Freedom and Rationality

Imagine a world where there is no poverty; imagine a world where all people are free to satisfy their desires; imagine a world where society is organized in such a way that all people are satisfied at all times. Does it make you uneasy? It will if you read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, one of the prime examples of one of my favourite literary genres - dystopian fiction (other brilliant examples are George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Lois Lowry's The Giver, which is good for younger readers as well).

A dystopia is, to put it bluntly, an utopia gone wrong. In this type of fiction, the reader is confronted with a world which incorporates many features humans have strived to achieve throughout the ages, and shown the consequences (ranging from unpleasant to revolting) of the application of those ideals. The vision of human nature is generally quite bleak - these are not hopeful books. Their appeal - which is great, in my opinion - comes from giving us, in a distorted mirror, an image of our own society and of its failings, while stimulating our imagination, human empathy and rationality. These books clear your view of the world and lead you into philosophical reflection, for you are forced to think about what exactly is wrong with the society portrayed, about what makes us human, and about your own set of values, in a courageous way, by following a trail of thought to its last consequences (which is what the authors of these books do: they take a set of ideals and picture what a society based on them would look like).

Brave New World is based on full, perfect State control of individuals based on the use of scientific knowledge and industrial power (the writing style is very evocative of this reality, with a strong use of scientific language and decidedly unspiritual words in the modernist descriptions). Actually, I would say that there aren't individuals in this society, only member of a social class, conditioned and trained to perform a specific role. Everyone is happy - their each and every desire is satisfied in their social condition, for they were conditioned to desire only what they would get. If we take a naive definition of freedom as "lack of obstacles to do what you want", this society provides perfect freedom. But, intuitively, one feels that what is portrayed is the opposite of freedom, and that this world is not one of human beings. So, two connected questions ask themselves:

1. If freedom is not "lack of obstacles to do what you want", then what is it?
2. What makes us human?

These two themes are beautifully explored in Martin Hollis's Invitation to Philosophy (one of the books in my Philosophy reading list). 

About Brave New World, he says:

...the system engineers people with just the wants which it suits the system to satisfy. But, if freedom really is just the power to satisfy wants in a stable and lasting manner, (...) Brave New World may well be more efficient at preventing unsatisfied desires and, hence, be more free. For, by the test proposed [freedom=lack of obstacles to get what yo want], a happy slave is freer than a frustrated citizen.

To avoid this result, one must insist that there is something amiss with the wants of the happy slave. They are coherent, well-ordered, realistic and satisfiable. So why is the slave not free? The answer has to be that there is a test of freedom independent of their present wants and their achievement. Curiously, happy slaves are unfree because they could not satisfy wants which they do not have.

It appears, then, that freedom may be seen as the power to do what you would ideally want to do - freedom has a moral content, which suggests that there are wants which are essential to freedom, i.e., that freedom is not an isolated ethical value and is thus part of a wider model of humanity (Hollis calls this a positive idea of freedom). This leaves us in a difficult position: freedom and humanity imply each other, but what are they exactly, and how can they be reached? To answer, we need to determine what are the wants required for freedom, or, in other words, the values on which humanity is based. This means we are now searching for universal ethical foundations or principles. 


This is no easy task - in fact, it may prove to be impossible. First of all, there may be no such thing as universal ethical principles: we know our ethical judgements to be deeply influenced by our social, cultural and historical context, and it is possible that it actually determines all our ethical system. Though I don't deny the influence of the context we live in, I personally believe there are universal (human) values: these are based on the essential human ability to feel empathy, that is, to imagine we are in a different person's place and how we would feel in their situation. This is still rather vague, but it is a starting point, a kind of "ethical axiom" on which we can hope to build a system which leads to a solid understanding of the concepts of freedom and humanity.


We can restate this 'principle of empathy' in a different way: the desire to get close/connect to other human beings in a basic human want. It is obvious that the characters that populate Brave New World are lacking in this aspect: their desire for immediate (and easily available) pleasure makes it impossible for them to build deeper relationships, which take dedication, and always include pain (at the very least, when they end). We can say that their inability to look ahead and to endure unpleasantness - their lack of self-discipline - is their downfall, keeping them from emphasizing with others. And where does this feature come from? It is precisely from their conditioning, in other words, from their context (which is, in Brave New World, even more aggressively permeating than in our own society). For the good of society at large - a consumer society - people are stimulated to consume feverishly, and thus to have nothing lasting, including their relationships.


A new question appears: we now start to wonder if we aren't as conditioned as these characters in our own society. Are our thoughts, and therefore our lives, truly ours? Or are they the unavoidable result of outside factors? This is a re-statement of the ever-lasting problem of free will. This is not a closed question: actually, I doubt it is answerable. I won't go into it at depth now, so I will just connect it to a point I have already made: one of the most chilling features of those who populate Brave New World is their inability to stand back from present desires, precisely because that means their minds aren't active in choosing the path to follow, so they are not free to decide. The mind is active to the extent it builds a web of belief, that is, it constructs a view of the world taking input from the inner and outer senses. I we are to have free will, therefore, the mind needs to take an active role in dealing with this input.


These observations all lead in the same direction: by acknowledging that the mind plays an active role, we find that the ability to 'step out' of ourselves by using our imagination is essential to humanity. In this context, freedom can be reached by rationality, that is, by the ability to analyze a situation and decide what to do using the insight gained by 'stepping out' of the present moment. By learning and thinking, we free ourselves; if we want to keep free in a society which constantly appeals to immediate pleasure, we must keep questioning and searching and probing deeper into reality.