A Genealogy of Freedom

On the modern movement from freedom to license.

I was young. Twenty-two, to be exact. And I was teaching high school sophomores. My baby-face was unhelpful in this situation, as I looked younger than some of my students. Before the year started, I got all fired up after watching Dead Poets Society and decided I would try to rouse my world literature students on day one with a Robin Williams-like speech. Instead of carpe diem, I chose a line from John 8:32: Veritas vos liberabit. The truth will set you free.

Everything with the exhortation was going well, until I stood on the chair and delivered the line in Latin. They looked at me like I had two heads. Some laughed. Some put their heads down. I definitely didn’t seize the day, or the moment. I lost it trying to be someone else. This, of course, is ironic given the line about the truth setting you free. Sometimes, I’m too idealistic, and, it turns out, a motivational scene from fictional movie set in a 1959 all-boys boarding school just didn’t resonate with these inner-city students.

Despite the failure of my dramatic effect, I do think the year was a success. I recovered and found myself in the role. We set out to discover the truth about things — as conveyed by literature over the course of the generations — and to see if it made us more free. And it did. Veritas vos liberabit. The truth will set you free.

This thesis, that is, the bond between freedom and truth, runs counter to the contemporary understanding of freedom. Today, we view freedom as license, license to do whatever I want whenever I want. Joseph Ratzinger describes modern freedom as “The right and the opportunity to do just what we wish and not have to do anything which we do not wish to do…our own will is the sole norm of our action and that the will not only can desire anything but also has the chance to carry out its desire.”¹ Hence, in addition to license, we can also define freedom as “freedom from.” Societally, we view it as freedom from any authority outside the self. The human being is the engineer of history, which, according to Hegel and Marx, is a series of revolutions, a process of progressive liberations (e.g., free from bondage to authority, to the land, to geography, to sex, to gender). Freedom is an end unto itself and it’s beholden to none — not authority, tradition, or truth.

How did this develop, this divorce between freedom and truth? How did the concept of truth become the enemy of freedom, as opposed to its prerequisite?

A Brief Genealogy of the Modern Conception of Freedom

In what follows, here, I would like to trace the contours of thought over several hundred years that get us to where we are today. Obviously this risks gross over-simplification, as I have to paint with broad brushstrokes in an essay. Nevertheless, I think the general line of thought will become clear enough.

Martin Luther (1483–1546)

In 1520, Martin Luther published On the Freedom of a Christian. Here, Luther lays out his argument for justification by faith alone. No longer do works play a role in salvation. And, the Church doesn’t play one either. Instead, he emphasizes freedom of conscience as opposed to the authority of the Church. “It is not the order of the community that saves man,” Ratzinger explicates, “but his wholly personal faith in Christ.”² Now the Church and ordered medieval society appeared as a burden for every Christian, who “is by faith so exalted above all things that, by virtue of a spiritual power, he is lord of all things without exception.”³ By faith alone, Luther says, “a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.”⁴ The implications are significant, as “Redemption now meant liberation, liberation from the yoke of a supra-individual order.”⁵ Luther intended for this liberation only in the religious sphere. So, it was to be separate from the political sphere and protected from the political sphere. Yet his thought had political ramifications. Philosophical ones as well, as it was the precursor to the Enlightenment.

John Locke (1632–1704)

If Luther took out the Church, John Locke, the English philosopher of the 17th century, began the process of setting up the individual in its place. Locke is considered the “father of liberalism.” He sought liberate the individual from political systems, ecclesial authority, and Scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics (with its focus on essence, the nature of things).

Locke develops his thought the area of political theology. At the time, the common position held that the sovereign was God’s representative. There was a hierarchy: God, sovereign, citizens. To liberate the individual, Locke needed to find a way to justify revolution. He did this by saying there is God, and there is man, and no man can claim godlike power and authority over others. Matthew Crawford summarizes Locke’s position, saying, “We are all equal in our smallness before God…our natural estate is one of freedom in relation to one another.”⁶ In other words, there is no third party to arbitrate disputes, no authority outside the self — unless one consents to such an authority. So, what if you do consent to a government and then you want to alter it? How do you justify a revolution? Through the assertion of individual rights.

