expresses itself through a perverse and distorted form of monotheistic religion. The struggle against this new and present danger may well last a generation or more.

The roots of this new struggle run deep into history. Some argue, and I would not disagree, that they run more than 1,300 years into the past, and that what confronts us today is the contemporary expression of a civilizational contest that has ebbed and flowed for well over a millennium. Because its roots run so deeply into the religious and cultural sub-soil of history—because we have been forcefully reminded over the past three months that the deepest currents of world-historical change are religious and cultural—analyzing the causalities that brought us to September 11, 2001, is no simple business. Yet amidst the inevitable complexities of history understood as an arena of moral responsibility, there has also been some welcome, and perhaps long overdue, simplicity.

For in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, there was a remarkable resurgence of simple, indeed robust, moral clarity in a country that had long been told, by everyone from Alan Wolfe to Jerry Falwell, that it was awash in moral relativism. That moral clarity and the resolve that accompanies it seem to have retained their vigor among the vast majority of our people. Among certain parts of the intellectual class, however, they lasted, by my count, approximately 96 hours.

This seems to be the statute of limitations in the commentariat on radical moral relativism and its "real world" political offspring—appeasement strategies, moral-equivalence theories, "root cause" analyses of terrorism, nonsense about "violence begetting violence" (as if a justly conducted war were the same thing as turning a 767 into a weapon of mass destruction), self-loathing anti-Americanism of the most vulgar sort.

Thus far, these intellectual and moral aberrations have been reasonably well confined to the farther fringes of the chattering classes in the United States. But they are well advanced among intellectuals and commentators in western Europe, where I spent five weeks in October and early November. And this fact has everything to do, I suggest, with four things we have pondered this evening: the deterioration of the idea of freedom into willfulness, the detachment of freedom from moral truth, an obsession with "choice," and the consequent inability to draw the most elementary moral conclusions about the imperative to resist evil—or to recognize evil as such, rather than to deny its reality by an appeal to psychiatric or quasi-Marxist political categories.

The response to September 11 has demonstrated the essential moral common sense of the American people. At the same time, the national recommitment to civil tolerance and the basic human decencies in a religiously diverse society has demonstrated the enduring power of the Judeo-Christian tradition to ground those commitments, which are not being sustained today by ACLU-style theories of liberty or by alternative religious traditions. So let us gratefully take note of the fact that, at a moment of national emergency unprecedented in two generations, the American people are acquitting themselves with the dignity, decency, and determination that come from deeply rooted moral convictions.

What, however, will sustain us over the long haul? There has been a remarkable resurgence of uncomplicated, unapologetic patriotism over the past three months: flags, not yellow ribbons, are the icons of the day. But can this welcome recovery of patriotism be sustained unless it becomes, once again, the expression of a nobler concept of freedom than mere willfulness? Is happy hedonism that for which we are pre-pared to make the sacrifices that will be required of us? Or is it more likely that the acids of the relativism that accompanies a merely negative concept of freedom as "noninterference" will eventually erode today’s resurgent patriotism, too—to the point where appeasement will once again become a respectable word in the national political vocabulary?

A society without "oughts" tethered to truths cannot defend itself against aggressors motivated by distorted "oughts." That is the truth of which we should have been reminded when reading those chilling letters from the hijackers the week after September 11. The answer to a distorted concept of the good cannot be a radical relativism about the good. It must be a nobler concept of the good.

And that brings us back, at the end of the day, to our tale of two monks.

Freedom for excellence is the freedom that will satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human heart to be free. It is more than that, though. The idea of freedom for excellence and the disciplines of self-command it implies are essential for democracy and for the defense of freedom. Homo voluntatis, willful man, cannot exploit the new genetic knowledge so that it serves the ends of freedom and avoids the slippery slope to the brave new world. Why? Because Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.

Homo voluntatis cannot defend himself or the institutions of democracy against the new dangers to national security and world order. Why?

Because Homo voluntatis cannot give an account of a freedom worth sacrificing, even dying, for.

There are, indeed, two ideas of freedom. Both ideas have consequences. One of them is worthy of this nation. One of them will see us through to a future worthy of a free people.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All

This is part three of an extract from the inaugural William E. Simon Lecture given to the 25th Anniversary of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Part one examines the two concepts of liberty in a modern context, and part two tells a tale of two monks. The whole paper can be downloaded here.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy and heads the Catholic Studies project.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by George Weigel
Related Links
Ethics and Public Policy Centre
Photo of George Weigel
Article Tools
Comment Comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy