What’s it all about, Alfie?” The eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked a version of that question by a London cabbie (“What’s it all about, Bertie?”), and he was famously speechless because he held that only precise questions deserve precise answers. Later, the Harvard philosopher W. V. O. “Van” Quine was asked what the meaning of life was, and he replied, “Life is algid. Life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim, primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.”1
What on earth was the great philosopher talking about? If his listeners understood him rightly, Quine either meant that only a few make the most of life, and they make the rest of us feel that we are wasting our time. Or more simply, that the question was stupid and beneath him. In Terry Eagleton’s wry words that open his attempted pocket wisdom on the subject, “The meaning of life is a subject fit for either the crazed or the comic.”2 Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life compounded the two options: questions about the meaning of life are stupid and the answers are absurd. Life is a joke.
One of the funniest evenings of my life was when my wife and I spent time in Greece with Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His own answer to the big question was the story of his fictional computer Deep Thought. When asked to work out the meaning of life, it took seven and a half million years and finally came up with the answer: 42. The world then had to build another larger computer to find out what the question was. The search for the meaning of life is perhaps the only meaning there is to life.
Such attitudes are surely some of the silliest ideas in our sophisticated modern age. The simple fact is that Homo sapiens lives by more than animal instincts. We are meaning mongers. No one can live without meaning and belonging. We all need to make sense of life, find security in the world, and follow a story line in our lives. Without answers to such questions, meaninglessness becomes a serious problem and suicide a serious possibility. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols.3 And in the dark, black why-less night of Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl found again and again that the search for meaning was an indispensable motivation for surviving, as death seemed to offer the only escape when life was hell. Without purpose, his fellow inmates became “blanket cases” and took to their bunks, gave up, and died. That central insight later became the dynamic core of his meaning-centered treatment, “logotherapy.”4
Albert Camus wrote similarly in the celebrated opening words of his Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”5 In contrast, Eagleton tells the story of the poet Gertrude Stein, who on her deathbed was rumored to have asked again and again, “What is the answer?” before finally muttering, “What is the question?” His own comment: “A question about a question posed while hovering on the brink of nothingness seems a suitable symbol of the modern condition.”6
Yet neither ivory tower philosophers nor the cynicism of humorists should blind us to the importance of the meaning of life. How do we see reality? Why do we prize human dignity or demand equality? Where do we anchor our sense of identity and purpose, and develop our understanding of morality and love? What is a good life? And how do we pursue happiness? What is a successful human being? Why should we care for our neighbor and the other? None of these questions can be answered without an underlying sense of the overall meaning of life—and the same is true of freedom. Our understanding of freedom will be shaped by our understanding of life and reality, our view of humanity and the world. The point is not that each of us has to think through each question for ourselves and completely from scratch. That would be impossibly arduous and redundant because so many thinkers have raised and pursued the questions before us. We all, including philosophers, have to assume some answer to the question of the meaning of life if we are to live meaningfully. “The unexamined life,” as Socrates said just before his execution, “is not worth living.” And that is true not only for individuals but for whole societies and for nations.
What is inexcusable is to deny the questions and to remain indifferent to the answers. Yet that is what many American leaders are now doing when it comes to human dignity and freedom—two issues that are decisive for international as well as domestic affairs. It is one thing for individuals to espouse secularism as their conclusion to a genuine search for an examined life. It is another for elites to behave as if secularism were true by cultural fiat, and then to take a tin-eared stance toward other views of the world and to pretend that the differences make no difference. A crucial weakness of the foreign policy of the Obama administration was its blindness to both the religious roots of America’s culture of freedom and the zealously religious motivation of America’s self-professed enemies.
Where then is the best and surest foundation of freedom to be found? That is the vital question for Americans now and for all lovers of freedom in today’s world. For while the human search for meaning is universal, there are many different answers as to what the meaning of life is, and therefore within each answer what freedom is and how best it should be understood and pursued, either by individuals or societies. In short, we are back to chutes and ladders again. There are choices and there are consequences. There are differences, and the differences make a difference.
If you shake a kaleidoscope, the colors and patterns also change. In the same way, freedom will look entirely different within the different views of the meaning of life and the different theories of what reality is. The same English word freedom might be used to translate different terms across all the different views, but what freedom means in each case will vary according to the kaleidoscope of perspectives that different people and different societies bring to freedom. The challenge for inquirers is to resist being paralyzed by the vertigo of relativity and instead to be clear about what sort of freedom they are looking for, and what are the personal as well as the public consequences of the different kinds of freedom that are on offer. The previous questions on the checklist should have sharpened the criteria that Americans must bring to the search. Only a robust and well-grounded notion of freedom can meet the exacting demands of the American experiment. The eighth question on the checklist therefore asks: Where do Americans ground their belief in freedom? And which worldview best undergirds the robust and self-reliant freedom that the American republic requires?
The great Austrian satirist Karl Kraus was famous for a sketch in which he played a drunk looking for his keys under a lamp post, even though he had lost them elsewhere—there was more light under the lamp post he said. In the same way, many people in the Western world are blithely counting on a freedom that cannot be found where they are looking. Countless others can be heard mouthing clichés about freedom as if freedom were the constant state of the world and will stay that way forever. Were such people to remember history, they would know that freedom is not the norm, it does not simply happen, and it cannot last unless it is understood and sustained with care. If Americans at large were to debate the issues, they would see that this is no time to be complacent about freedom. The cultural ground has shifted under their feet in the last generation, and claims from the past no longer have the solid footing they once had.
