Author: O.S. Guinness
Title: “A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the
American Future”
Publication: 2012, IVP Books, ISBN 978-8308-3465-5, 224
pages, indexed, 7 Chapters
“Sustainability” has not always been a moral buzzword. The early Christians expected the “end” to
come soon. In most of the twentieth
century (and previous centuries) the welfare of a country and all its
constituent social groupings had a lot to do with surviving external threats
from enemies and with throwing off political tyranny and authoritarianism,
migrating toward liberal democracy with increasing recognition of diversity and
individual rights.
In recent years, we have indeed started to question how we
can sustain our western lifestyles, not just against competitive enemies (like
radical Islam) but from climate change and “demographic winter”.
Guinness generally keeps his reasoning high-level and
abstract, as if he were proving a sequence of theorems about political or
social science. He starts out by
focusing on “the American experiment” (not to confuse this term with the name
of a conservative group in Minneapolis), comparing America to other great
empires, and the American revolution to other traumatic changes in
history.
He comes up with a nice idea of a “triangle” of
sustainability: Freedom requires
virtue, which in turn requires faith, which in turn requires freedom, closing
the triangle. The problem is that virtue
cannot be derived purely by intellect alone, because some moral issues –
especially those having to do with the relationship of the “special” individual
to the group – tend to lead us into contradictions. For example, it seems good to like or prefer
people who seem “virtuous” (or who “look” virtuous), but then we are putting
down the less fortunate. (Perhaps that
means, if I was lifted up, I owe it to “society” (or God) to lift someone else
up.) We tend to resolve these moral
conundrums by looking for absolute moral
teachings in scripture (for example, the way the Vatican interprets scripture
as “the Teachings of the Church”). The scriptures play umpire, defining the size
of the pitcher’s strike zone. But
no one can really experience faith until
he or she is free to do so without external pressure from the external,
paternalistic state. And that brings us
into some paradox concerning what “freedom” at the individual level must mean
if it is to remain sustainable.
Guinness defines a concept called “negative freedom”, that is,
the insistence on being left alone (mentioned in a couple of famous Supreme Court opinions). We
need to let ourselves be bothered with other people’s needs because our own
output in life means nothing except in its ability to meet the real needs of
other people (although “real life” can become quite broadly construed, despite
my own late mother’s ideas about this.) Guinness decries the weakening not only
of marriage but of most social structures.
He says that real freedom is the province only of those who “belong” to
others and to purposes larger than themselves.
I always have a problem with the idea of belonging to
someone else’s purpose, because you could wind up playing on the wrong
team. Who wants to “belong” to a crime
family, however pious? Individualism is indeed a good check on corrupt
leadership. People who are “different”
but talented find themselves in a precarious position in these kinds of
revolutionary debates; the asymmetry of their efforts can topple things over
back toward exclusion of others who are even less talented and maybe to certain
kinds of authoritarianism (even fascism).
In an individualistic culture, people are supposed to take care of
themselves and “mind their own business”;
but it is still necessary to learn how to be attentive to others and
take care of others, at least in a family setting, and this responsibility is
inherent and occurs long before any decision to have children. Indeed, the whole meaning of marriage becomes
something that ratifies one’s ability to channel his deepest sense of
satisfaction and purpose toward real needs around; but marriage doesn’t cause
it. It becomes a chicken and egg
problem, or another endless loop, a moral spin or low pressure system.
Guinness never mentions homosexuality or gay political issues, but he does criticize the notion that sexuality is (or has become in western society) a private, self-serving experience rather than part of the process of socialization. He seems to think that deference to scriptural notions of right and wrong are necessary to get around apparent surface contradictions. He sees libertarianism as "selfish", but that's also how he sees the self-serving behavior of much of American business. Freedom, he thinks, more about doing the right things out of "habits of the heart", for the good of everyone (including other generations), in concentric rings around immediate family.
The book implies that the willingness of people who are "different" (me) to become other-centric, and not too invested in their own chosen purposes, can become critical for the sustainability of a whole free society.
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