Freedom.
For a word that has become almost synonymous with the United
States of America, the more worldly among us are gradually becoming savvy to
the fact that freedom can only be spoken of as a goal, not an achieved reality.
There is a huge splotch of grey that exists between free and not free. We
should never just toss the word out there unqualified but should always speak
of degrees of freedom. A child whose one parent is lacking a high school
diploma and who is trying to learn to read in an inner city class size of 45 is
quite a bit less free than the child of a cardiologist and a CPA who is
learning in a private classroom of 16. A family in a safe neighborhood is more
free than a family in a dangerous one, and so on.
As his own country (Germany in the 1930s) was trying to
achieve a certain version of freedom at a great cost to its cultural soul,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that the idea of freedom, if it is only defined
in the negative (freedom from), can achieve nothing more than a paranoid
hysteria as a society tries to eliminate anything that could be perceived as a
threat. Any freedom that is worthy of the name, needs to be defined positively
(freedom for), because only after discovering something to live for outside of
ourselves, can we escape our enslavement to obsessive self-concern.
In this blog and the next one, I’d like to take the last two
parts of FDR’s famous “Four
Freedoms” speech—“freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”—and ask the
question: how are we doing?
In a not-so-recent Ted Talk, psychologist Barry Schwartz
laid out what he calls “the paradox of choice.” The long and short of it says
that if you give someone three different kinds of vehicles to choose from at
the dealership, she will be a little happier
than if you only give her one choice; but if you give her 50 choices, she will
be much less happy than if you had
only given her three. That is, our
conventional assumption that more freedom to choose is better is true to a
point, but that point comes fast and hard. And once that threshold is passed,
the happiness graph can plunge downward as far as you like.
Most of us probably know this from experience. At the
grocery store, where they give me three brands of cheddar cheese, I can be
reasonably confident that I’m walking away with the one that I like best. But
when I come away from the golf shop with one of 50 drivers, I’ll always wonder
if one of the others wouldn’t have added 20 yards off the tee or reduced my
slice. And it’s best for my mental health, if I don’t even consider the
possibilities of switching to Romano or Fontina cheese.
Obviously, golf clubs and cheese are fairly trivial issues.
But think about what this means for our larger aspirations. I’ve read of a
study where people rated their own happiness more and more highly up to a household
income of $75,000 (gallup.com/businessjournal),
after which there is a hard cutoff. There may even be some drop-off as added income
isolates people and eliminates any impetus for them to build a strong social
network. The study depended on self-reporting, which has its limitations, but
the findings certainly ring true to my experience, growing up in a part of town
where many households would’ve considered $75,000 unlivable but where happiness
was scarce.
It is an old, old insight from a myriad of philosophical and
theological traditions that wanting what we don’t have leads to unhappiness.
And even modern pop culture is aware of it. The nineties band Sublime’s words,
“Life is short, so love the one ya got,” were ubiquitous in the dorm rooms of
my generation of young scholars, and the sentiment is just an echo of an older
generation’s “Money can’t buy you happiness.” But a few chart toppers and
homespun sayings notwithstanding, the modern western world has created an
economic and political belief system that is more or less designed to keep
raising the happiness high jump bar just beyond our reach, even as, deceptively,
it encourages the invention of mechanisms that help us to jump higher. We have colluded
with the free market and the advertising industry to make the satiation of our
own appetites impossible. Like a child trying to grasp a floating dandelion
seed, the prize gets further and further away the faster we fling our limbs at
it.
I don’t want to be misheard. Our system does a better job of
incentivizing innovation than perhaps any other before it, and this has
resulted in creature comforts, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options
that I benefit from everyday. I’m definitely not ready to undo all of that just
yet. But all great thought traditions have recognized that it’s not easy to
discern just what causes happiness. And comfort, convenience, entertainment,
and consumer options are regularly given more credit than they deserve by the
popular mind.
As a society, we are forever deceived into speaking,
purchasing, and voting as though the stated goal of our society is to “create
wealth,” something that we’ve succeeded at indisputably over the last century. But
if we think that the wealth we’ve created should be put in the service of
happiness and not the other way around, our successes are much more ambiguous.
This is why church leaders should never be afraid to ask
people to give up their money. The
primary reason to press this issue in faith communities is not to cover staff
salaries, renovate buildings, or pay the electric bill, nor, fellow
well-meaning liberals, is it primarily to do good projects in the world (but by
all means, let’s, if we have the cash, and we can be intelligent about it). The
primary reason to press this is in order to smash idols.
The acquire-wealth-in-order-to-obtain-freedom-from-want
experiment failed. We acquired the wealth. We have more money now than any
generation before us. I read once that the average middle class home has more
different kinds of consumer goods than King Henry the VIII had in his palace.
But the “want” remains. It could even be argued that we have more want now than
previous societies, which never stated “freedom from want” as a goal in the
first place and so never thought to provide so many choices.
The word for something that promises you happiness but
doesn’t deliver is an idol.
It’s not “greedy” for church leaders to ask for money
(assuming it’s not going into their back pockets, which, if you’ve ever seen
the financial statement, is not how it works in your typical neighborhood church).
It’s a decision not to enable. It’s the refusal to give in to a lie.
