Let the Capacity for Meaningful Action Ring
Thinking clearly about freedom in an age of sloganeering
Yesterday’s Inauguration was certainly a grand spectacle, though if you’re looking for commentary on what to make of it, you came to the wrong place—but I’m sure many of my fellow Substackers will have fine reflections to offer today. That said, you may have noticed that the idea of “freedom” played quite a prominent role in the proceedings, not least in Rev. Lorenzo Sewell’s unfortunately rather overwrought riff on “I Have a Dream” (“…from the curvaceous hilltops of California—let freedom ring!”) And for that, of course, you have come to the right place.
In his speech, Trump promised to “give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed, their freedom.” But nobody could have mistaken his speech for a libertarian manifesto. The age of negative liberty is over. The age of positive liberty is at hand.
Students of political philosophy will recognize in these terms Isaiah Berlin’s famous “Two Concepts of Liberty,” a 1958 lecture that has been required undergraduate political theory reading ever since. As I summarize in Called to Freedom:
The first designates “the area within which the subject . . . is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons.” It is then the liberty of “non-interference,” the freedom to be left alone, the freedom that each individual in late modern society demands from other individuals and especially from institutions and authorities like the government. This is no doubt the concept of freedom that leaps most quickly to mind and most readily incites political action in our own day, whether invoked on the Left (as in the freedom of “my body, my choice” asserted by abortion-rights advocates) or on the Right (as in the demand for low taxes, deregulation, and private property rights that have been identified with conservatism since the days of Ronald Reagan).
Although the Right has been moving away from this focus in some measure over the past eight years, it clearly still has strong purchase among many—such as among those Trump supporters (like Elon Musk) that want to reverse a TikTok ban on the basis of “freedom of speech.” But while we might well disagree (indeed, passionately do), over how much scope for negative liberty different spheres of government should leave us, we seem to be coming around to a recognition that negative liberty alone is not enough. It is a purely negative liberty that has given us trans kids on women’s swim teams. Left totally alone without any guidance or even persuasive nudges, we would, I write, “be entirely directionless, paralyzed with indecision or else lurching randomly in response to passing whims. Hence the need for any such negative liberty to be matched with positive liberty.”
So what is positive liberty? Again, from the book:
When it comes to this latter notion, Berlin’s various halting definitions are less clear, but it is not hard to get the gist of his argument. Where negative liberty is “freedom from,” positive liberty is “freedom for” or “freedom to.” Positive liberty suggests that I am not merely left alone, but I am going somewhere; my actions have a purpose, a direction, a meaning. It is this that great athletes seem to have in mind when they speak of the exhilarating “freedom” they experience when performing at the highest level. It is not that runners or mountain-climbers lack constraints—indeed, there may be few situations more constraining than those encountered when scaling a cliff with scarcely any handholds—rather, they know that they are fully able to be and to do what they aspire to within those constraints. From this perspective, we can see the shortsightedness of our modern imagination that “freedom is constituted by the absence of limits” (Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order) On the contrary, limits are what makes free action possible. As finite creatures, we cannot cope with infinite possibilities, and even when we do have many possibilities to choose from, we exercise our freedom by limiting ourselves to one. There are many goods that you are only free to enjoy to the extent that you commit to them, renouncing all others: a spouse, for instance.
The idea of “positive liberty” also captures the simple fact that lack of external constraint is not enough. A paraplegic is not “free” to get up and walk around just because no one is holding him down, for he lacks the internal conditions for action. This is why, in my book, I define freedom or liberty (I use the words interchangeably) as the capacity for meaningful action. Each part of this definition is key, highlighting a different dimension (or set of poles) in relation to which we must map out different ideas of freedom.
For us as human beings, freedom is always for action, which is to say that is directional, not aimless; it has a telos or end; it is the ability to aim at a goal or purpose, and to achieve that aim. This is what we mean by saying it is positive as well as negative. But as a capacity it can be threatened not merely by constraints, obstacles, or people outside of us, but by weaknesses within. Thus we must speak of not only of an “outward” liberty, such as that which is guaranteed by political rights or by a free market, but of an “inward” liberty that is actually more important, fundamental, and unshakeable than those outward freedoms. Again, from my book:
There is a natural freedom within the human mind that no human power can take away: a freedom to form thought and beliefs, entertain desires, and form purposes. This freedom can operate amid even the most profound external oppression. …Consider Paul and Silas in the Philippian prison: while the jailer thought that he had them in his power, they were cheerfully “praying and singing hymns to God,” so free in the midst of their bondage that when an earthquake burst the prison doors open, they saw no reason to run away (Acts 16:25–28). A secular form of such inner freedom is captured in the poem “Invictus,” made famous by Nelson Mandela’s recitation of it in Robben Island Prison: “In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . . It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Paul would disagree, of course; fallen man lies captive to sin, and redeemed man submits to the Lord Christ as captain of his soul. Still, these words can be true in a relative sense, and even for unbelievers, such inner freedom can be a source of strength amid profound adversity.
