Philosophy of Liberty – Part #1 – You Own Your Life
/
Philosophy of Liberty – Part #1 – You Own Your Life
An analysis and exploration of the Philosophy of Liberty as set down by Ken Schoolland and Kerry Pearson from a Christian Perspective.
Years ago, as a young teen, I saw a video entitled The Philosophy of Liberty. It was a simple video where shapes and symbols were used to represent a slowly building set of statement premises on the topic of liberty. Liberty was always an assumed idea for me, something seen as positive and fundamental, but it had never actually been defined for me in any clear way. As I watched I found myself agreeing with each idea as it was presented. They all seemed perfectly self evident and I knew of no one who was really questioning them. So I nodded my head and went about my life.
If you would like to watch the video you can find it here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I
Years later, I stumbled across that same video. I found myself shocked at how deeply the idea of liberty and its implications had taken root in my mind, and how many of the ideas which I had first seen there now served as a bedrock foundation when it came to faith, family, politics, relationships, and how I look at our evolving societies. I was concerned on two fronts. Firstly I realize I had never really had the opportunity to hold this bedrock up to the light of serious pointed speculation. It is not that I haven’t thought about these topics. In fact I have considered them at length at various times. But rather I had never examined them in their place as foundational principles. Allowing a set of assumptions so fundamental to remain unexamined and unchallenged is problematic, and on the other side, there is much gain to be found in the examination.
Secondly and even more interestingly, I was astonished at how often the concepts embedded in the idea of liberty are not universally held, even my own society which was founded upon them! Many of those ideas are now considered deeply divisive, and the debate is being aggressively and even violently engaged throughout all corners of society in places all across the globe. And I have found, many times that when I am disagreeing with someone on a point of politics, religion, or even family matters the point is often deeply muddled because of a fundamental disconnect on the place and function of liberty.
So I began using the idea of liberty as a lens through which to see the world. A sort of scale by which the things I saw could be weighed. As I started looking round I was astonished at how regularly the tenants of liberty, ideas which I had found to be so self evident, are debated, berated, abused, and tossed aside. I have seen it done intentionally by the dominant, the despot, the dictator, and the petty tyrant. But much more often I have seen it done unintentionally by the simple act of valuing something else more highly than liberty. I have seen kind people, concerned activists, fearful defenders, and prideful do-gooders throw the values of liberty aside for values that sound good, look lovely, seem altruistic, and have the advantage of being far more popular in today’s world. And the effects of lovely sounding values can be quite dire, even if it is not always evident.
So I think there is some value to be found in exploring the ideas behind the philosophy of liberty, especially when looking through the lens of our modern times. In this series I will take a line by line approach. The philosophy breaks nicely into sections, each with a distinct and fundamental idea that can be plucked out, explored, considered on its own, and then slotted back in to see how it plays with the others. Today I will start with the first and most fundamental idea, the very core of the concept of liberty, and something I consider to be one of the most basic fundamentals of what it is to be human. It is the simple axiom that “You own yourself.”
Part #1 – The Premise – You Own Yourself
“You own your life.
To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you do.
No other person, or group of persons owns your life.
Nor do you own the lives of others.”
You own your life: I love the first line as a starting premise. “You Own Your Life” is as simple as simple can be. It is easy to defend, and it is highly self evident for most people who live in our modern times. But we forget that we find it to be self evident because we have been raised with it. We forget that the truth of it has been fought for and against throughout history. From the deific pharaohs who believed in divinity by right of birth, to the slave owners stretching from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern slavers in Lybia, China, and India we see that this sentiment has not always been universal. From the British royalty who fought tooth and nail against the Magna Carta, monarchs who clearly believed in right of conquest, and imperialists who believed in “The white man’s burden”, to the cult leaders who claim a religious dominance over their flocks, we can see that the idea of the sovereign ownership of the individual has been challenged. I am exceptionally grateful that by some miracle the world, by and large, has come to the belief that a human owns their own life! Indeed the horrific consequences that arise from a society where that is not the case have not only been the norm throughout history, they are an absolute catastrophe for the vast majority of the individuals who must live through them!
