“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” — Nelson Mandela
It’s our mortality that entitles us to live as we please. It’s our birth that binds us in obligation to others. Amidst the upheaval of a global pandemic, life goes on within us, and without us.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has brought, sadly, too many reminders of mortality, and the limited time we have to achieve our individual desires for this earthly life. One has to believe, though, it has also brought many reminders of our obligation to others, including in the form of social distancing rules.
The pandemic has also illustrated why illuminating the reasons for such rules is important, given understandable frustration with the limits social distancing rules place on individual freedom, both social and economic. On one level, the reasons are pragmatic: because the health risks are collective, decisions about what type of exposure is considered too risky must, to a degree, be determined collectively (i.e., by governments), not by individuals.
This pragmatic basis may explain why, for all the coverage of protests by persons chafing at these restrictions, by and large social distancing rules have public support.[1] More interestingly, though, the reasons to respect social distancing rules are not only that they are effective, but that not putting others at risk is morally and spiritually correct and beneficial. We may not understand why this is so — like many spiritual insights, it has a bit of a “gut feel” to it, which can be problematic if it makes it harder to explain.
I offer the view that this sense of rightness is because we recognize our earthly life is both individual and communal. That is, our life is ours to live as we choose, and yet it also exists because of, is shaped by, and depends on others. Because we owe our initial existence to others who came before us, we can come to an understanding that our lives are a gift, and that gratitude for that gift is expressed in respect for and service to those who live alongside us.
There’s an ironic symmetry in that what this pandemic asks us to do is come together by staying apart. It asks that, in a coordinated, uniform fashion, everyone goes to their own place to do their own thing (and be as creative as you can while still being safe).[2] This helps illustrate the interrelated dance of our individuality and our communal identity.
“Staying home” is also not universally experienced in the same way. For some of us who live (mostly) alone, this is an unexpected season of solitude. For family homes with children, it is an unexpected season of cohabitation during the daytime. For couples, it may be a season to remember Rilke’s observation that “a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude.” In either case, the tension and the harmony of the dance between solitude and fellowship is acutely evident.
This post contends that successfully integrating this interrelatedness, this dance between personal free will and collective duty, is a better illustration of human flourishing than frameworks that emphasize either free will or duty in isolation. Thinkers, for example Nietzsche, have argued human purpose is fulfilled by individual will. Others, such as Confucius, argued human purpose is fulfilled in altruistic service to social harmony. Many of those thinkers are far more learned than me, and in most cases I have not even done them the courtesy of reading their writings in the original language. So, it’s with some presumption I say they’re wrong that this is an either/or matter.
Spiritual fulfillment requires both freedom and community, and it’s the two most important features of our existence — death and birth — that illustrate why. Our mortality gives us license to spend the limited (by whatever measure) time we have as this person in ways of our own choosing. As Jimi Hendrix sang, “I’m the one who has to die when it’s time for me to die.” It’s not the only reason, but our mortality is a key reason we’re each entitled to solitude, to autonomy, and to fundamental rights, including a right to participate in civil, political, economic and social concerns.
For human fulfillment also requires some level of participation. Dr. King taught that “life’s most persistent question is what are you doing for others?” Participation, whether it is in a family, a congregation, a community, a nation or all of humanity, requires both laws and punishment, and forgiveness and reconciliation. To make participation possible we need processes that, like our response to the coronavirus pandemic, require collective action to structure and incent individual choices that both advise, sanction, teach, and welcome.
And it is how to best balance autonomy and structure which should be the focus of our attention, rather than whether one is more fundamental than the other. Picking individual will or collective harmony as a champion virtue, to the exclusion of the other, is simply to dodge the issue. We must integrate rules that protect participation with those that protect personal liberty.
Neither free will nor social harmony can be discarded or avoided — just like the facts of birth and death that animate their importance. We tend to focus on the inevitability of our passing, but it bears equal emphasis that we came into existence, and we were given zero choice in the matter. We are mortal and we exist. Neither fact can be avoided.
