Is Modern Liberty Moral Debauchery?

This weekend I saw on TV a pop music video where they were selling the idea of sexual liberty, with a homosexual tone. The chorus would insist on the word "liberty! liberty!" from beginning to end. The song was in Spanish, and I couldn't retell the name of it. Anyways, I'm not interested in promoting it; just mentioning it to make my case.

This idea of linking liberty to sexual license has always produced discomfort in me, especially because I don't see this value anywhere in any major religion or spiritual philosophy. Contrariwise, sexuality is usually seen as base, immoral, destroyer of the bond between human beings with the higher being of God. The idea can't be proved empirically, but it happens that every major religion, from India to the Americas, rebuffs sexuality as something unworthy of a transcendent life. But because we like the word "liberty", because we link it to the highest values we strive for in the West, the discourse that tries to link liberty with sexual license disturbs me profoundly, because it forces me to choose between liberty and spirituality, and nothing can be further from the truth. The point of spirituality is to truly free the human spirit from the bonds that incarcerate it to its material condition. If the discourse of sexual license as liberty is true, we are forced to deduce that spirituality enslaves us, or liberty is a base and unworthy thing. I reject that conclusion. Instead, I want to bring to notice another discourse that is very old indeed, but no less true.

The solution to this problem was offered by Plato, in his Laws, book III. There he debates the virtuous middle path between liberty and slavery, where liberty is the condition under democracy and slavery the condition under monarchy. He considers both extremes vicious and contrary to prudent moderation that leads to true, elevated happiness. In 694a he speaks of "the just middle between slavery and liberty". A strange thought, isn't it? We are taught that slavery is always bad, always deplorable. But what kind of slavery is he talking about? Not the institution of slavery, that's for sure, but the acceptance of the higher truths of virtue that moderate the inclinations of the individual's will. This is a very old debate, but by presenting it this way he has illuminated me on this issue (like most of the time when I read Plato).

From Hobbes onward we have taken liberty to be to do whatever we want without interference from external things. But Hobbes does not follow that: the more liberty the better for us. Contrariwise the government is formed to regulate our liberty and solve the collective action dilemma that would lead us to self destruction. Plato and Hobbes agree on something essential: more liberty is not always better. I agree with those terms. The difference is that for Hobbes, individuals cannot be trusted to be sociable unless they are compelled by an extraordinary external force, whereas for Plato the cultivation of a virtuous life lead to self regulation and the enjoyment of true happiness and true liberty. 

The problem with Hobbes' notion is that he does not give us a solution to the problem of excessive liberty that does not imply frustrating it. The less government interference, the more liberty we enjoy, because we can do with our bodies whatever we want: hence, sexual license. This is one of the more paradoxical conclusions from Hobbes' Christian thought. But Plato, two thousand years before, already gives us the solution. If liberty in the abstract sense is a good thing, an aspect of the virtuous life, excessive liberty, in order to be bad for us, has to be something else. We call it licentiousness or debauchery, and it cannot be termed with true liberty without reducing it to an absurd concept. Why? Because true liberty is always moderate, prudent, self-regulating, conscious of divine truths, respectful of God and the aspect of God within us. All of these sexual licentiousness destroys, debasing the body, divorcing it with all its spiritual potentials. 

In this sense we have to see slavery not as oppression, but as moderation. In what sense? The Arabic word Islam gives us a hint: it means "voluntary submission to God," the origin of all universal truths and of all spirituality. If in all major religions God commands against sexual license, and also in pagan thinkers like Plato the same conclusion is reached, we have to accept that, empirically or not, all relevant spiritual traditions guide human beings through another path, and to another end than that portrayed in modern secular ethos and its sexual licentiousness. This not only includes homosexuality, but any kind of excessive practice of sexual life, like pornography.

I even claim that modernity is cheating on all of us. Excessive sexuality never produces true happiness, and the joy enjoyed by so many who live like this is an illusory comfort for a life void of spiritual content, of transcendent meaning. Contemporary capitalist, secular and modern values are contrary to ancient and universal wisdom. The idea that sexual license is liberty is derisory, and we should rebuff it whenever we find it expressed. 