The slow growth of the principle of the self sovereign individual is one of the greatest wonders of history. Mostly because, as it was put by clinical psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson, “It is just so very unlikely!” It is certainly inconvenient for anyone who happens to be in a position of power to allow each man under him his individual freedom. What’s more, the weight of being responsible for yourself, which must always come with that freedom, tends to be deeply uncomfortable for each member of the population that must bear it. And the intelligent wielder of power knows this! There is a security to be found for any tyrant if they can manage to keep the large majority of people moderately comfortable and in a state of minimal responsibility. This creation of comfort for the critical bulk of the tyrannized is the de facto state of any tyranny that lasted any reasonable amount of time. So how in the world did we come to such a state where most of the world seems to accept the sovereign ownership of the individual of his own life? Those scholars that I am familiar with, who have bothered to speculate on the point, tend to attribute it to the rise of Judeo Christianity through the roman empire and into the rest of the world. It is Judeo Christianity in which above all else is found the idea of free will. It posits the truest nature of man is that he is made in the image of God.
To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you do: This next line makes for a nice corollary that not only clarifies the first statement, but flushes it out and supports it. For indeed, who could have a higher claim on your life than you? But this is where we tend to get into the mud because even though this may seem self evident, all too often we accept the claim that someone may actually be able to lay claim to at least part of another’s life.
This idea gave me more than a bit of pause. I have struggled with it more than most because I can think of several people I feel have a claim on my life, or on whose life I feel I have a claim. By far the majority of these can be seen as cases of mutual agreement, situations where the obligation was freely agreed to by both parties. I have agreed to show up at a certain time for my job in return for a paycheck and health insurance. I have agreed to be faithful to my husband and he has agreed to be faithful to me. Most of our obligations fall into this category. The idea of free trade is one we will address later in the philosophical scaffolding so let’s lay those aside for now. There still remain some examples that do not fall under that category.
The most straightforward example I can think of is the idea that a child you care for has a claim on a large part of your life, and more interestingly, you as a parent have a great deal of authority over the liberty of that child! This is not an arrangement agreed to by both parties. It simply is, and few would deny it! Indeed it is so commonly accepted that if you fail to bend the requisite amount of your life to the care and well being of your child you will go to jail. And any very young child that demands liberty from what people consider a reasonable level of parental authority would be returned to them. Indeed I did just that when my dear friend and neighbor’s 3 year old decided to toddle over to my house for cookies without his poor mother’s permission.
Indeed this is an important example because one of the major fears common to those who oppose the idea of liberty is that it is simply an attempt to run from responsibility! Would not an unfettered idea of liberty say that the parent should take no authority over their child’s liberty? And perhaps the parent ought not to feel any obligation to care for the child! As silly as that sounds I think this is a very justified fear. We have all seen parents that fail to control their children, denying them nothing, and who feel morally superior in doing so. It is also one of the major arguments for abortion, that the mother should never be required to enter in to parental responsibility against her will. Additionally, I was once taught in an Education Theory course that it is wrong to stop a child from doing whatever they wish. Upon challenging the idea I was told that, yes, I must allow children to do anything up to and including sticking a fork in a light socket. If such idiocy exists we must answer it. More importantly we must examine it because any good thing taken wrongly will result in error, and that includes costly error that may affect your well being or even cost you your life! So we must look closely.
Why would a child have a right to lay claim to a part of their parent’s life? And, in the same breath why would a parent have the right to curb the liberty of their child? The simple answer, which I think applies to almost every case where one may feel their life is owed to or owned by another, is that the child cannot care for themselves. A very young child is probably incapable of understanding that they must not run out into the middle of a busy street, so their liberty must be curbed! A slightly older child may not understand the importance of hygiene and so must be made to brush their teeth at night. And an older child may not understand the consequences of violence against their peers and must be stopped, reprimanded, and taught. But the key function is that the child is, in one sense, not a fully functional person, and may not be capable of some of the responsibilities that fall upon the shoulders of a fully aware and functional individual.
