Sohrab Ahmari wants you to rethink freedom

Writer Sohrab Ahmari left the repression in his home country of Iran to find freedom in an icon of the West – the United States. But in his own telling, his new home revealed how excessive freedom can enslave rather than liberate.

Ahmari's new book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos," seeks to reorient Americans' interest in freedom and direct them toward what he sees as its proper ends. More specifically, it's a guide for his young son, Maximilian, who was born into a society Ahmari fears has lost its way. Ahmari currently works as the opinion editor for the New York Post.

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Throughout his book, Ahmari attempts to show how tradition has been promoted by figures as different as St. Augustine of Hippo and feminist Andrea Dworkin. In this interview from April, Ahmari discusses the relationship between restraint and freedom, where he thinks the West has deviated from proper understandings of human nature, and how it can restore a traditional sense of liberty.

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

There is one line that you had in your column "Against David Frenchism" that I think sums up what the main issue is that we’re dealing with in terms of these ideas about freedom. You say autonomy-maximizing liberalism is normative in its own twisted way. Can you elaborate on that and how you think we should view freedom?

What I try to get at in the book is that, although the book obviously presents a capital-T tradition, but in fact, if you look, I present the wisdom of many traditions. About a third of the book's characters are Catholic … you have Protestants, you have Confucius, who is completely outside that whole matrix, you have traditional Jews. People would say, well, that's many traditions, but I would say if there’s one thing that unites them all, [it] is the question of freedom and how we define it -- and the difference between modern and ancient liberty … the modern account of liberty is having the maximum amount of choice between different contraries. So, I am free because when I go to lunch, I could get a burger, or I could get chicken, or I could get pizza or whatever. 

So, you are free to the extent that you can maximize your choices. The more unrestricted you are, the freer you are. That's a very recent innovation in the whole spiritual and intellectual history of human kind. For most civilizations, across most of history ... freedom wasn’t to be able to just choose and have maximal freedom to choose. To be free was to master yourself -- if you can restrain yourself, if you can obtain a life of virtue, then you've overcome the first tyrant that you face, which is your own base appetites and desires. And therefore, if you have --  go to the level of a political community -- if you had a people who have that kind of self- mastery then you’d have a people who also would be able to govern itself. So, self-government is a term we often use in modern discourse, but no one knows what it really means. It doesn't just mean that you don't have a tyrant over you. It also means that you've governed yourself. 

In this book, which is a book I've written for my son, in each chapter -- even though they deal with very different topics and the figures profiled range from a Hasidic rabbi to a Chinese sage, [and] Andrea Dworkin. But in each of those cases, what you see is the playing out of the same paradox, which is something that appears in tradition as a restriction-- or that seems like an imposition on your freedom -- actually turns out to be a source of freedom. Getting rid of the restriction doesn’t actually make you free, it imprisons you -- whether that means it imprisons you to your own appetites, or it imprisons you because it makes your social life more chaotic. So, for example, getting rid of Sabbath restrictions. In this country’s Protestant tradition, we had Sabbatarianism, which is the idea that we should set aside a day of rest and the law should recognize that. We were told getting rid of Sabbath would liberate us. You can shop, you can work, etc. But in practice, ordinary people lost a day to just be with themselves, be with their families, be with their God. So, what appeared like this promise of freedom turned out to be pretty illusive.

That's really the core of the book: What is freedom? As a father, as a husband, as a man of faith, I've come to realize that the ancient idea of freedom, which is more about self-government, accepting limits, and accepting restraints was more liberating than the idea of having maximum choice. 

You talk about how Gnosticism is starting to resurface. It seems as though there’s some kind of relationship where we’re seeking to exit our bodies or exit the restraints of the physical world, and that comes along with this different idea of freedom. 

The theme of the book is that the things that seem to bind you and limit you are actually what make you who you truly are. They make you fully human. And the attempt to get rid of them -- although they look like liberation -- in practice, it works out in a different way. In some ways, the desire to transcend these limits is much older than we think. The classical gnostic religions emerged roughly in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East and North Africa and reached their peak in late antiquity -- maybe 200-300 years after Christ. 

They are very different religions, very diverse, but one thing they all share is this suspicion of the bodily and material -- the idea that the body that you’re born into is a kind of prison, that your self is purely spirit and it doesn’t belong to this world. And so, the goal of all these gnostic religions was to separate the true self, which was non-bodily, from the body, which was this kind of fleshly prison.

Historic Christianity never went in that direction. Christianity -- as it actually developed in history -- always insisted that the soul and the body were part of this dynamic union. So, when Christ redeems mankind, He redeems mankind body and soul. This is reflected in the fact that He himself is a fully incarnate God. He is a God who has a human body, was born to term in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and she herself was assumed into heaven [in bodily form]. So through Mary and Jesus, mankind have a bodily claim on heaven, not just a spiritual one. Gnostic religions rejected that. They would say the body is horrible. It has these horrible temptations, it’s filthy. 

