The Great Conversation:
Liberty—Part III

Go here for Part I (mainly on liberty versus slavery and liberty of thought), and here for Part II (mainly on the theory and history of classical Liberalism).

So far, we have mainly discussed various senses in which people can be free or unfree in relation to each other (legally, politically, and socially). There are many more of that kind, like economic liberty, which time fails us to look over. However, there are several less tangible senses of liberty—liberty in the spiritual dimension, we might say—that merit our attention.

Liberty often comes up in discussions of the virtue of temperance. We naturally pursue things we like, and have to be taught principles like fairness, patience, and so on, which interfere with our wants. As a result, we often think of temperance as a negative virtue: “don’t do this,” “that’s too much,” “not right now.” Self-indulgence can thus feel like a liberation, and people who habitually ignore the rules are accordingly described as libertines; incidentally, it is no coincidence that the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, was also called Liber or “the Free.”

But most people cannot afford that kind of freedom, in many senses of the word “afford,” and will raise an eyebrow at someone making wholesale self-indulgence into a vocation rather than a treat. People who write great works of theology, law, or philosophy are known to fill them with such eyebrows. The conventional libertine counter-accusation is that deep down, these temperance cheerleaders are writhing with envy, trying to compensate themselves for all the fun they want to have but can’t (Wonders of the Invisible World isn’t going to write itself, and besides, what would mother say?) It must be admitted that in most cases, the charge is probably true. Many forms of misery and servitude are enforced as much by the envy and spite and fear of ostensibly good people who don’t want their “inferiors” to surpass them, as they are by the the avarice of those servitude actually serves. As Bill Watterson put it, “I suspect most of us get old without growing up, and that inside every adult (sometimes not very far inside) is a bratty kid who wants everything his own way.”*

Another name for pursuing pleasure recklessly is hedonism, but with that word we run into a curious problem. It comes from the normal Greek word for pleasure, ἡδονή (hēdonē); fine so far. But when the philosophy of Epicurus comes up, terms such as hedonism  or epicureanism can cause confusion, because what Epicurus in fact argued was that the habits of moderation and self-discipline, far from being antithetical to pleasure, were vital to long-term contentment. The fact that he considered total freedom from physical and mental distress the highest good doubtless contributed to this outlook. Many later schools of ethics, philosophy, and psychology have granted a similarly high role to pleasure in their accounts of human motives and behavior—from St. Augustine‘s claim that all our desires are forms of love, to Sigmund Freud’s explanation of the development of the mind as an increasingly sophisticated set of strategies for meeting the instinctive desires of the id. But if our only motive for doing anything is the pleasure it brings, whether to ourselves or someone else, that prompts a question: are we, in some sense, slaves of pleasure?

A phrase like “enslavement to pleasure” may put us in mind of Puritan preachers thundering at malnourished churchgoers. However, there is more to the concept than the words just as such: the treatment practices for substance abuse often draw on such metaphors, as when we speak of someone being free of an addiction, or of their behavior as compulsive (a word we sometimes forget is related to the verb compel). And while the thesis that all human choices are motivated by pleasure may seem intuitive enough, a surprising number of traditions are intensely concerned with, or even based on, the idea of being freed from certain dominating impulses in our own makeup—Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Christianity, and Islam all share this characteristic. The very word “self-mastery,” while it may be silly, does suggest a conquest of one part of ourselves by some greater or higher version of the self, resulting in a greater freedom.

This may seem like an arbitrary paradox, but we do see it regularly. For example, all else being equal, a modest person has more options at their disposal for responding to an insult than an egotistical person does, because an egotistical person can’t let things go; they, rather than the modest, are the ones stuck serving just one desire (fix the ego-wound somehow). There is a strong case to make for the claim that asceticism, even without any religious motives behind it, is a path to far greater inner freedom than being a libertine is. Part of the reason the ancient Christian martyrs made such a strong impression on the world, non-Christian as well as Christian, was that most people are too afraid of death to be able to choose it for the sake of truth. Ironically, one of the most famous early martyrs, St. Lucy of Syracuse, was said in later versions to have been supernaturally fastened in place: found guilty of Christianity, she was condemned to serve in a brothel, but heaven sanctioned her freedom by keeping her still.