Sometimes it is difficult to know whether what you are thinking
and writing is a thought-provoking philosophical accounting, or simply a crazed
intuition transformed into rant-gone-wild. In this respect, sometimes
philosophers are like crazed Dutch hairdressers (or at least the one that I
know). This might be one of those equivocal times for all of us, for me the
author as well as for you the reader.
It also
comes to mind that this reflection might be destined primarily for American
readers; so if you are among those who find this ‘thought-provoking
philosophical accounting’ cum
‘rant-gone-wild’ to be only of marginal interest, chances are good that you are
a European who has government-organized and sponsored health care. Freedom, in
the American sense of the term, does not concern such as you.
‘Freedom’ is the most abstract of concepts, even in moments
of extreme philosophical lucidity. The Greek philosophers, for example, did not
make the philosophical case for freedom… (Elevtheria!!!! I can still hear the
cynical battle cry of one of my former racquetball partners ringing in my ears…
he taught romantic literature, of course, in addition to beating me on the r-b court!);
because Greeks of the ancient sort did not believe themselves to be free.
Rather, they lived in a world tragically conceived, where powerful Gods
dominate and control, as invisible and formidable causal forces. In such a
tragic world the actions of Gods and men are inextricably intertwined, and although
men like Achilles and Socrates understood themselves to be ethically autonomous, i.e., masters of their own choices within the confines of their restricted human knowledge, they did
not conceive of themselves as ‘free’ players on the Divine Chessboard. In
antiquity, Autonomy tempered by human ignorance as to what the Gods were up to,
was not equivalent to this contemporary notion of Freedom.
In that ancient
world, which is explicit in the epic poetry of Homer and elevated to a metaphysical
principle in the great tragic poets, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the
actions of men could never be free of that external and all-determining causal
environment created by the very presence of the unseen, active, and very powerful
external causal Forces who/which necessarily controlled every aspect of the
world of men.
Freedom was
a value created rationally by philosophers of the world become Christian
(post-B.C.E.). In the Christian argument, Freedom is the keystone concept wedged
in-between the idea of a God who, unlike
any of the other Gods of Antiquity, is good, i.e., moral, and the idea of human moral accountability vis-à-vis
this God. For this philosophical conceptualization and argumentation to work,
the God can only make morally
weighted demands on men if men are meaningfully free—i.e., uninfluenced by the God
in their judgments and choices. This (new world) obviously isn’t Kansas
anymore, Socrates!
So the philosophically minded in contemporary America might
ask, what does it actually mean to be free? In the Land of the Free and Home of
the Brave we believe in this Big Idea; we strive for it (because we tend to
equate ‘it’ with happiness); we fight for it; we suffer for it; we die for it;
and even more cynically, we encourage others to die for it. Yet what does
Freedom mean in the good old (unofficial) E Pluribus Unum?
I suppose
it is best to start conversations such as this by asking the question, what can
be known clearly about the idea of Freedom?, a question that is, in turn,
perhaps best pondered by asking precisely the opposite question: in what ways
are Americans not free? (For a justification
concerning this convoluted approach to understanding the Universe at large, please
see the above reference to sometime philosophers and crazed Dutch hairdressers…).
In this American
‘Home, Home on the Plains’, which declared its Independence from British despotism
in terms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we know for example
that, while we may be free with respect to our own life, we are not personally ‘free’ to own our own death,
yet. However, the ‘freedom to own our
death’ discussion in America, which has the formal and somewhat pejorative tag,
Assisted
Suicide, is now fairly consistently on the national radar thanks to a
variety of initiatives.
There was
Dr. Jack (a.k.a. Doctor Death) Kevorkian’s willingness to risk doing jail-time in
the battle for Americans’ right
to die. After multiple corpses began showing up at the entrances of Detroit
area hospitals, in 1999 Dr. Kevorkian was sentenced
to 10 to 25 years in prison for 2nd degree murder for physician
assisted suicide, and he did 8 years of that sentence before being eligible for
parole. Beginning right around the same time there was the national saturation coverage
of the Terry Schaivo,
case (1998-2005), which highlighted the Nation’s philosophical free-for-all in
a desperate search to define what types of principles should be given priority
in cases of prolonged life-support, where a third party, e.g., the husband in
this case, but it could equally have been a doctor, or the State, or the
insurance company, or…, makes a life/death decision on behalf of (read: in the
place of) a person, who is no longer capable of making decisions for herself
(e.g., who is in a persistent vegetative state). The husband won on the
principle of legal next of kin; the parents lost, and the State lost.
There have also
been a variety of right-to-die organizations, such as the Hemlock Society
(although its name has since been changed), whose stated mission is to inform
about the rights of the dying, as well as to back any type of legislation that
will advance the right to die of Americans.
Finally, it
might come as some relief to some to know that straightforward, self-determined
suicide in the United States no longer carries
the Common Law penalty of ‘Forfeiture of all the goods and chattels of the
offender.’ This piece of information, however, would not have relieved the
narrative tension in the reasoning of Arthur Miller’s disheartened Death of a Salesman protagonist, Willy
Lomen. For purposes of theatrical tension, Lomen decides not to commit suicide
because this would not help his family, but would instead simply invalidate his
life-insurance policy—no breadwinner and
no life-insurance money would not be an improvement for the family finances. For
purposes of real-life tension, this also happens to be generally
true about life-insurance.
