And the wisdom to know the difference? Freedom, control and the sociology of religion - 2002 Presidential Address

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Eileen Barker

Resting on an assumption diametrically opposed to that underlying the metaphor of brainwashing is the belief we can achieve total freedom. This is what the Church of Scientology offers its practitioners, the proposition being that we can, through the techniques of Dianetics and pursuing the truths revealed by L. Ron Hubbard, reach such a state (Wallis 1976).

   Scientology offers humanity freedom from this needless suffering,
   both now and for all future time. By following the path outlined
   in the scripture of the Scientology religion, the thetan (9) can
   progress through higher and higher levels of spiritual awareness
   and return to his native state and thereby achieve complete
   spiritual freedom. Now, in this lifetime complete spiritual
   freedom can be achieved.

   The primary path to this spiritual freedom is through "auditing,"
   one of the two central religious practices of the Scientology
   theology. With this freedom comes release from the eternal cycle of
   birth and death and full awareness, memory and ability independent
   of the flesh. And with it comes a spiritual being who is "knowing
   and willing cause [sic] over life, thought, matter, energy, space
   and time." (Hubbard 1998:562)

But while Scientology claims that it differs from the Jewish and Christian traditions in that its concept of salvation is much more immediate, those of us who have yet to encounter a "fully operating thetan" may suspect, as doubting Thomases, that (at least epistemologically) the offer of total freedom in this life is not all that different from the offer of salvation in the next one. Neither seems likely to be put to the test in the immediate future. For that reason, at least until we are proved wrong, it seems more helpful to take the pragmatic approach of considering freedom as something that will be more or less present--rather than totally present or totally absent. And this now takes us back to the question: What reduces and what increases freedom?

Laws, Regularities and Degrees of Modifiability

It has often been pointed out that knowledge of the ways in which we are not free can itself give us a kind of freedom--the serenity to accept the things we cannot change--or, more crudely, the freedom not to bang our heads against a brick wall. The natural sciences describe laws that clearly impose well nigh insuperable limits on our freedom. We are bound by our human bodies; we cannot escape the passage of time; we cannot deny the pull of gravity; we cannot live without food and water. Freedom from such restrictions would take us beyond this world as most of us know it--although some religions such as Shamanism teach this is not impossible, and even non-believers have reported out of body experiences.

So far as the laws of nature are concerned, however, there is general agreement in normal scientific discourse that we cannot change them. Their existence is independent of our existence. None the less, through our knowledge and understanding of these laws, we can find a way around them; it is through our use of the laws that we can overcome some of the constraints that they have imposed on us and give ourselves new freedoms. It is insofar as we understand the functioning of gravity that we can escape the earth's atmosphere and get to the moon; it is insofar as we understand how cancer "works" that we can hope to cure the disease.