Clive Hamilton's "The Freedom Paradox. Towards a Post Secular Ethics" (Sunday Forum)

by James, Australia, Sunday, February 01, 2009, 14:43 (1567 days ago) @ PeterR

Peter,

Thank you for drawing my attention what Aquinas said about freedom, because it links in quite well with many of the things that Clive was talking about.

Perhaps I spent too much time in the review on the philosophical underpinnings of morality and not enough on what is, after all, the title of the book, "The Freedom Paradox".

One of Clive's important points is that with all the liberation movements that have been going on over the last 50 years, we have ended up with more freedom of choice (I use that phrase deliberately) than ever before, but our sense of freedom has been diminished.

The reason is that it is very easy for us to allow ourselves to become slaves of fashion, of the market, of the advertising gurus who play on every human weakness to sell their products. Conventional mores might have been overthrown, but they were simply replaced by another and more insidious authority because the clever advertisers don't want us to be aware that we are being influenced.

On page 226 of his book, Clive speaks about recovering our freedom by a 'life of detachment' which is

"not a life of disengagement from the world; rather it is a life of engagement on one's own terms, of inner freedom...it does not turn away from possessions; it owns them for what they are, not for what they promise. It insists on neither the hair shirt nor the Armani suit but is happy to wear either occasionally. It aspires without the need to aspire."

I guess there is nothing particularly new about this, reflecting the Aristotelian, "moderation in all things", but it is very attractively re-stated for modern times.

And although I have some misgivings about the philsophical bases for his "post-secular ethics", that I referred to in the review, I don't have any misgivings about what he says about freedom in the modern world.