Nobody will tell you what is good
January 31st, 2007We humans grew up as serfs. We have a double servility history: a personal servility history when we were kids, and a collective servility history when we were ruled by kings. Wherever we went, whatever we did, whomever we met, there was always someone or something telling us what to do, what was good and what was bad. What to wear, where to live, what to do for a living, whom to marry, which God to worship, what to love, whom to hate…
Then we gained freedom. At least in some lucky places, we are free on an unprecedented scale. Our forebears, crushed under the weight of injustice, fought dearly and won. It was a strange victory, in which they did not defeat injustice, but they won freedom, and passed it on so that we could be born free. But are we grown-up enough to be endowed with such an awesome gift? Just imagine kids making a big fuss because their parents have been unjust on an important matter (say that they had promised wednesday afternoon TV was kids choice, but today is the world cup finals). Imagine the parents yield, step back, turn around and leave the kids alone in the house, free. That’s what freedom is: an overwhelming double-edged heirloom.
A laborious exercise
With unconditional freedom, when our free will roams with no other limit than the freedom of our neighbor, everything becomes so difficult. For every little or big action we take, we have to answer the dreaded question ‘what should I do?’ In theory, we should have a decision criterion for every action and our choice should optimize the criterion. Unfortunately, we are free to choose the criterion itself, making the choice an infinite recursion problem with no answer.
Let me illustrate with the basic action of choosing chocolate at a department store: my criterion can be to buy the cheapest, but when I look at the ingredients, I reconsider my criterion; then I choose health as a criterion, but then I think that if calories were my primary concern, I would not be choosing chocolate in the first place; so I choose taste, but then I understand that I would be deceived by package niceness when I really cannot know the taste from the look; so I choose quality, but then I know I have been brainwashed by TV ads to believe quality has something to do with brand fame; so I choose the organic one, but its brownish paper looks dull; I am tempted to pick at random, but each time my hand reaches for a bar, I find a good reason not to choose this one; just before I give up, I finally choose the plainest cooking chocolate, because I know it will at least be useful for making muffins, but I cannot help feeling disappointed.
Now imagine what freedom can be like on a larger scale, when we have to choose a job, a house, a spouse, a language, a religion, a presidential candidate. When we know the choice can result in unfathomable long-term consequences, when it involves other people who would have different criteria or opinions, the exercise of freedom can represent an overwhelming combination of responsibility, doubt, stress, and ultimately guilt.
Freedom has to lean on a solid frame
In fact, doubt cripples action, and we cannot trace a path if we have to ponder every step we take. If we want to move forward, our free will has to have a solid frame on which it can lean. My understanding is that we need to abide by a set of rules, which we hope has been thoroughly thought through or validated by long practice. This way, we do not lose time deciding whether each action we intend is good or bad. This is why freedom is so fragile: it feels so good not to have to worry about what we should do that our natural tendency is to swear fealty to a doctrinal frame, then hand over our share of freedom and live as slaves (which would you rather be: parents in charge or spa-goers at a hot spring resort?)
In the past, every social group or nation had one single such frame, a packaged collection of rules that everybody had to abide by, making free will a superfluous commodity. For every action, people knew what was good or bad because they were told. Everything was either black or white, and fortunately, every social group managed to be on the ‘white’ side of their particular frame of rules — there was no responsibility, there could be no doubt, no stress, no guilt.
A diversity of slaveries
Such frames, such packaged sets of rules still exist today, even though we are free. Everybody still has a set of rules and acts accordingly, therefore partially relieved of free will. The fundamental difference is that gurus no longer have a monopoly. Everybody can choose one they prefer. One can choose several different rules in the course of one’s life (starting as a yuppy, then turning into a hippie). One can even choose different rules at the same time depending on the context. One can be a vegetarian and a conservative. One can be a biologist and a church-goer. One can be pro-choice and pro-war. The number of doctrines about what is good have multiplied like gremlins in a pool, so that even in a small social group, the notion of absolute good does not exist anymore.
This leads to a very inefficient society, where for every person believing something is good we could find someone with the opposite belief. On the one hand, it is very reassuring to know that we do not behave as a herd of bosonic sheep. On the other hand, when I am absolutely certain about the right thing to do (e.g. about global warming, health, feminism, research, solidarity), it is extremely frustrating to see so many people running in the opposite direction.
The temptation of unanimity
I am sure that good-willed leaders constantly feel this frustration and therefore consider freedom as a hindrance to ambitious enterprises like wars, economic development or (mental) revolutions. I mean, if everybody could embrace energy savings and take up the challenge of the post-oil era with the same unanimous determination as the Germans embraced National Socialism back in the thirties or as the Americans hunted down communism back in the fifties, global warming and peak oil crises would be a piece of cake and Nature would be saved, wouldn’t it?
Unfortunately, the way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I believe no great cause can justify to dump freedom. Looking back at world history, we can see that the worst almost always came from unanimous crowds gathered around a grand ideal. “Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête” (He who would act the angel becomes the beast — Blaise Pascal, in Pensées), or put it simpler: baddies always believe they are goodies (please teach this to your kids before they become President).
Doubt and disorder is the price to pay for freedom.
Freedom can actually be so imprisoning when we don’t know how to let go of our own beliefs about what we can actually change and what we can’t. I just struggle so with the notion of having to serve in order to be free, as world religions teach us. It’s so counter-intuitive. Meanwhile, no matter how often I may mutter, “You know, nobody’s really free in this society,” I know perfectly well that I wouldn’t want to have to give up my life in the here and now to live as a slave in 19th-century South Carolina, for example.
Meanwhile, your chocolate bar analogy was brilliant.
Nobody has to have a car, a mortgage, a full-time job. Yet life is so much simpler when we have a mortgage, then we must have a full-time job, and therefore a car to get there: there are much fewer alternatives, week-ends are the only moments we only have some sort of choice about our life (like which movie to go to). That’s the perfect modern-times self-inflicted slavery system, when in fact we are free to choose otherwise (humanity lived and prospered long before there were cars, mortgages and full-time jobs).
PS: I knew you’d like the chocolate bar analogy