Two Contrasting Structures of “The Two Meanings
of Liberty:”
An Essay on Political Theology
Douglas B. Olds
August 2023
The civilization of care rather than the
politics of thymic and hegemonic authority recognizes the qualities, needs, and
particularities of citizens—especially those most vulnerable—in order to create
conditions for their flourishing. Thymic politics expressed in rhetorical
allegories of “heroic” rage, contention, control, and status seeking construct
a false metaphysics of human transcendence (Fame, Fortune, Peace though strength, Security through Order,[1]
[“good guys with a gun”]) rather than discover it in the aspirational folk poetics
of common people pursuing loving means. It instead proposes a positive program
of interventions for creating a "natural" order (often framed as negatively
engaging [controlling] ever-loosely identified threats of chaos). In contrast,
the civilization of care begins with people severally and individually to equip
the capacities of all to live fully in their God-graced character and
potentiality. Positive liberty—the ability to choose and enable constructive
and liberative projects that responsibly fulfill one’s gifts and calling (including to duty and responsibility)—is one such condition. A problem of politics arises when the conditions
for care and flourishing become abstracted by hegemonic epistemologies from
concrete, existential needs. For example, by abstracting positive liberty into
“freedom” absent obligation to liberate others. Valorizing negative liberty as
to be left alone to do anything one wishes. Abstractions such as this displace
the caring impulse and change the civilizing social contract of politics and
the collective peoples from seeking the common good of flourishing to that of
enabling and empowering highly individualized and facultative, centrifugal
self-interest that erupts in acute or chronic deprivation and trauma. In these
cases, the political margins of wolfish reactionaries invade the sheepfold’s
core consensus of Christian caring, blighting some churches with thymos,
adversarial culture warriors, and self-aggrandizing and transactional personalities.
By this, the neurosis of agon manifests, lamentable in its false witness
to the Gospel of love, peace, renewal, and restoration.
The dichotomization of liberty into “negative”
and “positive” captivated the thought of Isaiah Berlin’s acolytes, including many
libertarians. Berlin proposed a definition of this dichotomy that inverts the metaphysical
locus of ultimate agency (in the isolative creature rather than the relationally Trinitarian Creator) but
nevertheless are two overlapping aspects of negative responsibility to--failure
of--the duty to care:
The 'negative' sense [of
freedom], is involved in the answer to the question 'What is the area within
which the subject–a person or group of persons–is or should be left to do or be
what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?' The
second, which I shall call the 'positive' sense, is involved in the answer to
the question 'What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can
determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?[2]
Like his “negative liberty,” Berlin’s “positive
liberty” sustains the kind of egoism expressed in “heroic rage” that both by its limiting virtus
and refusal to care are grounded in an anthropology of radical and
agonistic false self-determination out of harmony with the metaphysical
conation of grace that creates and sustains. The Christian, in
contrast, understands freedom as bounded by the law of love: the
positive Golden Rule and its own negative constructs in the Decalogue (Exodus
20: 1-21) which Calvin (Institutes II, vii, 12) recognizes as the “third use of
the [moral] law.” Bounded freedom is structured solely by the positive duty to
care, which includes the training to recognize and respond to precarity (Olds
in prep.). Thus, Christological liberty has a positive aspect in the duty to
care (positive because the locus of liberation and material sustenance is realized by the enabling of agency
of others first) and a negative aspect that prohibits the
infliction of harms by individual practice of sin that violates the Decalogue’s
moral law.
Berlin must be aware of some relational
dimension to liberty (as, for example in its negotiations and political settlements by means of deliberative virtues) but primarily presents its structure in terms of
individualized (re)cognition of vectors of power qua negative influence arising
from social orders. Any constructive power of liberty is expressed by a
creature acting individually with “rational self-interest.” In this, an
ideology of power generates a self’s false sense of unboundedness from caring for others with their
own intrinsic value and claims to moral and material goods both private and
public.
In contrast, the Christological power is the laying
down of all expressions of hegemony as “false consciousness and praxis” of
power.[4]
Christological power is constructive as it is supremely other-directed rather than self-interested. In the constructive duty of the
Golden Rule is the power of grace structured, shared, and recognized. Only in a
civilization of care is agency allowed to flourish. Selfishness pursued as
“negative freedom to be left alone” actually binds the practitioner to the limiting
powers (divine justice) he attempts to flee.[5]
Giving up any expressions of coercion is a ceding of the ensnaring false power
(Matthew 13:41). Only in a re-definition of the power of freedom and caring absent
hegemonic control is Christological power realized. Positive power is caring.
