This thought since yesterday won't leave me and I'm going to use this blog as a bit of a public attempt to work it out, since imagining I'm explaining it to somebody else seems to help.
The more I think on it, the more I am enamored to the idea that freedom is not multiplicity of choices but right will. It dovetails nicely with the struggle I have had in reconciling in part the issue of our own limited nature, that we in fact do not have all choices open to us at all times but instead may only be able to pursue a subset of them given our own constitution. I simply do not see how else we can get around the fact that the more we know about ourselves as organism the more we see that we cannot pretend the body is merely a puppet animated by the spirit. What the full suite of possibilities for us is we cannot be sure, hence the default stance of believing change is possible in people while knowing that it may not be for everybody.
Furthermore, it makes me realize that choice in a way is strange. If there are better and worse options why would we want to choose the worse? And if all the options are the same, like that aisle in the supermarket full of dozens of variations of peanut butter, why is freedom anything other than trivial? So it seems to me like what we really want is: a) The ability (wisdom?) to ascertain what the best choice is, b) The right will to pursue it. It is only our mistake in everyday experience, that how we experience freedom is rather its lack, when we are prevented from a course of action, that makes us think that it's about having options to choose from.
It makes me contemplate the circumstantial element of ethics that I have so often struggled with, that of simply doing what is best given the situation, and I realize that society must by definition play a large role in this. I read somewhere recently, I do not recall where, on this point that we can only be as virtuous as our society allows us. Now, this is a phrase apt to be misunderstood, but it makes sense of the historical evolution of ethics. In the primitive world killing each other was par for the course; if you didn't, they did. Now, of course later religions address this by saying that it is better to be the victim of evil than to commit it, something that I can feel is profoundly true... but as I ended my last essay on, we cannot ignore the practical, mundane element of this all. If people had not stuck it out, and if some people had tried to be as good as they could given the circumstances rather than hew to an absolute moral scheme, then we never would have gotten anywhere.
This brings me to a problem I've rolled around on my tongue in the past: mendicants. Reflecting on above, I can see why that path is so popular in the religious history. If you have to keep doing the things society requires you to do in order to be a member of it, and these obligations may often prevent you from pursuing the most direct and powerful spiritual path, then the only response is to shuck them. After all, even the Buddha abandoned his wife and child while Jesus refused to give any special acknowledgement to his mother and family. Even monasticism, the halfway step, requires that you get along with people in a way that may force deviations from a path. But mendicants of course have a crucial problem: we can't all be mendicants. If we were, there'd be nobody to beg from and we'd all die. The most extreme spiritual seekers are dependent on the fact that others are less so; what an odd state of affairs.
Now, to put this in a more positive light, it also means that the better societies are those that hinder less and/or support more this freedom to choose the best path, this being in direct contradiction to the contemporary concept of maximizing choice-options for individuals in a society. To be sure ensuring that the options are there is important, and also to be sure since nobody can know everything we should take a tolerant attitude of providing an arena in which to pursue that good, but it strikes me as missing something crucial when we remove from the equation the idea that there is a goal beyond providing these choices for their own sake. We become atoms bouncing around in a box at that point. Meaningless.
To lump something else in here, reading A Concise History of Buddhism by Andrew Skilton this morning, I noticed that among the original Buddhist vows was sexual abstinence. I think it's a habit to associate such puritanism with Christianity alone, but it seems to me that it comes up everywhere. I wonder, though, if we've conflated two issues: 1) That promiscuity in the social realm leads to friction, 2) That by being such a powerful impulse it often removes our freedom to do what we believe is best. The former is why sexual morals exist universally in cultures; we simply cannot ignore the issue and have a functional society. Again, a case where I think the total hands-off attitude of the modern world may be doing us harm (not that the opposite extreme hasn't also been a mess). However, I think it is the second that characters like Augustine so firmly opposed. It's not that sexuality is opposed to spirituality, but that untrammeled impulse is and of all the impulses in us, it's among the most powerful.
Returning to the main theme again, then, I feel like I'm circling around an issue that hits on several of the key issues that plague me right now: how to unite valuing here with hereafter, the nature of ethics, free will, why societies succeed or fail, and ultimately how I can be a good person. I haven't solved anything yet, but this idea of freedom seems to be prying open a door a little to addressing these together as a unified issue.
p.s. A metaphor that perhaps seems apt in all this is being on the freeway. You have options in whether you speed up or slow down, change lanes, etc. but underlying this is a goal: you're trying to get somewhere and all of these options are subordinate to that. Having the choice to get into an accident is not really something we covet. Likewise, our options are constrained by what everybody else around us is doing, whether they're following certain rules, etc. They can make it harder or easier, as can we on them, and ultimately none of us are independent of the circumstances we find ourselves in. I still feel like I'm being banal in my statements, but I have something by the tail.
No comments:
Post a Comment