Freedom and its Abuses
D'Souza, Dinesh
"Freedom and its Abuses" WHEN VIRTUE LOSES ALL HER LOVELINESS BY DINESH D' SOUZA The most serious charge against America is not that it is an oppressive society, or one that denies...
...Even the Starbucks guy's studs and tattoos are an attempt to communicate something to sonicbody...
...But he is doing a lot more than that...
...Contrary to what the cultural conservatives fear, the new morality is not simply a screen for self-indulgence and immorality...
...The Starbucks guy wants a distinctive identity, a life that is not simply a copy of other people's lives...
...In Augustine's view, God is not to be found "out there:' but within our hearts...
...Generations of critics have denounced Rousseau as self-indulgent, disgusting and perverted.They have noted that he fathered several children out of wedlock and then abandoned them to an orphanage...
...Augustine, of course, was one of the early church fathers, and at first glance, his account of morality seems to be quite similar to that of Rousseau's...
...Newcomers are often shocked by the vulgarity and shamelessness of American popular culture that, even as entertainment, shapes the general tone of society...
...Our society attaches great prestige to this quest for authenticity, even when it takes strange or controversial forms...
...Clearly, there is some truth to Schumpeter's analysis...
...Rousseau's view emerged in resistance to an earlier view, according to which morality was a matter of costs and benefits...
...FREEDOM AND ITS ABUSES WHEN VIRTUE LOSES ALL HER LOVELINESS B Y D I N E S H D' S O U Z A The most serious charge against America is not that it is an oppressive society, or one that denies freedom and opportunity to minorities...
...For instance, who can deny that there is something bizarre and even repulsive about people like Dennis Rodman, Howard Stern, Madonna and Prince...
...The Starbucks guy's objection is valid on two counts...
...The change can be described in this way...
...They are seen as undaunted souls who are following their inner convictions, even at the cost of social rejection...
...Like technology, capitalism has had a transforming effect on mores...
...Intellectuals have been rebelling against the Christian order for several centuries...
...Islamic fun damentalists hold that the United States and the West may be materially advanced, but they are morally decadent...
...One hears strong echoes of them in Emerson's ethic of self-reliance and in Thoreau's quest for inner harmony through solitude...
...Babbit's indictment has been echoed in recent years by cultural conservatives such as Allen Bloom, Patrick Buchanan, Bill Bennett and Robert Bork...
...Why did the ethic of authenticity win such widespread acceptance in America...
...The weirdos that we see on daytime talk shows, for instance, are the modern equivalent of circus freaks...
...While these are valid points, the criticisms of Qutb, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Bork and others cannot be so easily dismissed...
...In our time a large number of Americans aspire to be artists...
...Some religious and political activists have gone further, demanding laws that enforce Christian precepts, or the norms that prevailed in the 1950s...
...The great conservative challenge is to bring this issue back to the forefront...
...For the first time many people, especially young people, began to find the external rules arbitrary senseless and oppressive...
...Rousseau turns this paradigm upside down...
...Think of Ernest Hemingway, Elvis Presley, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicholson and Oprah Winfrey...
...Technology has also helped to change women's roles and thus to destabilize traditional "family values...
...At the same time, most Americans find them fascinating...
...In 1978, in his famous Harvard address, the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn charged that in the West freedom has become another word for licentiousness, and "man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer...
...Freedom and autonomy are precious commodities, and conservatives better than anyone else recognize the great tragedy when they are trivialized and abused...
...The success of Rousseau reflects a failure on the part of the "greatest generation": It failed to replicate itself.The children of the World War II generation emphatically and often bitterly repudiated the moral code of their parents...
...Ultimately, this expressive freedom must have some underlying purpose...
...It is the legal, social and moral norms of the community that provide the guardrails protecting the Starbucks guy's freedom and autonomy...
...Finally, we should note that in recent years crime and illegitimacy rates have declined, so that American culture is healthier in these respects...
...He is estranged from his own nature...
...He wants a life that counts...
...The founders set up a regime dedicated to three types of freedom-economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech and religion-so that people could pursue happiness, or what we call the "American dream...
...The problems with this root-and-branch repudiation of contemporary ideals can be seen by considering an example, which I offer as representative of the whole culture of authenticity...
...Rousseau admits that natural man may never have really existed...
...As a consequence of this change, America became a different country...
