Back in March of 2009 when I migrated over to Front Porch Republic from that inimitable and short-lived artifact of early internet culture, the New Pantagruel, I was most attracted to the goods of place and limits enshrined in the FPR triad of “Place. Limits. Liberty.” I am fortunate to be able to say that liberty was a given for me at the time. The kind of community that can only be built on place and limits—that was the more elusive good that I sought as a young teacher living in Northern Virginia.
But as we slouched into the annus horribilis 2020, I came to appreciate that the venerable founders of FPR had included liberty as well. It became much easier to imagine all forms of tyranny taking hold. While some of the absurdities of 2020 are seemingly behind us, both liberty and tyranny remain slippery, and we do well to be on our guard.
Brad Littlejohn’s recent book, Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License, offers wise guidance for navigating our way through these times of rapid change. He gives a short definition of freedom early in the book: “capacity for purposeful or meaningful action” (8). A more expansive definition in the conclusion is also helpful for context: “Freedom is not merely a spiritual reality or a worldly ideal; it is not merely inward or outward. Freedom, rather, is experienced above all in the conformity of the soul to reality, the fit between our wills and the world, that moment when everything clicks into place and we find ourselves able to be and to do what it is we feel meant to be and to do” (147).
Littlejohn is especially attentive to the forms of tyranny that have evolved in our digital age, and is one of the co-authors of “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right.” He is the Director of Programs and Education for American Compass and the Coalitions Advisor for the Digital Childhood Institute, the founder of the Davenant Institute, and active on Substack.
Stewart: Called to Freedom offers valuable historical context to our sense of what it means to be free. Our sense of freedom is often defined negatively—we find out which freedoms we most value by which threats loom largest in our minds. Considered in light of other historical eras, what threats do you think we underrate, and which do we overrate? I suppose you may need to break this “we” down into different populations.
Littlejohn: Yes, this is precisely one of the points I highlight in the book, drawing on my mentor, Oliver O’Donovan: “freedom” is to our moral world like “health” is to our physical well-being, and just as one person’s health can be threatened by too little food and another’s by too much, so freedom can be threatened from many different directions, indeed sometimes completely opposite directions. Depending on where the most urgent threat lies in a given time and place, a different sense of “freedom” comes to the fore as a priority to defend.
Speaking for us in the modern West, and especially America, I think that we can safely say that the greatest threats to freedom come from the loss of a communal context within which to exercise our agency, the loss of shared norms and values that help orient us and provide us purpose and direction. The result is a kind of aimlessness or anomie, in which we are each thrown back upon our own resources to generate some kind of life project. And it turns out that for most of us, our own resources are not enough to overcome the darker underside of our nature—our headstrong appetites, desires, and emotions, which community norms otherwise help us to discipline. Our freedom is thus threatened from within, as our will is reduced to whim, and from without, as powerful companies (especially in the tech sector) figure out how to monetize those whims.
So I think that compared to most earlier eras and to traditional societies still functioning in some parts of the world, we tend to underrate the role that community actually plays in making freedom possible, and the threats to freedom that can come from within our own souls. We tend to assume that freedom is threatened by other people, especially authority figures, when increasingly for us today it is the opposite.
Stewart: Fittingly for a book on freedom, you open it with the famous lines from Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” We do throw the word “freedom” around all the time and with seemingly infinite meanings. I tell my students that I prefer to use the word “liberty,” since freedom carries so many different connotations. Perhaps it is just wishful thinking, but to me liberty sounds at least a touch more archaic, and thus suggestive of the positive duties associated with the idea in the classical and Christian traditions. Which of the many meanings of the word do you think we most need to attend to now?
Littlejohn: Yeah, I think you’re probably right that “liberty” has a slightly healthier field of connotations than “freedom,” although I think there’s enough semantic overlap that I opt to just use the words interchangeably in my book. “Liberty” is still pretty elastic, especially as co-opted by modern libertarians. But it is a bit more archaic, and thus tends to put us back in touch with an older field of discourse in which rights were seen as inseparable from duties. Whichever word we use, though, I think we need to recover above all the idea of what I call “corporate liberty” or “communal liberty”—the liberty that is exercised by a community acting together as a whole, such as when a church exercises its freedom of public worship. This liberty might at first glance limit the freedom of individual members (dang I wish they would pick better hymn tunes on Sunday morning!), but nonetheless provides a context for a much richer and fuller form of action than the individuals would ever be able to experience on their own.
