Public Freedom, Private Freedom

Freedom, part 3

Public freedom

Freedom is about relationship. My seven-year-old self in front of a mirror, in the grip of wonderment about an idea, was playing out a relationship through ideas with my father. My eleven-year-old self, running, yelling down the hall on the last day of school, was swimming in a joyful shared celebration with his friends and classmates. It was our togetherness that made it freedom.

Private freedom

The freedom of mindfulness lies in the more direct relationship with the people and things of the moment, less filtered through preconceived purposes. The freedom of working with others for a shared cause certainly lies in that relationship, but even the freedom of the loose cannon tenured professor is, if it is worthy of the name freedom, about bringing her idiosyncratic pursuits to a relationship with students that – while observing the appropriate boundaries – is also deeply intimate. Love is both cause and result of true and free teaching.

“I have an instinct that tells me that I am less free when I am living for myself alone.” (Thomas Merton)

Freedom is about relationship. Some of the Quotations from this month's issue of On the Journey illustrate.

There’s Clarence Darrow saying, “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.”

And Audre Lorde writes, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.”

And Rosa Parks, who saw the purpose for her struggle for freedom in the freedom of others: “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free so other people would be also free.”

And Barack Obama, in his speech accepting his party’s nomination at the 2012 convention, declared: “A freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.”

Freedom is about relationship. Freedom is something we make together. This was the lesson of the Passover story: no Hebrew walked out of Egypt alone. Nor could any have survived the wilderness alone. Freedom is a collective enterprise. We need each other to be free. Yes, there is necessary work only you can do. And part of our collective work is ensuring greater opportunity for individuals to engage in projects of self-creation, heeding their own inner and private call. Protecting the spaces of privacy and aloneness in which a person can give birth to herself is itself a collective enterprise – requiring, for example, great libraries where your solitary discovery of obscure texts that seem to speak to you alone enrich the uniqueness you can then bring to the world.

This is the public work of facilitating private self-creation, and that is what freedom looks like.

Aside from the labors of self-creation, there is also other necessary work: the work of shoring up our democratic institutions, securing the rights that we all need, protecting freedom of speech and press, guarding the independence of the judiciary, honoring the findings of science even when we don’t like them, providing social safety nets and lifting our neighbors from poverty. This work we can only do together and publicly; it is done with shared touchstones of value rather than unique and idiosyncratic fascinations. The public and joint creation of US, and the private and individual creation of ME are the dual, equally necessary, projects of creating freedom.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Freedom"
See also
Part 1: A Feeling. Mostly.
Part 2: Things That Feel Like Freedom

Things That Feel Like Freedom

Freedom, part 2

When my Journey Group talked about our experiences of freedom, we mentioned a number of features that contribute to this feeling.

A new way of seeing things sometimes feels like freedom (like seeing a certain hypothetical computer and the world as the same thing).

Sometimes it feels free to be freed from some chore or responsibility. I have a memory of the last day of school at the end of fifth or sixth grade, making our way up the hall and out of the building on that last day. There was supposed to be no running in the hall, but our energy was uncontainable and in the last minutes of the school year, the teachers were not inclined to try to contain it – and so we ran up that hall and we cheered and yelled as we ran toward the door. That was an experience of freedom.

On the other hand, sometimes stepping into new responsibilities was freeing. Remember when you were hired for your first really significant job? Or getting married. Or maybe the first time you moved to a new house. It felt exhilarating, and you were free at last of the life that you had had up until then. A few years on down the road, the same set of responsibilities that once were liberating might now be stultifying.

Mindful presence is a path to freedom. Directing attention to just what is there, without reactivity or distraction, liberates us from the tyranny of our reactivity – and our endless distractability, being continuously in thrall to the next shiny object. Mindfulness breaks the grip of automatic thinking – those unconscious habits of thought – and lets us see the moment more for what it is and less for only those features that relate to our own attachments. We can then engage that moment in more fresh and creative ways.

Sometimes freedom comes from being part of a larger thing that gives purpose and meaning to life – contributing to the goals of an institution. A life without purpose might be one in which you could do whatever you wanted, but if nothing you do matters – or if it feels like it doesn’t matter -- then that’s not really what liberation looks like.

But freedom also comes, sometimes, from creating your own projects that are yours alone, even if there is no market for them. The unappreciated artist or writer engaged in the deep task of self-creation through her work is embodying freedom – accountable to an inner call to become something unique rather than to make something useful to others. In this context, I think of something Richard Rorty wrote.

Let me first share a word about the meaning Richard Rorty had in my life. I discovered his work as a grad student at Baylor, and I went from there to study with him at the University of Virginia. He was my model and mentor and primary professor. When he died he 2007, I hadn’t seen him for 15 years, but the news still hit me like a body blow. As his student, I read all his books and his voluminous papers. And as my actual father had started me thinking about freedom, Rorty, too, helped me think about the subject.