Two obvious truths confront the West today. First, we must face up to the fact that, over the past two hundred years, the West has chosen to cut itself off decisively from the Jewish and Christian faiths that once provided its roots and its moral and social ecosystem. By its own choice, the West has become a cut-flower civilization. It forgets that flowers in a vase may be beautiful, but they simply will not last. The flower of freedom is no exception. If the Jewish and Christian roots are severed, where does the West seek to ground its freedom now?
Second, we must clarify what we mean by freedom today because of pluralization and the explosion of diversity in our modern global world. Humans, it is said, represent the most diverse form of life on planet earth. But not all the world’s worldviews undergird the worth of individual human beings, as for example Judaism does (“A single soul is like the universe”). Many in fact do the opposite (Zen Buddhism: “Man is a stone thrown in the pond who causes no ripples”). It means that those who prize freedom must choose with care between the different views of life that we are offered. For the blunt fact is that some of the views on offer today provide no basis for freedom, and others are an open contradiction of human freedom.
For all practical purposes, the overwhelming majority of people in the world take their views of the meaning of life and their views of freedom from one of the three major families of faith—the Eastern, the secularist, and the Abrahamic. When used of faiths, the word family refers to the fact that certain religions, worldviews, and philosophies share a common family resemblance because they stem from a similar understanding of what is behind everything or what is ultimate reality. There is no common core unity between the world’s faiths and philosophies. There are differences between the different families of faiths, and the differences make a difference for whole societies as well as individuals. Remembering the checklist of questions I have raised so far, our focus is not on a general comparison of the families of faith but on the significance of their differences for our concern for freedom.
The first major family of faiths is the Eastern family, which would include Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and different varieties of the new age movement. They share a similar understanding that the ultimate reality of the universe is an impersonal ground of being, from which we have become alienated. (In the understanding of a major branch of Hinduism, each of us is a manifestation of “God’s temporary self-forgetfulness.”) As seen from the viewpoint of this worldview, human life is a life of bondage on the wheel of samsara, the cycle of affliction, suffering, aging, death—and reincarnation (determined by the balance sheet of each person’s karma from their previous incarnations). What drives us and keeps us bound to the wheel is desire, which leads to craving, which leads in turn to attachment. The problem is not that we die but that we are reborn and bound to the wheel all over again.
The Eastern family of faiths is therefore deeply concerned with freedom. But what does freedom mean within this view of the world? And what does this perspective mean for personal and political freedom? The Sanskrit term for freedom is moksha, which means “liberation” or “release” (used of a horse released from its harness). This freedom centers on liberation from the world of maya or illusion. Thus freedom is highly desired in the Eastern religions, but it is quite different from the traditional Western notion. The road to freedom, represented by moksha, requires different paths or ways of living within this life, but its overall trajectory is essentially one of renunciation or withdrawal from the illusion of individual selfhood in this life.
Different schools of Eastern thought have differences over the from what and the how of freedom. For Hindus, such liberation can come from following many paths, including yoga, each one leading toward union with the divine: Brahman, the one supreme Self and Ground of Being. But all the paths involve renunciation of the human self, in the same way that salt loses itself as it dissolves in water and rivers end as they run into the sea. For followers of the Buddha, liberation comes along the path of “right mindfulness,” rejecting the extremes of self-indulgence and asceticism, and taking the middle path that leads to Nirvana, the “great deathless lake of extinction.” The differences between the Eastern religions are important, and they should never be minimized, but common to most of them is the notion that freedom is not freedom to be an individual, for that is to remain caught in the world of maya or illusion. Freedom is freedom from individuality, for the individual self is an illusion. “It [not I] is liberated,” cried Siddhartha Gautama when he became the Buddha, the enlightened one. He had attained the not-self. At last, said his disciple Buddhaghosa after his own enlightenment, “I am nowhere a somewhatness for anyone.”
What does such a view mean for either personal or political freedom? Clearly this view of freedom has much to say about personal freedom, though in a strenuously negative form. Is there freedom and the hope of fulfillment for the individual self in this world? Forget it. To pursue such a goal is to pursue an illusion and to remain caught in the world of illusion. That view in itself is strikingly different from the Jewish and Christian view that holds to the inalienable dignity of the individual person, according to which every single life matters, so that by definition there can be no outcasts and no untouchables.
At the same time, the Eastern views have little or nothing to say in addressing the political freedom that is central to Western democracy and to the arguments surrounding the American experiment. To be sure, Eastern views and the practices such as yoga are popular in the advanced modern world. But they represent a sort of escapist ideology in the world of modernity. They provide a refuge from the rush, din, and stress of the advanced modern lifestyle rather than a faith that drives and shapes the world of science, technology, and business—and the politics of freedom.
