‘Freedom’ as purposeless autonomy tends to enslave

Sohrab Ahmari will discuss “What is Freedom for?” at the 2021 Legatus Summit West, Sept. 16-18 in Phoenix.

Ahmari grew up in a nominally Muslim home in Iran but as a teenager had renounced all religion. In 1998, he immigrated to the United States. He worked as a writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal, and is today op-ed editor of the New York Post, a columnist for First Things, and a contributing editor to the U.K. journal Catholic Herald.

He announced his conversion to Catholicism in 2016 and wrote about it in his 2019 book From Fire, By Water (Ignatius Press). In 2021, he released The Unbroken Thread: Discovering Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (Convergent Books).

You’ve said you wrote The Unbroken Thread for your son. Please explain.

My concern is that the modern account of freedom—which reduces freedom to mere autonomous choice—will form a man out of my son who may be materially successful but whose life is ultimately marked by purposeless decadence. A society that urges him to just “get ahead” and “keep your options open” may, if not counteracted, leave him enslaved to baser desires and unbound from any of duties and commitments that make for a truly happy and free life.

A great thinker you feature is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. What can we learn from him?

Solzhenitsyn had helped expose the horrors lurking behind the Iron Curtain, in the gulag, but when he arrived in the West he was baffled by how Westerners were also unfree, only in a different way. An excess of rights, unbound from duties or a concern for the common good, had created in the West a system of diffuse, private tyranny, in which private actors pursuing their own selfish ends hindered moral, spiritual, and intellectual excellence. He shockingly told an audience of Harvard grads in 1978 that he wouldn’t recommend American society as a model for the transformation of the nations trapped behind the Iron Curtain!

You believe many abuses of freedom in America originate in the bad ideas of past philosophers.

Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers posited human beings as radically FREEDOM’atomized, at war with each other and with nature. In so doing, they radically rejected the classical and Christian account of the human person as a rational, political animal ordered to certain objective ends by nature, in whose fulfillment he found his true happiness. “Self-government” became merely the protection of individual rights in a dog-eat-dog world, rather than the rule of the self over the tyrant within and the rational pursuit of the common good. So much of the degradation and brutality we witness in society today can be traced back to this break with the older philosophical traditions of the West.

How has growing up under an oppressive Islamic regime sensitized you to these issues?

Those of us who have lived under blatantly lawless tyrannical regimes can be especially alarmed by how Western liberalism itself has become tyrannical. With my friend Patrick Deneen, I’m persuaded that this tyrannical turn is merely liberalism becoming more fully itself.

How can Catholicism serve as an antidote to our society’s problems?

Catholic social teaching — and the Church’s entire tradition of social and political thought stretching from Aristotle to St. Thomas to Pope Leo XIII — provides not only an acute diagnosis of what has gone wrong, but also a powerful antidote. We must recover the common good. We must recover a true anthropology, a true account of who human beings really are. The Church’s intellectual repository is full of treasures for those who would undertake such a project of recovery.