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March 18, 2001

The Final Freedom

By ALAN WOLFE

Should I lie or tell the truth? Is my marriage vow binding? Ought I give in when
temptation calls? To whom are my obligations strongest? To answer such questions,
Americans have traditionally relied on time-tested moral rules, usually handed down by a
supreme being, that command obedience and punish defiance. Now we live in an age of
moral freedom, in which individuals are expected to determine for themselves what it
means to lead a good and virtuous life. We decide what is right and wrong, not by
bending our wills to authority, but by considering who we are, what others require and
what consequences follow from acting one way rather than another.

This country has always experienced freedom, but only recently has it discovered
moral freedom. In the 19th century, principles of economic liberty were instrumental in
creating a society in which the right to own property, to hire workers and to manufacture
and dispose of goods was accepted as the most productive way for a society to create and
distribute its wealth. This was followed, in the 20th century, by the spread of political
freedom. By century's end, the idea that people had a right to vote and to run for office --
and that such a right could not be denied them on the basis of ownership of property, race
or gender -- had become so widely accepted that no society could be considered good
unless its political system was organized along democratic lines.

Although political freedoms are enormously important, they are restricted to one
sphere of human activity: obtaining and exercising political power. The same is true of
economic freedom, which, by definition, is limited to such essential, but also essentially
mundane, matters like the buying and selling of commodities. Moral freedom involves
the sacred as well as the profane; it is freedom over the things that matter most. The
ultimate implication of the idea of moral freedom is not that people are created in the
image of a higher authority. It is that any form of higher authority has to tailor its
commandments to the needs of real people. It cannot be surprising that Americans made
a best seller out of a book -- actually three books -- called ''Conversations With God.''

Even the most traditional Americans have been touched by the spread of moral
freedom. Born-again Christians generally do not believe that people should be free to live
as they choose, especially when they choose what evangelicals consider sinful:
homosexuality, for example, or premarital sex. Yet evangelicals are also people who
often reject the religion of their upbringing, opt for start-up churches and prefer to home-
school their children, giving them more in common than they realize with gays and
lesbians who have redefined marriage and family and founded houses of worship that
serve their own spiritual needs. Conservative millionaires may vote Republican because
they believe America lost its Christian standards under Bill Clinton, but they probably
obtained their millions living by rules of corporate loyalty, equity and honesty that
Christians generations ago would have called sinful.

Moral freedom is so radical an idea, so disturbing in its implications, that it has

never had much currency among any but a few of the West's great moral theorists. Even
those who made passionate arguments in defense of freedom in general did not extend
their arguments to moral freedom. Indeed, the common position among most Western
thinkers has been to argue the necessity for moral constraint as a precondition for
freedom in all other aspects of life. This was most true of conservatives who justified the
received authority of church, prince, law or nature. But it was also true of liberal thinkers
like John Locke and Immanuel Kant, for whom liberty made sense only when shaped by
pre-existing religious or ethical commandments. Timeless, transcendental, absolute --
morality stood in the sharpest possible contrast to freedom, which was transient,
inconsistent and dependent on mere circumstance. Even in America, despite the
celebratory individualism of an Emerson or a Whitman, the idea of moral freedom made
little sense until very recent times. When Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 announced the four
freedoms -- of speech, of worship, from want, from fear -- moral freedom was not among
them. When, in 1957, the United States Supreme Court finally got around to talking
about sexual freedom -- calling sex ''a great and mysterious force in human life,'' which
was ''a subject of absorbing interest'' -- it did so in the context of upholding a conviction
for violating obscenity laws.

In the 1960's and 1970's, for the first time in American history, a number of thinkers
began to take the idea of moral freedom seriously, and enough people paid them attention
to mount a significant challenge against moral authority. Reviewing the history of
religion in America since the first Spanish and French settlements, the historian Sidney
Ahlstrom concluded that ''only in the 1960's would it become apparent that the Great
Puritan Epoch in American history had come to an end.'' If nothing is so powerful as an
idea whose time has come, the idea of moral freedom, when it finally came, was powerful
enough, at least for a time, to sweep all before it.