The second major family of faiths is the secularist family, which includes atheism, agnosticism, naturalism, materialism, and physicalism. What these worldviews share in common is a firm rejection of God, gods, the supernatural, and the insistence that the ultimate reality in the universe is chance. According to this view, all that exists is a product of chance plus time plus energy plus matter—Bertrand Russell’s “chance collocation of atoms,” Jacques Monod’s “chance and necessity,” Richard Dawkins’s “blind watchmaker,” or simply, “We won the lottery!”
Secularism, it must be said, glories in its affirmation of freedom, and for many atheists this is its first and greatest appeal. There is no God, there are no gods, and there are no supernatural beings behind the universe, atheists say. So we humans are on our own, life is all up to us, and we are each masters of our own fate and captains of our own souls. We are free to think and to live as we like, and this freedom is brandished as the trump card in many a secularist’s argument. If God is dead or absent, everything is permitted. Free of God, the atheist is untethered from outside control and free to think freely and to live freely.
How does such a view of freedom work out? True, there is no one and nothing we are accountable to, or to interfere with what we choose to do. If everything comes from chance, there is no meaning in the universe that we need to discover. So if we want and need meaning, which of course we do, it is up to us to make it for ourselves. Russell’s picture of the Greek giant Atlas carrying the world on his own shoulders is the perfect expression of the secularist worldview. Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” is the perfect musical accompaniment to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus I willed it” and Ayn Rand’s “And I meant it.” If the essence of the Eastern attitude to the freedom of the individual self could be distilled into two words, “Forget it,” the essence of the secularist attitude can be captured in three: “Do it yourself.”
Again and again, atheists witness to their joy in their newfound individual freedom. Don’t just read Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Sing its exhilarating song of freedom aloud to yourself! Atheism is freedom, and atheists are free thinkers. The worst thing to be said about God, they say, is that if there were such a God, he would be meddlesome, the great interferer. But there is no Father, no Big Brother, or anyone or anything behind the universe. There is no one to spoil their pleasures or cross their will. There is no all-seeing eye and no divine surveillance. There is no one to interfere. There is no one to impose. There is no one to whom any of us is accountable, and no one with the right to determine how each of us should think and live except ourselves. Rejecting any and all kinds of religion, the supernatural, and all authorities beyond the human, atheists declare that they are free and autonomous. They are independent sovereign selves.
But this ecstatic cry of individual freedom is untethered from reality. Even Nietzsche was unable to live as he wrote. There is an obvious practical problem in stating secularist freedom in terms of unrestrained individual freedom—other people are similarly free, and that creates the fundamental social and political problem of how we are to create a harmonious society out of a cacophony of competing selves all claiming freedom in a million different ways. The danger of such a view is that it quickly becomes a form of negative freedom run riot. By nature, it does not provide any counterbalancing place for the positive freedom of equally important notions such as community and commonwealth. But that said, there is a far deeper theoretical problem with the secularist view of freedom. If naturalistic science is counted on to replace religion and provide all the needed explanations for secularist knowledge and wisdom, as secularists claim, does naturalistic science provide any grounds for human freedom? The answer, which is becoming increasingly evident, is no.
B. F. Skinner, the champion of behaviorism, put all his cards on the table in the title of his bestselling book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. (“What is being abolished is autonomous man . . . the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity.”)7 Skinner was following the work of John B. Watson, who in pioneering the principles of stimulus-response claimed that he had discovered the psychologist’s equivalent of the atom, the basic building block humanity came from. Skinner argued that while the traditional Jewish and Christian view of humanity supported Hamlet’s exclamation, “How like a god!” this new Pavlovian view supports the statement, “How like a dog!” But that should be considered an advance and not a setback, he said, for it is the truth that science tells us.
More recently, new atheist philosopher Sam Harris comes to the same conclusion. “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. . . . We do not have the freedom we think we have.”8 Even Albert Einstein, humanitarian and resolute antiwar pacifist though he was, disavowed freedom. “In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.” His position, he said, was that of the philosophical pessimist Schopenhauer: “A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.”9
Yuval Harari summarizes how, according to this secularist view, science has driven nails into “freedom’s coffin.” “To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom.’ The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul,’ a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.” But of course, this bleak judgment spells the end not only of freedom but of liberalism too: “However,” Harari continues, “over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny.”10
Ideas have consequences. What begins as an idea washes down in the rain as behavior. For if humans are not free, then life is not meaningful as they believe it to be, and they are not responsible. Societies with no place for personal responsibility can move in only two main directions: chaos or control. In A Writer’s Diary, Fyodor Dostoevsky predicted the former. What would happen if there is no responsibility and everything could be blamed on people’s environments and backgrounds, so that there was no crime and no guilt? Then everyone and everything could be explained and excused, but the result of such nonresponsibility would not be peace. Instead, he argued, the outcome would be “crime as a duty.” Better barbarism than boredom, Baudelaire had argued. Better mayhem than non-entity, Dostoevsky warned. Responsibility neutered would express itself as anything but neutral. It would exert itself in violence (caused by far more than easy access to guns). “Since society is organized in such a vile fashion, one can only break out of it with a knife in hand.”11
The way out is to remember that there is all the difference in the world between science and scientism, the belief that science knows all there is to know. The truth is that for all the importance, the brilliance, and the indispensable character of science and the scientific method, there is more to be known than science will ever know. Freedom, along with its accompanying ideas such as purpose and intention, cannot be captured by the scientific method for two reasons. First, freedom looks forward, whereas the scientific method by its nature looks backward. Scientific knowledge and scientific explanations depend on the relationship of cause and effect. And second, freedom, being free, is not caused, so it cannot be captured by the insistence on the caused and the repeatable. It is unique and unprecedented.
