I don’t know if it has always been this way (I suspect it has), but people today do seem to have a tendency to want to control the world around them by dictating what other people should do.
I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”
We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.
The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.
This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.
This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.
At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.
There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.
There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.
It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Monday, July 12, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
A Dog's Life
One summer evening a few years ago, I was sitting in my backyard unwinding with a bottle of Warsteiner after a day’s work when something struck me that has stuck with me ever since. Our backyard at the time was a rectangle surrounded by a chain-link fence, and as I sat there I could see through to the other backyards, which were also rectangles surrounded by chain-link fences.
What struck me was how much the houses and yards along our block resembled the kennel where my wife and I had boarded our two dogs not long before. It was one of those nice kennels, where each dog had a nice big cage inside and an opening to a nice individual fenced-in “run” outside. We felt good about leaving our dogs there for a week because they were free to go in and out, they weren’t as confined as they would have been in one of those old nasty kennels where they had to sit in a cage all day waiting to be walked.
What we had done, of course, was judge the kennel according to our human standards. Without realizing it, we had boarded the dogs at a kennel that essentially was modeled on our own living space: a box in which we felt safe and sequestered when that was what we wanted, and an attached open area where we could go out and be “in” nature when that was what we wanted, but safely marked off from our neighbors’ parcels of ground. We were imputing to our dogs the same kind of need for a well-defined freedom that we felt for ourselves.
Now, it may seem invidious that I’m comparing an average American suburban home to a dog kennel, but I don’t mean it that way. On the contrary, the comparison really depends on the fact that we love our “companion animals” and want only the best for them. The point is simply that we conceive the “best” for them in the same terms we conceive it for ourselves: as having a certain kind of private, personal space in which we are free to do what we want, when we want.
If there is anything invidious in this, it’s the contrast between this rather limited – one might almost say compromised – version of freedom and the “Freedom” with a capital F that people make such a fuss over in the sphere of public discussion and action. It’s perhaps a little hard to reconcile the Freedom that people have fought and died for with the freedom to have a barbecue and burn tiki torches.
Still, the two kinds really aren’t totally unrelated. Where they are related is in the understanding that you and I have a right to do whatever we want to do in our personal spaces. (Within reason, of course: If my neighbor is committing sex crimes or torturing puppies in the house next door, I need to interfere with him doing that.) This is precisely why the ownership of a home is the core of the American Dream: because my home is a space where I can exercise my sovereignty as an individual, and of course individual sovereignty is what America is all about.
Freedom also involves, of course, the freedom to work at the job one chooses so as to be able to afford a home. And for some fortunate few, their work itself provides the kind of fulfillment we all seek, while for others work is just a means to obtain the kind of personal space we need to practice whatever else gives us that fulfillment (“I work to live, I don’t live to work”).
I happen to live in a kind of middle space in this regard: As a journalist, I sometimes am lucky enough to wander into a story that actually does some kind of good for others, and that’s about as rewarding as it gets. But I also have an inner life that I pursue in the privacy of my home that gives me some satisfaction even on those days when my job totally sucks.
I imagine a lot of us are in somewhat the same situation, doing what we can in our careers to give something to the world, and/or seeking in our “leisure” hours to cover whatever we feel as a lack in our spiritual or psychological lives. This sort of thing is, I believe, exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote that we have an “unalienable right” to “the pursuit of happiness.”
What I find regrettable in our society in regard to these things is the widespread tendency to confuse means with ends. It appears that many of us expect to find fulfillment in the acquisition of the personal space and its accoutrements, rather than the use. There’s a bumper sticker that sums up the attitude: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Many of us seem to believe that it’s the mere having of a home, or the size of the home, not the life lived inside it, that matters most. Once they have it, what are they supposed to do with it?
It appears that for many, the “pursuit of happiness” within one’s private space or in public means eating as much, drinking as much, owning as much, playing as much as one can, with no thought for the consequences to oneself or the world at large. Such an attitude is truly tragic, because it focuses on the most ephemeral things the world has to offer and leads people away from the sources of real, lasting happiness.
Our consumerist economic structure of course encourages this sort of belief and behavior, and the recent shakiness of that structure is a warning about its unsustainability – as if further warning were needed on top of our repeated energy crises, our “obesity epidemic,” our high crime rates and all the other social ills that are so obviously traceable to our society’s tendency to want more, more, more.
