A hallmark of many religious movements is voluntary servitude to a magical force. This raises the 16th-century French writer and poet Étienne de La Boétie, in his famous text, ‘Discours de la Servitude Volontaire’, the question: why do people obey the tyrant? The voluntary servitude De la Boétie writes about refers to the voluntary surrender of one’s own freedom and voluntary submission to power. According to Dela Boétie, our obedience to power is not enforced but given voluntarily. His simple question is why do people obey, even if it is often against their own interests?
In the 20th century, philosopher Michel Foucault revisits the mystery of voluntary servitude and argues that power is essentially unstable and under constant threat because it is only maintained by our consent. We do not attack power because we are obedient and do everything obediently as we are commanded. But, Foucault writes, forms of complete obedience and servitude were always accompanied by the possibility of disobedience. For instance, the religious heresies of the Middle Ages disrupted the Church’s ruling power by spreading deviant, dissident ideas, doctrines and ways of life. In other words, it is precisely because we freely submit to power that we can undo it. All forms of power are therefore always haunted by the possibility of their own disappearance. Power is impermanent and depends on the essential characteristic of our being: human freedom.
Erich Fromm wrote in ‘On Disobedience’ that human history begins with an act of disobedience-the disobedience of Eve in Paradise-an act that gave us freedom. In bourgeois morality, disobedience is seen as a vice. Fromm countered that if we do not dare to disobey, there is very little hope for the future of humanity. It is not unlikely that our history will end by an act of obedience!
Eve’s disobedience should be celebrated because she freed herself from paradisiacal servitude to live in self-chosen disobedience. There are more examples in the Old Testament of prophets resisting the services the Lord asks of them but finally giving in anyway.
Eve got me thinking that conversations with God about commands to be carried out in obedience could have gone very differently. That different course would probably have been a blessing for humanity. Take the conversation between Abraham and God about the sacrifice of his son Isaac or the conversation between God and Joshua about the conquest of Canaān.
Inspired by Eve, Abraham could have said ‘dear Lord, with all due respect, but this is going too far. I am ready to honour and praise You but my son is sacred to me. It is cruel and unwise to ask this sacrifice as a test of my faith from me and , with all due respect, You should know better. May I remind You of Eve and her disobedience? I will disobey Your insistence and thereby become a role model for all who wish to live in accordance with their destiny as free people and gladly take Your wrath as a risk ‘. Inspired by Eve, Joshua would have said ‘dear Lord, with all due respect, but I’m not starting that. You are asking me to take possession of a land where others already live, defeat them and also not connect me with the survivors. It sounds to me like an order for genocide that will haunt us for centuries to come. With all your wisdom, I would rather get advice on how we can live in peace with the Canaanites. I want to make Canaan an example of peace in the world and in consultation with all concerned.’
The Old Testament stories of Abraham and Joshua could have been written down as contentious conversations that could have saved us from the violent servitude with which we face 2025. Perhaps disobedience would have made room for the possibility of ‘amor mundi’. The book on political theory that Hannah Arendt had wanted to call ‘Amor Mundi’ was never written. We will never know how against the background of her writings on totalitarianism, anti-Semitism and evil – she would have conceived love for the world. It is possible that her pessimism about the state of the world got in the way of loving the world. Yet the first biography written about her has the subtitle ‘For Love of the World’ (Young-Bruehl, 1982). Perhaps Arendt realised that in the midst of the gross evils of the world, we must love the world, Mother Gaia, or else we will let her and ourselves perish. Amor mundi requires the moral strength to love the world. The Roman poet Horace coined the phrase Aude sapere’, meaning “dare to know”. This phrase was embraced by the philosopher Kant and eventually became the motto for the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment. A motto for our time could be ‘dare to love the world’. This means having the moral courage to actively participate in public affairs, to rebel against situations we perceive as unjust and immoral, to accept that our moral universe extends to future generations as well as to newcomers to our societies, such as refugees and migrants. Realising that living always means living with others, we must take responsibility for a world in which we and others can live with dignity, freedom, equality and security. We have to decide how to deal with this moral challenge. But what a shining prospect for a new year that we can love the world in freedom and disobedience.
Cees J. Hamelink, emeritus professor Faculty of Theology, Vrije University Amsterdam.