Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections on Four Decades of American Moral Experience [Hardcover]

Peter Marin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 1995

Evokes Thoreau in his ability...powerful stuff. --L.A. Daily News

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The essays Peter Marin collected for this anthology are noteworthy not only for their diversity but for the very high quality of the writing. Marin takes on subjects such as Vietnam films, the Naropa Institute and its founder Chogyam Trungpa, "The New Narcissism," and the dilemma of how people both hate and help the homeless. Marin's writing is not just thoughtful but it's lively, contemplative while never boring.

From Booklist

Welfare mothers. Vietnam vets. Alienated adolescents. Homeless men. Everywhere Marin looks he sees morally confused people. What's more, their confusion defies easy resolution within the ethics Marin espouses. But even when he cannot reach resolution, the author insists on an astonishing honesty and rigor in his moral reflections. Readers will be surprised, for instance, to find a self-described secularist conceding that secularism has helped create a destructive moral vacuum in modern culture. Likewise unexpected is the argument that deification of the self leads to a kind of "soft fascism." Whether visiting a Buddhist school in Colorado or interviewing Esalen enthusiasts in San Francisco, the author has an eye for ugly realities that refuse to fit within political orthodoxy. It is those realities that readers must attend to if they are to accept his invitation to participate in a renewed conversation about moral values. A provocative look at a topic too often reduced to sound bites. Bryce Christensen

Product Details

• Hardcover: 265 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Press; 1st edition (February 16, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642248
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642242
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,521,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Peter Marin takes a hard look at American Morality., March 13, 1998

By 

Dean Farwood (San Rafael, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections on Four Decades of American Moral Experience (Hardcover)

Published in 1995, Freedom & Its Discontents contains nine essays written between 1969 and 1994. Most were originally published in Harper's, The Nation, and Psychology Today.

The Fiery Vehemence of Youth, (1969) is largely the result of Marin's year as director of Pacific High School in California (1967-68). Marin argues that the American educational system is "geared to another century" and is incapable of adapting to the demands created by the "inner events in adolescents" of the 1960s. Where the goal of education should be "intelligent activity [and] wisdom," traditional schools teach self restraint for the sake of order and produce "immobility, insecurity, [and] an inability to act without institutional blessing." For Marin, the alternative was to make of the world a school. Adolescents "respond more fully and more intelligently when they make direct contact with the community," where they can learn to deal with the "freedom of volition in all its complexity." And, indeed, Marin began his year at Pacific by eliminating the school's few rules (prohibition against drug use and mandatory school construction work) and later intervened when interference by parents or police threatened the freedom of students or staff to conduct school activities in the world at large.

The New Narcissism (1975) examines the "trend in therapy toward a deification of the isolated self." In it comedy and pathos share the page: the "ill-taught and ignorant catechism" of EST; a therapist's claim that "we are all entirely responsible for our destinies;..... the Jews must have wanted to be burned by the Germans." Marin suggests that therapeutic self-obsession is an attempt to legitimize our inclination to "smother the tug of conscience" and to defend against the demands of the world.

Spiritual Obedience (1979) is based on Marin's experience teaching for several weeks at the Buddhist school, Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado. Founded by Chogyam Trungpa, a witty, hard drinking forty-year-old believed by his followers to be the incarnation of an earlier Tibetan master, Naropa attracts artists, intellectuals and academicians as both faculty members and adherents. The center point of the essay is the story of the poet, William Merwin, who came to Naropa to teach and met with violent treatment at the direction of Trungpa and to which none of his followers objected. It is the behavior of the followers and their "immense capacity for passivity and obedience" which Marin explores by relating reason and morality: "It is fashionable these days in intellectual or countercultural circles to decry the loss of mysticism, irrationality, and intuition, and to believe that their return would somehow restore the generosity and stability men have lost. But all this is nonsense. The great rationalist dream of the Enlightenment -- that reason might lead men toward justice and lives of conscience -- has never been proved unworthy or false; it has hardly been tried...........The history of America has in fact had little to do with reason, consisting instead of wave upon wave of zealotry and ideology, and religious excess, generations of superstition and foolish beliefs, and a yearning for salvation and the ceaseless abdication of the stoic virtues necessary to democratic life: independent thought; the acceptance of human weakness; humility in the face of complex truths; the refusal to abjure either choice or responsibility; and the willingness to choose conscience and uncertainty rather than submission and safety."

