Freedom from choice?

by Narkissos 20 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Narkissos

  Just a few reflections as I announced on blueblades' thread about 'the commands to love and free will'.

  What is freedom?

  I think it is practically impossible to give an absolute (= timeless, or contextless) answer to such a question. There is both continuity and difference in the use (hence meaning) of notions like "freedom" (or "liberty") from one language, culture, civilisation, period of history, to another...

  We can, to an extent, provide contextually defined answers -- and those will be mostly negative: to the ancient world "freedom" would have been construed as the opposite of slavery, or captivity, or foreign rule (for instance). The central idea (but it may be already too much of a positive generalisation) might be autonomy vs. heteronomy -- being "ruled" by one's own "law" instead of another's.

  As the concept of "free will" (and more clearly in French, libre arbitre) illustrates, we ("modern Westerners") have come to think increasingly of freedom in terms of choice, or decision. To be free is being able to choose between several political parties and candidates, religions, lifestyles, careers, potential mates, brands of food, drink or soap. (Representative) democracy and consumerism both feed on this notion of freedom as, if I dare say, indifferent difference. As long as we have a choice -- and the more unconsequential the better, for we do not reckon a choice between life and death as choice anymore -- we deem ourselves free. Corporations have long learnt to exploit this trend by offering basically the same stuff under apparently concurrent names and packages.

  My impression is that the very notion of will, as was still used in the 19th century, with the tragical inner necessity and accepted responsibility which it implied, has completely vanished in this understanding of freedom as "undetermined" choice. And I sometimes wonder if such freedom, with the constant need for choosing without ever making a real difference, is not the heaviest slavery to which mankind has ever "freely" surrendered itself.

  Will we next be longing for freedom from choice? Will we rediscover necessity and reinvent destiny? Will we dig up our age-old metaphors for freedom -- the wind, the rivers, the birds etc., as in "he wind blows where it wills" -- and build a sense of freedom which has nothing to do with the abstract "possibility" to be, want and do otherwise?

  Comments welcome.
• 

  slimboyfat

  But modern society still offers us the choice not to choose. We can join a radical political party or even a strict sect like Jehovah's Witnesses and have the most important decisions in our life taken for us by others. This is obviously a considerable comfort to many people because a significant minority choose thus to abrogate the bewildering array of choices modern life offers in preference for a total system of thought with ready made answers to everything.

  The thread makes me wish I had paid more attention when I read The Fear of Freedom by Erich Fromm. I know there was much in that book relevant to your thoughts, but it escapes me now. I was led there by Andrew Holden's discussion of the appeal of Jehovah's Witnesses in the modern world. He argues adherence to authoritarian sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses offers people a way to opt out of the disconcerting instability of the endless choices we face. Fear of freedom is also part of what stops many leaving the Witnesses. Without going off at too much of a tangent can I quote a passage from Holden's essay on the subject because I think it is relevant?

  It is not uncommon for Witnesses who experience doubts about the movement’s teachings to talk of having ‘nowhere to go’, and this reveals as much about attitudes towards the outside world as it does doctrinal dissatisfaction. While the Governing Body’s revised eschatology has no doubt been successful in retaining some people who may previously have considered leaving, it is the powerful combination of the individual’s affective bond with other devotees and his/her fear of the outside world that secure loyalty. Reluctance to air objections forces devotees either to remain silent or to terminate their membership. For many, the latter would not only mean rejection from close friends and relatives, it would also involve abandoning a community that has offered them emotional security for the biggest part of their lives.[x] Though the inside may be fallible, the outside is potentially much worse. In his well known monograph The Fear of Freedom (1960), Erich Fromm suggests that this kind of submission to an all-powerful closed system is one way of escaping the problems of so-called liberal democracies. Although Fromm writes from a psycho-analytical perspective, the root causes of anxiety in the modern world are, he suggests, social. Fromm argues that the collapse of medieval tradition and the development of modern capitalism, both of which ostensibly produced freedom, created isolation, doubt and emotional dependency .[ xi] In this sense, escaping freedom is a form of psychological liberation. Liberation from choice can lead to far greater security than liberation as choice. Fromm suggests that the rise of fascism in

  Germany in the twentieth century, for example, can be seen as a longing for the return to the authoritarianism of pre-individualistic society. For Fromm , withdrawal from the world and the destruction of others are mechanisms of escape and symptomatic of the need for certainty. Whatever doubts individuals might have of the Watch Tower community, it is most unlikely that they would experience life outside as better. When devotees suppress their ambivalence,

  they suppress the ambiguities of the modern world. The aversion of secular society with all its uncertainties is well worth the sacrifice of what others in their folly call ‘freedom’. If this analysis is correct, it would appear that the forces that lure people into millenarian group membership are the same forces that prevent them from leaving. This notion that freedom exists within the movement was endorsed by a long-standing member who shared with me her perceptions of life outside:

