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

by Debb , Monday, February 02, 2009, 12:25 (1571 days ago) @ James

»
» “The Freedom Paradox” is a great read, and a book I found hard to put
» down. It certainly improved my knowledge of Kant, Schopenhauer and modern
» philosophy generally. In the end, however, I did not come away convinced.

Thank you for your review, James. I did not finish reading "The Freedom Paradox". I started to read it because I heard Clive Hamilton's talk about the book on the ABC last year:

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2008/08/bia_20080824.mp3

Clive Hamilton spoke with a certain verve. I liked his ending:

In conclusion, then, humans have always needed stories to live by. For millennia until the Enlightenment mythical stories gave our lives a narrative coherence, and since the
Enlightenment we have invested our hopes in stories of liberation—liberation from feudal authority, from the arbitrary exercise of power, from political exclusion, from prejudice, from plutocrats and from material deprivation. Although spawned by the social movements of the sixties, post-modern intellectuals have ended up colluding with the economic libertarians to deny us a meaningful story by which to live. For the existentialists this is the moment they declare “you are on you own”, and the only response is retreat into mundane life. But ultimately there is no comfort in the everyday, unless mundane activities are practiced with a transcendent purpose.

This is perhaps the unconscious reason so many young people are drawn to environmental activism. What better way to engage with the magnificent questions than to bind oneself to the fate of the planet? Environmental activism is a repudiation of quietism; it is the resurrection of the subject whom the post-structuralists had pronounced dead. There is no place for post-modern irony and nonchalance when the future of humanity is at stake. The young activists commit their lives to a higher cause and thereby acquire not just an authentic identity but an abiding sense of connectedness between the inner landscape and that of the natural world they seek to protect.

So, I borrowed the book, assiduously read the first half, with lots of bookmarks. In the second half, I just lost interest. The passion was gone. He was trying to make an intellectual case, and I just could not make myself care about what he was saying.

The subject matters greatly, and I share Hamilton's concern that we have no common story to live by. I wonder, though, whether his attempt at philosophy is going to give us that story (although, I must confess it is some time since I returned the book to the library, and so perhaps I have forgotten something significant about what he wrote).

He was closer to it in his talk, I think. The story of our earth, our lives on it, our common future is what is likely to provide us all with a common story, and the Christian version of that story is more likely to come from de Chardin that from Rome.