As for the child’s claim on the parent, I will have to concede that the topic of the genesis of that responsibility is a curious and deeply nuanced one that could take a great deal more thought than I am prepared to devote here. So suffice it to say that for now, I have found that the function of time, chance, and the forces nature happen to all men, and they will always limit our liberty. I can think of no better category to put the arrival of a child than that of the wondrous, fearsome, and glorious beauty that is nature. I cannot swim the sea that is in my way, and I cannot fly to the moon on my own wings. Nature curbs our liberty in truly humbling ways, and becoming a parent is nothing less than a force of nature, and in that it is miraculous, as well as humbling in the truest sense. We must bend to it and perhaps that is where human liberty truly ends. We can do all we can, until we suddenly can not.
Now, this construction has one very interesting consequence that I will return to often in this series. It is the idea that to take ownership of another’s life, or an aspect of their life, even in the most well meaning fashion, is a declaration that you are equipped to pilot the ship of their personhood and they are not. For a child this is clearly the case. The parent is hopefully equipped, but the child is certainly not. And it is not just children and parents. With my elderly grandfather, who suffered dementia for a time near the end of his life, this was also clearly the case. My grandmother and my mother had to make him to stop driving, give them the check book, let them schedule the doctor’s visits, and require him to remain in the house in the evenings and not go out looking for his squad mates left far behind in the jungles and trenches of far away wars. And in this we see that the loss of the ability to govern your own self is a tragic and sorrowful thing. It is vital that you understand this if ever you wish to take it away from someone else.
As you look and see scenarios where well intentioned people think they have a claim of ownership over one another, take a moment, and try on the thought that the claim of ownership is a declaration that the person controlled is so incapable that they must have that liberty taken away. And if it turns out that it is not the case, the person whose liberty is being curbed is, at the very least, being deeply and gravely insulted.
Well intentioned removal of liberty is still a removal of liberty. The adult child who’s mother runs their finances, the daughter in law who is required to keep her house the way the mother in law demands, even the maturing teen who is fully capable of packing their own lunch, may be the victim of a deep offense to their personhood. As friends, spouses, lovers, and especially parents we should strive to give those we care about the maximum personal liberty and the respect that comes with it. Keeping your child as close to the apron strings as possible is a deeply selfish act. It is one that both cripples and demeans them. And keeping your beloved as dependent on you as possible is as insulting to them as it is unhealthy for you!
This is not to say that the person who now has their liberty will not make mistakes. Indeed they will! It is one of the dangers of the personal responsibility that comes with liberty. It is also one of its greatest benefits. Humanity is wired to learn by trial and failure. If we are to deny one another the possibility of failure, well, it cannot be done without denying one another ability to grow. Indeed the nature of true liberty is that you have the freedom to not only make mistakes, but to make fatal mistakes! We live in a society that has done all it can to limit threat, to moderate risk, and to insure against catastrophe, and in doing so we have all too often fooled ourselves into thinking that if we give up enough liberty we will be safe from the terror of the Fatal Fail State. But to have that kind of safety prohibits the freedom to live. And regardless of how much you give up your liberty you will still never actually get rid of the risk. So it is crucial that our young children have experience with risk, with the responsibility to pilot their own ship of personhood and crash it softly against the smaller obstacles and failures so that when they float out at sea for the first time as an independent adult they are not paralyzed with the terror of the open water. Better they know how to look for the dangers, and become brave in the face of catastrophe, than to never leave the harbor of childhood and never accept the freedom and liberty that is innate to their nature.
