Customer Reviews

Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice

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You've got to hand it to Alan Wolfe. Building on "Whose Keeper" and "One Nation After All," Wolfe's latest book "Moral Freedom" is a tour de force which examines Americans' views of morality in the age of expressive individualism and rampant consumerism. Using a methodology similar to the one he employed in "One Nation After All," Wolfe interviews a random selection of 200 Americans in 6 geogrphical locations ranging from the Castro district in San Francisco to a small midwestern town in Iowa.

Coupling these interviews with a nationally representative telephone survey conducted with CBS, Wolfe gets down to cases fast. Asking eternal moral questions, e.g. what is virtue, what is vice?, Wolfe comes to a startling conclusion: Americans have for the most part jettisoned traditional teachings of religion in favor of a looser, more pragmatic situational ethics. Although some of Wolfe's respondents hew to very specific religious beliefs, even these individuals are loathe to cast the first stone against those who might not agree with their beliefs.

In terms of narrative strategy, Wolfe uses the gay and lesbian population of the Castro district as one end of the moral spectrum, the small town folks in Iowa as the other pole, and finds they have a lot in common with all the other folks in between. He does stop and point out differences along the way, of course, but in the main, finds considerable agreement. The extended quotes from Americans to whom Wolfe and his colleagues talk demonstrates how smart and thoughtful the average American really is -- as Wolfe showed us in "One National After All." But there is something troubling about their articulateness, too. Some of it sounds like "Oprah-speak" -- there's lots of forgiveness, lots of psychologizing mixed in with the strains of good 'ol American pragmatism.

His main thesis is that we have now arrived in a brave new world of "moral freedom" but have not descended into moral anarchy, a fear espoused by moral philosophers from the Greeks onward is a tad overdone. (His short survey of moral philosophers' views on the question is illuminating -- but for his real thinking on these questions look at "Whose Keeper"). It may be that Wolfe is given to seeing the new era of "moral freedom" because of a kind of teleological necessity induced by his earlier works. I mostly buy it -- it makes a good story -- but I'm a little skeptical that the diverse voices he captures here really add up to proving his thesis.

Still, thought-provoking, insightful, using empirical social science in conjunction with his theoretical speculations, with "Moral Freedom" Wolfe has pushed his exploration of morality into a new and invigorating space.

Wolfe provides a litmus test of where we are in America today as we move towards greater moral freedom. He does not provide personal pronouncements of what should be considered right or wrong. Rather, he interviews people from varying social backgrounds to get their views on matters ranging from indulgence of the self to forgiveness of others. Wolfe captures Americans' search for a moral compass in world that has drastically changed from their parents' time. He shows how individuals are trying to cultivate their own sense of morality while trying to balance allegiance to one's self and to society as a whole. In the face of monumental change, American conversation regarding our values has been polarized between two competing, and extreme, dogmas. Wolfe provides a balanced framework to assess where we're headed. "Moral Freedom" is a must read for anyone wishing to find solutions that work for mainstream America.

This would be a great book to read with a book club or a couple friends. The content makes for great conversation. It is also written in a way that makes reading easy.

The subtitle of Alan Wolfe's latest social study is "The Impossible Idea That Defines The Way We Live Now." Professor Wolfe purports to study the idea of moral freedom and its applicability to the brave new world in which we live. This is a highly literate, reasonably well-designed popular study, the general conclusions of which are,insofar as Prof. Wolfe's interviews and surveys extend, no doubt generally accurate. For Prof. Wolfe tells us, in essence, that ours is a secular society in which relativism, materialism, subjectivism, and hedonism are displacing Christian humanism. That will come as no surprise to anyone. These isms, corrupt as they are, have led to a long train of sorrow and suffering: abortion, drug abuse, rampant crime, mass murder, and ethical confusion and chaos. When the idea of the sacred disappears, it will be replaced by a new god, and his reflection can be seen daily in our bathroom mirrors. One's complaint about Prof. Wolfe's study does not concern the question of its accuracy but rather the issue of whether he has even the foggiest notion of what "moral freedom" really is. He defines it as the idea "that individuals should determine for themselves what it means to lead a good and virtuous life" (p. 195),which, of course, means that we should, much as Charles Reich once told us, "build [our] own philosophy and values" (p. 216)and re-define or re-design our own god (because the "old" one just isn't accommodating enough [cf. p. 226]).
But of course this is not moral freedom at all; it is, rather, licentious and libidinous anarchy. Prof. Wolfe's (selected?)interviews of often well-meaning but inarticulate Christians unfortunately do not make the point one finds presented so powerfully in Pope John Paul's 1993 letter "The Splendor of Truth": "People today need to turn to Christ once again in order to receive from Him the answer to their questions about what is good and what is evil" (#8). Moreover, the idea that freedom means the opportunity to "serve one another through love" (Gal 5:13; cf. 1 Pt 2:16) and the notion that freedom is selfless devotion to God (Mt 22:37)--and that therein lies the source of human dignity--Prof. Wolfe and a number of his readers would no doubt perfunctorily dismiss. Consider that one of his interviewees says of Mother Teresa that she was a "[vixen] on wheels" (p. 194). How can one react in the face of such stunted moral "vision" except to feel, not anger, not disgust, but pity? To think, even for a moment, that such a person (the interviewee) has a glimmer of "moral freedom" is to misunderstand both "moral" and "freedom." For the source of "morality" is not to be found in our appetites and urges; and the meaning of "freedom" is not to be found in the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, lust, anger, gluttony, sloth, greed), but in ordering our lives so that we live as we should, in the service not of the one we design to approve the indulgence of our urges, but of the One who designed us (cf. Rom 6:15-23, 12:2) to know His peace (Phil 4:7) in eternal life (1 Jn 5:13).