Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit als Geschenk; F. und Wahrheit: Maßstab nach Werten vs. "go with the flow" (Instinkte, Sklave der Gefühle); Totalitarismus; Anpassung an Wahrheit an sich vs. Angepasst-Werden an die Welt d. Dinge

Kurzinhalt: He can either react in an emotive fashion, "go with the flow" of his own likes and dislikes, as it were, or he can measure those things according to a scale of values derived from an objective standard to which he has access and according to which ...

Textausschnitt: Freedom and Truth

114b The notion is widespread today that a freedom which must submit itself to the truth is no freedom at all. Freedom, to be freedom, must submit to nothing whatever. This, of course, is a distortion of freedom even in the political sense of the word. As Bloom points out, freedom in the United States was originally linked to the human ability to reason, not set in opposition to it. He said, "the regime established here promised untrammeled freedom to reason—not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion."1 (Fs; tblStw: Freiheit)

114c Moreover, and more ominously, politically speaking, is the fact that when people lose sight of an objective reality against which their actions can be measured, they leave themselves wide open to the totalitarianisms which have dominated this century. George Orwell's Big Brother is a perfect example of how absolute power can operate only in the absence of any publicly-recognized objective truth against which the claims of Big Brother might be challenged. Winston had written in his diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." But Big Brother is a thoroughgoing relativist and subjectivist. Truth is what Big Brother says it is and nothing else. Winston is tortured until he acknowledges, of his own "free will", that two plus two equals five or three or both simultaneously—what-ever Big Brother at any given time declares the answer to be. Winston will not be put to death until he has accepted lock, stock and barrel, in his own brainwashed mind, the power of Big Brother to define and incessantly redefine the truth of things. (Fs)

115a The silver lining to the modern emotivist cloud, a lining admittedly thin and not without its serious drawbacks, is the fact that, even today, freedom is not entirely divorced from reason and truth, if only because, as Bloom noted, "our relativism does not extend to matters of bodily health."2 Current campaigns against the tobacco industry, theater popcorn, hot dogs, soda pop, et al.—combined with the condomizing of sex and the attempt to establish a universally mandated health care system from which no one will be allowed to exclude himself-—all offer evidence that not everyone committed to moral relativism is committed to relativism across the boards. Even our campaigns to inform the public about AIDS and drugs bear witness to the fact that most people still understand some Unk to exist between the truth of things and the ways in which people will choose or should be encouraged, if not forced, to behave. (Fs)

115b The reason why the truth is essential to human freedom lies in the fact that man has only two ways in which to respond to the things around him. He can either react in an emotive fashion, "go with the flow" of his own likes and dislikes, as it were, or he can measure those things according to a scale of values derived from an objective standard to which he has access and according to which he makes his choices. In the first instance, he cannot really be regarded as free, for he is simply reacting according to his own "instincts", his own preferences. He is the servant of his own desires, the slave of his own emotions. In a sense, he does not choose anything at all; he simply succumbs to things. (Fs)

115c Pope John Paul II explains the relationship between truth and freedom in this way:
Truth is a condition of freedom, for if a man can preserve his freedom in relation to the objects which thrust themselves on him in the course of his activity as good and desirable, it is only because he is capable of viewing these goods in the light of truth and so adopting an independent attitude to them. Without this faculty man would inevitably be determined by them: these goods would take possession of him and determine totally the character of his actions and the whole direction of his activity. His ability to discover the truth gives man the possibility of self-determination, of deciding for himself the character and direction of his own actions, and that is what freedom means.3

116a In a sense, we are back to Chesterton's definition of freedom: the power of a thing to be itself. Is man to be in freedom what he already is in truth? Will he conform himself to the truth already inscribed in his being, or will he be conformed to the things of this world? In the final analysis, he has no other choices. And, in the final analysis, to be conformed to the things of this world is not freedom at all, but enslavement, for it deprives him of the essence and capacities of his own being. As Chesterton amusingly observed, "You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette."4 Or, in less amusing terms, if man relinquishes "himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him", he cannot but become "the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products" (RH 16). If, in other words, he wants to be "like God", i.e., to define for himself who he shall be, he will discover that he is no longer free to be a man but only to be a slave to the whims of his own or someone else's fallen nature.5 (Fs)