Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Freedom Is Not a Gift:
It’s Earned Only with Effort
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

We may not want it, may dread it, but even so, we leap into the quarrel at some point, get caught up in its swirling motion, as in a whirlpool. Worse still, with those we love and live with, the very same conflict and quarrel may be repeated again and again. In this particular quarrel, nothing seems ever to get settled. We know this. and still may be drawn repeatedly into the wrangling.

Is this kind of quarreling something over which we have no control? Is it like this, in fact, with everything in our lives? Are we governed by forces outside us and within us which press us inexorably into actions, into patterns of thought and feeling, whether we will it or not, no matter how much we may wish otherwise? Are we helpless before the vast array of forces that bear down upon us from the moment we are born? Is our thinking that we make deliberate choices merely a comforting delusion, one that we are reluctant to give up, even in the face of evidence to the contrary?

For centuries humanity has been grappling with the question of whether or not we are free to make choices; whether or not our actions are determined by forces we can’t control. You would think we would be able to resolve this issue: it is so important in its implications. We are intimately involved in the issue every moment of our lives. Yet the answer continues to be contested. How strange!

It has seemed to me that part of the problem is the strong tendency we have to think in either-or terms. That is, we have been prone to think that either people are free or their acts are determined. But this is an over-simp lified view of the matter.

There are signs of new insight into the issue. As we have come to understand ourselves a little better, we have come to see the answer to this perennial puzzle.

II. Order and Limits?
To begin, philosophers and religious thinkers in times past understood something about human existence that we lost sight of in the twentieth century. With the rise of affluence, the generation by science, technology, business and industry of a vast flood of material things, we lost sight of the fact that human nature is such that it is not the satisfaction of all our wants, needs and desires that brings us a sense of well-being; rather, we gain a sense of well-being by, in some way, giving order and limits to our wants, needs, and desires. By gaining command of ourselves — to some substantial degree.

III. On Being Conscious
Consciousness is an important factor here. Consider its nature. It is hard to grasp at a glance. It is an ambiguous phenomenon, difficult to define. I can myself see at least two distinct senses in which we use the word. First of all, we use it in a rather simple, direct sense as meaning the opposite of unconscious. The distinction is roughly the same as that between awake and asleep.

When we are conscious in this simple sense of the word, we are looking out on the world and receiving impressions of some part of the enormous universe that exists out there. Consciousness used in this sense (and it is the most common use) means that our mind is passively open to an awareness of things outside us and within us. A cat or a dog (or any animal) is also conscious in this sense. It is aware of sights, sounds and smells outside itself, and of impulses of fear or hunger or memory from within itself.

However, we are capable of another level of consciousness, and we use the word in this sense also. We use it to refer to the active, aggressive, rational use of the mind, in which it is not just passively open to impressions but rather embraces them; actively collects, compares and integrates them, considers them in the context of previous experience and understanding.

In this case, consciousness not only records impressions, but takes hold of them, groups them, arranges them in a pattern of order and significance. Judges, evaluates, projects, speculates, gains understanding, gains insight.

All human beings are conscious in the first (passive) sense of the term. And all are partially conscious in the second (active) sense of the term. They may vary greatly in the areas and degree of consciousness, as well as vary from time to time. A physician, a physicist, and a plumber are likely to be actively conscious in the area of their occupational concern, but may be only partly conscious in a great many other areas. I have myself known a number of individuals who appeared to be quite alert and conscious in the passive sense, but were largely unconscious in the more active sense.

Their thinking and behavior patterns seemed to be determined largely by their social conditioning. They thought, felt, believed, aspired as their people had taught them to. If their people regarded women as inferior, then they too held this conviction fervently. If gaining status and wealth were seen as the major goals in life, they diligently pursued both.

There is a passive kind of consciousness and an active kind. The latter is a relative newcomer to the human scene. Up until about 2500 years ago, it appears that the greater part of human behavior was determined by the interaction between natural drives on one hand and social conditioning on the other. That is, by the impact of myth, tradition, code, and custom on our natural being. People then received impressions passively from their inner selves and their outer environment, and responded without much conscious deliberation.

Then, between 800 BCE and 200 BCE, a significant change in the quality of consciousness began to develop in various parts of the world. It was a turning point in the cultural evolution of our species. A few individuals began to appear who actively grasped the patterns of social conditioning that had shaped them, consciously judged, evaluated them, and proposed alternative patterns, proposed reforms and revisions of the way of life of their people, proposed far-reaching changes.

This is the period of the great Hebrew prophets in ancient Israel, of Buddha in India, of Lao Tse in China. Jesus is another (and later) example of this prophetic tradition. He was an active, thoughtful critic of the prevailing patterns of life in his society.