If a plane is flown into a skyscraper, and the skyscraper falls, the collapse is the effect and the plane and its pilot are the cause. With causal relationships the process is never the other way around, which means simply that scientific explanations are retrospective, and they have to be. Just as the processes of big data codify the past and predict the future only in terms of the evidence of the past, so scientific explanations work backward. They lack the human imagination to create the future. By their nature and their logic they cannot see ahead, let alone prove anything forward. They can only speculate on the future based on the evidence of the past. Big data loses the trees for the forest. It cannot see the individual because it sees only the group and the past, and in a similar way science as normally understood simply cannot prove freedom. Insisting on repeatability, what happens all the time, and what happens in the same way in all times and all places, science cannot—by definition—see the singular, the extraordinary, and the unprecedented that happens only one time.
To be sure, that problem is true of science as normally understood or science understood in the classic Newtonian way. But those who understand reality in light of quantum mechanics see things quite differently. Following Walter Heisenberg, they break with the strict determinism of Isaac Newton’s universe. According to quantum mechanics, the mind is not simply an observer but an agent. It has an independent and decisive role in shaping reality and therefore makes the reality of human freedom possible, and makes life and moral choices meaningful. Physicist Henry Stapp points out that in the causally mindless mechanical world of the materialist, “this power of our minds is denied, and that denial eliminates any possibility of a rationally coherent conception of the meaningfulness of one’s life. For how can your life be meaningful if you are naught but a mechanical puppet, every action of which was completely fixed by a purely mechanical process pre-determined already at the birth of the universe?” Instead, he argues, our mental selves are not “mere passive witnesses to an inexorable sequence of material events that lie beyond the capacity of our thoughts, ideas, and feelings to affect in any way. . . . ‘Free choice’ stipulates that this choice is not fully determined by the material aspects of reality alone, but is influenced by an input from the mind of the observer.”12
This means that, like many other things in life, freedom does not have to be “scientific” in the sense of being proved by the scientific method. The truth is that science—for all its glories—is not the first, last, and only word on life. Freedom will always elude a certain type of scientific scrutiny, and the scientific method can never justify freedom. To ask science to do so is as futile as Kraus’s drunk looking for his keys where he knew they weren’t, even though there was better light there. We are all grateful heirs of the scientific method and its extraordinary illuminating power, and not for one moment do we repudiate science. But science and its scientific paradigm are not the sole or the final guides to truth, and they can no more prove the reality of freedom than they can verify love, describe the color of evil, or hope to capture the supernatural in a test tube. It is no criticism of science to say that it can only do what it is designed to do and does so brilliantly. But to ask it to do more is untrue to science and damaging to freedom.
Put differently, the glory of science is among the highest human achievements, but it includes a paradox. The approach that succeeds in the scientific exploration of nature may fail in the scientific exploration of human nature, for the detachment that helps scientists to see when it comes to nature may make scientists blind when it comes to humans. In G. K. Chesterton’s words, “That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guesswork which makes a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of a man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity.”13
Down the way of scientism, or dogmatic naturalistic science, lies the unfreedom of a thousand determinisms and the dismal swamp of reductionism and “nothing buttery.” There is no freedom left when the present is always pronounced to be determined by the past and the highest human ideals are pulled down from their pedestals as nothing but this and nothing but that. Better far the humility that values the scientific method but acknowledges its limits, and then uses it gratefully for what it is designed for. There are important things in life that science cannot discover and cannot assess, but we should never say that they are unreal or irrelevant for that reason. Science has a hard time doing justice to love, to beauty, and to notions such as justice. Human freedom is too important to be dismissed like that, and the point is clear. Within the bounds of science, humans can never be more than objects, by definition. Sam Harris’s admission about freedom and science is telling. In the light of science, freedom is only a feeling and an illusion: “We can’t make sense of it in scientific terms.”14 The truth is that neither the rationalist nor the scientist can ever establish human freedom. Freedom is not the fruit of either logic or lab.
The truth is—and the third family of faiths has always insisted on this fact—nature itself cannot prove human freedom, and nature is also inadequate to provide ethical guidance for human behavior. Nature has no heart. Nature is deaf to human cries and indifferent to our concerns. Nature is morally silent. Witness the barbarism of those, like the Social Darwinians and the Nazis, who have made the mistake of grounding ethics in nature. It takes history and theology to demonstrate that humans are not only objects but subjects and agents with dignity and genuine freedom. And it takes revelation from outside nature to guide us on how we are to live in relation to our fellow human beings.
Rabbi Heschel states, “Patient, pliant, and submissive to our minds is the world of nature, but obstinately silent. We adore her wealth and tacit wisdom, we tediously decipher her signs, but she never speaks to us.”15 Or as Leon Kass observes, “The heavens may, as the Psalmist sings, declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), but they say not a peep about righteousness. Not only is nature silent about right and justice; absolutely no moral rules can be deduced from even the fullest understanding of nature.”16 That sort of humility is rarely part of the understanding of the second family of faiths, which of course underscores the recurring point in our discussion. Once again, there are choices and there are consequences. Philosophies and worldviews are consequential because they provide the lenses that determine what we see, but because of their limitations and inadequacies they may also be the lenses that determine what we will never be able to see—and fail to see to our loss.