In a 1989 essay, he drew a distinction between the kind of education that high schools are for and the very different function of colleges. High schools, he said, need to, and rightly should, focus on what students should know by graduation. But the question, “What should they learn in college?” had better go unasked. Such a question, Rorty explained, suggests

“that college faculties are instrumentalities that can be ordered to a purpose. The temptation to suggest this comes over administrators occasionally, as does the feeling that higher education is too important to be left to the professors. From an administrative point of view, the professors often seem self-indulgent and self-obsessed. They look like loose cannons, people whose habit of setting their own agendas needs to be curbed. But administrators sometimes forget that college students badly need to find themselves in a place in which people are not ordered to a purpose, in which loose cannons are free to roll about. The only point in having real live professors around instead of just computer terminals, videotapes and [photocopied] lecture notes is that students need to have freedom enacted before their eyes by actual human beings. That is why tenure and academic freedom are more than just trade union demands. Teachers setting their own agendas – putting their individual, lovingly prepared specialties on display in the curricular cafeteria, without regard to any larger end, much less any institutional plan – is what non-vocational higher education is all about.” (Philosophy and Social Hope)

Students need to have freedom enacted before their eyes – and this freedom is possible when professors are granted the space to develop idiosyncratic projects not ordered to anyone else’s purpose.

The experience of freedom arises in many different ways in different contexts. What they all have in common is relationship.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Freedom."
See also
Part 1: A Feeling. Mostly.
Part 3: Public Freedom, Private Freedom

A Feeling. Mostly.

Freedom, part 1

On the subject of freedom, and speaking of fathers . . . I was seven years old when, at dinner one night, my father off-handedly mentioned that there’s an idea that everything you do is known in advance. He probably used the word "predestination," but that was not a word that stuck in my seven-year-old brain. What stuck was the idea that my every action might be known before I even did it. Santa Claus only knew of my naughty and nice actions as I committed them. This was much more alarming than that.

"How?" I asked.

"According to the hypothesis, it just is known," said Dad.

I am not sure if I recommend introducing seven-year-olds to this idea or not. Maybe. It was for me, a mindworm. It got me thinking about freedom. Because Dad had said "hypothesis," I understood that it might or might not be true. But I wanted to know. Was it true? Was there a way to find out?

In the weeks and months that followed, as I turned this notion over, I would sometimes stand in front of a mirror, staring at myself. OK. What am I going to do next? I didn’t know myself – but maybe “they” knew. (Somehow in my interpretation of the hypothesis, it was “they.” Somewhere there was – or might be -- some invisible audience of watchers, who watched the world like a movie they had seen before, knowing everything that was going to happen.) What could I do that would surprise them, that they wouldn’t know I was going to do? Suddenly, I would jerk my hand to the right – ah, ha! This would be immediately followed by the disappointing thought, “Oh. They could have known I was going to do that.” Then I’d try jerking my other hand in a different direction. Nope. They might have known I would do that, too. It seemed unlikely. But I couldn’t disprove that it was possible.

I returned to that mirror several times over the next couple years or so. I always approached without any premeditation about what I was going to do – because if I was carrying out a plan, that would be easier to predict, right? Well that’s what I assumed. I would try various sudden spontaneous movements – and each time immediately realize: it's conceivable that they knew I was going to do that.

I tried flipping a coin. "Tails! . . . Oh, they could have known it would be tails. I don’t know how, but maybe they just did. Rats."

Eventually I figured out what you have probably been thinking. It’s a weird thing to be fixated on. It doesn’t matter if it COULD have been known. What WOULD matter would be evidence that that somehow some entity DID know what everyone did. It’s hard to imagine what such evidence could be, but that would be interesting. Or if an actual human person of your acquaintance told you one evening that you were very predictable, and proceeded say that yesterday she wrote predictions of what you would do today, took out an envelope, opened it, and read to you a surprisingly accurate description of what you in fact had done all day, then THAT would be something. You might examine whether you were in a bit of a rut, and you might want to get out of it. But the abstract theoretical possibility that some invisible entity COULD have known what you were going to do is meaningless. It has nothing to do with real freedom -- as I eventually concluded.

Or did I?

Many years later, I was graduate student in philosophy having lunch in a sandwich shop next to the grounds (I went to a school where the cherished tradition was to say “grounds,” instead of “campus”). I was munching a hummus and sprouts on cracked wheat, and was there with two fellow grad students. Into our conversation, I raised the possibility of a super- duper-duper computer that could assimilate all the input of the whole universe and could then predict everything that would happen in the world. You will recognize that as but a slight tweak of the conundrum that had been with me for twenty-one of my then-twenty-eight years. One of my lunch mates then said something that has proved to be another mindworm for me. He said: a computer that incorporated and played out EVERY event in the world would just BE the world. That was kind of a liberating insight.

In between that seven-year-old in front of a mirror, and that 28-year-old at the sandwich shop, there was a 17-year-old me, riding in the car somewhere with my Dad, when I just came out with it. I said, “Dad, what is freedom?”

He said, “It’s a feeling. Mostly.”

It’s a feeling. Mostly.

So what gives you the feeling of freedom?

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Freedom"
See also
Part 2: Things That Feel Like Freedom
Part 3: Public Freedom, Private Freedom