Because moral freedom is so new an idea, it inevitably arouses opposition. There is

a widespread feeling that the legacy of the 1960's has been corrosive to the American
social fabric. Disrespectful of established authority, cut off from tradition, unattached to
family or faith, Americans, we have been repeatedly told, embraced moral freedom only
to experience painful results. To discover whether such charges resonate among
Americans themselves, I assembled a research team and spent the last couple of years
talking with people from all walks of life about what it means to lead a good and virtuous
life. We concentrated on four virtues that have been praised by theologians and
philosophers for their moral seriousness: honesty, loyalty, forgiveness and self-discipline.
Are critics of our condition right to worry that we no longer believe in the old-fashioned
virtues that once made us great? Or should we celebrate the arrival of moral freedom for
the same reasons we have come to accept economic and political freedom: society is
better off when people decide for themselves the right thing to do rather than have it
decided for them by others?

We need not, and should not, take the thoughts of ordinary Americans as the final
word on our condition. But, as the reaction to recent events ranging from the school
shootings in Santee, Calif., to the presidential pardons demonstrate, there is moral talk
aplenty in America; if talk about morality were only a measure of morality, we would be
hearing about a moral surplus, not a moral deficit. The least we can do, before we stand
up to preach, is to listen to what Americans have to say.

'There's nothing like loading a few coffins,'' a retired Air Force officer told us of his
service in Vietnam. ''It turned my life around.'' Now working as a substitute teacher and
occasional lecturer outside Dayton, Ohio, he worries that his country recently has become
too soft and self-indulgent. ''The wonderful thing about democracy and capitalism is that
they lead to the good life, as Aristotle would want us to have it,'' he says. But the problem
''is that we tend to lose focus on the virtues,'' the most important of which are ''hard work,
dedication and sacrifice.''

As much as this man's views resonate with ideas of America's decline from a more
virtuous age, his defense of self-discipline was decidedly uncommon among our
respondents. ''You can be disciplined in a bad way,'' said one woman in Tipton, Iowa.
''You work 70, 80 hours a week, ignoring your family. I don't think that is good self-
discipline.'' Good self-discipline makes room for obligations to others. In a paradoxical
way, it also involves obligations to the self. Many people told us that the person who
indulges from time to time is more likely to be productive than the obsessive workaholic.

St. Augustine wrote that it is always wrong to lie. But the people with whom we
spoke believe that you are under a greater obligation to be honest to a friend than to a
stranger -- and that you are under no obligation at all to be honest to someone who is
dishonest to you. Honesty is not a one-size-fits-all virtue. Many of the gay men with
whom we spoke in San Francisco did not believe in loyalty to their sexual partners, but,
determined not to hide their sexual orientation, were among the most passionate believers
in honesty. Other respondents felt that there are times when honesty can be a vice. ''You
know,'' said a San Francisco therapist, ''people say terrible things and then they go, 'Well,
I was just being honest.''' In her view, a person of good character would rank sensitivity
to others higher than honesty to them.

Whatever the virtue, Americans will be more practical than principled. An engineer
in Silicon Valley talked about the problem of marital loyalty as if he were tinkering with
a stubborn software program: ''Is it irretrievably broken or can you patch it up? Was there
a basis for the marriage in the first place? Is there a basis for working together as part of a
team to move ahead from where you are and ignore the past?'' A divorced woman in
Hartford believes in forgiveness, not out of a recognition that even sinners may
nonetheless be good in the eyes of God, but ''because when we don't forgive, it holds us
back, it eats away at us.''