The third major family of faiths is the Abrahamic family, which includes Judaism, the Christian faith, and Islam. Today more than half the world lives by one of these three faiths, and in the form of the first two—Judaism and the Christian faith—they have been the primary shapers of the Western world, along with the Greeks and the Romans. What the two directly biblical faiths share in common is their belief that behind the universe is a personal and infinite God, and that two momentous truths flow out of who God is and what God has done: human freedom, God’s greatest gift to humankind, and meaningful history, the arena in which we live and act. In terms of God’s character, there are three decisive occasions in the Torah when God discloses himself to his people Israel as YHWH: once to Moses alone, once to the elders of Israel, and once—the moment that Jews consider the most important in all their history—to the entire nation at Mount Sinai.
YHWH is the name of God that Jews do not pronounce, or that was pronounced only at Yom Kippur and by the high priest. It is translated from the Hebrew either as I AM WHO I AM, or more literally as I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. In God, the past, the present, and the future are one, for he is the creator of time and is outside time. The God who spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then to Moses and the entire people of Israel is sovereign—and God’s sovereignty spells freedom, the capacity to exert his will regardless of any restraint or interference. God determines, speaks, and acts not because he has to but because he wills to. He is sovereign and therefore free, absolutely free. In Rabbi Heschel’s words, “The most commanding idea that Judaism dares to think is that freedom, not necessity, is the source of all being. Behind mind and matter, order and relations, the freedom of God obtains.”17
This God, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures declare, created humans in his image and likeness. As such, creation was the act of God’s freedom, and it created humans who are significant in their freedom and responsibility just as God is sovereign in his. Human freedom is therefore a gift from God through which we resemble our Creator, and it opens up the possibility of meaning in history. In the words of Rabbi Heschel, the second premise of Judaism is that “man is able to surpass himself. Such ability is the essence of freedom.”18
When God rescues the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, or calls people to himself today, he does so as a free God who liberates people to become free. He calls them to worship him freely, to become a people who live and walk before him in freedom, and to demonstrate a new way of human life and a new type of society built on dignity, justice, and freedom. Rabbi Sacks writes, “It is as if God had said, ‘My name is in the future tense.’” This means that God cannot be predicted or controlled. He cannot be confined to categories known in advance. Being free, he will be what he chooses to be, not randomly but as an expression of his character. “I am the God of the radically unknown future, the God of surprises. You will know me when you see me, but not before.”19 This freedom is the gift of God to humans created in his image. Always influenced by a thousand causes, yes, but unlike the rest of creation, humans are capable of thinking and acting freely, not because of causes from the past but through choices to do with an imagined future. Again Rabbi Sacks: “The key word of the first chapter of Genesis is Yehi, ‘Let there be.’ Creation, human or divine, means actualizing what has not yet been.”20 “Imagine,” John Lennon sang, but the world that he and Yoko Ono dreamed of and advocated for came no nearer. “Let there be,” God said, and “there was.” God’s word expressed God’s will, and the cosmos sprang into being as the effect.
Such freedom of the will “is not accidental to human existence as Judaism conceives it. It is of its very essence.”21 The same was true for the early Christians. In the second century, Irenaeus wrote famously, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”22 Tertullian in the same century quoted Genesis 1 many times and argued from it to ground human freedom. “Man was created by God as free, with power to choose and power to act. . . . There is no clearer indication in him of God’s image and similitude than this.”23 For both Jews and Christians, freedom is precious beyond all counting because it is the gift through which we most resemble our Creator. “Without taking freedom seriously,” Heschel concludes, “it is impossible to take humanity seriously.”24
The immensity of this claim about human freedom and meaningful history is radical and awesome, and it deserves to be pondered. As Jews and Christians see it, the choice is not between being free and being determined, as if it were a matter of either-or. Rather, the challenge is to exert one’s freedom and responsibility against all the surrounding forces that threaten to determine and condition, including the weight of one’s own character insofar as it has been determined by sin, wrong, and error. Freedom therefore lies in the act of overcoming the necessity that is born of normal processes. In today’s climate, such a view of freedom is too easily dismissed as religious mumbo jumbo. Yet in reality it is a truth mercifully different from ancient paganism (Sophocles: “Pray not at all, since there is no release for mortals from predestined calamity”).25 And it is excitingly different from the maximum-security prison cell of contemporary secular reductionism and determinism—so much so that it holds the key to a human future with genuine responsibility, growth, hope, love, and flourishing.
Humans are free and humans are responsible. But importantly, this majestic claim for freedom comes with an insistence on the need for self-limitation. In the biblical view there are two sides to both God’s freedom and our freedom, and in each case the second is as important as the first, though often overlooked. God is sovereign and therefore free, but God chooses to limit his own freedom in order to respect the freedom of humans he has made in his image. God enters the human heart only when invited. In the words of Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, God lives where we let him in. In Roger Williams’s daring term, God does not “rape” the human conscience. In Holman Hunt’s famous picture “The Light of the World,” Jesus stands at the door and knocks, but the door has no handle on the outside. It must be opened from the inside.