The basis of individual rights, for Locke, lies in his understanding that the individual is no longer a creature, but a person who belongs to itself. The “I” is not given in nature. Instead, it is made by the self. Since the self creates the “I” of the person, it is owned by its creator, the self. I make myself. Therefore, I own myself. The foundation of individual rights is ownership. My private property begins with the ownership of my self. What I have created, my “self,” is my private property. This is a radical exaltation of individual liberty and self-creation, and it is the basis for revolution. The role of the government is to protect and uphold my individual rights — what I’m entitled to — beginning with the fundamental right of private property. If it doesn’t, I can revolt. 

Lockean thinking is everywhere these days. I can find it in the entitlement exuded by our culture, which my kids catch everywhere they go and bring spewing into my house. Consequently, they feel they have the right to whatever they think is going to make them happy and it’s my job to give it to them. Or, we can look at social media, which is built on self-creation and simultaneously fuels it. Next, we must note society’s way of thinking about abortion, which is built on Locke. As Msgr. Frank Lane puts it, “The entire abortion argument centers on the notion of a woman’s right over her own body. If you can argue that the unborn child is part of a woman’s body, the argument need go no further…because the woman has a right to own and dispose of her private property as she sees fit.”⁷ And we see this Lockean thinking coming out of Silicon Valley with all the techno-utopian visions of cyborgian (i.e., “chipped”) human beings, and artificial intelligence. Tara Isabella Burton, in her compelling work Strange Rites, captures the essence of what we might call “transhumanism” when she says:

In America today, this appears in our techno-utopianism that worships human potential and its technological manifestations, including artificial intelligence. Autonomous minds trapped in feeble bodies, yet smart enough to transcend the body via technology, free the human being from bodily limitations by creating an optimized self, a finely tuned machine.⁸ 

Perfect self-creation is a chimera. The concreteness of the body is the problem. We can overcome the body, indeed, we can overcome our own humanity, via technology. Technology becomes the way forward for self-created freedom.

Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Moving on from John Locke, we come to Karl Marx in the 19th century. Marx accepts Locke’s concept of self-creation, but expands it into a collectivist position (i.e., one that prioritizes the group over the individual) that impacts social, economic, and political theory. Marx says freedom is only freedom when it’s freedom for all. Not just me. Not just you. Both of us. All of us. So, freedom is tied to equity; equity is the prerequisite of freedom. And political activity, not the individual will as it is with Locke, is the instrument of liberation. For Marx, substructures must rise up and overthrow the superstructures in order to create a new equilibrium of equity. The proletariat must rise in revolt against the bourgeoisie to establish this equilibrium. Marxism fuels communism.

Marxism is still alive today in the social justice efforts of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement (DEI). This movement appears in woke, social justice culture that seeks to free people, all of us, from our own hegemonic biases and to give voice to those individuals who have been underrepresented and discriminated against. Something interesting happens, then, in postmodernity. Marxism, a collectivist philosophy, comes to the revolutionary aid of liberalism’s individual rights. In America, we are witnessing a strange, powerful blending of Lockean and Marxist thinking, where the collective supports the individual, who finds his voice now within the whole and not apart from it. Revolutionary war is waged against any position (especially a traditional Christian one) that does not get on board with DEI.

Attempt at a Summary

To summarize, Luther’s revolt against the Church began the process of severing the tie between freedom and truth by severing the tie between the individual and the Church, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. From here, Locke built a political philosophy on progressive liberalism and individualism, with rights safeguarding freedom-as-license and justifying revolution. Marx builds on Locke, but he does so socially, arguing that this freedom-from-oppression, a freedom-as-license must be for all and it must be brought about through complete social revolution.

