Freedom of the will is something we all know; it’s obvious when we have acted freely, or when we have been under some sort of compulsion. At least, we can recognize freedom until we are so saturated in the streams of compulsion that we no longer see our own pitiable, enslaved state.
Freedom Versus Enslavement to Victimhood
Author Theodore Dalrymple in “Our Culture, or What’s Left of It” observed that the famous writer Stefan Zweig, who was a pacifist, one of the most famous writers of the 1920s, and who escaped from Nazi Germany, “would have viewed with horror the cacophony of monomanias—sexual, racial, social, egalitarian—that marks the intellectual life of our societies, each monomaniac demanding legislative restriction on the freedom of others in the name of a supposed greater, collective good.” These demands derive from the same sense of victimhood, the same sense of determinism (I’m a victim of social pressures, therefore I am not responsible for my actions) that we noted earlier, and which is the opposite of true freedom.
What Dalrymple is pointing out is precisely what author Kenneth LaFave points out when he says that, “The whole point of putting freedom at the center of our civilization is to push politics to the periphery.” Exactly the reverse, indeed, is now happening. For it is precisely in this area of personal freedom that “woke” politics demands allegiance. (To be clear, the term “woke” is used by both liberals and conservatives to describe a number of more radical progressive ideologies, including critical race theory, social justice, and gender theory.)
The most compelling evidence for this is in the explosion of their insistence that we change even the pronouns we use, and not only change them, but start misrepresenting reality, too: a woman not a “she” but a “they” What could be more invasive to our sense of personal freedom? As Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye said, “real freedom is something only the individual can experience.”
Another insistence is that others “be kind” and allow us the freedom of accepting our vulnerabilities—our victimhood—and even to start parading these around. But this is not truly a moral position, for paradoxically, this kind of “freedom” has, of course, an unintended consequence which is the opposite of what it seeks. Namely, instead of freeing us, it binds us; for as Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wisely pointed out: “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.”
Reason Cannot Be Our Foundation
“Morality is not one sub-system among others, such as that there is art, science, religion, business, politics, and so forth, alongside morality. Instead, morality is the guiding principle for all human endeavors,” according to University of Notre Dame professor Mark William Roche in his book “Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century.”
It is important to stress that morality has always been the guiding principle for all human endeavors—all human endeavors. We may disagree on issues as fundamental as our religions—there may be profound disagreements of philosophy and theology—but as to morality guiding our conduct and behavior, we should not disagree on the essentials. I should not kill you, steal from you, bear false witness against you, or attempt to sleep with your partner; indeed, if I did any of those things, I would be in denial of the central tenets of my religion. All major religions teach these principles and I would be, in fact, an immoral person.
Yet American classicist Allan Bloom made it very clear. “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.” Polish historian of ideas Leszek Kolakowski in his book “Religion” called modern reliance on reason as a value “Promethean atheism.”
The invariable message of Promethean atheism is that “human self-creativity has no limits, evil and suffering are contingent, life is infinitely inventive, nothing is valid—morally or intellectually—just because it has passed for valid throughout history, there is no authority in tradition, the human mind does not need any revelation or any teaching from without, God is but man oppressing himself and stifling his reason.”
In essence, you can be whatever you want and to hell with conventional morality. Again, Theodore Dalrymple: “Who is more contemned than he who clings stubbornly to old moral insights?”
One hundred years ago, the writer and prophet G.K. Chesterton, in a biography by Catholic writer Joseph Pearce, foresaw all this when he wrote:
“The work of the sceptic for the past hundred years has indeed been very like the fruitless fury of some primeval monster; eyeless, mindless, merely destructive and devouring; a giant worm wasting away at work that he could not even see; a benighted and bestial life, unconscious of its own cause and its own consequences. … But to say that there is no pain, or no matter, or no evil, or no difference between man and beast, or indeed between anything and anything else—this is a desperate effort to destroy all experience and sense of reality; and men will weary of it more and more, when it has ceased to be the latest fashion; and will look once more for something that will give form to such a chaos and keep the proportions of the mind of man.”
Sadly, one hundred years later, our culture has still not wearied of Promethean atheism in the West, and this is our perilous danger. For as American sociologist W.I. Thomas once said, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” If we are going to abolish right and wrong, usurp the common sense of the majority of the population, spend our time in gratifying our hedonistic desires without any moral checks, then the West will fall.
The fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the barbarians in the fifth century was only possible because it had first corrupted itself and lost its internal authority. That is the true danger now for America and its allies. As we fiddle with redefining moralities, the fires from the East burn ever nearer. We need to rediscover once again the true proportions of the mind of man, and most essentially their moral dimensions.