Finally, though, our action must be meaningful, or we will not experience ourselves as genuinely free. And although, as the examples cited above suggest, the believer can find a certain meaning in knowing that he acts always before the Lord, ordinarily, we can find meaning only by acting amongst our fellow men and women. Imagine that you were abducted by aliens (hopefully for all of you, this will be imagination only—not an unpleasant memory); and let’s imagine that these are very benevolent aliens, who try to make sure you are well fed and cared for, but who cannot speak your language or communicate with you in any way; nor could you understand their culture or customs. Would you feel “free” in such a situation? Certainly not. Nothing that you did or said would have any meaning to anyone outside yourself, and you would thus not feel free to engage in the most basically human actions.
Thus freedom requires a context of shared understanding and shared action. It is this aspect of freedom, I’d suggest, that we have felt most lacking today, and it is this longing to be free together, I’d wager, that Trump’s nationalist rhetoric most speaks to. I wrote at length on this subject in my 2020 American Affairs essay, “Individual and National Freedom: Toward a New Conservative Fusion.” But as I summarize in my book,
When Christians complained of attacks on religious liberty during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was preeminently the liberty of entire church communities to gather for worship that concerned them. When the American patriots of the Revolutionary era fought for freedom from Britain, they were fighting not so much for individual liberty, but rather so that each colony could govern itself, passing its own laws and charting its own course as a community. Such quests for national liberty continue to inspire powerful political movements, such as Britain’s campaign for “Brexit” from the EU, and acts of extraordinary courage, such as Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion.
To be sure, liberals will point out that such “corporate liberty” (as I call it in the book) can be achieved only at the cost of the liberty of individual members. Plenty of people did not vote for Trump, and are only being dragged along with his policies kicking and screaming. The free action of a whole will rarely be unanimous. Nonetheless, in a healthy body politic, members will see themselves imaginatively as part of the whole, and thus experience the expansion of its freedom as the expansion of theirs; they will find their freedom in and through the freedom of the community.
This is the first of a series of posts which will preview each chapter of my new book, Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. You can buy it now from Lifeway or Amazon.
Coming down the Pipe
“For Freedom Christ Has Set us Free” (The Gospel Coalition): This essay lays out the basic contours of spiritual and moral freedom as I describe them in my book, and explains why modern evangelicalism’s pursuit of a cafeteria approach to church (more programs, more service options, more technology), in the name of maximizing freedom, has proven so destructive to our freedom to be the body of Christ together. Should publish 1/23.
(with Clare Morell and Emma Waters) “Stop Hacking the Human Person” (The New Atlantis): This extremely important essay, which I’m very excited to be a part of, is slated to publish at The New Atlantis later this month. In it, we offer a comprehensive view of how we have allowed technology to develop in ways that, rather than unlocking human potential and healing human hurts, instead “hacks” the human person, short-circuiting our natural functions in order to hijack our desires. We show how this “hacking” mentality is operative at every stage of human development, from gamete to grave, and is the product above all of a failure of political economy, one that conservatives must redress soon if we are to protect the family and secure our future. Should publish 1/27.
“In Search of a Free Market” (Comment): In this essay, adapted from chapter 6 of my book, I look at the modern ideal of the free market as the maximization of consumer choices and explain just why this freedom leaves us feeling so empty—and what is necessary for a truly free market. Should publish 2/6.
“The Web of Narcissus”: If you’ve been reading this Substack the past few months, you know that I have been reading Anton Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation. And not just reading…but re-reading, annotating, outlining, and reflecting on. It really is one of the most important books I can recall reading over the past decade. That said, it offers precious few prescriptions at the end about how to escape the web it describes. In my forthcoming review essay for American Affairs, I wrestle through Barba-Kay’s key insights and suggest the beginnings of a way forward. Should publish 2/24.
The Book Zone
Here over the coming weeks I’ll be keeping track of book-related publicity and publications.
Reviews
Essays/Interviews
“The Illusion of Freedom in a Digital Age” (Digital Liturgies)
“Political Freedom Between Right and Rights” (Mere Orthodoxy)
Podcasts
Speaking Gigs
At Church of Our Savior Oatlands (Leesburg, VA, January 26)
“Thinking Christianly About Freedom” (Washington, DC, February 5)
“Christian Liberty or Godless License” (Greenville, SC, February 18)
At The Field School (Chicago, IL, March 1)
At Calvary Memorial Church (Oak Park, IL, March 2)
At the North Carolina Study Center (Chapel Hill, NC, April 3)
Get Involved
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If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.
The two visions of freedom manifested in America's early immigrants. Some came to America for the freedom to worship, and others came for the freedom from worship. I believe that true freedom is not doing what we want, but doing what God wants us to do.