“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1)
In an essay published in Foreign Affairs in 1950, entitled Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, Isaiah Berlin argued that politicians were prey to the rationalistic illusion that, with sufficient social engineering, human evils could be abolished and individuals happily assimilated into a seamless social consensus. The dilemmas of private and public life could be handed over to experts, scientists and other engineers of human souls. He contended that for every supposed gain in social justice there might be a corresponding loss of freedom. Fighting injustice was essential, but men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by choosing their own goals – a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. It was individual freedom, to choose well or ill, which had to be defended, not some ultimate vision of the human good. Fascism and communism had a shared contempt for ordinary human beings. Both sought to indoctrinate men into abandoning their faith in their own judgement. Berlin disliked attempts to deny human beings their right to moral sovereignty. Enlightenment rationalism supposed that conflicts between values were a heritage of mis-education or injustice and could be swept away by rational reforms, by indoctrinating individuals into believing that their individual interests could be fully realized by working exclusively for the common good. Therefore, to impose such reason on others is to liberate them by coercion. This is tyranny. The ends and goals that human beings pursued were in conflict. A free society was a good society because it accepted the conflict among human goods and maintained, through its democratic institutions, the forum in which this conflict could be managed peacefully. Human beings were unique, among other species, in their capacity for moral choice. He rejected historical determinism in favor of personal responsibility.
Present debates about lockdowns, mask and vaccination mandates, education, the use of fossil fuels, climate change, subsidizing selected industries, redistribution of income, social engineering, diversity, the idolatry of science, school choice etc. need to consider the competing values of human beings and to avoid coercing citizens into utopian thinking that has been proven unrealistic and destructive to society and personal liberty. The only freedom that lasts is spiritual freedom that is won from knowing the truth of the gospel of Christ (John 8:32). Salvation comes from deliverance from the values of this world which tries to persuade us of its secular remedies, which deceive us.
“It is freedom from the bitter bondage of meaninglessness into a new sense of purpose in God’s new society of love. It is freedom from the dark prison of our own self-centeredness into a new life of self-fulfillment through self-forgetful service. And one day it will include freedom from the futility of pain, decay, death and dissolution into a new world of immortality, beauty and unimaginable joy.” (John Stott)
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