As much as I would like to see increased regulation of businesses, I would be the last person to suggest that we impose further restrictions on people’s private behavior. “An ye harm none, do what thou wilt” strikes me as a pretty good ethical principle. The challenge is getting people to understand the “harm none” part, especially in a world in which we seem to have moved from the idea that “all men are created equal” to a belief that “individual sovereignty” means every man is entitled to be a king. Regrettably, it appears that the king everyone wants to be is this one:
What struck me was how much the houses and yards along our block resembled the kennel where my wife and I had boarded our two dogs not long before. It was one of those nice kennels, where each dog had a nice big cage inside and an opening to a nice individual fenced-in “run” outside. We felt good about leaving our dogs there for a week because they were free to go in and out, they weren’t as confined as they would have been in one of those old nasty kennels where they had to sit in a cage all day waiting to be walked.
What we had done, of course, was judge the kennel according to our human standards. Without realizing it, we had boarded the dogs at a kennel that essentially was modeled on our own living space: a box in which we felt safe and sequestered when that was what we wanted, and an attached open area where we could go out and be “in” nature when that was what we wanted, but safely marked off from our neighbors’ parcels of ground. We were imputing to our dogs the same kind of need for a well-defined freedom that we felt for ourselves.
Now, it may seem invidious that I’m comparing an average American suburban home to a dog kennel, but I don’t mean it that way. On the contrary, the comparison really depends on the fact that we love our “companion animals” and want only the best for them. The point is simply that we conceive the “best” for them in the same terms we conceive it for ourselves: as having a certain kind of private, personal space in which we are free to do what we want, when we want.
If there is anything invidious in this, it’s the contrast between this rather limited – one might almost say compromised – version of freedom and the “Freedom” with a capital F that people make such a fuss over in the sphere of public discussion and action. It’s perhaps a little hard to reconcile the Freedom that people have fought and died for with the freedom to have a barbecue and burn tiki torches.
Still, the two kinds really aren’t totally unrelated. Where they are related is in the understanding that you and I have a right to do whatever we want to do in our personal spaces. (Within reason, of course: If my neighbor is committing sex crimes or torturing puppies in the house next door, I need to interfere with him doing that.) This is precisely why the ownership of a home is the core of the American Dream: because my home is a space where I can exercise my sovereignty as an individual, and of course individual sovereignty is what America is all about.
Freedom also involves, of course, the freedom to work at the job one chooses so as to be able to afford a home. And for some fortunate few, their work itself provides the kind of fulfillment we all seek, while for others work is just a means to obtain the kind of personal space we need to practice whatever else gives us that fulfillment (“I work to live, I don’t live to work”).
I happen to live in a kind of middle space in this regard: As a journalist, I sometimes am lucky enough to wander into a story that actually does some kind of good for others, and that’s about as rewarding as it gets. But I also have an inner life that I pursue in the privacy of my home that gives me some satisfaction even on those days when my job totally sucks.
I imagine a lot of us are in somewhat the same situation, doing what we can in our careers to give something to the world, and/or seeking in our “leisure” hours to cover whatever we feel as a lack in our spiritual or psychological lives. This sort of thing is, I believe, exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote that we have an “unalienable right” to “the pursuit of happiness.”
What I find regrettable in our society in regard to these things is the widespread tendency to confuse means with ends. It appears that many of us expect to find fulfillment in the acquisition of the personal space and its accoutrements, rather than the use. There’s a bumper sticker that sums up the attitude: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Many of us seem to believe that it’s the mere having of a home, or the size of the home, not the life lived inside it, that matters most. Once they have it, what are they supposed to do with it?
It appears that for many, the “pursuit of happiness” within one’s private space or in public means eating as much, drinking as much, owning as much, playing as much as one can, with no thought for the consequences to oneself or the world at large. Such an attitude is truly tragic, because it focuses on the most ephemeral things the world has to offer and leads people away from the sources of real, lasting happiness.
Our consumerist economic structure of course encourages this sort of belief and behavior, and the recent shakiness of that structure is a warning about its unsustainability – as if further warning were needed on top of our repeated energy crises, our “obesity epidemic,” our high crime rates and all the other social ills that are so obviously traceable to our society’s tendency to want more, more, more.
