Freedom Is Wild - Introduction

A Serialized Memoir of Life and Death

9/27/2023

Years after I wrote the introduction that starts below the break, I happened across a interview with Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple) on the Triggernometry podcast. One of the interviewers asked Dr. Daniels what he considered to be the “root cause of crime”. Dr. Daniels replied, “The root cause of crime is the decision to commit it.”

I was not surprised by the shrewdness of his answer, but it should not go unremarked that the underlying premise of his response runs completely counter to what Carl Trueman calls the “social imaginary” of modern Western culture. The psycho-therapeutic explanatory narrative that dominates the minds of moderns stands in significant contrast to Daniels’ presumption of human volition.

In the West, the importance of moral accountability is minimized by the simple expedient of insisting that we ourselves are not actually capable of making moral choices. Everything we do, we are indoctrinated to believe, is a manifestation of how we have been programmed by our environment, our genetics, or the fantasies in which we indulge. By framing things this way, none of our actions can be considered reflective of a true moral choice for which we should be held completely responsible.

Daniels’ answer presupposes the primacy of human agency, that human beings have been given what Blaise Pascal has called “the dignity of causality”. Human actions are, therefore, the outcome of volitional decisions. Justice and compassion requires us, then, to treat other people as fully human, which necessarily means that they are accountable for their own actions.

Even as I am typing this, social media is lit up with videos of organized looting taking place in Philadelphia. The videos, in my feed at least, are mostly accompanied by expressions of outrage at the actions of the looters. But if you read down into the comments, you will find a subterranean discussion taking place seeking explanation for just how it was that the looters got to the point where they could behave in such an uncivilized (and unjust) way. On one side of the argument are those who energetically regurgitate the conventional wisdom that the looters are merely the product of their environment and, well, it’s complicated. Are the looters mere beasts who have been conditioned to behave this way? Or have they embraced a particular point of view and chosen to act consistently with what they thus believe about themselves and the world they live in? Are they fully human, possessing true moral agency and the associated accountability? Or are they essentially bestial, mere slaves to some internal impetus programmed into them by their circumstance?

There is even a very real connection between these ideas and the current artificial intelligence zeitgeist. The presupposition held by many AI practitioners is that the intellect - the human mind itself - is essentially computational. Or, to put it another way, they presuppose that general artificial intelligence is possible because human beings themselves are merely mechanistic and thus programmable.

We have all been marinating in these ideas for a long time now.

Much of what you are going to read in the following chapters is a chronicle of how our odyssey with our late daughter utterly transformed the way we came to understand her pathological choices. The pages that follow are an effort to record and explain what we have come to believe. But also how paralyzing and debilitating a psycho-therapeutic anthropology is when trying to help someone who is destroying herself. Out of utter desperation, because what we actually observed and what she actually said ran so completely counter to predominant ideas about environmental conditioning, we were driven to reconsider our entire understanding of what we were dealing with. We found that a biblical anthropology, one rooted in the way human beings are described in the biblical text, offered far more explanatory power regarding what we saw in our daughter and in ourselves, than any other understanding of why people behave the way they do.

---

Introduction

As I pulled to a stop behind the police car, the flashing lights on its roof played havoc with my night vision. The dark, rainy night that is so common in the Pacific Northwest only contributed to the heaviness I already felt. Losing a child to a self-destructive life is really a slow-motion version of losing a young child in a crowded place full of strangers. A troubled child’s self-destruction may play out over a longer period time, but the panic and sense of dread are just as overwhelming.

Nearly two hours earlier, I had been walking toward the bus stop from my office in downtown Seattle when my cell phone rang. When I answered, all I could hear at first was incoherent and angry shouting. Both male and female voices could be heard arguing. After a moment, a man’s voice came on the phone to warn me that I’d better come get my daughter before she killed herself.

At the time I received this phone call, I was 30 miles from where I knew my 18-year-old daughter was living with her “boyfriend”. And I also knew, at rush hour, it would be too late to intervene by the time I arrived. So I called my wife, told her about the call, and we decided to notify the police.

By the time I pulled to a stop behind the police car that night, it had been nearly 2 hours since I had received that terrible call. The “boyfriend” stood on the porch, in handcuffs, being questioned by the police. As I opened my door and began walking toward the police car in front of me, one of the officers came over to meet me and asked “Are you the dad?”  I nodded as the officer pointed toward the police car and said “She’s in the car”. The officer said they had put her in there to protect her while they questioned the man on the porch. Squinting, I peered through the window, the lights still flashing as the rain started falling harder. She was lying there, in a fetal position on the backseat of the police car, sobbing. The telltale signs of on-going abuse were all too apparent. The swollen lip. The trickle of blood. The prominent and growing lump on the back of her head.

And as I stood there on that dark, drizzly, miserable night, I was struck once again by the sheer unexpectedness of being in a place and circumstance like this. It still seemed so impossible. How had we ended up here? What had happened in our lives to cause our daughter to make the self-destructive choices she had been making for the past 2 years? How had we failed to protect her? Why had she chosen drugs and abuse at the hands of her “boyfriend” over the love and protection of her own home? When had she abandoned her faith? Why had she abandoned her faith?

Sometimes, just the improbability of it seemed overwhelming. Always, in every way, the grief and sorrow we felt over the loss and suffering of our daughter was intense. To be honest, some days it threatened to swamp us entirely. My wife and I talked openly about this. The emotional distress was so intense it was mentally paralyzing – even physically painful. There were many days where it was all we could do to simply put one foot in front of another. 

I gathered her up from the back of the police car, got her into my pickup, and headed to the hospital. She was distraught and beside herself and there were a few moments, as we raced down the highway, that I was afraid she was going to leap from the car.

After the doctors and nurses checked her over and determined that there was no lasting physical damage, a social worker appeared in the room and asked me to leave. She wanted to question Mary, outside my presence, on the possibility that I myself was the source of her injuries.

I sat in the waiting area and after 20 minutes or so the social worker sought me out. She sat down in a chair across from me, rubbed her forehead, and emitted a long sigh. That tired sigh may be one of the most vivid memories I have of that night.

“You should prepare yourself for the possibility that it is going to be quite a while before your daughter comes around,” she said. She spoke as though she had seen this before.

Sure enough, within 24 hours of leaving the hospital Mary was back with the abusive “boyfriend” and there was no persuading her otherwise.

Here is one of the first things we learned in our life with our daughter: grief really can feel like drowning.

If you, reader, are a person of faith who has lost a child to a life of dissipation and waste, you know what I’m talking about. If you have lain awake at night, agonizing over what you could do or say to help your child, you know what I’m talking about. If you have exhausted all of your creativity and all of your financial resources trying to save your wayward child, then you know what I’m talking about.

In the following pages I will share some thoughts about our experience, what we’ve learned, and how we came to find a coherent and, we believe, biblical understanding of what we were going through.

Our experience challenged many of our fundamental assumptions about parenting and, ultimately, changed our perspective about what it means to have a biblical worldview. We found that many of the traditional assumptions we held offered neither answers nor understanding, but only served to increase the pain and disorientation as we fought our way through the storm of suffering. Coming to grips with hard truths about ourselves, our children, and the way of the world was difficult. Through our suffering, and the suffering of our daughter, we learned that there were important areas of understanding where we harbored misconceptions and even illusions. And those illusions, we came to realize, were not unique to us.

Chapter 1 is here.