Because we naturally tend to focus on our inescapable death, we may tend to emphasize the freedom to which that entitles us. And this is certainly worth emphasis — in too many contexts external political repression or internal judgment and anxiety frustrate freedom and the human flourishing that freedom engenders. A truly free individual is frightening to many who are attached to their own sense of order or station in life. But this focus can also produce an excess diversion of energy into ego-driven experiences. It may motivate everything from Latin aphorisms (“carpe diem”) to pop music’s promotion of the “YOLO” (“you only live once”) phrase.
That “YOLO” became a rallying cry for risky and stupid behavior[3] is perhaps evidence enough the valuation of mortality-conscious freedom may be relatively inflated in today’s marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, what tends to go unnoticed is the connection between our birth and an equally unavoidable debt we owe to others, one which equally defines us.
The obvious example is the debt we each owe our parents, who are directly responsible for our existence. So too, we owe our existence to our grandparents and their families, and all who are connected to them, for they had some part (large or small) in the events and choices that brought our parents to conception and then to the events and choices that brought ourselves to conception. And, as the pandemic makes clear, our daily lives are adorned with a myriad of dependencies, personal and commercial, on others.
It may well be you owe your existence to a distant progenitor who, in turn, owes his life to Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine. Or she may have survived only due to Norman Borlaug, whose agricultural innovations curtailed famine around the world. More lightly, the movie “Back to the Future” illustrates gratitude is owed not only for our birth, but for all that did not happen to obstruct it. In the present moment, events illustrate how economically dependent we are on producers and purchasers alike, as well as to health care providers and those who take precautions not to infect others. Gratitude is owed, therefore, not only to your ancestors, but to society at large, and to fortune itself (or, if you prefer, to divine design).
In the Christian faith (and in others) it is a change of mind (metanoia) to one of peace and gratitude which becomes the agent of transformation. That change of mind compensates for both the powerlessness we may feel due to the absence of any agency in our own birth, and to the expectations of loss and pain due to our mortality. And it releases all insistence that our lives be dictated by either an urgent accumulation of pleasurable experiences, or by fearful acquiescence to authorities, traditions, or social conventions.
As one of Paul’s pastoral epistles advises, “[f]or God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7) (English Standard Version). God provides the capability to take it on faith — that is to say, to change our mental outlook — to cease all useless anxiety. So, we may take it on faith that our existence has value and meaning, and we may take it on faith our death is not to be feared, as it is a transformation not a vanishing. The spirit we are given affords both love that de-fangs death, and power and self-control that quiets anxiety and co-dependency.
Both the gospels of Matthew and Mark contain a variation on the question “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Matthew 16:26, Mark 8:36). It is a question that illustrates that the racking up of personal experiences — valuable as that may be — is not the end of the inquiry. And it is equally to recognize one can forfeit one’s soul not only through narcissism and greed, but also by self-disrespect and despair, denying the value of one’s uniqueness or hiding from experiences out of fear.
The Gospel writers call the believer to both question what we owe ourselves and what we owe to others, a question at the heart of many practical questions about our response to the coronavirus as well. For example, developing the fullness of our souls should include awareness and action in response to the structural and racial inequalities the pandemic reveals and their origins.[4]
This question from the Gospel writers is repeated in the George Harrison song “Within You, Without You.”[5] That song’s lyrics also capture this spiritual insight: life flows on within you (and thus your existence has value) and without you (and thus your death is not eternal oblivion).
The limitations on our earthly life, far from being a call to recklessness, are a call to treasure every moment for the unique creation it is. The limitations on knowing how and why we were thrown into this world, far from being a call to nihilism, are a call to gratitude for each contribution to the gift that is our life. All these mysteries are features that call us to realize both freedom and service are elements of the path most fulfilling to walk.
[1] One survey has the % of those concerned restrictions will end too quickly at just more than double those who think restrictions will go on too long. See Pew Research March 2020, https://pewrsr.ch/2KBf0lJ;
[2]https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-bored-people-quarantine-activities/?
[3]https://abcnews.go.com/Health/young-adults-tweet-yolo-live-engaged-reckless-behavior/story?id=18027279
[4]Jamelle Bouie, “Why Coronavirus Is Killing African-Americans More Than Others” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-racism-african-americans.html
[5] “We were talking about the love that’s gone so cold. And the people who gain the world and lose their soul. They don’t know, they can’t see, are you one of them?” George Harrison, “Within You, Without You,” https://www.thebeatles.com/song/within-you-without-you