  Some people look at Jehovah’s Witnesses and think that the boundaries are incredibly tight, but I don’t think they are personally. I think it gives you more freedom than somebody out there. You’re free from a morbid fear of what might happen to you by going against God’s laws, you don’t believe you’re going to be tormented by a fiery hell, you’re free to think that God is a God of love and he wouldn’t do something like that. I think you’re free from being enslaved to a lot of superstition, whereas people will let themselves be ruled by all sorts of silly things like walking under ladders, or if they see a black cat, or how many magpies; it’s amazing … and people who feel that their lives are ruled by the stars and they won’t do a certain thing because their horoscope tells them not to do. So you’re free from that. You’re free because today’s morals are so liberal and anything goes, because you stick within Jehovah’s moral guidelines, you’re free from outside immorality.

  What appears from the outside to be a highly restrictive way of life is, from the inside, one of security and liberation. The oppressive forces of totalitarian control can be subjectively experienced as gratifying. Though they may doubt, Witnesses who continue to support the Watch Tower regime are removing the uncertainties that would otherwise disempower them. Suppressing ambivalence may be the only way in which they are able to resist the problems that the twenty-first century life poses. Multiple options and individual choice are fertile soil for the restoration of moral authority. In short, the paradox (indeed, one of the many paradoxes) of the modern world is that the freedom it promises is the freedom that is feared.

  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/holden-cavorting-with-the-devil.pdf

  If modern consumer based freedom is oppresive as you say, maybe we are better off with the Witnesses after all.
• 

  BurnTheShips

  the constant need for choosing without ever making a real difference, is not the heaviest slavery to which mankind has ever "freely" surrendered itself..and build a sense of freedom which has nothing to do with the abstract "possibility" to be, want and do otherwise?

  Some choices are relatively inconsequential, i.e. soap. Some have consequences, choosing a mate. As for freedom from, how can one be totally free of influences? It is not possible. Life is always becoming. And to become there has to exist the abstract be, want and do.
• 

  trevor

  An interesting post Narkissos

  We live in a world that seems to become increasingly complicated and offer more and more choices. Many people would like a simpler life and long to return to a time when they had less choice and therefore more freedom.

  We also have more laws and regulations than ever before which we are told are there to protect our freedom. People are starting to ask if we are losing our freedom because of the very regulation that is supposed to protect our freedom. Governments are increasingly trying to control our thoughts and speech through political correctness.

  We are more and more dependent on being part of an expanding consumer led economy and are no longer free to live independently and freely of this system.

  Perhaps in the words of the Kris Kristofferson song,' Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose.'

  Or perhaps the only true freedom is death.
• 

  quietlyleaving

  Will we dig up our age-old metaphors for freedom -- the wind, the rivers, the birds etc., as in "he wind blows where it wills" -- and build a sense of freedom which has nothing to do with the abstract "possibility" to be, want and do otherwise?

  I vote for digging up the old metaphors for freedom. Science and biology tell us, what perhaps we knew intuitively in the past, that the wind the rivers and the birds respond to external and internal forces, that maybe, can be seen as "wills". We are caught up in a similar scenario simply because of being human and a part of that framework. So I think it is fitting that we draw meaning from metaphors taken from nature.

  ql
• 

  Narkissos

  Thank you all for your replies so far.

  slimboyfat,

  Very interesting quote -- although I find the included JW quotation a bit disappointing, as it doesn't really illustrate the author's main argument (at least as far as the present topic is concerned), namely: "escaping freedom is a form of psychological liberation. Liberation from choice can lead to far greater security than liberation as choice". Inasmuch as the quoted JW paints life outside the WT as servitude (real or imaginary) rather than threatening or disturbing freedom of choice, it fails to make this particular point. However I do feel the author's impression is basically correct. Dostoevsky's (or Ivan Karamazov's) Great Inquisitor comes to mind.

  modern society still offers us the choice not to choose.

  I wonder how far it does; tolerates might be more exact than "offers": there is some social reprobation on those who choose not to choose. Moreover, as your wording illustrates, modern society imposes its overarching category of choice on the "not-choosing option". What the believer would name "obedience" or "submission" s/he must construe as "free choice" within the broader culture.