There is a similar double truth in human freedom too. Created in the image of God, we humans are free and therefore significant. We can rise above determinisms, but we must remember that freedom requires self-limitation from us too. Human freedom requires self-limitation in two ways: through our own character that freedom requires, and through the consistency that respects the same freedom for others. In terms of character, personal freedom must always be exercised within the framework of the truth of who we are and how we should live, and in terms of consistency, personal freedom must always respect the equal freedom of all others, our fellow human beings. Only so can a just and free society be built and sustained for the good of all, and not just for the rich and the powerful.
This Jewish and Christian view of freedom means that on the one hand, there is no freedom like human freedom, giving humans the ability and responsibility to help determine themselves decisively and to care for creation. The call of God in a human life means that we actually become partners with God in caring for our neighbors and the world. On the other hand, it also means that there is no freedom like human freedom that is able to undo creation and create chaos and cause violence. As Mircea Eliade states, the Bible’s view of human freedom means nothing less than “absolute emancipation from any kind of natural ‘law’ and hence the highest freedom that man can imagine: freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe. It is, consequently, a preeminently creative freedom. In other words, it constitutes a new formula for man’s collaboration with the creation.” All other views, whether ancient or modern, Eliade claimed, lead not only to determinism and unfreedom but to a terrifying view of history as fate and meaninglessness and, “in the end, to despair.”26
Is it any wonder that 1776 and America’s great experiment in political freedom owed everything to the Hebrew Bible and to the book of Exodus in particular? And that none of this basis for freedom can be found in 1789 and its secularist heirs? Does this not mean that America’s future freedom depends on whether Americans remember and acknowledge their biblical roots? Rabbi Sacks puts the immensity of the historical significance of Exodus simply: “It poses a fundamental question: Can we make, on earth, a social order based not on transactions of power but on respect for the human person—each person—as ‘the image of God’?”27 Exodus as the grand master story of Western freedom gave rise to the United States as the world’s sole modern nation dedicated to freedom at the core of its being and to the high purpose of acting into history with meaning. Rabbi Sacks concludes simply, “History does not give rise to hope; hope gives rise to history.”28
This means that it is a serious mistake to trivialize the precedent of Exodus by leaving it at the level of ancient history or reducing it to a slogan (Let my people go!). Like Jewish freedom, early American freedom was anchored in the character of God as mediated through his nation-forming covenant with his people. Freedom was therefore covenantal (later, constitutional). It required a framework and a way of life that protected and perpetuated the freedom won by the victory over pharaoh (and over Britain). Liberty began with liberation (revolution), but it was far more than liberation. It was an ongoing mission, and not a once-and-for-all given, and it required an entire way of life, and not just a single day of release. Like a muscle, freedom is not static. Exercise it, and it grows. Neglect it, and it withers.
Amazingly, the Jews even dared to use the same word, avodah, for serving and worshiping God as they had used for slaving for Pharaoh, even though slaving for Pharaoh had meant cruel bondage whereas serving God was the service that was perfect freedom. The point was deliberate. As Rabbi Sacks explains, “The difference is not that one is hard and the other is easy. They are both hard work, but one breaks the spirit, the other lifts and exalts it.”29 Can there be any question that America owes it to Exodus that covenantal (constitutional) freedom is in the DNA of the American republic?
To be sure, the biblical grounding for human freedom is precious, but it can be all too easily diverted in two dangerous directions: toward a selfish individual narcissism or to an arrogant powermongering by the strong and the wealthy. To be the robust and caring human responsibility it is called to be, freedom must be balanced with ethics and directed by the accompanying truth of history charged with meaning and led with purpose. Is life only “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth declares?30 Is history no more than Joseph Heller’s “trash bag of random coincidences blown open by the wind,” as his protagonist Bruce Gold asserts?31 Not so within the biblical perspective, where history is the arena open to the action of responsible human freedom under God. Western civilization takes purposeful history as self-evident, but once again it is the gift of the Jews passed on through Christians. Paul Johnson admits that one of the reasons he wrote his own book A History of the Jews was this unique sense of purpose in history. It helped him answer “the most intractable of all human questions: what are we on earth for?” “No people had ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. . . . The Jews, therefore, stand at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.”32
To be sure, there is a cautionary check and a certain encouragement for America in the reminder that Israel did not maintain and practice this stance on freedom consistently for long, and this relapse must also be acknowledged openly. All too soon and all too easily the book of Numbers followed the book of Exodus, and the book of Judges followed Numbers. Degeneration followed liberation, and eventually freedom was denied and then lost. The same was true of the Christian church in its turn. When the fourth-century Western church was victorious over the gods of mighty Rome, for example, and it moved into its seat of power, it took over too many of Rome’s institutions uncritically. Erasmus, for one, pointed out how the papacy reflected the Caesars, so that Pope Julius, the worldly secular princeling, resembled Julius Caesar more closely than Jesus of Nazareth. In the process of improper assimilation, the church had abandoned the covenantal basis of the Old Testament’s political order and had established a hierarchical order of governance that dominated Christian Europe from the fourth century until the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