In the Land of Independently-minded Americans we also know
without a shadow of a doubt that we are not
‘free’ to act outside the structures provided by the Constitution and the Laws
of the Land. So, for example, it would come as no surprise to normally
reasoning Americans that the Bush Administration should come under scrutiny by
legal minds for issues regarding torture, which
has been illegal for a very long time now, both by US
law and by a variety of UN conventions,
from 1948, 1975, et al, to each of which America affixed her signature. If we
recall that the individual who assumes the mantel of the office of the
President of the United States swears to “preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution of the United States”, the conflict of ethico-legal
interest becomes obvious.
Constitutional
constraint (non-freedom) in America also
takes the form of Selective Service, or the draft,
the legality of which has repeatedly weathered a variety of legal challenges (1918,
1919, 1920, 1968, 1971, and 1981). Idem the persistently sustained legality of
the American government’s right to impose an income
tax upon its free citizens, a fact in
which all Americans undoubtedly rejoice.
More abstractly, in this Land-of-the-Free we Americans can
also know clearly, if we just think about it for a little while, that we are not ‘free’ not to conform to social
demands (ok… a double negative, but at least the infinitive is not split!).
This type of non-freedom is a bit more philosophically lofty, so we can turn to
Friedrich Nietzsche for clarity on the question – Kultur is like a prison, he might say, or a cookie-cutter.
Following through on this second simile, when we are born we are dropped like so
many pieces of dough into a (cultural) baking bowl (called America); and from
the very first day we enter into the bowl we are all pressed together and
kneaded into a homogenous ‘plop’ of American dough. From this sameness, the
various cultural cookie-cutters, i.e.,
family, language, friends, school, etc., transforms individual bodies into an
enculturated entity called An American
human. Within a demonstrable range, we Americans all dress similarly (because
we all have access primarily to the same clothing stores); we all speak
similarly, having the same range
of vocabulary (12-20 thousand words, depending on the source), which is
actually pretty limited (read: restricting, constraining, non-freeing) when one
considers that by most counts
English has about three-quarters of a million words at its disposal; we all
read roughly the same books, use the same money, think within the same value
parameters.
In other
words, we are not ‘free’ to ‘be’ without culture (a-cultural), because Kultur defines the very thing each
individual is beyond its human-ness—this is an American human, this a Dutch
human, this a French human, etc. And although former President Bill Clinton
reminded us in a 2000 White House speech that 99.9% of Human Genome is the same,
which is to say that there is statistically speaking no significant racial or
material difference among the peoples of the world, there are nonetheless very
real cultural differences between
them.
In another example of non-freedom, we can also know clearly
that we are not ‘free’ to choose to live
without an economic framework of some sort, whether money or barter or trade. We
may be free to own cars, if we can afford to buy them, but we are not free not to pay the local Secretary of State
for the license plates, or not to
have insurance, or, perhaps, depending on the state, not to have regular inspections that the individual must pay for. Idem
for our homes, guns, education, and any other of our possessions that we may
‘freely’ own, albeit in a regulated sort of way, if we can freely afford such
things.
We can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to function outside the confines of our biology –
remember in the film Birdy
the protagonist was so distressed by the world of men with their insane wars
that he wanted to join the world of his beloved, and peaceful, birds; but his
own biology did not allow him that freedom, and in the face of his insistence, his
society locked him away in a lunatic asylum. Our only freedom from our biology,
and this has little to do with being culturally American, would be for us to
understand the use of technology, perhaps in an Avatar kind of
way, and the (new and different) constraints to our freedom that they carry
with them. P.S.- Scuba divers tend not to forget to take underwater breathing apparatuses
on their dives!
It is clear
that Americans, and perhaps one or two others as well, struggle culturally and
philosophically with the question, what does it mean to be free? That this is a
generalized question in culture, American and other, is clear from such film
phenomena as The Truman Show, or The Matrix (1999), this
latter of which, according to the Internet-God, received a number of awards and
achieved a number of record-breaking financial objectives, thereby demonstrating
its importance culturally and philosophically. The premise of the film, of
course, is that the entire framework of our perception of reality (and not
simply our enculturation) is an artificial environment—that we are everything
(someone Else wants), except Free.
So, we have been reflecting on some of the ways in which we Americans
are not free; and yet all who are
America-minded continue to be deeply stirred by Reverend King’s famous
words reminding us of our historical calling to American Freedom:
“This will be the day when all of God's children will
be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land
of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's
pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
And if America is to be a great nation this must
become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from
the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of
Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of
California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone
Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of
Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring,
when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and
every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children,
black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be
able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free
at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"”
These are moving American
words about the promissory note of Freedom in the Land of E Pluribus Unum, and
they continue to speak to our guts
when we hear them anew. But the ‘job’ of the citizens in contemporary American does
not end in inspired feelings of
Freedom—the task has now become ours to discover how these words of Freedom might
speak to the minds of this generation
of American people, so they might be translated into real-world actions.
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