Two essays, Coming to Terms With Vietnam (1980) and Living in Moral Pain (1981) examine moral questions in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. The insightless Vietnam war films ( for example, Jane Fonda's Coming Home - "simpleminded and reductive in.....pursuit of virtue," Apocalypse Now - "morally stupid") do not acknowledge that actions in the real world can have devastating consequences for others and that the enemy are not symbols but people like ourselves. Marin sees such films as "imperial art.......designed to appeal to the citizens of a powerful but declining empire by allowing us the luxury of 'facing' reality while at the same time denying our role within it. Supposedly challenged, we are secretly soothed." He describes the torment of American Vietnam veterans trying to come to terms with their guilt and instead being pressed by well meaning therapists to participate in an unconscious cover-up by accepting the labels of "impacted grief", "acute combat reaction", or "delayed-stress syndrome" instead of acknowledging that it was the moral choices they had made which contribute substantially to their anguish of horror and guilt.

Easily the most challenging essay for this reader and, I suspect, the author as well, is the final seventy-page Freedom and Its Discontents (1994). In this piece Marin first confesses the unfulfilled promises of the secularist movement of which he is a self-proclaimed member. He was brought up believing that the "sources, ends and means of human meaning and moral value can be derived from and sustained by a purely human frame of reference," that a respect for reason in the interpretation of history, society and human nature is elemental and essential to the freedom which America's founders envisioned, and that "defining good and evil in terms of the will of God [should be viewed with] deep skepticism." He states that the tenets of secularism remain valid but that in America "this presumed force for tolerance, this belief supposedly grounded in reason, this tradition of skepticism, has now become something else altogether, has grown into its near opposite, and it now partakes of precisely the same arrogance, the same irrationality and passion for certainty, the same pretense to unquestioned virtue against which its powers were once arrayed." He goes on: "We bred out of secularism the deep seriousness that once informed it; the senses of tragedy, complexity, and ambiguity which once marked it as a legitimate response to the mindlessness of others have disappeared. And we've picked up along the way the bags and baggage of those mindless others: a passion for totalizing thought; a conviction that we know better than others what is good for them; an increasing reliance on coercion, a readiness to force upon people through law what reason cannot teach them; and a sense of superiority or virtue which makes us contemptuous of others and allows us to sacrifice their freedoms to our ends."

Marin suspects that once Americans achieved freedom we assumed that all the rest would fall into place by some natural and inevitable chain reaction. We would gradually begin to respect each other and ourselves; ethics and morality would flow from our inate, human inclinations; the civil institutions of our democracy would assure the dispensation of fairness and opportunity within a moral framework. But "freedom in itself guarantees nothing; it is merely the beginning of a task; it is itself a question: how shall we live ?" And Marin points out that the current American secular ethic is one in which "duty is conflated with desire, and in which morality is almost entirely identical to will, inclination and ideological preconception.......[that is,] no ethic at all." The closest we've come to establishing a moral framework for individual behavior, according to Marin, is psychology where popular therapies demonstrate our "fuddled attitudes toward responsibility, reciprocity, indebtedness, duty [and] guilt." It is not much to show for all the good intentions of American secularists - a psychology which "has become a scandal and a joke, a form of ritualized ignorance in which almost every human act is shed of genuine moral content." Marin is persuasive; secularists have promised us much but, despite their virtual control of American civil, educational

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Critical Book for Our Time, June 13, 2004

By 

Henry Greenspan "Henry Greenspan, Ph.D." (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections on Four Decades of American Moral Experience (Hardcover)

It is a travesty that this collection of Peter Marin's essays is not easily accessible. They are even more relevant to our current national and international circumstances than when he penned them. Marin goes beyond the one-dimensional discussions of living an ethical life in contemporary America. His discussions of the variety of ways people seek solace, salvation, or simply the capacity to get to sleep at night--and the variety of ways they are unable to do so--are profoundly illuminating. In particular, his essay, "Living in Moral Pain," has more wisdom in its barely twenty pages than I have found almost anywhere. Somewhat like Primo Levi, Marin expands our conventional notions of what it means to live with guilt--beyond whatever one has done or failed to do individually to what it means to live in a world of omnipresent destructiveness about which one feels powerless to do very much at all, and, above all, powerless to do anything alone. This essay is required reading in most of the courses I teach. I wish it were required reading for citizenship.