The Church always resisted these gnostic temptations. But now we see them coming back -- not in the form of the old gnostic religions, but a kind of Gnosticism that you see at work in the idea of transhumanism -- these movements that say what is truly human about us is the mind. It’s unfortunate that they think that the mind happens to be tethered to this fleshly apparatus. So, if we can somehow extract the mind and just become purely mental beings, that’s the next stage of human evolution. That’s a kind of Gnosticism.

Another one is transgenderism -- the idea that your gendered self is something that is in opposition to the body that you were born with. That you have this gender identity that is at war with the body you received from nature. In all of these cases, you see the Gnostic impulse. So, why is that problematic? Because if you think of the body as something that’s this alien, unnecessary thing, then you think there’s no responsibility in how you should treat it. If something doesn’t have a legible nature … you can do whatever you want with your body, and you can do whatever you want with your inherited relationships, because your mother and father are also a kind of encumbrance. So, who cares what your family thinks? Who cares what your relationships with others are? Because you don't even belong to this world. So, Gnosticism, in both its ancient and modern variety, are both an invitation to irresponsibility.

What do you think is driving this? It seems as though modernist materialism might have led to an excessive focus on the physical, and now there’s a rebound?

A worldview that says that you only have the material, you only have the bodily, doesn’t account for the fact that obviously, we’re spiritual beings and we have spiritual bodies. An excessive reaction to that could be a desire to just transcend the material altogether, but that’s equally problematic. What traditional Judeo-Christianity had always emphasized is this dynamic union between soul and body or spirit and matter -- not a radical opposition between them such that you get Gnosticism. 

There seems to be a suspicion that these temptations towards sexual excess that are related to Gnosticism are driven out of a desire for pleasure ... It could be driven out of a cynicism and despair that develops from overuse of your body. 

The other one is a desire to overcome death … if I can make my body subject to what I think it should truly be, as opposed to what it actually is … My body tells me I’m this kind of a creature, but I'm going to mentally override it. I’m going to use surgery and all sorts of modern technological developments to force my body to submit to what I want. Then, maybe I can also overcome death. All the limitations in what it means to be human, what it means to receive a body from nature can be overcome through my sheer will.

What can society do? Once you have all of this freedom, it's very hard to go back.

I wouldn't be so hopeless. First of all, I would argue that a lot of people sense that we’re somehow deeply unhappy. And not everyone can quite put their finger on it, or they can’t quite diagnose it but they sense that something’s gone wrong with the West … In an obvious sense, you see this … the fact that precisely the idea of maximal economic autonomy for corporations – which is something that people in my movement, the conservative movement, used to champion and still champion -- has been used to silence conservatives. 

The society that maximizes autonomy, has become deeply censorious. In my milieu -- I live in Manhattan -- I know so many people who sense that something is wrong with certain things, but you physically can tell that they don’t dare say it because if they do, they'll somehow get in trouble. To me, that's an opening. Maybe they can't give a political expression, but they just sense that something’s gone wrong. There’s something very decent about Western civilization, which is why I'm an immigrant here, and I have such gratitude as an immigrant of this society. But something's gone wrong, and it's not fulfilling its own promise in some ways … The radical dissatisfaction itself can be a beginning of an awakening of some sort. 

One of the more interesting parts of your book is Andrea Dworkin. Like you said, there is common ground to establish, and out of the sexual revolution, you somehow get a feminist who is more morally puritanical and pushing for more restrictions on sex. How do you think that Christians can work with feminists to create a better society?

She's a creature of the sexual revolution who looks around and says no, this is pretty abusive and unfulfilling ... Even men are finding hookup culture unsatisfying, because you’re not just an animal … Human beings are relational beings. They don't want to just hook up. They want to love. A hookup is not a true invitation to love. It's the opposite. It's kind of throwing away the other person. 

The point is that when Christians look at the #MeToo headlines -- and there are some things that are really unjust about the #MeToo movement -- the idea that men who are accused, even if their procedural rights are abridged, all men have to pay for the wrongdoings of a few. Obviously, we should reject that. But there are aspects of it where you think, "no, there's no reason for people of faith to uphold the sexual consensus of 1960." Sometimes, you see that among political conservatives. Just because #MeToo is perceived to be the movement of the left, therefore, it just means that we should weirdly embrace every kind of degeneracy that was thrown out by the sexual revolution -- just to own the left or something. That would be a mistake. 

Christians, but also other people of faith, should go to people who are carrying on the mantle of an Andrea Dworkin and say, look, Christianity and traditional religion had a way of trying to regulate this stuff. Not all sexuality is bad but when sexuality is unbound from the purposes for which is meant for -- the natural law says it’s for nurturing families and procreating the next generation -- that’s when you get Harvey Weinstein, that’s when you get Jeffrey Epstein … So, let's dialogue. I think there is a dialogue possible. 