As they decide for themselves the best way to live, people can and do consult
traditional sources of moral wisdom. Our respondents mentioned not only popular
television programs and self-help books but also the example of Jesus Christ,
philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and William James, novelists like F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Jane Austen and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and theologians including Teilhard
de Chardin and Rabbi Hillel. Still, listening to their reasoning gives a certain credibility
to those who argue that contemporary Americans have too much freedom for their own
good. Our respondents are guided by subjective feelings more than they are by appeals to
rational, intellectual and objective conceptions of right and wrong. They do not think that
virtue consists in subsuming their needs and desires to the authority of tradition. Indeed,
some of them are not even sure that virtuous is what they want to be. Without firm moral
instruction, Americans approach the virtues gingerly. They recognize their importance
but reinvent their meaning to make sense of the situations in which they find themselves.

Just because Americans may be living ''after virtue'' -- to use the evocative words of
the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre -- does not, however, mean that they are living
before vice. Both conservatives and liberals see a direct link between the 1960's and now.
From the point of view of those aghast at what the 1960's have bequeathed us, one
mistake -- the wrong drug or, later, the wrong sex partner -- and life itself could be
threatened. From the point of view of those who embraced the social changes of that
time, one too many concessions to established institutions of authority, and freedom itself
could be sacrificed. Yet for the people with whom we spoke, the 1960's -- understood as
a political movement designed to challenge the status quo in favor of revolutionary
transformations in lifestyle -- barely exist. Even in San Francisco, despite the fact that we
asked people questions about the most morally contentious issues of the day, only a
couple of our respondents reflected on what the tumultuous events of those years meant
for them and for their country.

The debate over the 1960's confuses two different phenomena. One is the freedom to
choose how to live. The other is the freedom to consider oneself unbound by moral rules.
The Americans with whom we have spoken make a pretty clear distinction between
choice and unboundedness. The former, they usually insist, is something worth having.
And the latter, most of them feel, is something worth avoiding. When Americans think of
the kind of moral anarchy and irresponsibility that conservatives associate with the
excesses of the 1960's, they do not think about their own lives but about the wild lives of
Hollywood celebrities, the self-centered actions of corporations and the dishonesty
exhibited by politicians.

Moderate in economics and politics, our respondents are, for the most part, moderate
in morality. The great bulk of them no longer adhere to traditional ideas about virtue and
vice, but neither do they live as moral libertines. They do not take their marriage vows as
binding under all circumstances and for all time, but they often approach the question of
divorce in a morally serious way, reserving it as an option when the price of excessive
loyalty is unwanted cruelty toward spouse or child. They are not as loyal as they once
were in the workplace, but only after being provoked into that position by extensive, and
often ruthless, disloyalty on the part of their employers. In their effort to find balance in
all things, they forgive to get on with life but do not forget wrongs done to them and do
not relativize away acts they consider evil.

The concept of moral freedom corresponds to a deeply held populist suspicion of

authority and a corresponding belief that people know their own best interest.
Historically, populist impulses expressed themselves in politics; Americans distrusted
elites, especially those whose power appeared to rest on breeding and connections, in
favor of appeals to the common man. Now that same populist sensibility extends to all
kinds of institutions; if Americans have learned to obtain a second opinion concerning
their medical condition, they are also likely to seek additional opinions concerning their
moral condition. As radical an idea as this may seem to those once issued commands and
expected to obey them, second-opinion morality seeks to work with, not against, the
institutions that make social life possible.

In an age of moral freedom, moral authority has to justify its claims to special
insight. Religion offers the best window into the ways such justifications are likely to
take place. More and more Americans are redefining God to suit their own tastes and
inclinations: Christian ministers who draw upon the Jewish tradition, Reform Jews
seeking gender-inclusive language and Americans of all faiths who borrow from every
religion and none simultaneously. Whatever emerges from the efforts on the parts of so
many Americans to redefine their faith, it is unlikely to resemble Jonathan Edwards's
Northampton, the urban parishes of 1950's Catholicism, the revival meetings of Billy
Sunday or synagogue life on the Lower East Side.

