IN HAPPIER TIMES, THE EXISTENCE of Jacob Phillips’s Obedience is Freedom wouldn’t have been necessary. That he felt compelled to fill 200 pages, casting desires as bad and virtues as good, says something about the human condition, given that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678, while the similarly themed Romance of the Rose has circulated since the days of Robin Hood.
Worse, at first glance it might look as though Phillips had fallen into the gimmicky publishing trap of producing an intellectual version of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, a penitential calculus of dos and don’ts for a generation lacking truisms, discipline or a half-decent critique of hedonistic utilitarianism.
Yet he doesn’t lay it on
