Human freedom, liberalism, and religion

In speaking of human freedom Claude Polin (Chronicles, Feb. 2014) is right in saying that the suicide of the West has everything to do with men thinking they have unfettered freedom, when men are only as free as human nature and the order of nature allow. Modern liberals believe that they are congenitally free to do anything they please, realizing, perhaps, that they cannot be free if they are “enslaved” to anything, including their own nature. This is why Polin sees “absolute individualism” as the real plague of the West.

For those who cannot affirm a God creating human nature and the laws of nature, the evolutionary sciences such as sociobiology have also underlined a human nature to which we are unfreely connected. We have some freedom within the determined paths of human nature, and we can believe in progress, without believing in the unfettered freedom of modern liberalism, because we are in the process of evolving toward the ultimate progress of Godhood, materially and supermaterially, in the cosmos. “First causes” are not even required when Godhood is seen as the zenith of our evolution in nature. We can harmonize with the laws of nature and evolution, which can help determine the laws of men.

As men are prone to arrogance, even religion went too far beyond knowledge and truth in declaring that it knew the laws of God and the laws of the universe, to which it said we must obey, and so as human knowledge evolved this arrogance had much to do with the rejection of religion. But religion can return when the largely involutionary traditional view of God is seen as a first symbolic-experience of the evolutionary path to Godhood which we need to attain, shaped by outside evolution. This return can be seen in the Twofold Path of theological materialism. The new can synthesize with the old in an Ordered Evolution.  Perhaps even the liberals could affirm this kind of freedom, even if they have the problem of having declared the biological origin of any cultural behavior politically incorrect, supposedly because they think it fetters their imaginary freedom, or license.