Stewart: You describe how a lack of freedom is marked by fear, forgetfulness, and futility. Whenever I find myself succumbing to these feelings, it is usually when I’m doom-spiraling after reading about some new way that Big Tech has decided to reshape our world. Usually, I don’t think of these changes first as a threat to my freedom—usually I’m just angry that the world is being reshaped in a way that threatens what I love most: face-to-face relationships, satisfying and meaningful work, human-scale places, the beauty and trustworthiness of the written word, the arts. But I think it is fair to reinterpret these moments as being influenced by fear that my freedom (and the freedom of my loved ones) is being restricted by elites I don’t trust or respect. You write often about technological change and its costs. How do you fight against such fear, forgetfulness, and futility when you’re confronting these challenges?
Littlejohn: You know, I’ve done dozens of interviews on this book now at this point, so it’s always exciting when someone asks me a question that makes me think about something for the first time. I’d not thought to apply that framework from chapter two of the book to the tech issues that I focus on in chapter five, but it’s a great question. For those who haven’t read the book, basically I say in chapter two that our deepest form of freedom—spiritual freedom—is threatened when we are cut off from our own past, by forgetting (often willfully) where we have come from; when we are cut off from effective action in the present by a sense of pointlessness or futility; and when we are cut off from acting into the future by a crippling fear of what lies ahead.
I think that fear of the future is particularly oppressive today as we look at the baleful effects of the technologies we have already unleashed, and the unknown unknowns of what AI is liable to do to our civilization and the dignity of the human person. And the sheer scale of the tech companies that we are up against, and their seeming determination to render human agency obsolete, can cause us to throw in the towel with a sense of futility. If I ask myself why I don’t do so (I’m in fact working full-time in DC tech policy these days!), besides sheer wishful thinking, I suppose it is out of a healthy appreciation of the past.
That is to say, while I think it is cliched to say, “Well, look at all the scary technological challenges we’ve overcome in the past, and we’re still here,” and is often said to encourage complacency . . . it’s also true. Nuclear holocaust seemed a very plausible scenario to our grandparents’ generation, and it didn’t happen, in part because many Christians worked hard and faithfully to make sure it didn’t happen. Before that, eugenics seemed on the verge of sweeping the Western world, and although it seems to be making a comeback, we have largely resisted it for the better part of a century. The industrial revolution was deeply dehumanizing for its first few decades, but determined social and political action transformed it into something that was clearly a net good for humanity, although certainly not without continued costs.
Plus, we could widen the lens to look at the horrific perils of violence and disease that used to be ever-present threats for our ancestors, and remember that they still somehow were able to keep putting one foot in front of the other and faithfully carrying out their vocations. While I really do worry about the world that my children are growing up into, and I want to prepare them for the prospect that it could prove to be a rather dark place, really, that’s the task that has confronted nearly every parent in history; the past couple of generations, where the future seemed bright and sunny, are really quite the anomaly historically speaking.
Stewart: Like many others in my circles, I recently re-read C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. It is not hard to make connections between the limits transgressed by N.I.C.E and the limits that are being transgressed on a more incredible scale by the elites who run our multi-billion-dollar tech companies. The anti-aging guru Bryan Johnson, for example, seems to have walked out of the pages of the book. That Hideous Strength ends with Merlin’s revenge, a bloodbath in which all these transgressors of limits receive their just deserts. Lewis was writing fiction, of course, but it is fiction that is consistent with most of our wisdom traditions. How far can we push these limits with seeming impunity?
Littlejohn: I’ll confess it’s been ages since I read That Hideous Strength (something I’m actually in the process of amending right now, but I’m only about a third of the way through). But I think Lewis’s broader point is that if you push dehumanizing ideologies far enough, there may be no way back without bloodshed. There will have to be a reckoning, and it will not be pretty.