As much as I would like to see increased regulation of businesses, I would be the last person to suggest that we impose further restrictions on people’s private behavior. “An ye harm none, do what thou wilt” strikes me as a pretty good ethical principle. The challenge is getting people to understand the “harm none” part, especially in a world in which we seem to have moved from the idea that “all men are created equal” to a belief that “individual sovereignty” means every man is entitled to be a king. Regrettably, it appears that the king everyone wants to be is this one:
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Phantom of Liberty
I find a lot of things disturbing about present-day society and culture; I suppose most people do. The thing I find most disturbing (because I think it’s largely responsible for most of the other things that disturb us on a daily basis) is the widespread and seemingly increasing fragmentation or atomization of society.
Certainly in Western culture, and perhaps increasingly in the rest of the world, we accept without question nowadays the notion that society is nothing but the sum of the choices and actions of individuals.
Political and economic theorists claim that this is as it should be, that each person should have maximum freedom to pursue his or her best interests, because in doing so we will all benefit each other by creating the best (and most prosperous) possible society. From a more psychological point of view (if that term is still allowable in this age of “behaviorism”), we must all have the maximum freedom to “express” whatever is unique about ourselves; and this, too, will redound to the benefit of society as a whole by enabling our “creativity.”
It’s hard to argue against “freedom,” of course, so these claims tend to be viewed as self-evident, and the debates tend to focus on how we can best enable (and who is the best enabler of) the “freedom” and “individuality” that are held up as such high values, perhaps the highest.
I would never argue against freedom or individuality as ideals. But I am compelled to point out that most of what passes for “individuality” today is illusory, and most of what’s called “freedom” is a lie.
What we have instead of individuality is individualism, which I’m going to define as “the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays.”
The lack of real individuality, and the lack of real freedom, can be summed up like this: “I’m going to the mall to buy some individuality.”
In effect, we must make use of the materials at hand to assemble our identities. If our educational system and our mass media withhold certain ideas and promote others, they render us unfree to make fully informed choices about what we want to believe or know. And if most of us are persuaded (or, less charitably, programmed or brainwashed) into relying on certain kinds of material objects to “express” our personalities, where will we find the “uniqueness” we want to display?
I think this focus on fake individualism is nothing less than a betrayal of our true nature as humans, and this overemphasized so-called “freedom” is just the license to choose from a strictly limited menu, and therefore a kind of hidden totalitarianism. I will develop these claims in coming entries; the next one will examine not whether you and I are related, but how closely.
Certainly in Western culture, and perhaps increasingly in the rest of the world, we accept without question nowadays the notion that society is nothing but the sum of the choices and actions of individuals.
Political and economic theorists claim that this is as it should be, that each person should have maximum freedom to pursue his or her best interests, because in doing so we will all benefit each other by creating the best (and most prosperous) possible society. From a more psychological point of view (if that term is still allowable in this age of “behaviorism”), we must all have the maximum freedom to “express” whatever is unique about ourselves; and this, too, will redound to the benefit of society as a whole by enabling our “creativity.”
It’s hard to argue against “freedom,” of course, so these claims tend to be viewed as self-evident, and the debates tend to focus on how we can best enable (and who is the best enabler of) the “freedom” and “individuality” that are held up as such high values, perhaps the highest.
I would never argue against freedom or individuality as ideals. But I am compelled to point out that most of what passes for “individuality” today is illusory, and most of what’s called “freedom” is a lie.
What we have instead of individuality is individualism, which I’m going to define as “the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays.”
The lack of real individuality, and the lack of real freedom, can be summed up like this: “I’m going to the mall to buy some individuality.”
In effect, we must make use of the materials at hand to assemble our identities. If our educational system and our mass media withhold certain ideas and promote others, they render us unfree to make fully informed choices about what we want to believe or know. And if most of us are persuaded (or, less charitably, programmed or brainwashed) into relying on certain kinds of material objects to “express” our personalities, where will we find the “uniqueness” we want to display?
I think this focus on fake individualism is nothing less than a betrayal of our true nature as humans, and this overemphasized so-called “freedom” is just the license to choose from a strictly limited menu, and therefore a kind of hidden totalitarianism. I will develop these claims in coming entries; the next one will examine not whether you and I are related, but how closely.
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