In the 4th century BCE, this active consciousness appeared in ancient Greece, most notably perhaps in the thought of individuals like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. When Socrates argued that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he was calling on his people to rise to a new level of consciousness. He was challenging them to be more than just passively aware of themselves and their world, to rise above the social conditioning that initially had given form to their humanity.

He was calling on his people to tap a potentiality in themselves, was urging them to move toward personal freedom, to exercise the freedom of choice that lives as a possibility (but only a possibility) in every human being.

IV. Gifts from the Nature of Things
We are intricately constructed creatures, we humans. We have a number of odd abilities and propensities, of potentialities and properties. Take our thumbs, for example. They are attached to our hands in such a way as to have become an especially useful appendage. We have subtle, refined, small-muscle coordination and can, as a result, do quite complicated things with our hands, such as surgery and sculpture, can crochet, make clocks and watches, can thread needles, do wood carving, cabinet-making, and so on. We are skilled in ever so many ways in the use of our hands.

In addition, among our many other abilities is a most extraordinary capacity not only to be, to exist, but also to be aware of ourselves as creatures set down in the world, distinct from it but in relation to it. And we can, at the same time, step back and watch ourselves acting or reacting.

We can also, if we determine to do so, delay taking action, delay our response. We can pause in the midst of life, step back mentally, and consi der both the immediate and long range consequences of what we might do (or not do). We can weigh and consider; can evaluate, make judgments, be critical of ourselves.

As the able psychiatrist, Dr Rollo May, put it several years ago, “this capacity to transcend the immediate situation and bring the time determinant into learning gives human behavior its distinctive flexibility and freedom.” [Psychology and the Human Dilemma]

Freedom (or free will, freedom of choice) is rooted in the capacity to rise above our embeddedness in the immediate situation, to insert intelligence, reason, awareness, understanding, active consciousness between stimulus and response, to do more than just respond without reflection to whatever catches our attention.

Notice that May uses the word “capacity” in referring to freedom. It is not a faculty like sight or hearing, rather, it is a capacity that we may or may not develop. Each individual may learn gradually to make more and more constructive use of this interval between stimulus and response.

Our freedom is, of course, not absolute. We are limited by many forces. We exist in a particular society, have a given genetic and cultural heritage, a given set of possible talents and abilities. Our freedom is limited by the health of our body, by historical forces, by social structures, by economic forces, by the quality of our intelligence, the pattern and intensity of our feelings, the laws of our society, the laws of nature, and by a thousand and one other forces and factors which will shape a large part of our lives, our destiny.

Freedom is, of course, limited by an enormous number of pressures, facts, and forces. We may, however, exercise considerable freedom, constructively and creatively, within these limiting factors. We gain in freedom when we develop awareness of the forces that are significant in shaping our lives and our selves, and then insert the active consciousness, rational awareness between the forces that act upon us and our response to their pressures.

We assess the situation, take account of as many factors as we can that have a bearing on it, then choose the response that consciousness tells us is the most constructive in the long run. We are no longer passive then to the forces that press upon us. We actively meet them with deliberate awareness. We can, in this way, move in a life-giving direction, can hold ourselves back from what might be destructive, damaging for ourselves or others.

Freedom does not mean always doing as we please, doing whatever we wish to do. It means consciously choosing our responses to the existential pressures to which we are subjected. When we insist on always doing as we please, we may well then simply allow our actions, our destiny to be determined by casual, immediate, impulsive whims and wishes. When we exercise our personal freedom, we act with our whole being, from the center of ourselves.

We bring together sight, sound, sensation, impulse, value, insight, wants, and needs — we integrate all of these diverse elements into a pattern — and relate to the world, to others and ourselves, with our whole being. We do not act on impulse only, not by reason alone, but from the living center of ourselves.

V. Not a Gift but an Achievement
Well then, are our acts free or determined? Do human beings have free will? Or are their actions, thoughts, and feelings determined by forces outside their control?

The answer is that we do not have free will as an easy gift from nature, as a native faculty; but it is something we can develop with time and deliberate, conscious attention. If we just drift through existence, not actively grasping it, most of our acts and ideas will be determined by forces we do not comprehend, forces of which we are only dimly aware.

But we are capable of rising above the limits of the unexamined life. We are capable, by the exercise of conscious awareness, of acting in freedom — intentionally. It is likely that those who are most aware of the significant forces in their existence will attain the greatest degree of freedom.

Furthermore, we are (many of us) restless, unfulfilled, incomplete until we find our way to some considerable degree of freedom. Not all of us, to be sure. A great many human beings find peace and security in an “escape from freedom” (to borrow a phrase from Erich Fromm).

We Universalists and Unitarians seem to be among those who have built into their natures an especially strong drive toward freedom, and we spend much of our lives expanding our understanding of ourselves and our world, in order to move, as far as possible, in the direction of that goal. Indeed, the celebration and pursuit of this goal, in community, is the primary focus of our Sunday morning gatherings.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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