From his book ‘Making Sense of God’ Timothy Keller shared:
The contemporary concept of freedom, which we could call absolute individual autonomy, is not only unworkable. It is also unfair because it denies what we owe others.
The internet is filled with claims like “I am responsible only to myself. No one has the right to tell me how to live.” These are always stated in ex cathedra, as if they were self-evident truths. But they would be true only if no one had ever sacrificially invested in you, or even if you were now self-sufficient. Neither of those is the case. If we read other people—and we do—then there is some shared responsibility for and to others, and we don’t really belong only to ourselves.
Dr. Atul Gawande, in being mortal, writes: “There are different concepts of autonomy. One autonomy as free action, living completely independently, free of coercion and limitation. This kind of freedom is a common battle cry in our culture. But it is . . . a fantasy.” It is an illusion that can be temporarily supported, he argues, when we are young and healthy adults. But as children we are dependent on the care of others, when we get old we will begin again. If we become injured or sick, that can happen now. “Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances beyond our control.”16
As we saw in the movie Calvary, the priest’s daughter attempted suicide and justified it by claiming autonomy: “I belong to myself and not to anybody else.” He responds, “True . . . false,” because her answer is unjust. “It’s a tired old argument, I suppose,” he says quietly, “but what about those you leave behind?”17 Though western people like to think of themselves as mainly the product of their own decisions and choices, such is not the case. You are the product of a family and a community of people who invested massive amounts of time, industry and love in you, much of it happening before you could speak and before you can now remember. To commit suicide, the priest rightly says is to strike a blow and inflict a pain on many that will never be healed. The question is, What right have you to darken their lives permanently?
Here, then, we see a truth that is hard to deny but does not fit well with the contemporary definition of individual freedom and autonomy. We unavoidably, to some degree, belong to one another, “No man is an island. . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (New York, N.Y., 1966) 103-104
