Obedience and freedom
Daniel Kamaluddin
In the course of the last century millions of people lay down their lives fighting for the value we call freedom. As the Berlin wall went up, or the last helicopters left the American embassy in South Vietnam, countless people risked everything, and very often their lives, for the faint chance of freedom. Yet, the more we learn about ourselves from personal experience, evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, the more Aristotle’s assertion at the very beginning of western philosophy that man is a ‘politikon zoon’ (‘a social/political animal’) seems to ring true. In some sense then, our focus in political philosophy, and personal emotion on freedom, even at great expense, seems surprising. Yet there is no denying, to put it poetically, that something deep inside of us calls out to be free. However, ultimately I see no tension here, we need to acknowledge that our concept of freedom and deep desire for community are inexplicably intertwined with one another. In the same way that a child is terrified, thrown into the sea but loves swimming in a swimming pool, we should say that we are terrified, rendered incapable and less ourselves, without the necessary community to set the organizing boundaries for our feeling of freedom to push against. In the same way that the bean grows stronger with a wooden stalk to help it grow, so too do we need at least some extent of societal boundaries in order to self-define such that we can make free actions. While obedience is certainly in some cases necessary for true freedom, I want to argue that it is not in itself necessary for true freedom. Rather, it is restriction, in various manifestations, of which obedience is one, that allows for true freedom. I think the scope of ‘obedience’ is too narrow because it implies a co-ercive submission to authority, or the whims of the social group. On the contrary, the term restriction leaves us open to the willing, mutual and necessary offering of oneself to meaningful participation with the group and with your future self. I want to say that freedom can only exist through restriction, therefore, ‘true freedom’ must be taken to mean a state where the balance between freedom and restriction is struck best rather than ‘true freedom’ as we so often imagine it now as a situation where the individual faces no social restriction whatsoever. In the course of this essay I will show that this asocial state of affairs is ultimately an impossibility, and that, even if it were possible, it would be a deeply undesirable and desperate state of affairs. The first area in which we see necessary restriction carving the way for freedom is in the way we have been set up by evolution as a social animal. Research on mammalian behaviour has shown repeatedly that primates, when given the option between nourishment and the comfort of others will go hungry in favour of this social contact. In a deep evolutionary sense, we are hard-wired for participation in a group. This ability to work together as a social unit, which has expanded into participation in large- scale societies is to a significant extent what has allowed humans to control the biosphere. Given that ejection from the tribal unit meant death for the individual for millions of years of hominid evolution, we associate isolation with death. This explains the immense terror that people feel around loneliness or social rejection, as the body is constantly making calculations about its survival and knows that on the evolutionary timescale death is imminent. Man cannot live by bread alone. Studies in longevity has
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