Negative (ineffectual, creation-opposing) power is controlling. Positive
freedom is the allowance to choose one’s ideology and expression of power. Negative freedom is
the responsibility to choose wisely and live with the consequences—to live by
the sword is to die by the sword (Matthew 26:52; cf. 7:2).
Berlin’s existential confusion about the metaphysics of power revealed by his ironical inversion of negative and positive spaces of agency reveals that these two proposals (Berlin’s and Christological) of freedom’s structure can themselves have these considerations of agency applied to them. Berlin’s systematics of freedom is “negative” in a multiplicity of senses. The very confusion of terms and the misunderstanding of metaphysical duty and allowance ensnare personal agency rather than liberate.
Again in contrast, Christology reveals a “positive” systematics of freedom. It induces allegiance to the reign of God expressed in the Christological virtues free from the necessity of strategizing and control. Freed indeed from the vain practices of hegemony-seeking selfish advantage that will only return the geometric wages of self-limiting justice coercing responsibility for the hegemon and his sins and the return to freedom for his captives (Luke 4:18-19). Liberty for Pharaoh has no sustaining power. It looks into its own mirror, frozen in the hegemon's self-regard sublimating the terror at inexorably slipping control.
But what makes others alive will truly make you alive too. Join in, freely, ceding control to the flow of metaphysical grace. In this--in Christ's virtues--is liberty truly found. This system of bounded liberty (bonded to the creation and its limitless goodness) is profoundly different than the structure of liberty that defines itself negatively by unbondedness from a limiting world.
[POSTSCRIPT: I submitted this essay to the evaluation of ChatGPT 4.0 on August 16-17, 2023. In the process it came up with its own alternative structure, "conditional liberty," machine monitoring of social conditions ("metrics"), constantly adjusting the operation of liberty to a predetermined (by system stakeholders) end and overseen by oligarchic cadres of human circuit breakers. In short, hegemony. It also proposed another structure for liberty, "Evolutionary Liberty," where the operationalization and definitions of freedom are tethered to a teleological principle, presumably as derived in the TESCREAL complex.
Of course the effect on liberty from the virtue ethical approach is how it dispenses with the need to structure or predefine an "ends" for liberty. This is another distinction of the two structures of liberty's meaning proposed by this essay, and another dimension that poses a significant humanistic challenge to ideals of machined liberties of "conditionals" and "evolved:" Because of generational change and different stages of historical and epistemological development, including historicist epistemologies, the application of a predetermined end to these systems of distributing liberty as a public good inevitably involves coercion. Virtue ethics in its Christology is free of concerns with coerced ends.]
[1]Herder, Johann Gottfried. Adrastea II.8 (Continuation)(1801-02): Imagery (Bilder), Allegories (Allegorien), and Personifications. English translation.
[2] Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Liberty:
Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, 166–217 (169). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002. First published 1958.
[3] Schmitt, Carl.
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated
by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, chap. 1.
For
a repudiation of putatively Christian warrants of sovereignty and “dominion” through
ontological violence and religious ideologies of “chaoskampf" (violent struggle with chaos) and theomachy (divine
battling), see Douglas B. Olds, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care:
Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism
(Wipf and Stock, 2023), 72-80.
[4] Matthew Winthrop Barzun,
The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go (New York:
Optimism Press, 2021). See also empirical studies
on leadership power structured on hierarchy and control, e.g. “In his study of brain stimulation,
neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi found that powerful people exhibited an
impairment in ‘mirroring.’ Mirroring is a neural process that causes us to
subconsciously mimic another person's non-verbal behavior.” Jerry Useem, “Power
Causes Brain Damage,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/.
Also:
mp2201 [author], “Power Damages Our Capacity for Compassion and Empathy." The
Disability Inclusion Challenge. https://www.thedisabilityinclusionchallenge.com/2022/07/12/power-damages-our-capacity-for-compassion-and-empathy/.
[5] The Golden Rule/duty to care has negative (the Rich man in hell: Luke 16:19f) and positive (the Good Samaritan Luke 10:14f) exemplars. The negative is radically cautionary.
This duty is illustrated in the contexts of individuals in proximity and not of a political or sociological discourse. However, there is a sociological dimension to the duty to care, part of the developmental process of eschatology. The Greek version of Matthew 7:12 has Jesus address the plural of "you" in his imperative, similarly plural in the return flow of grace. It would be coherent for a directive to the individual would not be changed in a collective or historical context.
Finally, these illustrations of bounded liberty involve no considerations or claims of reciprocity. Proximity of precarity triggers the awareness of sociological or humanistic responsibility carried out in the duty of the individual to provide care.
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