A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

One. The Lack of Freedom

17 One The Lack of Freedom You have only to consider yourself free to feel yourself bound; you have only to consider yourself bound to feel free. —Goethe The growth of freedom has been the central theme of history, Lord Acton believed, because it represents God’s plan for humanity. One does not need such a Whiggish view of history to notice that the history of the West, at least, has indeed been a story of the development of freedom, whether actualized or idealized. We trace the origins of Western civilization back to the Greek “emancipation” of reason from myth. Since the Renaissance, there has been a progressive emphasis, first on religious freedom (the Reformation), then political freedom (the English,American, French revolutions), followed by economic freedom (the class struggle), colonial freedom (independence movements), racial freedom (civil rights), psychological freedom (psychotherapy frees us from neuroses), and most recently gender equality and sexual freedom (feminism and gay rights emancipate women and sexual “deviance”). Today deconstruction and other postmodern intellectual developments free us from authorial intention and the strictures of the text itself— what might be called “textual liberation.” So it is no surprise that freedom today is the paramount value of the Western world, and through the West’s influence it has become that 18 A Buddhist History of the West of the rest of the world as well. “People may sin against freedom, but no one dares deny its virtue.”Yet is this virtue losing some of its luster? Recently it has become more obvious that the critiques of democratic individualism espoused by some East Asian nations are usually little more than the apologetics of authoritarian regimes.1 Nonetheless, the history of freedom contains enough contradictions to make us pause.As important as the Renaissance was for the development of personal freedom, we also see in it the roots of the problems that haunt us today, especially the extreme individualism that liberated greed as the engine of economic development and that continues to rationalize the erosion of community bonds. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions resulted in Napoleon, Stalin, and Mao, respectively, vindicating Burke’s warnings about the sudden disintegration of even oppressive political authority.And today our technological freedom to transform the natural world is despoiling it so effectively that we are in danger of destroying ourselves as well. If freedom is our supreme value, then, it is a problematic one.This chapter explores that problematic from a Buddhist lack perspective. It argues that making freedom into our paramount value is dangerous, for freedom conceived solely in secular, humanistic terms is fatally flawed. It cannot give us what we seek from it. Part of our resistance to such a conclusion is caused by the difficulty in considering freedom objectively.That ideal is so much a part of us, so deeply involved in the way we understand ourselves, that it is hard to look at it. But this value has a history. Rather than being “natural,” it is the result of a complicated genealogy that needs to be examined.Therefore a comparative approach can help to delineate our situation: Why did the ideal of freedom arise in the West, when and where it did? How does it contrast with the primary values of nonWestern cultures? Another difficulty is that the very concept of freedom is extremely elusive. It is almost impossible to define in a satisfactory fashion, because the abstract concept loses meaning outside particular contexts: freedom from . . . or freedom to . . . In Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), Orlando Patterson distinguishes what he calls the chord of freedom into three notes: personal (being able to do as one pleases within the limits of others’ desire to do the same), sovereignal (the power to act as one pleases, regardless of the wishes of others), and civic (the capacity of members of a community to participate in its life and governance). Such a tripartite definition already suggests the tensions The Lack of Freedom 19 that have dogged the history of freedom from the very beginning. If freedom is a chord it is evidently an unresolved one. It is unfortunate that throughout history fighting for freedom has been much easier to do than to live freely. Why does that continue to be so? Most studies of freedom emphasize that the West has made the major contributions to the theory and practice of freedom. Patterson also attempts to explain why...