It sounds unlikely but I happen to know that there is a kind of dialogue ongoing between Christian feminists and -- often they’re called TERFs -- Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists -- but they both start from the point of view that femininity is an embodied thing, so you can't just will yourself into being a woman. There's a bodily element to it. And that the sexual consensus that came out of the 1960s just empowered [bad] men. There’s no reason for Christians to defend it.

Can you talk about the concept of libido dominandi? It seems as if Augustine and Andrea Dworkin are on the same page in some sense. Because they think it’s so hard to regulate that impulse, it seems like it would be hard for Christians to convince feminists to follow a more conservative order.

Libido dominandi is lust for domination. Augustine, in "City of God," diagnoses what is wrong in pagan Rome -- saying you Romans are in some ways admirable people. You’ve tried to subdue your base instincts and animal drives to your rational selves. You've tried to build a republic based on laws. So why has that gone wrong? It’s because ultimately, your lust for domination was behind even your highest aspirations. The lust for domination undid even the Romans' greatest aspirations, and therefore, in order for you to really have a good society, a good republic, you need your souls to rule over your bodies. 

That also means that the spiritual realm should rule over the temporal realm, that the spiritual authority should oversee your city as well. Again, it's the idea of self-government -- the rule of the soul over the body. The rule of spirit over matter. So, this is the diagnosis of Rome at the 10,000-foot level.

But then [Augustine] goes to the level of the individual bedroom, and there’s a famous passage where he points out how at the first night of a wedding, the Roman groom has to have the help of all these polytheistic gods in order to do his business on the first night, in the marital bed. The woman is really terrified and all of the gods have to hold her down. The point he’s trying to make there is that sex is not a private affair. What made that scene uncomfortable -- which is the man’s dominating lust of meeting a woman not as a fellow human being, with whom he wanted to unite his soul, but just as an object to be dominated -- was mirrored in a larger structure of Rome’s imperial ideology [and] what made Rome so violent. 

The lesson of a scene like that for a Dworkin, or for a modern, is that we have the same thing. We think of sex as this private thing that happens, and it’s all good fun, and it doesn’t really have any larger meaning. But Dworkin and Augustine say no, you can’t build a society if its foundational unit is unbound lust. You might say that you have self-government in the halls of your Congress and in your civic institutions, but in fact, 100 million men daily visit Pornhub.com and watch images of horrific exploitation. There is a sort of hypocrisy there. You don’t have self-government at the level of the individual soul … That disconnect ripples out … This is where we do reasonable, rational government. Over there is where we watch horrible porn. All of this should sort of discomfit us a little bit -- that Dworkin was in some weird way on same page as a Catholic saint.

You always talk about the excesses of liberalism and what they’ve led to -- in your latest op-ed, you were talking about how there are certain classical liberals who will say, ‘Well, that’s not my form of liberalism.’ You say that that’s almost like Trotskyites during the Russian Revolution. But the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution -- those types of transitions or flip-flops between ideology -- that happened so quickly ... Maybe there’s something about the American revolution that’s significantly different and prevents that?

There’s absolutely a difference. There’s something in the American tradition that makes it so that our revolution was not the revolution of guillotines followed by absolute horrific terror - setting aside the question of African Americans in slavery … If you look at liberal ideology across different settings -- Canada, the United States, France -- it’s true they developed at a different pace and the changes took different shapes. 

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But it's interesting that at the end of the day, they all end up legalizing the murder of the unborn child. It all ends up legalizing euthanasia, it ends up with the idea that gender is a malleable thing that you can subject to your human will, and all the excesses that we talk about. So, although I'm willing to say that there's something in the American founding that didn't lead into the horrors of post-revolutionary France, at end of the day, an ideology that says the goal of man is to be autonomous, to have maximum choice, to dominate nature as opposed to seeing himself as part of nature -- as a part of a whole that normatively governs him for being a part of the whole. At the end of the day, it kind of goes in the same direction. I’ve kind of lost patience with people who are like, well, this is all a distortion … It's like well, everywhere it played out, it goes in the same direction.

There are absolutely strains in the American soul that resist this tendency of abstract liberalism to go in this direction ... They're not necessarily in the founding documents but they inform the founding documents. This country had a deeply, deeply Protestant strain. I am Catholic and yet I would do everything I could as a Catholic to strengthen those elements … The United States had a really strong Sabbatarian element. When Americans watched in the late 1790s as the French Revolution descended into absolute horrors, the president of Yale ... gave a sermon in which he said that ... we have to protect our religion. Our religiosity is our bulwark against the kinds of things that are happening in France. And specifically, he said our Sabbath laws and maintaining our Sabbath is what will prevent us from going down this route. I thought that was really, really wise and it shows you that the American founding is complicated, and there are resources in our national tradition that can be mined in today's atmosphere.