On Freedom, Self-Making, and the Myths We Live By
The following little essay is an attempt at a summation of a lot of things I’ve been working through, though they are more directly precipitates of reading a recent truly sad article that has been circling the social media sphere the last day or two; it’s a bleak read but the following little essay, particularly the first few paragraphs. I apologize for the utter dearth of writing here, despite my promise of greater output. The drought will perhaps make more sense in light of the last section of this essay and of a less cryptic announcement I hope to be able to make in a few weeks’ time.
One of the fundamental motifs or myths underlying liberal modernity—and in different forms (such as more state-centered ones) all of modernity, arguably—is the idea of absolute self-determination and self-autonomy, in which the self, and by extension the activities of the self in the material, social, religious, etc, worlds, can and should operate at-will, free from constraints, coordinations, limitations, and so on. The self may enter into contract with other selves but such contracts are by nature contingent and temporary and can be broken with relative impunity. This is what is taken to be ‘freedom,’ unmoored from any loci of meaning or from any larger coordinates of life: the assumption is that everything ought to orient around human desires and intentionality. ‘We’ set the flow of our own lives, and to a certain extent of course this is, contingently, true. Beyond rather superficial inputs we in the industrialized world need make few concessions to the flow of the seasons or to the ecological limitations (or for that matter opportunities) with which we find ourselves (or do not, as the case may be). ‘Nature’ only rarely intrudes, and it becomes easy to imagine that we have no real dependence on it, when of course our dependence remains but has been mediated through an almost endless chain of actors and places and resources such that any coordinates are lost to us, and the illusion of autonomy and self-direction can safely subsist. In the sphere of self-performance we imagine ourselves autonomous actors given to an endless plasticity of identity and being, or, at least, that is our aspiration, the goal towards which all social order and structure is supposed to bend. To be reminded of the biological—that which within us and around us lies outside of, or primarily outside of, our intentional control—is to create immense anxiety and resentment, a fear that scrambles for containment of the troubling implications.
Not only nature but human relationships become utterly contingent, subject to whim and erratic desire: once relationships are no longer purely contingent, they are taken to be stiffling, arresting our endless plasticity and powers of self-invention and self-discovery. Part of the power of the myth is the sidelining of the reality that other selves end up being deeply harmed and limited by our unlimited exercise of self-realization. To look squarely in the face of such harms would be to imperil the myth, and so such examinations and self-honesty are surrounded with powerful and unconsciously generated taboos. The proliferation of that which must not be said in our world is deeply rooted in this subconscious urge to protect the structuring myths, and to avoid the breaking-in of other ones.
If what I have said seems to primarily apply to the so-called left side of the socio-cultural spectrum in America and elsewhere (though I can best speak to my own context, knowing it does not apply precisely everywhere, even within the Anglophone), that would be a mistake of interpretation: the right side of the spectrum inhabits the same world and embraces the same wider cult of self-formation and self-autonomy, with different emphases and loci of significance. So while the left side of the spectrum in the current moment puts much emphasis on the Self-Made Person, the right side of things embraces the myth of the Self-Made Man (or perhaps Woman). For the first it is the reconfiguration of gender norms and of biological givens that is celebrated; for the second it is the reconfiguration of economic relationships and of the underlying material reality of nature resources (though that is today rarely stressed or even recognized). I suspect that much of the political and cultural rancor and division that has become so typical of America in recent years (with deep historical roots and antecedents, to be sure) is rooted in the fact that left and right inhabit basically the same space of myth, both are committed to not just the project of modernity but a particular version thereof, which is by necessity rife with contradictions and tends towards internal divisions. Over the last couple of years our collective contested and splintered myth world has been severely challenged on many fronts, and potentially faces an unraveling, if that is not already in fact happening.
One of the great dangers I think in such a potential unraveling of our myths is that like all myths they are not entirely false and that the breakdown of our myths would threaten the loss of the good that is contained within them and that is to some degree realized in the contemporary world. Freedom and autonomy are concepts that at root have real content, meaning, and value, even if as words and cultural complexes they have been utterly eroded of meaning and significance and probably require wholesale replacement. If the absolute sovereignty of the (privileged and economically-supported) autonomous individual is simply ceded away to another absolutism we have gained nothing and indeed lost much.
Critical theory can do much work here I think, as maligned as it has become in recent years. When we step back and examine things with a critical eye we can see that what is imagined as endless plasticity and powers of self-invention are neither endless nor truly self-generated or even self-desired. Ironically the kind of self-invention and ‘autonomy’ that we so highly value can in historical reference only exist within a highly regulated and regularized society, one structured by extensive laws and punitive interventions and hedged about by a vast array of security measures. And within the basically statist and capitalist controlling structures actual routes of identity and meaning are tightly contained within socially-generated scripts which mimetically spread along the routes of institution and capitalist infrastructure. The Zeitgeist is in fact a ghost in the larger machine, and while its path is not pre-determined it is tightly constrained and directed. What we take to be an embrace of our ‘true’ self—whether it is genderfluidity or robust masculinity or whatever else takes our fancy—is in fact the mediation of the embracing system and of the structuring work of social scripts, themselves generated at large scales without our individual input. Even something seemingly as autochthonous as desire, particularly sexual desire, is not entirely or even primarily self-generated but is structured by what is socially and culturally possible, overlaid upon a biological matrix we understand only foggily and which we generally prefer to avoid thinking about.
All of that is to say that things like freedom and autonomy will always be somewhat mythical and will always be contingent in some degree or another, they will always be rooted and maintained within specific structuring contexts. What we should ask is, first of all, where do freedom and autonomy inhere? Are they only or primarily located in individuals? Or might freedom and autonomy (and other values of a like nature) operate and require other scales and other iterations of relationship? Second, what are these values for? What am I free to do, to become, and why? From what ought I or the communities and interconnectivities of which I am a part be autonomous? When is it better to have a degree of autonomy and when is it better to be in—or simply to recognize!—a relationship of dependency or subordination? For in reality life is impossible without a complex mixture of autonomy, dependency, subordination, and contingency; as biological creatures we are deeply dependent on a whole host of other organisms and biological, geological, and other processes and systems over which we have precious little power. We cannot, for instance, control the evolutionary trajectory of a virus; we cannot control the trajectory of human history despite being the ones making it.
What we can do is reflect upon and, to some extent, change and shape how we relate to one another, to nature, to the past and future, and how we conceptualize and realize fraught values like freedom and autonomy. It would be absurd for me to suppose that we can reinvent our myths and our relationships wholesale, that we could step entirely outside of the social, material, and other bonds within which we find ourselves. We cannot; there is much that will and must of itself continue on both in discursive and material realms. But we can begin to reshape our relationships with the world, with nature, with one another, making use of the resources that we already have and modifying them as we go. It is impossible to sit down and write brand-new scripts for practice, but one can begin the process and seek to shape it, and perhaps be pleasantly surprised where things end up.
To conclude things on a personal note—our family is looking to embark on our own journey of reorientation and reshaping, of stepping, if only a little, out of the overarching myths and structures and to work for reconfigurations. God willing, I will be able to share details and particulars in the coming months; I might even put together a little manifesto of sorts, so stay tuned, and until then, Happy New Year, and a belated (or, for any Orthodox Old Calendar readers) blessed Nativity!