I wouldn’t wish to complete the sentence in the title because I think the obvious completions are too pessimistic, yet, there is little room left to claim that human beings place a generally high value on freedom. Or that they can even recognize it.
It might be the case that a desire for freedom, the courage to accept freedom, and so forth are no different from other human traits — they lie on a spectrum. Just as some human beings seem nearly fearless in physical matters while others are very timid and most of us lie in between, so there are some nearly fearless when they face the great risks of freedom and some who shake in fear at the possible consequences of freedom or perhaps just at the uncertainty. Some may even be oblivious to the very possibility of freedom.
I’m starting to address moral and social and political issues within the context of my worldview. For now, I wish to make one specific point about difficult issues such as the possibility that many human beings aren’t made for freedom:
The world is what God made it to be and not what it is in someone’s speculative understanding of the world based, far too often in the case of Christian thinkers, upon an incoherent and unattractive mixture of superstitions and speculations plausible in past centuries but not now.
When we overlook harsh realities of God’s world, or turn away from them, we’re not being ‘idealistic’, we’re being dishonest and even disrespectful towards our Maker. We’re making a claim that we know better than God. We’re in a state of rebellion against God in His role as Creator of this world.
Historical evidence, and probably the weight of empirical evidence about human personality characteristics, tells us that few there are who can tolerate any substantial amount of freedom and many who seem to be in that camp lived in an era where they never had to make great sacrifices for freedom. This may be no more than support for the apparent claim of the New Testament that most men are sheep and few who pretend to be shepherds love freedom any more than those they pretend to guard and guide. Yet, if this is how we are to interpret Biblical claims, it merely emphasizes the great errors in our understanding of man and of the political, social, and moral aspects of his nature.
The more I try to make sense of human political and social and moral teachings, the more defects I can see. At the most fundamental level. That would indicate it’s wrong to even speak of defects and closer to the truth to say that our beliefs in these areas aren’t even wrong — they have nothing to do with reality.
And so I return to the need to reconsider our understanding of human desire for freedom and maybe even to reconsider our understanding of freedom itself. Given my belief that our minds are shaped by our responses to our environments, I’d have to conjecture that freedom is something you can’t much enjoy, or at least fully enjoy, unless you have a coherent intellectual understanding of freedom set in the context of a coherent intellectual understanding of human nature. The pursuit of a poorly understood freedom will lead you to a state of deluded slavery. This doesn’t mean that understanding of freedom has to be sophisticated or even defensible against the attack of philosophers. The simple farmers and tradesmen of Switzerland had a clear idea, if an undesirably simplistic idea, of the freedom they were defending against the Austrian occupiers of their country.
There’s a need here for careful thought. Before we can produce better theories of man and the political and social and moral activities proper to him, we need to properly abstract from what has already been observed in history and what we can see around us. Just as Adam Smith taught us how primitive and apish man rose to the state of Scotsman, so the better thinkers of modern libertarianism have taught us that primitive and apish man was already a central European intellectual in embryo if only he can live in economic freedom and avoid fiat currencies. And, yet, there is much that’s true and useful in both of those viewpoints, if also much in the way of human possibilities which is missing — and not all those possibilities are good.
My claim remains: neither history nor my personal observations support any claim that few human beings desire true freedom, though perhaps they wish to set their own schedule or to watch dirty movies. When the efforts of a small group of freedom lovers, such as those culminating in the American Revolution, have granted freedom to many around them, that freedom is sold within a frighteningly short time for promises of security. The Founding Fathers were barely turning to dust when Hawthorne wrote of his experiences as a customs agent and how it made him feel unmanned and he noted that most Americans seemed willing to be unmanned in return for mere promises of financial security. (In the introduction to the first edition of The Scarlett Letter.) The situation only got worse from that time, especially when power-hungry men could get the American herd stampeding in unison with tales of an enemy who had to be destroyed, of evil that threatened the purity which was the American way of life.
God is merciful and, in any case, He seems to have told us though His prophets and His Son that most men are sheep in strong need of good shepherds at least during their mortal existence. Yet, in all honesty, I have to wonder how someone who has little desire for freedom, perhaps little aptitude for it, can enjoy a life shared with God, a life in which, I would conjecture, we’ll share the true freedom of the Almighty. Perhaps sheep can grow to be like their Shepherd? Perhaps they can even learn to understand and desire freedom in this mortal realm? To be sure, we are yet in the early stages of the growth of the mortal entity, the Body of Christ, which will reach its true and mature form only in the world of the resurrected.
I’m thinking it might be best when describing our current situation to adopt the pessimism that John Adams brought to bear in his political thought. When we look to the future, we should perhaps consider the optimism that Thomas Jefferson exercised towards human potential.
Interesting questions are like good books, so many and so little time.