While Locke and Marx may disagree, their thoughts converge at many points as well. First of all, the Creator is no longer the possessor of what he creates. Self-creation is the new “given” — whether in the form of a self-creating person (Locke) or a self-creating society (Marx). For both, freedom is the highest good. And these strands come together in a strange way in postmodernity, where social justice advocates for the individual, where the body is the contemporary battleground in the revolt attempting to liberate freedom from truth. Today, our culture views freedom as completely unfettered from truth, the exercise of the autonomous individual — supported by a Marxist social justice movement that upholds individual liberty.

A Lesson from a Child

My kids lie. Not all of them. But, many of them. Usually, it’s a phase and it will begin somewhere around age four. It’s annoying, but it does give us a chance to talk about its destructive nature and the need for radical honesty within a community.

Lying is a form of self-creation. Our kids usually fib over a trifle thing, like brushing teeth or washing hair. Here’s a real dialogue, for example:

“You’ve been in the shower forever. Did you even wash your hair…with soap?”

“Yes.”

“Let me smell your hair. [Sniff.] You didn’t use soap.”

“I did! You just can’t smell it.”

“No you didn’t. Mom bought you new shampoo because you complained about the other one. It’s your shampoo and you like it. I don’t see it in the shower. You didn’t wash your hair.”

“I did. Once I finished, I put it in the closet.”

“Okay. So why don’t I see it in the closet?”

“It’s up there. Maybe back on one of the shelves.”

“Actually, I saw that shampoo in my bathroom before I walked in here to question you about it.”

“Oh. Yeah. Can you bring it to me?”

This example, however banal, perfectly illustrates the basic connection between freedom and truth. My son lied. He freely severed the tie between the truth of the matter and his disclosure of it. He created a new tale, a story that differed from the way things really were. With each iteration he found himself more and more bound by his own story — and one lie led to another. The self-creation we found so freeing at the start ends up as the source of our bondage somewhere down the road, because the truth (i.e., what is) comes out eventually. And it’s the truth that sets us free. Living within the truth of things sets us free. Without it, there is slavery, confusion, and distrust.

In truth, the whole modern genealogy of freedom that moves from Luther to Locke to Marx, that movement is a modern iteration of a struggle that has been around from the beginning. Its root is sin. And, as Joseph Ratzinger puts it:

At the very heart of sin lies human beings’ denial of their creatureliness, inasmuch as they refuse to accept the standard and the limitations that are implicit in it. They do not want to be creatures, do not want to be subject to a standard, do not want to be dependent . . . sin is, in its essence, a renunciation of the truth.⁹

Or, we can turn to St. John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae (which is worth quoting at length because it summarizes this entire essay):

Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim. 

This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus soci- ety becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail. Still, in the face of other people's analogous interests, some kind of compromise must be found, if one wants a society in which the maximum possible freedom is guaranteed to each individual. In this way, any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life.¹⁰

At the bottom of it, freedom is not limited merely to choice. Yes, we do have the ability to choose, but unlimited license is an illusion for a creature — one who did not actually create himself (as indicated by his own belly button) — living in a meaningful world he did not create. The reduction of freedom to freedom from any outside authority leads to widespread individualism and subjectivism, as supported by a collective compromise that looks like social justice but is really another specter of Marxism — the dictator of relativism in disguise.

The Catholic position holds that the more we bind ourselves to the truth, the freer we become. It’s a paradox. Freedom is not only the ability to choose, it’s a state of being that results from choosing what is good in accordance with the truth of things. The more we choose what is good and true, the freer we become. Freedom is not fuel for self-creation, but a gift given by God, the Creator, to live in accord with the truth. And, the Truth is not an abstraction, but has a face — his name is Jesus.

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. — Gaudium et spes, §22

1. Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 148.

2. Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 151.

3. Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian.

4. Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian.

5. Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 151.

6. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 119.

7. Lane, Reflections, 94–95.

8. Burton, Strange Rites, 191.

9. Ratzinger, In the Beginning…, 70–71.

10. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §19–20.