Freeeeeeedom?

Between the Christian and the liberal democratic tradition there must always be some element of enmity. What either understands as freedom the other must view as a form of bondage.

– David Bentley Hart, In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (2009), p. 90-91

I really like this quote. Freedom is an extremelly important idea for the Christian. In Paul’s great letters it is often one of the main ways he explains the gospel. We have been set free from fear, oppression, death, slavery to all sorts of powers, harmful ways of living and thinking. Most importantly, we have been set free to love and know God. 

Freedom is also an extemely important idea for the liberal democratic tradition, and your average joe-the-plumber living contently within that worldview. Freedom means that you can do anything, go anywhere, and develop your own life plan. You are free to come up with what you think is most important and let that orientate your life, perhaps even spend all your life chasing after it.

And here’s the animosity. The Chrisitian thinks any freedom that doesn’t free you to know and love God is not really freedom at all. The average liberal democrat (i.e. most contemporary western people) thinks that any freedom that tells you what to do and comes loaded with a conception of the good is not really freedom.

Play me off, Bob… 

On Money and Privacy

We are fascinated with privacy. Gossip magazines, stories about dual identities and secret affairs, and TV shows like Lie to Me and Big Brother disclose this fascination of ours pretty obviously. There is something alluring about the possibility of a secret identity, a secret relationship, secret passions, a secret past. At the same time there is something comforting, warm and even liberating about a secret place, a secret hobby, a secret dream, a secret song, a secret ability –  a secret thought-life which is not open for others to critique, question, probe or trample all over.

But is this a good thing? I realise this is a pretty broad question to throw up – is privacy in all instances and at all times an excellent or a harmful thing? – but it’s an important question. What reactions do you immediately have to it?

A friend has recently introduced me to the prose of Joan Didion. She is a brilliant writer, penning some real insights about human nature and American life. Writing in the 1960s, she has this to say about America’s fascination with millionaire Howard Hughes:

Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the west, trailing a legend of desperation and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favourite people and our favourite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted…That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake, but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course we do not admit that…There has always been divergence between our officials and our unofficial heroes. Hughes is the last private man, the hero we no longer admit.

-          Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), p. 71-72

In this excerpt Didion suggests that the reason Americans made a hero out of Hughes was because he was a symbol of complete freedom. Legends circulated that he would buy up entire hotels for just him to use, that he would buy movie stars to only work in his movies, that he would pay a barber large amounts of money to be standing-by 24/7 in case he ever wanted a haircut. His money and his power were the means to mobility and privacy. This is both an interesting suggestion about why money and power (often thought to be materialistic ends in themselves) are so valued, and also a dark suggestion about what desires may actually drive human beings.  A suggestion that there is something destructive embedded within the American dream.

There is a delicious irony to Didion’s suggestion. America secretly admired a man who has complete privacy, because it would not be publicly polite to admit that you actually value and desire privacy above all things. America secretly admired the man who had the means to live completely secretly.

Perhaps contemporary fascination with promiscuous NRL players, outspoken radio personalities, adulterous politicians, and idle hedonists like Paris Hilton, is generated from that same place as America’s fascination with Hughes.

Christianity has bad news for those who would chase all their life after ‘personal freedom, mobility, privacy’ as the greatest good in life. And it has a word of warning to those of us who love our privacy a little too much:

The sins of some men are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later.  (1 Timothy 5.24)

…Either way, they appear. Privacy is in fact, a myth. Don’t romanticize it, let alone secretly chase after more and more of it.