Unquestionably, the deepest expression of this view of human freedom and responsibility is biblical, the clearest statements of it today are Jewish, and no one is more eloquent in expounding it than Rabbi Sacks, speaking with his distinguished background in Cambridge philosophy:
Human freedom and the self-consciousness that accompanies it are the great unknown and unknowable within the otherwise orderly processes of nature mapped by science. There can never be a science of freedom, for the concept is a contradiction in terms. Science is about causes, freedom about purposes. Science explains phenomena in terms of other phenomena that preceded them. Free action, by contrast, can only be understood in terms of the future we intend to bring about, not any past event, historical, biochemical or neurophysiological. To be sure, there are many influences on human behavior: some genetic, others cultural and environmental. But they are influences, not causes in the sense in which the term is used in the natural sciences.33
Freedom is at the heart of the biblical view of human dignity, and at the heart of history with meaning and purpose. According to this Jewish and Christian view, humans are created to act into history while aiming for an ideal that is higher than history and reaches beyond the horizon of their individual lives. But importantly, there is another distinctive feature of the Jewish and Christian views that is critical to the biblical understanding and to its success in defending freedom. The Bible is realistic about the human capacity for evil and vigilant about the abuse of power, and therefore aware that freedom never lasts and rarely turns out as its advocates hope. The reason is sin, the natural human inclination to do wrong and to go wrong. What Immanuel Kant famously described as “the crooked timber of humanity” was long foreshadowed in Genesis, the book of beginnings and the story of prototypical humanity. As Leon Kass comments in his magisterial book The Beginning of Wisdom, when we investigate the meaning of stories such as the garden of Eden, the flood, and the Tower of Babel, “readers are shown the dangerous natural tendencies of humankind: on the one hand, toward order-destroying wildness and violence, on the other hand, toward order-transforming efforts at self-sufficiency and mastery of the world.”34 Our English translation of Kant’s German came from philosopher R. G. Collingwood (“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”), but Kant himself was only quoting the Bible (“That which is crooked cannot be made straight” [Eccles 1:15 KJV]).
This Jewish and Christian realism about evil is critical for guarding freedom, because it counters the danger of utopianism that is at the heart of the Enlightenment, and it tempers the irresponsibility that might flow from an emphasis on freedom alone. In the words of Rabbi Sacks again, “Without limits, freedom for the strong means slavery for the weak. Freedom for the rich means misery for the poor. These limits have nothing to do with nature. The limits of nature are about power: they are about what we can do. The limits God places upon humankind are about ethics: what we may do.”35
According to this biblical view, humans have an inalienable dignity and worth because they are created in the image of God. While still creatures, like the animals, they are God-like in the sense of being made in God’s image. They are therefore free and responsible, and both the freedom and the responsibility must be respected, cherished, and protected—against all determinisms and all despotisms. But the same biblical view also underscores that the power that makes freedom possible can become the power that corrupts freedom fatally. With freedom, responsibility and risk go hand in hand and stand as a reminder that America may be the New World, but the American is still the Old Adam. James Madison was tutored by the redoubtable clergyman John Witherspoon at Princeton College, and his two essays, the Federalist Papers 10 and 51 are America’s most celebrated political exposition of the biblical view of sin, the danger of the abuse of power, and the vital importance of limiting power. Creation and corruption are never far apart.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.36
The last three centuries have underscored Madison’s realism with red flags of their own—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through control via social engineering, and the twenty-first century through control via big data. Some of the fruits of the Enlightenment have turned out to be so poisonous that it must forever be “the Enlightenment” or the so-called Enlightenment. And one of its most telling lessons is that some of the vilest crimes against humanity were carried out in the name of utopianism, not malice or misogyny.
This utopianism, as we shall see, is the fatal flaw in the vision of the sexual revolution, but one that too few recognize. For the moment, think of the monstrous outcomes of Mao Zedong’s pretensions to be an artist painting a new China on a blank canvas, killing tens of millions of his own people in the process. The practical expression of the contrasting biblical realism, and the surest bulwark against utopianism, is the insistence on a separation of powers, an appreciation for the necessity of checks and balances, and a respect for the role of prophets as social critics. No leader is so wise and so virtuous that they do not need to be checked and balanced, especially those who pride themselves on their intellectual brilliance or their ethical uprightness (which are rarely claimed together). Nor can there be such a paragon in the biblical view.
For the Jewish people, this separation of powers was expressed institutionally in their famous “three crowns” of authority (the king, the priest, and the prophet), each of them under God. Some absolutely vital ideas were at work in this principle: first, a separation of powers; second, a suspicion of power; and third, a secularization of power. This meant that the prohibition against idolatry ruled out the idolatry of politics. Politics was therefore relativized. It was never central or foremost in Israel, as it was in Aristotle’s Greece and in the modern “politicization” of life and society by today’s Left. The king was not the priest, the priest was not the king, and the prophet was the social critic whose responsibility was to hold the nation accountable to the standards of the covenant and thus to call the king, the priest, and the people back to their covenantal commitments.