I do worry that we’re already beginning to see evidence of this in our world right now. The rise of political violence, as in the Charlie Kirk assassination, and mass shootings of every kind, seem to betoken a society that is beginning to unravel around the edges. And what’s most troubling is the canary in the coal mine that almost all of these acts of violence are being done by very young people, people who have been deeply alienated from their own humanity by the digital doom loops that they’ve been sucked into or the transgender craziness. And all that is pretty much before we’re seeing the effects of AI, which we already know is making a lot of young people (and older people) psychotic and suicidal.
I’d like to think there is still a largely peaceful way out of the dystopia into which our elites seem hell-bent on throwing us, but I think it’s more likely than not that we see a dramatic increase in violence. I think that a That Hideous Strength scenario, where the violence falls chiefly on the most evil perpetrators that deserve it, rather than on society at large, is the optimistic scenario.
Stewart: This quote below from Hans Jonas has stuck with me (I think I first came across it on Alan Jacobs’ blog) and comes to mind when I think about how AI is influencing our culture:
“If a man in the fullness of his days, at the end of his life, can pass on the wisdom of his experience to those who grow up after him; if what he has learned in his youth, added to but not discarded in his maturity, still serves him in his old age and is still worth teaching the then young — then his was not an age of revolution, not counting, of course, abortive revolutions. The world into which his children enter is still his world, not because it is entirely unchanged, but because the changes that did occur were gradual and limited enough for him to absorb them into his initial stock and keep abreast of them.
If, however, a man in his advancing years has to turn to his children, or grandchildren, to have them tell him what the present is about; if his own acquired knowledge and understanding no longer avail him; if at the end of his days he finds himself to be obsolete rather than wise — then we may term the rate and scope of change that thus overtook him, ‘revolutionary.’”
Is it worth framing the effects of AI as a war on the already weak bonds between the generations?
Littlejohn: Yes, I think this is absolutely right, and it’s something I’ve reflected on with sadness over the past year. It’s easy to lament and even reprimand the “OK, Boomer” attitude among young people these days, as reflecting an ugly arrogance and a deep dishonor of the hoary head. But it’s also important to understand that, more than any previous generation, the young have a hard time seeing why they should listen to and respect their elders. Of course, the temptation to dismiss the wisdom of age is as old as humanity itself, but for most of human history, the aged could at least plausibly lay claim to a much greater understanding of how the world worked, and how to act effectively within it. Their wisdom came from long experience, and it remained relevant because the world the young inhabited, aside from a few minor changes of fashion, remained essentially the same world as what they had grown up in.
But of course, this isn’t true in revolutionary times, such as for instance the Reformation period, when the wisdom the old have learned no longer seems to have any relevance to the new state of affairs. The young are thus thrown back on their own resources, and tempted to despise altogether the wisdom of age, failing to recognize that in many ways “there is nothing new under the sun.” In the past, though, such revolutionary periods have come and gone, and after a brief period of turbulence, the continuity of culture was usually able to reassert itself. But no longer.
In some way we’ve been in a state of continuous and accelerating revolution for the past two hundred and fifty years. And the more it accelerates, the less and less relevant becomes the acquired knowledge and life experience of older generations. This is tragic when they realize it—and thus feel themselves to be useless and cut off from earlier generations. And it’s tragic when they don’t, and try and govern contemporary affairs in light of now-discredited principles. For instance, from my experience in tech policy, the biggest obstacle to sound policy comes not from the young, who are often clear-eyed about the harms of many of these platforms, but from those over fifty, who grew up in a largely pre-digital world and are tempted to simply repeat empty nostrums about “the free market” and “the blessings of innovation.”
I don’t know any easy way out of this dilemma, though we must begin by recognizing, as Aragorn says to Eomer, “good and ill have not changed since yesteryear.” The constant across the generations is human nature, and the moral order that governs it. Too often we can allow ourselves to be bewitched by the pace of change into thinking that the old rules no longer apply. But by and large, they do. So much of the technological transformation is just froth and the surface, that tricks us into forgetting that the basic needs, hopes, and fears of human beings remain the same—and the generations need to come and reason together about how to apply and how to maintain these unchanging norms in a revolutionary age.
Stewart: Thanks for taking the time to join us at Front Porch, Brad. Godspeed to you.
