Tag: freedom

we do not yet want much to do with responsibility

It is arguable, I think, that our country’s culture is still suspended as if at the end of Huckleberry Finn, assuming that its only choices are either a deadly “civilization” of piety and violence or an escape into some “Territory” where we may remain free of adulthood and community of obligation. We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility. We have imagined the great and estimable freedom of boyhood, of which Huck Finn remain s the finest spokesman. We have imagined the bachelorhood of nature and genius and power: the contemplative, the artist, the hunter, the cowboy, the general, the president – lives dedicated and solitary in the Territory of individuality. But boyhood and bachelorhood have remained the norms of “liberation,” for women as well as men. We have hardly begun to imagine the coming to responsibility that is the meaning, and the liberation, of growing up. We have hardly begun to imagine community life, and the tragedy that is at the heart of community life.

Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” from What Are People For?

I’ve always admired Wendell Berry, and his reputation, but mostly from afar. I am trying to amend that early on this summer by digging into his works a bit, starting with What Are People For?, a collection of essays he published in the early 90s. The quote above is pulled from the essay “Writer and Region”, in which Berry grapples with regionalism in American writing through the lens of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. This essay jumped at me not least because of the strange place occupied by that classic American novel in our culture today. It has come under heavy, and I’d say misguided, critique because of its necessarily contextual relationship to race. The book was published, after all, in 1885.

Berry does a good job of identifying why it is such an important book in the history of American literature, namely, its prolonged meditation on boyhood and the freedoms and responsibilities of growing up. The quoted passage really jumped at me because of the application of those themes to America – the America of today as much as the America of 1987 that the author was writing in. Maybe more so today, three-and-a-half decades on. We’ve learned very few lessons from Berry in that time, least of all what freedom and responsibility really mean for a people. We’ve leaned into heavily into the desire for freedom and rights and power, and away from the attendant demands of responsibility. Our economic, cultural, and military power has long been able to paper over this rupture, but it seems those days are coming to an end. The cracks are appearing as we continue to pull our demands for greater and greater autonomy away from any sense that that autonomy demands even more of us than we could imagine.

And this isn’t exclusively an issue of the right or of the left, a point I have been asserting more and more here and elsewhere. All points on our political spectrum have leaned into the idea that any ties that bind or responsibilities that demand or burdens that we may be asked to carry are somehow illegitimate and tyrannical. This is the freedom of small children, all expression and emotion and movement, and devoid of any sense of themselves as existing in relation to anyone or anything else. It’s the freedom of Huck Finn, as he desires to leave Miss Polly and the town and people he knows. It’s a freedom that takes the boyhood adventures of Finn as the only testament of life, rejecting the idea that Huck continued to grow beyond being a boy and into a man. Twain didn’t write that story, and we get to pretend it tells us something about the trajectory of our own lives.

I don’t want to rant too much here on this particular hobby horse of mine, so I’ll wrap this up. I’m looking forward to reading and sharing more of Berry’s works here over the coming weeks, and reflecting on his particular vision of life and his critiques of all of our cultural and societal shibboleths.

Excerpt #23: the story of freedom

The moral challenge is not consumerism or materialism. Such characterizations of the enemy we face as Christians are far too superficial and moralistic. The problem is not just that we have become consumers of our own lives, but that we can conceive of no alternative narrative. We lack the practices, and hence the imagination, that could make such a narrative intelligible. Put differently, the project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. Such a story is called the story of freedom and is assumed to be irreversibly institutionalized economically as market capitalism and politically as democracy. That story, and the institutions that embody it, is the enemy we must attack through Christian preaching.

I am aware that such a suggestion cannot help but be met with disbelief. You may well think I cannot be serious. Normal nihilism is so wonderfully tolerant. Surely you are not against tolerance? How can anyone be against freedom? Let me assure you that I am serious; I am against tolerance; I do not believe it is a good story, because it is so clearly a lie. The lie is exposed by simply asking, “Who told you the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story?” Why should that story be determinative for your life? Simply put, the story of freedom has now become our fate.

For example, consider the hallmark sentence of the Casey decision on abortion – “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Remember that was written by political conservatives. Moreover, it is exactly that view of freedom that John Paul II so eloquently condemns in the encyclical, Veritatis Splendor. A view of freedom, like that embodied in Casey, according to John Paul II, assumes we must be able to “create values” since freedom enjoys “a primacy over truth, to the point that truth itself would be considered a creation of freedom.”

In contrast, John Paul II, who is not afraid to have enemies, reminds us that the good news of the Gospel, known through proclamation, is that we are not fated to be determined by such false stories of freedom. For the truth is that we are not free to choose our own stories inasmuch as we are God’s good creation. Freedom lies not in creating our lives, but learning to recognize our lives as gift. We do not receive our lives as if they were a gift, but rather our lives are gift. We do not exist and then God gives us a gift, but our existence is gift. The great magic of the Gospel is providing us with the skills to acknowledge our life as gift, as created, without resentment and regret. Such skills must be embodied in a community of people across time, constituted by practices such as baptism, preaching, and Eucharist, which become the means for us to discover God’s story for our lives.

Stanley Hauerwas, “No Enemy, No Christianity: Preaching between ‘Worlds’ in Sanctify Them in The Truth, pages 197-199.