...And the institutions of society should be devised in such a way as to steer flawed or sinful human beings away from temptation and to keep them on the straight path...
...Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that art has replaced religion as the leading cultural institution in America...
...Even within the United States it is controversial: many cultural conservatives react to it with fear and loathing...
...Rousseau's strongest complaint against the bourgeois is that he professes to be moral, while acting like a mercenary...
...That generation showed a relentless drive to triumph over scarcity and to win the freedom to make one's own life-exactly what powers immigrants to the United States today But their children found themselves in a different situation...
...Rousseau's objection to the bourgeois is that he is a bit of a low character...
...I speak, of course, of the automobile...
...And the "death of God" appears to have resulted, just as Nietzsche said it would, in the collapse of traditional morality and the rise of moral relativism...
...Although I want to form the man of nature," he writes, "the object is not to make him a savage and relegate him to the depths of the woods...
...America is a country where the traditional family seems to have irretrievably broken down:The typical marriage ends in divorce, and illegitimacy is now common across racial and socioeconomic lines...
...The inner light is controlled by an outer source, and that is God...
...Despite all the picturesque churches that dot the American landscape, religion seems to have little or no public authority over society...
...Freedom in America means choice, and from the perspective of the critics, choice has been deified without regard to the content of choice...
...The ideal of authenticity now helps to define what it means to be an American...
...Undoubtedly, there were members of the "greatest generation" who struggled to conform...
...he only wants to appear good...
...Second, the root-and-branch rejection of authenticity ignores the moral force of this ideal...
...And how can a political strategy that defines itself against America's core value of freedom possibly succeed...
...It is practically a definition of the cultural mainstream to say that the idea of authenticity-of being "true to oneself"-is now the new morality...
...If man's original home cannot be restored as a place, it can be restored as a state of mind...
...The bourgeois man doesn't care about being good...
...It has been said of him that he labored under the illusion that changes within his own life mirrored the great transformations of Western civilization...
...What changed in the late 1960s and 1970s is that the bohemian culture became part of the mainstream culture...
...I use the term to cover not just painters, but also writers, sculptors, actors, musicians, even athletes...
...The counterculture did not reject morality...
...There is no way to go back to the shared moral hierarchy of the past, however fondly that era may live on in their memories...
...Babbit sees Rousseau as simply weird, exhibiting "an eccentricity so extreme as to be almost or quite indistinguishable from madness...
...Ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue," Rousseau writes...
...Those of our time talk only of business and money...
...But what good would come of this...
...Our mission, therefore, is to steer the American ethic of authenticity to its highest manifestation, and to ennoble freedom by showing it the path to virtue...
...And as this new generation inherited the reins of power, its ethos entered the mainstream...
...Indeed, it fails by its own standard: it is inauthentic...
...Perhaps there are more meaningful ways that he can convey his individuality: through art, for example, or by dedicating himself to a cause he believes in...
...He would undoubtedly regard judge Bork as a self-righteous mullah who is trying to tell him how to live his life...
...At this point they became prime candidates for conversion to Rousseau's way of thinking...
...The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a moral revolution in the United States in which the idea of freedom was extended beyond anything the American founders envisioned...
...I do not think that it is either right or prudent to attack him for this.The Starbucks guy is an idealist, and it would be wrong to trample on that idealism...
...Most people's reaction is, "Well, if it works for you...
...In its most important manifestation, inner freedom is moral freedom-the freedom to determine what is good...
...Their personality says to the world, "Whether you like it or not, this is the way I am...
...This is not to say that Rousseau caused the social revolution...
...is "slouching toward Gomorrah...
...Freedom is not its own justification...
...Today we can see the triumph of authenticity in the enormous importance that American society grants to the "artist...
...And he is under no illusion that modern people can recover natural man-we cannot now return to the forest and live with the bears...
...He needs to realize that his seemingly bold stance is a bit of a pose...
...Successful entrepreneurs and executives sometimes opt out of their businesses when they find the work "unfulflling...
...The CEO's wife would much rather sit on the museum board than on the parish committee...
...The bourgeois wants to look good, smell clean and have regular bowel movements...
...By insisting that each of us has an original way of being human, Rousseau is articulating the idea of individuality...
...But I think it is fair to say that until the 1950s-the era of the "greatest generation" the Christian paradigm held firm in America...
