Obedience is Freedom

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There is also a discussion on what is understood by respect. There is a well-meaning, though misleading, way of engendering respect through racial categorisations. However, the author points out that this is not behaviour borne out of a shared living experience but, rather, construed in “peer-reviewed journals and Powerpoint slides.” This and other factors reduce culture to a “dangerous place steeped only in prejudice and hatred… fear and suffering” rather than the “source of unity” that it can—and should—be. Growing up in the 90s, ‘obedience’ wasa dirty word. The aversion to obedience never wore off. Parenting manuals now advocate a style of parenting based on dialogue and consensus. The text of the marriage service frequently omits the word ‘obey,’ lest it offendanyone in the congregation. Rebellion and revolution are portrayed as the only vehicle for true freedom, while tradition and authority are depicted as oppressive tools used to rob others of their dignity. The only place where one can legitimately demand obedience is in the army.

Obedience is Freedom by Jacob Phillips | WHSmith Obedience is Freedom by Jacob Phillips | WHSmith

For all our choice, comfort, opportunity, and stimuli, today’s West is neither dynamic nor happy; perhaps, like Prometheus, we are being tortured for knowing too much. We all know there is no such thing as a free lunch; we now need to learn there is no free freedom. For every freedom we are afforded, there are often important restrictions, paradoxical corollaries of a need to balance often competing desires—most obviously our ability to think or say what we want on an ever-expanding range of subjects. Not all colors can be found in the rainbow. Phillips does not shy away from entering the central debates of the present culture wars. However, he does so not with the armour suit of a warrior but with the sensitivity of a profound thinker and with elegant and engaging prose. He highlights the propensity to label any form of disagreement as emotional abuse. This is instructive because “emotional abuse causes a person’s grip on reality to break down.”When this is applied to differences of opinions, it implies that subjectivity is assigned to all of reality. Nothing becomes fixed anymore. His solution is to meet such attitudes with “sober-minded sagacity”—something which this book does brilliantly.The skill of the author lies in how he crafts his argument. This is neither a polemical text nor a heavy read. Instead, the author avoids a preachy or condescending tone and guides the reader gently through various themes. It is almost as though the author enters into a conversation with literary figures, philosophers, and theologians and offers their views to the reader. He weaves into these conversations his own experiences and observations, thus presenting a book that is engaging, personal, and even moving at times. He uses this example to contrast this with the culture “in which child-bearing is conditional on self-fulfilment.” This attitude restrains the development of “basic impulses of responsibility and care.” He makes a caveat: “This is not to say that only those who have children exercise such responsibilities. It is to say that the degree to which natality is celebrated in a culture is a vital barometer of how responsible that culture is.” Yet Goodhart, who is commendably sympathetic to the often-disregarded Somewheres, is still a little patronizing about the importance of loyalty. Phillips, unlike Goodhart, sees loyalty as an elemental rather than a merely primitive emotion, and an uplifting one, encouraging self-sublimation in the service of others who may have few or no other defenders.

Obedience is Freedom | Wiley

Still, as I am sure Phillips would say, men with beautiful houses often torture themselves with the desire for a beautiful boat, and the history of successful musicians — or actors, or athletes — heaves with anxieties and insecurities. Rare is the desire which is ultimately satisfied. Phillips writes: Such paradoxes have of course often been noted, but Phillips drills deeper than most. He argues that through adherence to premodern values, and by respecting established codes and rules of behavior, we can aspire to a “more enduring and genuine freedom than that offered by today’s self-fulfilment paradigm.” By sometimes reining in our own impulses, we are clearly limiting our potential “lifestyle choices.” However, self-restraint may also allow us to enter into a richer kind of existence, one that is more emotionally satisfying—just as submission to the rhyming rules of poetry has so often spurred literary genius. As Oliver Goldsmith knew, sometimes we need to “stoop to conquer.” Sensual liberty is as unsatisfying as political liberty. Pornography is existentially emptying, leaving everyone with a “permanently scorched vision” and a deeply dispiriting notion of the universe as a mechanistic eternity of grinding lumps of flesh, short-lasting sensations, and cold-eyed transactions. The sexual deviants from what norms still remain are partly the products of mainstream sexualization. Conspiracy theories, from 5G wireless mind control to the QAnon cult, may be fueled by “an intuitive sense that our cultural atmosphere is increasingly permeated with things that are unsanitary and deleterious.” By giving into our whims, by indulging our weaknesses, we risk becoming like the mutineers of the HMS Bounty, who drank saltwater and went insane, drifting in a vast and meaningless expanse.Brahms had a personal motto, frei aber froh (“free but happy”), which features famously as the note sequence F-A flat-F in the first movement of his Third Symphony. He adopted this cheerful philosophy as a jovial riposte to his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, who had used the phrase frei aber einsam (“free but lonely”) in disconsolate self-description. Brahm’s breezy motto is still a liberal, and libertarian, ideal today.