Freedom is the right to be wrong
and it's God given
I will run the way of your commands
you give freedom to my heart - Psalm 118(119):32
The more prone to censorship our western society becomes the more I am convinced that freedom ultimately boils down to the right to be wrong. If you think about it, the assumption that we all have a right to be wrong is what creates tolerant societies. Societies lacking this freedom will necessarily become authoritarian and even totalitarian. When we hear incessant messaging from our elite, ideologically captured mass media about the dangers of misinformation and disinformation, and when governments begin resort to not only debunking but ‘pre-bunking’, we should realize that our freedom is in imminent danger.
There used to exist something called healthy skepticism. Healthy skepticism was something that allowed one to evaluate ideas and trends, even those currently enjoying near universal approval, from a detached, objective perspective and decide for oneself about their veracity and goodness. As my dad once said, “just because something is popular doesn’t make it good.” It used to be considered something of a virtue to think for oneself.
In our factionalized western society there’s little room for healthy skepticism. Perhaps that’s because for the past sixty years or so, we’ve been encouraged more and more to ‘discover ourselves’ as opposed to thinking for ourselves. Discovering oneself is a subjective process. To think for oneself requires an objective, or realist, perspective. The emphasis on self-discovery leads to tribalism because as we look at ourselves and begin to describe ourselves to ourselves we quite naturally look for others like ourselves. In other words, we seek out our tribe.
This process of forming assumptions about who we are is very different from how people understood themselves in the time that preceded our deracinated, atomized individual age. People used to be born into an identity. John’s son, for example, or a smith or a baker. I use those common examples from the English language because they’re easy to comprehend but Marx wasn’t wrong about the “standpoint” of the “isolated individual” being an historical aberration (what he got wrong, in my opinion was exactly what he, as an atheist, understood man himself to be). In any event, for millennia we were all born into a specific place within a specific community with specific expectations of what we would do and how we would live.
For several hundred years, western civilization benefitted from a broadly shared base assumption about what mankind was and how one ought to live. This base assumption was provided by what is often called Christendom. For over a thousand years the vast majority of people in the West were born into the christian church and died in the church. Life revolved around the sacraments, feasts and liturgical “times” of the church. That’s not to say that things were perfect and there was no injustice. Man is flawed and mankind is incapable of perfecting itself. Christendom is not synonymous with the Kingdom of God as established by Christ.
While it did not bring about an earthly utopia, Christendom did provide a stable cultural foundation from which people could question various aspects of the world around them. Not least, it facilitated many of the scientific discoveries that would eventually allow us to live with all the conveniences we have today. I mention that specifically because the Catholic Church for centuries was the main conduit for scientific discovery, the popular misconception of what exactly happened to Galileo notwithstanding. You can look that up what really happened there if you care to.
If we look carefully at what was happening when these discoveries were being made, as systems of government and economics changed and even as the Church itself was being split asunder we see that undergirding all of it was the right to be wrong, the right to question certain assumptions. Christendom was not a theocracy. Luther was excommunicated but he wasn’t put to death, he went on to found his own church instead. The basic assumption, that man was created by God and as such is subject to His divine authority, would continue to subsist until relatively recently and contained in that assumption is the knowledge that our free will consists of the right to choose wrongly.
While the current cultural lore is that the Church has a long history of ‘persecuting’ certain types of people, what is meant by persecution is not at all what is happening to people who choose wrongly in our broader culture. For example, in Germany today people can be fined or go to jail for posting or even just liking internet content deemed offensive by the government. People are arrested and jailed for silently praying on the street in the United Kingdom. Why is this now the case? Why must being ‘wrong’ be punished? Why is the response to so called hate speech now criminal sanction instead of more speech?
The answer becomes very clear as soon as one thinks about what is meant by the claim that to deny that a person can actually become a member of the opposite sex is equivalent to ‘erasing’ trans people. Trans people have constructed an identity for themselves that is not based on anything beyond their own subjective feelings and the affirmation of those feelings by society. In way, if society stops affirming them they do cease to exist. To construct that identity they have to deny a lot of basic assumptions about reality that have been held for thousands of years. Something similar goes for the claim that to object to a woman intentionally killing the child in her womb is to deny her agency over her own body. This similarly reflects the belief that we can do whatever we want with ourselves, that we (along with the so-called ‘products of conception’) are merely putty in our own hands.
In his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that man was formed from the slime of the earth and so is called “‘a little world,’ because all the creatures of the earth are in a way to be found in him.”(Prima Pars, q. 91, a. 1) Later, he explains the way in which we are made to the image of God and the one way in which man is more like to God than the angels, “in the fact that the whole human soul is in the whole body, and again, in every part, as God is in regard to the whole world.”(PP, q. 93 a. 3) We are all ‘little worlds’ but we exist in a larger context of being-ness that extends beyond time, beyond space and beyond the limits of our imaginations. The inhabitants of Christendom knew this in their bones. We can no more create ourselves than we can create the universe.
When we shrink reality down to the boundaries of just our own self-created little world we lose our connection to the larger truths of existence. The reality we construct is fragile and can be destroyed if we allow ourselves to entertain those who may question it. This is why any response beyond wholehearted affirmation is met by such hostility and even hatred by those who live in these types of self-created realities. If the only truth you have comes from your own subjective feelings about yourself and the world you have built around yourself you are on shaky ground and at some level you probably sense that.
For many years now people who continued to abide by the fundamental assumptions of Christendom have been accused of being intolerant whenever they failed to change their opinions or behavior to match those of the broader culture. Ironically, however, as more and more people stopped attending church or even professing faith of any kind the culture did not, in fact, become more tolerant. Now that the culture has been more or less captured by those who profess a strictly secular worldview there is almost no tolerance for anyone who dares to question the cultural consensus. In America, at least until recently, that has meant being shunned by ‘polite society’, being fired from your job, or even being prosecuted. As I mentioned above, in other parts of the West the consequences have been, and continue to be arguably even worse.
Under Christendom, the shared basic assumption of a created world and a Creator was the bedrock upon which believers stood. They knew they had not created the world, that the world existed outside of themselves and they believed they could discover truths about that world and that the world was more or less intelligible. Because the world was also mysterious they could at least entertain new ideas, whether they ultimately agreed or disagreed with them. They had no need to construct an identity for themselves because they were born into one. Now, because so many of us believe that we are our own creations, those holding the reins of power must act as the arbiters of truth. Under such a scenario there can be no right to be wrong because to disagree is just to willfully create yourself wrongly.