The Chains of Freedom

Mark Meador

Wendell Berry could be called an agrarian curmudgeon, if not the agrarian curmudgeon. He could also be called modernity's Cassandra, an unheeded prophet of coming misfortune. And yet no matter how off-putting his tone may be (at least in his essays), no matter how hard-to-swallow his message, it is a challenging task to convince yourself he is wrong. His insights and logic seem to carry an uncomfortable truth.

Such is the case with his piece in the May issue of Harper's Magazine, wherein he attacks modern society's ahistorical and foolish preoccupation with limitlessness, something with which he says we equate “freedom.” This understanding of freedom, Berry argues, does not liberate humanity but rather destroys it:

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.” But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am.”

Home from college one summer, I heard a Fourth of July sermon in which my pastor used the image of violin strings as a metaphor for freedom. The strings, in a state of perfect freedom and completely loose, are of no use. It is only when they are bound to the violin, stretched taut and tied down, that they can finally “sing,” as it were. Only through restraint can they fulfill their purpose. This is precisely the point that Berry makes, lamenting that we have spent the last few centuries gradually increasing our efforts to delude ourselves otherwise. The result is that we are on inevitable march towards a confrontation with reality. Much like walking into a brick wall with your eyes on your toes, it won't be pleasant.

Though perhaps bittersweet, this forced reckoning may yet bode well for humanity:

This constraint, however, is not the condemnation it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too long cut us off...

In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define “freedom,” for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, “free” is etymologically related to “friend.” These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of “dear” or “beloved.” We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our “identity” is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

In essence, Berry argues that we are living out the saying of Augustana College professor Greg Jesson: “Bad ideas can only bear the weight of reality for so long.” Citing Faustus and Paradise Lost, he deliberately connects the idea of limitlessness to hell, to inhumanity. The other side of this is the view that “We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period.” We still, naturally, have the option of raising our eyes to the dead end looming ahead and changing course—that is, if we [re-]learn to understand restraint not as something which restricts, but that which refines and sharpens. (To make the point more positively of connecting humanity with limits, Berry might profitably have cited Dan Russ's new book, Flesh-and-Blood Jesus.)

If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlowe’s Faustus and Milton’s Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlowe and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan’s fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus’s error was his unwillingness to remain “Faustus, and a man.” In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan’s and Faustus’s defiance as salutary and heroic.

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.

Typical of Berry, and of curmudgeonhood in general, little is provided in the way of practical suggestions for a way forward. Nonetheless, the cliché is true that the first step towards solving a problem is admitting that you have one. And in this case, the very delusion would appear to be nine tenths of the problem itself. Perhaps encouraging this realization might be practical suggestion after all.

Mark Meador is a 2008 John Jay Institute Fellow interning with the Trinity Forum.

Gleanings, Being Human, Fri 11 Jul 2008