Christian and Nostalgic criticism to Capitalism

There is a common misconception in our times that if you dislike or criticize the capitalist society you must be a left-wing socialist. In the same way if you disagree with state run economies you must be a right-wing capitalist. However, not all criticism to capitalism comes from a socialist progressive approach. The best example in our times is the criticism waged by the Pope Benedict XVI in his multiple writings and sermons. Capitalism leads to self-interest as selfishness, which produces alienation, and ends charity within the human heart. I come from a similar perspective.

There are two layers of thought that I use to address the modern world. The first one is the pessimist and pragmatic. The second one is the Christian and judgmental.

1) By pessimism and pragmatism I mean yielding to reality. Yielding to the times you were born in. This is a scientific approach. It simply tries to understand our world to the limit of our intellectual capacities, without making universal moral judgments.

You can still make moral judgments, but they will always be in pragmatic form, which is almost the same as to say that they are not moral. I deny any claim of utilitarianism of being a moral philosophy. There is nothing moral in the useful. Morality demands sacrifice, because it is the external form of love, and love is the core of moral actions. In the extreme this demands martyrdom. Profiting from moral acts runs contrariwise to common sense.

The whole point of this layer of understanding capitalism is playing by the rules, because you acknowledge that it is beyond your human capacities to really "make a difference". Economic success is not making any difference. It's playing by the rules. Actually, you come to understand that if you want to be efficacious in this world, you first need to take it as the starting point, and this demands playing by the rules.

Understanding how things are is the ultimate goal. If you start from a moral judgmental vantage point, the task of understanding is totally blocked, you will fail to differenciate between truth and falsehood, and any enterprise set from these principles will ultimately fail, or turn into monstrous consequences, like it happened to Marxism. Hence, philosophy of praxis is denied.

2) But we don't want to yield our capacity to judge. We still want to preserve our ability to say that murder is a reproachable act. But this is where we must accept that we move in a different layer, not completely disconnected with the previous one, but with different rules.  

The idea is that we can be good, and all good comes from God. And the teaching of Jesus is the ultimate content of God's will. Jesus points to love and rebuff self-interest egoism. As I said, taken to the extreme, this reaches martyrdom. In sooth, true Christian behavior runs contrariwise to capitalist demands and conceptions. But it also runs contrariwise to socialism. Why? Because socialism is nothing but the next step in the progressive movement. It is supposed to be the next stage after capitalism. But Christianity already rejects capitalism from the very start. It rejects the logic of economics, which socialism and Marxism push to its ultimate consequences. In this debate, capitalism and socialism are allies against Christianity and any other kind of religious thought and feeling. In my view, this includes Islam.

The cleavage would be, then: capitalism/socialism vs. Christianity/Islam. Curious way of seeing it, right? We are not taught to see it this way. Well, this is what I want to offer. Any kind of religious thought and feeling is concerned with God and with loving concrete human beings in need. Capitalism only promotes egoism and individualist alienation and socialism only promotes social consciousness at an abstract level, detached from concrete human beings, because it considers charity to be an obstacle to revolution.

But Christianity rebuffs any universal call to change the structural conditions of society. It does not consider it to be possible. Its call is for individuals to engage in charity, not in spurious revolutions or big and ambitious political agendas. Christianity is realist in the sense that it takes the world for granted. In few words, it acknowledges that capitalism is a foul system and liberalism a false and self-defeating ideology, but its call is not to change the world or men or societies. Christianity has been going around the world for quite a long time to realize that such a call is spurious and filled with pride and self-righteousness nonsense. It would simply be ideological delusion. Philosophy of praxis is again denied.

The world cannot be changed, but that doesn't mean that we cannot criticize it from a nostalgic point of view. That is, from a pessimist approach. Acknowledge men as he is, acknowledge his vulnerability to corruption and sin. Don't pretend that you can create a society of angels. Don't pretend that you can extricate capitalist evil from the world, because you can't. It's better to understand with a cool head, and act pragmatically. But on a higher layer, create the Christian consciousness that would allow you to work in this world by imitating Jesus and helping the poor, not with grandiloquent ideologies, but with humble and true charity.

Conclusion: Capitalism sucks. Liberalism is its false and self-defeating ideology. But this is the world in which we were born. Live with it, as long as you don't fall into trap of believing, like many fools, that it is really a more just, more fair and more happy world.