...the self must be overcome...
...I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's...
...Indeed, the average American moves a dozen times over the course of his life...
...Even the inner self needs a compass-some substantive understanding of the good life...
...The American founders believed that all people share a basic human nature, and therefore they want pretty much the same things in life...
...Augustine...
...Feminists fought for women's right to have careers, but their success was made possible by the pill, the vacuum cleaner and the forklift...
...The old morality was based on the premise that human nature is flawed.The self is the enemy...
...The triumph of Rousseau's worldview gives rise to a new set of problems...
...Supreme Court a few years ago endorsed the ethic of authenticity, when it declared that all Americans have a "right to define their own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life...
...But is it realistic for a democratic society to enforce norms based on a moral order that is no longer shared by the community...
...Since the triumph of authenticity in the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis has been on radical freedom, largely to the exclusion of the question of what that freedom is for...
...Even today the popular impression is that Rousseau wanted us to abandon civilization and live the life of a noble savage...
...They will point out, correctly, that many Americans are deeply religious, and that of all First World countries, America has the highest percentage of people who believe in God and go to church...
...Consequently, morality withers, and even choice itself ceases to matter because there is no significance to what one chooses...
...But in each case, some external framework remained in place and provided an unquestioned standard by which human action was judged...
...Before the era of the automobile, most Americans lived on farms or in small towns...
...Finally, if I have not lived an irreproachable life, I am a well-meaning and good person and I care.The reader may recognize in this portrait the moral code of a certain American ex-president...
...The conformity of the bourgeois is the mark of his unfreedom...
...But Rousseau's answer to them is something like the following: If I am not worth as much as you are, at least I am different.You may find me unappealing, but at least I am sincere...
...The social traits I have described here are intrinsic to a free society oriented around technology and commerce, but they are not 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 the full story...
...But the Starbucks guy needs to change, too...
...Qutb argues that modern America is suffering from jahilliya-from the same polytheism, idolatry and moral degeneracy that the prophet Muhammad found in the Bedouin tribes in the seventh century...
...beyond our shores many people find it incredible and incomprehensible...
...And the staid U.S...
...The American founders agreed, and they created a mechanism that allows people to pursue the good life without government interference...
...Some Americans will find this portrait of their country to be exaggerated and unduly harsh...
...It is not the only culture: One can still find, especially in the heartland, recalcitrant remnants of the old culture...
...it was passionately concerned with morality...
...It is the charge that America is an immoral society...
...Even his opinion of himself is derived from how he is perceived by others...
...Many American conservatives and evangelical Christians share these concerns...
...Rousseau argues that in deciding what to become, whom to marry, how to live, I should not go by the dictates of my parents or my teachers or my preachers or even God...
...If you were to sympathetically engage the Starbucks guy in conversation, and ask him to account for himself, he would probably say, "I am trying to be unique" or "I am trying to be me...
...We can recover the voice of nature in us...
...I can't tell you how many orthodontists, venture capitalists, housewives and limousine drivers have greeted me with the sentence, "I, too, am writing a book...
...Consider the one thing that has done more to undermine morality in America than the combined influence of Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche...
...Even the traditional enemies of authenticity shape their lifestyles according to its code...
...But now it is the individual's act of choosing that is important...
...Irving Babbit's famous critique of Rousseau anticipates many of the charges we hear today...
...The change was brought about by the "counterculture," the melange of antiwar activists, feminists, sexual revolutionaries, freedom riders, hippies, druggies, nudists and vegetarians...
...But in the 1960s, this notion of freedom was radicalized...
...They took comfort and security and opportunity for granted, and sought something more something to give uniqueness and significance to their life...
...They argue, too, that Hollywood movies and TV shows are entertainment-they should not be seen as represen Dinesh D'Souza is the Rishwain fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the new book What's So Great About America, from which this is adapted...
...being an artist is cool...
...Rousseau's charges are precisely the ones that the young people of the 1960s launched against their parents...
...Bork, for example, has urged the enforcement of "public morality" through the censorship of objectionable songs, movies, TV shows and Web sites...
...But I cannot blame the aspiring authors...
...The reason that we admire artists is that they draw upon resources within themselves to express something that is distinctively their own...
...If I do not, I miss the point of my life...
...But Rousseau explicitly disclaims any such intention...
...Here the great catalyst of social transformation was the mass movement of women into the workplace...