Yet the desire of so many Americans to have a greater say in the moral choices they
make is anything but a bitter renunciation of religion. It is more likely to take the form of
a prayer that someone in a position of religious authority will take them seriously as
individuals with minds and desires of their own. Far from being secular humanists,
Americans want faith and freedom simultaneously. That would seem like an odd
combination to Europeans, for whom faith has often meant dogma and freedom has often
meant dissent. But it suggests that in America, religious institutions will not break under
the weight of moral freedom but bend, as many of them have bent already, to
accommodate themselves to the freedom of moral choice to which Americans have
increasingly grown accustomed.

What is true of religious institutions applies to other institutions like schools, if from
the opposite direction. In the spirit of the 1960's, educational reformers began to advocate
radical changes in education, proposing that schools should stop disciplining students,
encourage free-form expression and individual creativity, de-emphasize honors classes
and tracking and find new ways to teach such subjects as math and history. In extreme
versions of educational reform, moral anarchy rather than moral freedom seemed to be
the operating principle, as if schooling itself ought to be abolished. So powerful were the
forces behind educational reform that in most established school districts, one version or
another of educational reform produced schools that no longer resembled the strict,
segregated, vocational and prayer-infused institutions of the 1950's.

Americans today want second opinions about both what and how their children learn
in schools. Resisting the influence of liberal school administrators with as much
determination as they resist the messages of conservative religious moralists, those who
support greater school choice through vouchers and charter schools see freedom of choice
as a way of encouraging greater institutional responsibility. Those who continue to
support public schooling often express a desire for higher standards and an insistence on
the value of teaching character. If American schools move in a more ''conservative''
direction toward discipline, it will be for the same reasons that churches move in a more
''liberal'' direction of therapeutic inclusion. After anarchy, moral freedom can be a
requirement for re-establishing authority.

In a time of moral freedom, no institution will be able to stick its head in the sand
and pretend that the people who approach it for advice and guidance can be treated as
supplicants. Morality has long been treated as if it were a fixed star, sitting there far
removed from the earthly concerns of real people, meant to guide them to the true and the
beautiful. In the contemporary world, however, people experience in their own lives
many situations for which traditional conceptions of morality offer little guidance: what
do you do when the pursuit of one virtue conflicts with another? How do you apply moral
precepts to situations unforeseen by those religious and philosophical traditions
developed for another time and place? Can seemingly unambiguous moral principles be
capable of multifaceted interpretations? Faced with such real-world conflicts, many
Americans will say, as did one of our respondents in San Antonio: ''Somebody can't make
you do something you don't want to do. You know, you draw your own guidelines.''

No matter how strong their religious and moral beliefs, nearly all people will
encounter situations in which they will feel such a need to participate in interpreting,
applying and sometimes redefining the rules meant to guide them. Are they somehow less
moral if they do? Telling them that they are will cut no ice with a gay couple determined
to legalize their union in an era of widespread heterosexual divorce, with women who
find that a too-early marriage stultifies their desire to become more autonomous later in
life or with religious believers who find that the best way to express one's faith in God is
to reject traditional denominations.

Because we can never know what freedom will bring in its wake, defenders of social
order have never been all that comfortable with any of the forms taken by freedom in the
modern world. Economic freedom did not create a hoped-for society of independent
yeomen but a regime of mass consumption. Political freedom did not result in active and
enlightened civic participation but in voter apathy. In a similar way, moral freedom is
highly unlikely to produce a nation of individuals exercising their autonomy with the
serious and dispassionate judgment of Immanuel Kant. Yet moral freedom is as
inevitable as it is impossible. Critics of America's condition insist on the need to return to
the morality of yesterday, but it may be better, given its inevitability, to think of moral
freedom as a challenge to be met rather than as a condition to be cured.

Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life
at Boston College. His new book, ''Moral Freedom,'' from which this essay is adapted,
will be published next month by W.W. Norton.