Over the course of The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin traces the recent history of both our country and the people who constitute it.  While government and big business and culture are huge movers in the story, the daily practitioners of “expressive individualism” are the proof in the pudding.  “Expressive individualism” reflects the fatal end of a certain kind of liberty.  Which is why it’s good that Levin brings up the issue of liberty in the context of individuals, especially when the unspoken motto of every American is “don’t tread on me.

To liberate us purely to pursue our wants and wishes is to liberate our appetites and passions.  But a person in the grip of appetite or passion couldn’t be our model of the free human being.  Such a person is not someone we would easily trust with the exercise of great political and economic freedom.

The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desires.  This is hardly a novel insight, of course: Socrates helped his students grasp it twenty-five centuries ago.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are rooted in it.  But it is a truth our high self-esteem sometimes makes us forget.

This week I’m talking “worldview questions” with my students.  The question of “what is the point of human history?” is always a sticky one, with many students wanting to wrongly recast it as “what is the point of studying history?”  The question, though, assumes (hopes?) that the story of mankind on planet Earth is meant to go somewhere.  It is not existence simply for the sake of existence.  In the same way, liberty i s freedom for a reason.  Levin echoes Augustine when speaking of appetites and passions not being the point of existence.  And Levin is right: such talk is a huge pill to swallow for those who gorge ourselves with a high self-esteem diet.

The older idea of liberty requires not only people be free to choose, but also that they be able to choose well.  Such liberty arises when we want to do more or less what we ought to do, so that the moral law, the civil law, and our own will are largely in alignment, and choice and obligation point in the same direction.  To be capable of freedom, and capable of being of being liberal citizens, we need to be capable of that challenging combination.  And to become capable of it, we need more than the liberation of the individual from coercion.  We need a certain sort of moral formation.

To achieve that formation in a free society—where we do not want the state to direct or compel it—requires that we commit ourselves to more than our own will and whim.  It requires a commitment precisely to the formative social and cultural institutions that we have seen pulled apart from above and below in our age of fracture.  They are where human beings become free men and women ready to govern themselves.

That word “older” is really important, I think.  Without it, we might equivocate ourselves back into the contemporary meaning of liberty as “permission to do whatever.”  Which brings us back to the idea of formation (particularly moral) and the institutions that are meant to be part of formation’s matrix.  And that’s the rub with Levin’s book and with our current situation: the things we need most to help in our formation are themselves  in ruin and in need of rehabilitation (which is why certain aspects of the Benedict Option make urgent sense).  The question for those of us in the middle, then, is how do we bring healing to one so that we might then bring healthy formation to the other.

(image from historicphiladelphia.org)