Later in Jewish history, the lines became blurred. Kings, such as Jeroboam and Solomon, appointed their own priests, and in the time of Herod and his Hasmonean successors, the lines were effectively erased as the kings became high priests and priests became hopelessly entangled in politics. This confusion of powers contributed to the twin catastrophes of AD 70 and 133. For the American founders, the same insistence on the separation of powers led to the three branches of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. A free and independent press and charismatic leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later filled the roles of the recurring voices of prophetic criticism.
Needless to say, such realism about the flawed nature of humanity and the enduring necessity of a clear separation of powers is conspicuously absent in America today, especially on the Left where utopianism is never far away. It is a key reason for the persistent dangers of overreaching presidential power, an overreaching judiciary, the practice of burgeoning executive regulations, and the idolatry of politics that is represented by politicization, which leads in turn to the idolatry of the state and state control. Together these trends are changing America beyond recognition, and in the process menacing freedom. Thus a generation too sophisticated to talk of old-fashioned and politically incorrect notions such as sin and evil becomes a generation enamored and bogged down in ever-cleverer styles of corruption and overreach.
Presidents, judges, and movement activists who believe they are correct and on “the right side of history” rarely show respect for such notions as checks and balances, encroachment, and the will of the people. Arrogance replaces humility, persuasion is considered a waste of time, scalability becomes a virtue, and coercion becomes the handiest tool to reach for the domination that consistency calls for. Clearly, the American elites can project their own will onto the general will of the American people—“the expert knows best.” And in the grand manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all other wills, including those of the majorities who disagree with them, can be made to go along with their executive actions and legal decisions, all dressed up of course as “freedom.” Rousseau wrote, “Whoever refuses to pay obedience to the general will shall be liable to be compelled to it by the force of the whole body. And this is in effect nothing more than that he may be compelled to be free.”37 Joseph de Maistre described the result: the revolutionary will of the First French Republic was “a battering ram with twenty million men behind it.”38
“Compelled to be free”? A battering ram on behalf of liberty? And how many died in its path? Such a vile paradox and its outcome takes us back to chutes and ladders again. Are Americans content that these things should be so? That certain elites are suppressing dissent and conscientious objection in the name of a bogus charge of discrimination? Do Americans realize what they are choosing, and what their choices will mean for future generations? Are the elites to allow no alternatives to their way of thinking and living? Without a solid basis for freedom, there can be only determinism and despotism, and without a sure barrier against the abuse of freedom, there will be only exploitation and corruption. True lovers of freedom must be realists as well as idealists, and such realism is essential if freedom is to have a chance of lasting and not becoming its own worst enemy.
The central challenge of this last question to America can be put in the form of what might be called the Tocqueville reminder and the Jefferson query. Tocqueville noted, “Every religion has an affinity with some political opinion.”39 Which worldview, then, has the closest affinity with American freedom: the Hindu or Buddhist? The secularist or the Muslim? Or the Jewish and Christian? Jefferson was more pointed still: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the Gift of God?”40
Was Jefferson’s claim pure cant, in the same way that so many of his statements on freedom were hypocritical and never applied to his ownership of slaves? Or on this point was he realistic and right? If so, what are the grounds needed to justify American freedom? Which are the most adequate? Which best fits the American republic as it was founded and best fits its requirements nearly two and a half centuries on? But perhaps the question should be sharpened today: Why are rights such as freedom of religion and conscience and freedom of speech considered “inalienable”? If they are no longer considered God-given or rooted in the unique nature of human reason and conscience, as recent challenges have claimed, are they in fact inalienable any longer? And what does that mean for human rights? Are they simply fiat rights, paper rights, fictional rights?
These three families of faiths and their very different relationships to personal and political freedom today are clear. But there is little American thinking on the order of Jefferson or Publius now. Much of what is best about America is simply taken for granted. Too many Americans are repeating unexamined clichés and platitudes; too many are mouthing claims that they can no longer justify; and too many are putting their confidence in fashionable ideas whose consequences they have not examined. If a serious discussion about the foundations of freedom were to be opened, it would soon be choked off in the acrid air of the culture war hostilities on one side and the poisonous political correctness on the other.
Again, will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the eighth question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: Where do you ground your faith in freedom?
Why do notions such as human dignity, freedom, justice, and equality need any foundation at all? Do most people that you know lead what Socrates called an “examined life,” or do they just take over what their peers and the social media hand down to them? What will happen if there is a growing mismatch between the ideas and ideals that Americans believe now and those on which the republic was founded? Human dignity, freedom, and genuine liberalism itself are all under threat from various ideas and developments today. As Yuval Harari expresses the point, there are challenges that go far beyond philosophical challenges. “We are about to face a flood of extremely useful devices, tools and structures that make no allowance for the free will of individual humans. Will democracy, the free market and human rights survive this flood?”41
Nothing is more important than an open and continuing debate over these matters. Without solid foundations, without sure claims to truth, and without appropriate ways of living, there will be no lasting freedom, and without a free and open debate, there will be no chance to decide what is true and wise and good. Free people and genuine liberals can thrive only when everything is open to debate, though always within the rule of law, the bonds of civility, and a keen-eyed respect for the good of all. Can American freedom survive today’s culture wars, today’s political correctness, and today’s identity politics—with all their accompanying styles of repression? Can American freedom survive conservative obscurantism and liberal illiberalism? Once again, today’s choices are shaping tomorrow’s consequences, and the choices need to be considered with far greater care.