Don't Forget the Purpose of Things
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Emphasis on Freedom may Mean Forgetfulness of Ends
Freedom of choice is, as we have said, only ever about what means to select in pursuing our proper ends. We’re not free to change the requirements of our nature, we’re not free to change what will and what will not bring us happiness. We’re free, rather, to pursue happiness through a careful strategy of virtue leading to God or to go against our own nature by pursuing finite goods in a haphazard and disordered way that brings us away from Divine Beatitude.
The point is that since our freedom pertains to the means we choose, and not to our inbuilt purposes, sometimes our cultural overemphasis on freedom, freedom, freedom can be an indicator that we’ve lost sight of what our basic human purposes really are.
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Tool-shed example
Imagine a father is sitting in his tool-shed, and his little daughter comes to talk to him. Imagine she points to a saw, and says, “What’s that for, Daddy?” And the dad answers, “That’s for freedom, dear.” Then imagine she points to a hammer, and says, “And what’s that tool for?” And the father answers, “That’s also for freedom.” The girl points to a screwdriver, and a leveler, and a pair of pliers, “What about that one, or that one? What about that one, Daddy?” And the father gestures at all the tools on the workbench, and says, “They’re all for freedom!” The little girl smiles and says, “You don’t know what any of these are for, do you Daddy?” And the father hangs his head, and shakes it slowly, and says, “No. I used to. But I’ve forgotten.”
That father is our civilization. We have forgotten what we are made for, and so we have forgotten the various purposes of everything human. And all we can do is keep repeating, with a desperate and incoherent insistence, “freedom.”
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Liberals on Freedom
This forgetfulness of our ends is, at least in the United States, expressed very differently by so-called conservatives and liberals.
When you ask our liberals: What’s the point of marriage? What’s the purpose of being male and female? What is the proper design for human reproduction? What are the guiding principles for how to live our sexuality and family life? They simply repeat, over and over, like a mindless mantra, freedom, freedom, freedom! They’ve forgotten what it is to be human, what it is to be made in God’s image, how our masculinity and femininity and fertility represent God and His people, Christ and the Church, the very Trinity itself. We have to tell them the purposes of these things, or they’ll just keep chanting freedom as they group in the darkness.
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Conservatives on Freedom
Unfortunately, it’s not only so-called liberals who make freedom the end-all be-all. A lot of times it’s also so-called conservatives too. When you ask them: What’s the point of money? What’s the point of business? What’s the point of the government? What’s the point of the economy? They take up the slogan of freedom, freedom, freedom! They’ve forgotten that the purpose of all these things is to help people work together towards a shared vision of human flourishing. They’ve forgotten that money and business and government and the economy, all of them, exist to promote the common good. These things all exist to allow us to better help each other, help each other physically and help each other on the path to virtue. They don’t exist just to let us do whatever we want.
Hell, maybe, exists just to let us do whatever we want, which translates to eternal selfish and lonely misery. But every human structure, including the government and the economy, exists for the sake of promoting what is good, not just in ourselves but in one another. If we’ve forgotten that, we’ve forgotten the point of every social institution there is.
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Don’t Lose Sight of the Purposes in Things
Freedom can never be really empowered unless we know what things are for. You can’t choose the means well unless you know the end. You can’t aim the arrow right unless you know where the target is. That dad, unless he figures out what those tools are for, will never be able to use them rightly. So don’t forget the purposes of things.
When it comes to things outside the human person, their purposes are always the perfection of body and soul. When it comes to some excellence of body and soul, whether a meal or a good night’s sleep or a course of education or a conversation with a friend, these are always to be pursued in such a way that it can bring you closer to, and never further from, the Lord Himself. If we remember that, and act accordingly, our wills will be able to choose well.