One of my walking routes on campus is through the Music and Theater Building bridge that borders College Hall. It’s a spot for either econ students or music students, and lucky me this time got to see my good pal Hayden Busby. Hayden was sitting with a friend of his, Luke Ratcliffe. Luke and I have a lot in common. We both are half-Armenian, we both visited the homeland this summer, and have unorthodox (and ironically heterodoxical orthodox) theological views. Oh, and we both listen to progressive metal. It was a wonderful friend meet friend moment that happens all too rarely. And I had another one a couple of nights ago in my mind when I realized that C.S. Lewis and F.A. Hayek have an eerily similar conception of freedom.
William James had a famous articulation of the relationship between God and Man as a chess-game.
“Suppose two men before a chessboard, the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the novice’s king. Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for the infinite mind in which the universe lies.”
(James 1896, 180.)
In this case, God’s power is not diminished and free-will is allowed. The novice player has free will in its moves, but can never defeat the master. This model has a double practical punch. First, it places God in time. He will be making moves in the future that we cannot yet foresee. Second, it gives meaning to each individual move that we make in the here and now. Though, we know who wins the game, our moves now are a part of that tapestry.
The power of this metaphor transferred over to C.S. Lewis. In the second chapter of The Problem of Pain, Lewis is addressing the technical issues of God’s Omnipotence. A standard objection to the Augustinian theodicy (that God has granted us free will thus resolving the problem of evil) is that even if we freely choose evil, God ought to intervene repeatedly to correct all of our errors.
“We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the soundwaves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighborhood would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations.”
(Lewis 1944, 24-25)
If God was to take this course, we would actually lack the freedom he wants to give us. Omnipotence means that God can do anything but impossibilities are not even things in the first place. If the arena of my free action is entirely controlled, I was in fact never free. Free will is not a mere attribute of a soul, but rather a by-product of the interaction between a being and its environment.
Miracles, however, do happen and are an important part of the Christian faith.
“That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him – if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared wherever their position on the board was not to his liking-then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.
(Lewis 1944, 25)
Lewis invokes the same metaphor of a chessboard to get his point across. God can make exceptions to his own rules and preserve the stable environment for free action, but he can’t go all the way.
The Constitution of Liberty (1960) is Hayek’s first comprehensive shot at articulating his political vision. He is not talking about a mystical document, but rather asking “What constitutes Liberty?” It’s very difficult for him to articulate directly what Liberty is. Most of the book is a description of the institutional conditions of liberty. Liberty, simply put for Hayek, is the absence of coercion. He then goes to great lengths to show what coercion is. Coercion (though he squirms on his own definition) is when one person’s will absolutely dominates another. When one man’s mind is made into the tool of another’s. Hayek curiously finds like Lewis that control of the environment is tantamount to control of the other’s actions.
“By ‘coercion’ we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another…Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped by the will of another. It presupposes the existence of a known sphere in which the circumstances cannot be so shaped by another person as to leave one only that choice prescribed by the other.”
(Hayek 1960, 71)
In more political language, one may have freedom of thought, and freedom of desire, but if they have no freedom of property, their previous freedoms are meaningless. Whoever controls the means controls the actual ends. As Hayek took lengths to point out in The Road to Serfdom, one cannot be liberal in their politics, but be socialist in their economics.
Unfortunately, coercion is sometimes necessary to prevent coercion. To preserve a sphere of freedom, the defensive coercion must be institutionalized in rules which are generally fixed and announced beforehand. The realm of government action may include coercion, but it must be in a fixed rule. Thus, the executors of government power have little control over its actual scope.
“Coercion according to known rules, which is generally the result of circumstances in which the person to be coerced has placed himself, then becomes an instrument assisting the individuals in the pursuit of their own ends and not a means to be used for the ends of others.”
(Hayek 1960, 72)
I hope the similarity is not lost. Government, like God, has the power to manipulate the environment, though in a much more limited sense. In both cases, God to man and government to citizen, individuals are only free if the rules instituted above are generally untampered with. They are “fixed and announced beforehand”. The actor’s free constructions can only be erected on stable ground. The expectation that a certain zone will not be tampered with is an important facet of the willingness to build anything out of it in the first place.
Hayek stresses in his first chapter, that he is not speaking about metaphysical but simply personal liberty. I’d like to push against him on this. The Bible can be read as a social story between God and his creation. If we are in a relationship with a personal God, then metaphysical liberty is just a form of personal liberty that Hayek articulates. Both God and government, if they are to offer us freedom (which God does and government can), establish the rules by which they operate and only rarely deviate. Churches must operate in the same way so that parishioners are not the theological slaves of their priests. There’s a lot more to unpack here in church history and economics of religion that I hope to work on in the future.
Appendix: Tolkien’s Theodicy
In the 2nd chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion titled Of Aulë and Yavanna, we find a wonderful example of the chess-playing God at work. Eru had created the world, and the Valar (the pantheon of archangels/gods) were hard at work preparing it for the coming of the Firstborn Children of Illúvatar, the elves. Aulë, Valar of stone, became impatient with the dumbness of the world, and he made the first dwarves and hid them under a mountain. Eru, in a very Garden of Eden fashion, sees under the mountain and rebukes Aulë for his impatience. The elves are the intended firstborn, and the dwarves are a deviation from Eru’s plan. Eru commands Aule to destroy his own creation with his hammer, but at the last moment stays his hand (in a very Abraham and Isaac fashion).
Eru, though displeased with Aulë’s disobedience, sees that the dwarves are good handiwork and permits Aulë to keep them as long as they stay asleep until the elves awaken. Yavanna, Aulë’s wife and Valaress of Arda’s flora and fauna, become worried at the prospect of the dwarves. Dwarves, when they awaken will have no affinity for the trees, but they will need lumber for their mining operations. To counter this propensity in the dwarves, Yavanna creates the ents as shepherds of the trees.
Neither the dwarves, nor the ents, were necessarily part of Eru’s design, but he allows his creation the ability to go in that direction. Regardless, every fixed element of his plan still goes as follows. The elves are still his firstborn children to experience the world, and the rest of Arda’s history unfolds despite several new tensions that arise.