...But inner freedom also encompasses the broad range of choices that makes one's life richer and more fulfilling...
...The medieval Christian monk might have doubted his ability to live by the Benedictine Rule...
...In this quest, they often viewed the dogmatic rules, social conformity and materialistic preoccupations of their parents as soulless and alienating...
...Capitalism also produces a dynamic, mobile society in which people rarely end up living where they were born...
...By providing universal access to the city, the car helped to bring about the end of a whole way of life in America...
...The philosopher Charles Taylor of Harvard-on whose interpretation of Rousseau I rely-expounds Rousseau's new idea: "There is a way of being human that is uay way...
...Today art is not admired for its fidelity to nature, but for its fidelity to "inner nature...
...The great thinker who stood behind them, the philosopher of bohemia, was Rousseau...
...Since the earliest days of Athens and Jerusalem, most of the great figures ofWestern civilization have regarded the question of the content of the good life as central...
...Tom Wolfe has pointed out that in America today it is much more fashionable to donate a mullion dollars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art than to give it to the Presbyterian Church...
...Capitalism produces mass affluence, and mass affluence extends to ordinary people the same avenues of fulfillment-and of debauchery-previously available only to the upper class...
...Against the false values of the bourgeois, Rousseau offered the alternative of primitive man, natural man, of honao sapiens before the advent of civilization...
...To understand why Rousseau's ideas are so controversial, to see why their consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s continues to torment and divide Americans, it is helpful to contrast Rousseau's Confessions with another book of the same title: the Confessions of St...
...he is a kind of mental construct, a "hypothesis...
...Some may find these aspirations banal, even comical, but the goals are legitimate...
...It is hard to see these people bearing a close resemblance to their parents...
...Perhaps one should not be surprised at the barbarism and weirdness of many American teenagers-their role models are people like Howard Stern...
...It is society that corrupts man...
...We see it in corporate advertising: "Just Do It...
...The principles of Rousseau did not make their first appearance in the 1960s...
...The means of this corruption is reason, which is deployed to enable one man to advance above another, to accumulate more...
...No one sees it as obr'ioils that the military or the Islamic life is the best or highest calling...
...Behavior that is considered wrong and deviant in many cultures-such as premarital sex, homosexuality and the use of pornography-is tolerated, if not accepted, in the United States...
...I entered into the depths of my soul," Augustine writes, "and with the eye of my soul I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over me...
...Cultural conservatives must recognize that the new morality is now entrenched and pervasive...
...Dennis Rodman, Madonna and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, formally known as Prince...
...But they are evident for all to see...
...True, Americans are probably more religious and socially conservative than Europeans, but that is not saying much, considering how decadent the Europeans are...
...Before Rousseau, no one believed that each human life should follow its own distinctive moral course...
...For Rousseau, calculation is the ethic of the bourgeois, the man of commerce...
...Rousseau can be seen as the original deadbeat dad...
...I surveyed him with curious fascination: the Mohawk hair, the earrings, the nose-ring, the studs on his forehead and tongue, the tattoos...
...But if a return to nature is impossible, Rousseau argues that there is a second option available to us...
...Americans recognize the voice of authenticity here, and this is why they are so tolerant of such extremities...
...Rousseau's innovation is to cut off this quest from any external source of authority, including that of God...
...It is now common practice for vice presidents and sales managers of companies to go mountain climbing in the Rockies or Tibet, to "find themselves...
...I should decide for myself alone...
...Orthodox Jews, Catholics and Protestants continue to affirm the existence of an independent moral hierarchy...
...I miss what being human is for uie...
...What changed in the 1960s in America is the collapse of this framework, the erosion of belief in this external order...
...Rousseau was a champion of radical freedom...
...Rousseau insists that in determining the unique course of one's life, the self is sovereign...
...The magnitude of the change is evident when we consider the philosophical presuppositions of the "old morality" and the "new morality...
...Buchanan calls censorship "an idea whose time has come...
...I could just imagine judge Bork entering the room, grabbing hint and shouting: "What is wrong with you, you demented freak...
...The bourgeois is far more concerned with his portfolio than with his soul...
...To the American founders' list of freedoms, Rousseau adds a new one: inner freedom...
...Instead of completely denying the value of expressive freedom, conservatives would do better to embrace it-at least in part-and to focus on educating people about the rich moral sources of freedom and about how to use freedom well...
