Let my people go: Ancient Egyptian prison scenePassover is a time to commemorate our freedom, but as New York Magazine points out, perhaps no one understands the meaning of the holiday more than the Jewish inmates at Otisville Prison. The Jewish prisoners, who number about 60, hold a yearly Seder at the medium-security facility in upstate New York. Unlike the ancient Israelites, who were enslaved by Pharaoh against their will, the inmates at Otisville are mostly white collar criminals. Still, prison chaplain Gary Friedman argues that the Seder allows the men to celebrate freedom, at least in the metaphorical sense. “The Haggadah has a line that reads ‘Tonight we are all free men,’ and for the duration of the Seder, they are.”

The Kissers: John Currin's paintings spark controversy The artist John Currin is striving to bring sexy back, and he believes that the future of civilization depends on it.

The New Yorker profiled the artist's career last week, focusing on his recent pornography-inspired paintings. (A small portion of the article with artwork is online.)

Through "painting porn," Currin says that he seeks to challenge liberal, western societies that have disavowed -- and refused to defend -- artists who critique and attack puritanical, anti-sex ideologies, or offend the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists. His interest was piqued by the controversy over cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers:

"That the Times decided it was not going to show the cartoons-O.K., they're terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that those thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam-all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That's when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing-not the Iraq war but the larger struggle." ... Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture...

Will Currin succeed in politicizing porn? Will his reaction-provoking paintings, such as "The Danes" and "Women of Franklin Street" inspire liberal societies to rise up against the forces of violent religiosity?

Maybe, but Currin fails to address an ominous paradox: He wants to spark resistance to censorship, but he's using a medium that has lost its ability to shock anyone. The pornography industry is suffering at the creatively destructive hands of the market. Sex has been sold, sold and sold. Consumers are past the point of saturation. The corporate extensions of the biz are in crisis due to Internet piracy and amateur video. High definition is "ruining" the "quality" of porn because every blemish becomes magnified, reducing those perfect bodies to flawed flesh with wrinkles and surgical scars.

Even the definition of pornography has been lost. The hyper-publicized paparazzi trophies of 2007 -- crotch-shots of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan -- blurred the line between pornography and celebrity gossip-mongering.

The label "pornographic" no longer elicits major outrage. The majority of our population would no longer hold book burnings to purify the world of sinful material. Instead pornography simply bores us.

Unless the mullahs of London and Amsterdam subscribe to the New Yorker or take a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery, Currin's jabs at sexually repressed extremists might very well go unnoticed. (Will the same newspapers that were afraid to run the Mohammed cartoons decide to spotlight Currin's provocations?)

Nevertheless, Currin's intermingling of Hustlerian voyeurism with "Mannerist compositions echoing Old Masters from Baldung to Parmigianino" makes his work striking. Even if no political mobilization arises, Currin's "elegy to liberal culture" is a solace for those who are disgusted with flaccid western complacency.

Related: Arabs Hot For Israeli Porn  

Steve Chapman has a nice piece at Reason dissecting the flagrant and transparent hypocrisy of Mitt Romney’s call to religious voters to put aside their misgivings about his creed in order to unite behind him in a popular front against godless heathens.

Chapman devotes some space to debunking Romney’s preposterous claim that “[f]reedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” writing

Romney's theory that faith is essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world. Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often sponsored,
oppression in Europe and elsewhere.

Which is all quite right, and explodes Romney’s assertion in the context in which almost everybody has interpreted it. I want to make a small analytic point, though, that there is a tradition of deploying, with terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, a concept or concepts that very few of us would associate with freedom or liberty, but which makes the “freedom requires religion” claim a conceptual truth. For example, you can see in Kant’s claim that “we assume that we are free so that we may think of ourselves as subject to moral laws," and that we "think of ourselves as subject to moral laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of the will,” the potential move to a position that action predicated on rejecting the concept of morality Kant proffers (which is a deduction from the nature of practical reason) also rejects the concept of freedom, “an idea of reason whose objective reality is in itself questionable.”

The upshot would be that an irrational actor cannot be said to be free --- so it is only by accepting the dictates of morality, which may include God on some pictures of morality, that one can be free. (Not that this is necessarily Kant’s position, but it is a direction one could go, and some people have gone; I read Hegel as advancing a view very close to that one, for example.)

This treatment of freedom becomes a bit easier to grasp, and looks all the more idiosyncratic, when viewed on a global and political, rather than individual scale. Kant possibly, and Rousseau definitely, promise a republic of free citizens --- whose freedom consists in assenting to a “general will,” which only reflects their preferences if their preferences reflect the structures of rationality, as construed by Kant and Rousseau. As Julian Sanchez puts it:

What this means in practice, of course, is that the legislator can simply do whatever he thinks is best, and still claim to be following "the will of the people" in some suitably abstract, hypothetical sense. Recall this the next time some pol or flack confidently declares what "the American People" want, demand, value, or won't stand for. There's a fair chance they're referring to the ideal Platonic "American People" in their head—a population that, miraculously, seems always to hold the same views as the speaker.

The parallel to this line of thinking, which incorporates religion explicitly, and therefore touches on the contents of Romney’s speech directly, is the quasi-tradition within Catholic philosophy --- which is essentially a Talmudic approach to reading Aquinas, who in turn was recapitulating Aristotle for a Christian audience, and several other church fathers --- according to which human freedom is parasitic on man’s telos, such that action deviating from that telos cannot be said to be free. And what is man’s telos? Well, medieval philosophy isn’t my specialty, but from what I know it involves being a sincere and devout member in good standing of the Roman Catholic Church.

You can see this view reflected in the premium placed on a religious concept of free will in Catholic teaching, juxtaposed with denunciations of liberal freedom and freedom of choice as we understand them, from Cardinal Ratzinger inveighing against the “liberal-radical ideology of individualistic rationalistic hedonistic character,” to Daniel P. Moloney’s suggestion that “the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally.” [Ed note: Moloney should give Ratzinger an iPod and ask him which venue is more congenial to forgetting about God --- but I digress.] The basic idea is that God gives people free will in order to glory in His commands, so that turning away from God means turning away from freedom too. Deviating from one’s telos can be freely chosen, but in some idiosyncratic sense, by so deviating one ceases to act freely.

Adapting the Ratzinger-Moloney line to Romney’s everybody-but-the-atheists ecumenicism, it’s easy to see what Romney might have been asserting (though he probably wasn’t): Freedom is conceptually contained within religious belief --- any religious belief at all, it doesn’t matter which --- so those who do not submit to God lack a concept of freedom, and therefore can’t experience it.

Or as someone else once said, freedom is slavery.