Freedom and Identity
by John F Doherty, Public Discourse:
The greatest enemy of our freedom, which we all must confront, whether we live under a totalitarian regime or in a free society, is our deep-seated tendency to create and cling to a simplistic, false notion of our identity.
“There is no doubt,” Joseph Ratzinger has written, “the era we call modern times has been determined from the beginning by the theme of freedom.” Today, says writer Jacques Philippe, “freedom appears very nearly the only value about which people still agree unanimously.”
Most recently, this enthusiasm for freedom, the power of self-determination, has focused on the self as such, or identity. Some, as Yuval Levin notes in A Time to Build, are struggling for political freedom by emphasizing “group identity and structural power relationships among different racial, ethnic, sexual, and socioeconomic camps.” To challenge their perspective, they think, is “to dismiss [the] very being” of oppressed people. For others, Ratzinger notes, “existence itself” has become oppressive: they want “to be free from [their] own human nature,” sometimes by altering their bodies permanently.
Contemporary zeal for self-liberation has drawn public attention to a perennial question: In what is the human person’s “very being”—our freedom and identity—grounded?
“Very being” is the theme of metaphysics, the subject in which philosophy steps into religion; for perfect being just is God. Unsurprisingly, many identity activists display a religious spirit, as Levin notes. They use the “framework of Puritan theology,” with its “rich vocabulary of defilement, taboo, and purification” and its zeal for “orthodoxy backed by powerful moral imperatives.” Their aim, “as they understand it themselves,” and despite the violence of some of them, “is not to crush dissent or dominate society,” but to seek justice, “to proclaim liberty to captives” like the prophet Isaiah. The identity movement answers a hunger for God in our secularized “age starved for liturgy (let alone for theology).” Therefore, we must not only promote civility and free speech, but also speak to people’s “deep and legitimate hunger for the good and true.”
Levin calls us to convert others’ minds to truth by proposing better arguments. But people starved for God also need the deeper conversion of the will, or heart. We must redirect our good and natural loves for freedom and identity beyond politics to their highest, spiritual objects. Jacques Philippe’s book Interior Freedom can show us how.
Please right-click links to open in a new window.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
