The swami said, no matter how much you reflect on it, you cannot really know anyone else-all you have are the bare details of another individual's life, a faded picture that you keep in your top pocket, as it were. And you can never see clearly because, ultimately, you can never see your own life with any clarity. We are strangers to ourselves, me & you, but the '&' is sweet...
Yesterday, I tried to convince little r that it was a good thing to be a liberal. So, tell me, little r, are you the Taleban or a liberal?
What is the Taleban?
Well, they're people who say you can't have your beloved chicken and rice; no Barney or Dora either!
Not convinced, I'm afraid. She just marched off, singing her song, 'I am the Taleban, my friend'.
Jesus!
~~~
Now, you might say that a liberal society must make some place for non-liberal attitudes, practices. But on what basis? Diversity and pluralism? If so, what is being stated is that associations which are not autonomous (or, to beg the question, fully autonomous) have some kind of legitimacy because people choose to enter them, even if they're not 'the best' according to our version of the good (who is 'our'?). Underlying this line of reasoning is the notion that autonomy/individuality can be sacrificed if it favours diversity. Again, there's a difficult question of: to what extent? Certainly voluntarily entering into a contract that restricts one's future autonomy is highly problematic. A more tangible example: a woman who chooses to follow what she deems to be a religious life, one that entails submission to the authority of her husband, hardly seems like a very satisfactory situation.
A bit of untangling/tangling:
This isn't always a clear-cut distinction. People in liberal societies acknowledge all kinds of constraints or obligations (from marriage, to decent behaviour, and from promises to work norms). Also, this ignores the fact that through industrialization and the creation of a mass society, the huge conformities produced by the education system, and the culture, marketing and fashion industries, individuals' ability to determine their own goals in life may not be as free as we think it is.
On the other side, should we say that artists who follow a pattern of living and learning, a tradition for lack of a better word, are in some sense "constrained" or that they lack autonomy? And what of someone reflectively chooses to follow a religious life? Is 'choose' the right word here, or is it respond to what one thinks one's capacities and true inclinations are? For to say 'choose' already presumes a 'chooser'-and that is, precisely, what is so contentious here.
Merton, for example. Someone who writes:
'life consists in learning to live one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling life..to do this one must recognize what is one's own...true freedom is openness, availability, the capacity for gift.'
hardly seems to be an automaton.
Of course, this is a rather extreme example, but if one takes the more prosaic ones then it seems that there are indeed lots of fairly decent religious people who pick and choose various practices, paths, and aspects of religion that suit them. Fundamentalists (and perhaps liberals as well) would like to condemn them for not being 'truly' religious, but I don't think that's right. Reality is always more syncretic, varied, flexible and messy than theorists would allow for.
What's wrong with this picture, then? I think it's the view that autonomy can only really exist in an unencumbered self. To talk of anything that is 'given' already strikes some ears as suggesting dependence. So, the usual dichotomies are set up: liberal vs communitarian, atomism vs holism, the individual vs society...
One influential version of this is economic man who is, by all accounts, a Robinson Crusoe interacting, freely and voluntarily, with other Robinson Crusoes. What relation there is with anyone else is a matter of a contract. The social, to the extent that it exists, is a product of individuals' transactions and nothing more. Here he is, the free-floating self, with his hard-won freedom from family, society, the state and religious authorities. The self is not determined in any way by any substantive notion of 'the good'. The individual's freedom to choose is the good, whether it makes his life go better or not. In a world governed by laws and regularities here we see the isolated will completely determining itself, making a leap, as it were, out of the causal network (Gnosticism, again?).
Of course, one has to recognize how organizations and authorities have cramped and blighted people's lives for centuries And one only needs to be reminded of the horrors of Communism and, more generally, of the deep reach of the all-pervading state to find something deeply appealing in this 'existentialist' or Protestant view of the individual. But, could it be a reaction to a peculiar set of circumstances in 'the west'? After all, the centralization of the state, the concentration of power, was bound to set off all sorts of counter-movements? And could it be the role of the Church, as a hierarchical religious institution and authority, naturally induced a kind of rebellion in favour of determining one's own moral and spiritual outlook? Does the problem go back further? Does it have something to do with an opposition between the secular and the sacred, lived time and the 'end of time' (as George Steiner once suggested)?
Must we always veer between two extremes: a picture of pure or absolute freedom, an empty freedom, perhaps, but deeply cherished nevertheless, and on the other hand, tyranny or a rigid determination of what we 'are' by factors that lie outside our control?
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