Milbank and Koyzis Revisited

Permit me to connect what I take to be the dots between recent posts on John Milbank and by David T. Koyzis . For fun, you can also take a look at this post by Koyzis on another site.

We have made an idol of choice, regarding it as the logical concomitant of our “natural” freedom. But freedom so conceived is really anti-natural, for it demands that we do away with all the barriers and constraints that come from nature (and, I might add, nature’s creator). The only way to overcome nature and hence to facilitate choice is to acquire power, lots of it. Choice requires empowerment, in other words. But what is truly empowered in this process is not the human being, but the organization (that is, the government) that purports to empower him or her. C.S. Lewis, by the way, saw this in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength .

Our libertarians, so infatuated with choice, are really infatuated with what facilitates or empowers that choice—that is, with government.

The antidote is to recognize what we are made for, about which our bodies (created by the creator) give us some very strong hints. We can through very great efforts seem to overcome the limits of our bodies (in medicine, we sometimes call that “playing God”), but that doesn’t free us so much as it makes us dependent, not on the partners for whom we were made, but on the Leviathan that offers us choices.

The fundamental issue here is not anyone’s sexual orientation; it’s the assumption that choice, pleasure, and self -fulfillment are our be-all and end-all, an assumption that many—nay, all—of us sinners share.