But I have digressed wildly from the simplicity of my premise. So I will end by saying that one must accept that liberty, along with the risks and responsibilities that it requires, is the natural state of the adult human, and to deny it, along with its responsibilities and risks, to someone is a deep injustice and an error that results in not the loss of agency, but in the denial of personhood. To deny it to others is slavery. And to deny it to yourself, makes you a slave to whoever you have left responsible for you. It keeps you from being truly a fully actualized human. So let that come to mind the next time you tell someone. “This is for your own good.” Because if you are going to do that, you had better be darn well sure that the insult it is justified. And when someone tries to say that to you, recognize the insult! And if you object to what they demand of you, demand your liberty.
No other person, or group of persons, owns your life: The assertion that no group of people can exhibit rights that are not innate to an individual person is a powerful idea. The state does not own you. Your political party does not own you. Your racial or cultural kindred do not own you. Your family, once you are an adult, does not own you. The organizations of your faith, maybe despite their protestations, do not own you. And no group of people, no matter how persuasive or powerful should have the right to own your life.
But the Christians have a stunning counter argument to this statement. Are you not owned by God? And if you are owned by God, and not yourself, should you not do what he says in all things? Submit yourselves one to another, give to Cesar what belongs to Cesar and all the rest?
This was a compelling argument to me that I mulled over for some time. And the conclusion I came to lies in what I believe about free will. Let me pose a question. If all good things come from God, and If God gave us nothing what could we ever give to him? If you give to him what was always his, what virtue could be in that? If it was always his to begin with, how could that be love? I say it cannot. It would only ever be Duty. One may do their duty in love, but the act will only ever be duty.
But if God has truly given you to yourself, and if you render your soul unto God, and give yourself to him willingly, that is love! There is the mystery of free will: that God in his wisdom gave us to ourselves! Freely! We are ours, and our lives are ours to do with as we will, and it is wonderful. One of the greatest gifts we as humans were ever given. And what better way to use it, than to give it back to him? What virtue or semblance of love is it for a slave, who cannot choose his lot or station, to render his life to his master? But we are no longer slaves. We are called sons and co-heirs with Christ. This is because we own ourselves and we can choose to cry, “Abba Father.” As it says in Galatians 4:6-7: And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.
And there is the virtue that can only ever arise from the liberty of free men and women. If we choose to be His, then we freely choose to follow him in all those things he commands. But we do it as free men and women who have chosen ourselves to be upright citizens, who do not lie, who do not steal, who do not kill, who are faithful to our spouses and who love one another. We show respect to our elected governors, and church pastors. But we do not follow as slaves to the state, nor as blind sheep to our churches. We have the liberty to object to unrighteous laws and we correct one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.
I have found that this concept has a much wider application in terms of good works and giving. All too often I have heard Christians declare, “It is not my money it is God’s” when giving to a good cause. On service outings, or outreach they say, “It is not my time, it is the Lord’s.” I think that these people are making a mistake. They are giving as a slave gives, believing they give nothing of their own, but simply rendering a duty.
If you are a son you have an inheritance, and like the son in the parable you may spend it foolishly, or like the faithful son, you may spend it wisely. But in either case, it is yours to spend. And there is honor in spending it in charity and kindness, just as there is shame in spending it on wasteful frivolity! But that can only be if it was actually yours to begin with.
Nor do you own the lives of others: This last little phrase seems redundant but I find it to be crucial! It is noteworthy that the reciprocal nature of this statement is consistent throughout the philosophy. The underlying assumption is: If it is true for one it must be true for all, and if it is true for me, then it must be true for them. And not just “them” as a collective, but each and every one of them as individuals! That idea permeates this philosophy. I like it as a fundamental presupposition of true equality. A standing boundary on all that we could propose saying that no one has a fundamental right that is unique to them, no matter station, birth, race, or gender. Very egalitarian!
That wraps up the first idea in this series! This was undoubtedly one of the longest we will see. As the primary core it absolutely merits a bit of extra scrutiny and it is my hope going forward to show that the rest flows from this one single presupposition, the idea that You Own Yourself!