  If modern consumer based freedom is oppresive

  Thinking again, I would not describe it as oppressive (I did use the adjective "heavy" but that was a poor... choice of words). Debilitating, unnerving, dissolving might better express what I think is the effect on the individual subject. What is lost is the seriousness of tragedy and the particular aesthetics and meaning it determines.

  If Isolde could just as well divorce king Mark in Reno and marry Tristan in Vegas, we wouldn't have such a beautiful tale of love and death I guess.

  Anyway, I was rather thinking of individualresistance to choice -- an apology of dipsukhia, "soul duplicity" or indetermination, or epokhè, "suspension (of judgement)" as you have sometimes expressed in our past conversations -- than abdication of choice to someone else. Nevertheless there is also some truth in Herminia's words to Harry Haller in Hesse's Steppenwolf (free translation): "obeying is like eating and drinking: nothing is worth it when you have long been missing it."

  BTS,

  Becoming is the point indeed. But I would suggest that in the "consumer's choice" paradigm it is rarely taken seriously, as the chooser is entertained with the constant illusion that every choice can be indefinitely undone or done again and that s/he will remain essentially unaffected (which is the opposite of becoming). Only the constantly avoided thought of death would make any (and every) choice significant. As Antonio Machado put it,
  (solo) "un golpe de ataúd en tierra es algo
  perfectamente serio."
  (En el entierro de un amigo.)

  trevor,

  Great points. I do believe that facing (the thought of) death -- instead of avoiding it -- is, in a paradoxical sense, the beginning of freedom. One of the best (imo) understandings of Christian "salvation" is expressed in Hebrews 2:15, "to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death" (which includes repressing the thought of death). Unfortunately it has become just another way to avoid the thought of death.

  quietlyleaving,

  Thank you for understanding and expressing better the point I was trying to make, that "freedom" doesn't need to be construed as the opposite of outer and inner determination. Perhaps, indeed, that thought can only be approached through metaphor (as in "free fall," for instance?).

  Please keep them coming. I should be away from this board in the next few days but I will enjoy reading your thoughts when I'm back.
• 

  Deputy Dog

  Nark

  We can, to an extent, provide contextually defined answers -- and those will be mostly negative: to the ancient world "freedom" would have been construed as the opposite of slavery, or captivity, or foreign rule (for instance). The central idea (but it may be already too much of a positive generalisation) might be autonomy vs. heteronomy -- being "ruled" by one's own " law" instead of another's.

  Good topic! As a Calvinist I think about many of these issues.

  When I think about "will" I think in terms of desire, as apposed to having the ability the actually cause the things to happen.

  My impression is that the very notion of will, as was still used in the 19th century , with the tragical inner necessity and accepted responsibility which it implied, has completely vanished in this understanding of freedom as "undetermined" choice. And I sometimes wonder if such freedom, with the constant need for choosing without ever making a real difference, is not the heaviest slavery to which mankind has ever "freely" surrendered itself.

  This sounds a little like Calvin.

  Will we next be longing for freedom from choice? Will we rediscover necessity and reinvent destiny? Will we dig up our age-old metaphors for freedom -- the wind, the rivers, the birds etc., as in " he wind blows where it wills" -- and build a sense of freedom which has nothing to do with the abstract "possibility" to be, want and do otherwise?

  This reminds me of the day I realized my (spiritual) salvation was not a result of even my own will. It was quite liberating!
• 

  BurnTheShips

  As Antonio Machado put it,
  (solo) "un golpe de ataúd en tierra es algo
  perfectamente serio."
  ( En el entierro de un amigo. )

  Claro. Everything else is changeable. Like my grandmother would say (and still does): "No hay mal que dure cien anos, ni cuerpo que lo resista."

  Yea, thou art still for me the demolisher of all graves: Hail to
  thee, my Will!

  And only where there are graves are there
  resurrections.-

  http://philosophy.eserver.org/nietzsche-zarathustra.txt
• 

  jgnat

  Watch the pretty ball. Buy the pretty ball. That's rampant consumerism at it's worst, isn't it? We slave to fill a yawning need that others tell us is there.

  I sense the loss, in the western world at least, is our self-possession. Do we live according to our highest values? Have we spent time thinking about what we value most?

  It's not the pretty ball, is it? Or the stainless steel barbecue?
• 

  BurnTheShips

  Watch the pretty ball. Buy the pretty ball. That's rampant consumerism at it's worst, isn't it? We slave to fill a yawning need that others tell us is there.

  I sense the loss, in the western world at least, is our self-possession. Do we live according to our highest values? Have we spent time thinking about what we value most?

  It's not the pretty ball, is it? Or the stainless steel barbecue?

  All too many of us are empty vessels that allow ourselves to be filled with crap. Know thyself? BTS