...Moreover, his ethic of authenticity is entrenched in his psyche: how realistic would it be to uproot it...
...In Rousseau's new world, the external framework ceases to be authoritative.A person can, of course, join the Marines or become a Muslim...
...From the Starbucks guy's perspective, the cultural conservatives are enemies of freedom...
...The disastrous consequences of this moral upheaval have been compiled by Bill Bennett in his "Index of Cultural Indicators...
...Both Augustine and Rousseau counsel inwardness as the means to truth...
...we can rise above the corruptions and compromises that society seeks from us, and we can recover our natural goodness...
...On the right, figures such as Robert Bork, Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer have warned that American culture has deteriorated to the point that, in Bork's expression, the U.S...
...Only the "nuclear family" holds together: the extended family is scattered...
...Because the drive that sustained the generation of the 193()s and 1940s could no longer sustain its children...
...In Schumpeter's view, technological capitalism unleashes a "gale of creative destruction" that undermines traditional institutions and traditional values...
...Augustine, by contrast, presumed that MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35 the inward journey is merely the pathway to the Creator...
...Freedom becomes insignificant if it makes no difference what I choose...
...E my in the 20th century, the economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted that technological capitalism would produce massive social upheaval...
...For him, human nature is basically good...
...All of this adds up to a powerful critique, which states that in America freedom has established itself as the highest value and has fatally undermined other cherished values...
...By listening to that inner voice, and following it...
...Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack, the editor of one evangelical magazine described the World Trade Center as a modern Tower of Babel dedicated to the "false deities" of materialism, secularism and relativism...
...But he articulated its complaints and aspirations in the most eloquent, profound way...
...But the bohemian culture now sets the tone for the society at large, and it commands a strong allegiance among the young...
...By embracing the new morality, the children of the 1960s became incomprehensible to their parents...
...He wants to be original, and this is a good thing to be, but every fourth guy at Starbucks looks like him...
...The Spartan soldier might have wondered whether he was courageous enough not to retreat in the face of certain death...
...God is the interior light that powers our souls...
...We cherish them as pure originals...
...It is a massively important idea...
...Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, recently termed the West "the first atheistic civilization in the history of humankind...
...There their virtue and chastity were sustained by the moral supervision of the local community...
...Rousseau was a deeply strange man...
...Even the bourgeoisie now concede the validity of Rousseau's moral critique, and seek to live by his precepts...
...It had been modified over time to take into account the multiplicity of Christian denominations, as well as the presence of Jews-hence the attempt at forging a Judeo-Christian synthesis...
...He is a man of limited horizons...
...But it substituted Rousseau's conception of the inner compass for the old rules of obligation...
...Indeed, the United States gives more latitude than any other society to the claims of the 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 loner, the dissenter, the eccentric...
...In order to discover what is good and true, we must set aside reason and be in touch with our feelings...
...These men would like nothing better than to uproot the ethic of authenticity and restore the moral consensus that existed in the 1950s...
...Think Different": "The Greatest Risk Is Not Taking One...
...the self is under the sway of the passions...
...A much better approach for conservatives is to acknowledge the legitimacy of the ideal of authenticity, but to make the case that the Starbucks guy has adopted a debased form...
...As Sayyid Qutb observes, at least the West used to be Christian: now it is pagan...
...The grave weakness of the ethic of authenticity is that it simply stresses the autonomy of choice...
...The epithets and remonstrations of the conservative have no chance of persuading the Starbucks guy...
...tative of how people really live...
...After all, it is our rich, commercial society that makes an establishment like Starbucks viable...
...First, many conservatives do sound like they are against freedom...
...Moreover it is the hard work, discipline, deferred gratification and frugality of his parents that now enable Starbucks guy's bohemian lifestyle.A little gratitude and understanding should not be too much to expect...
...In America, of course, the moral order was represented by Christianity...
...Despite these accommodations, the vast majority of Americans in the 1950s believed that, for human beings in general, there was a "right way" to live and a .,wrong way" to live, and they were pretty confident that they knew the difference between the two...
...And rich people who cannot be artists frequently try to identify with artists in some way...
...Recently I stopped into my neighborhood Starbucks, and there, behind the counter, was a specimen who probably would not have existed in earlier generations...
...MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 3
