On Freedom, page 14
Past thinkers have warnings for us, including a warning precisely about that. We live amid devices that make us predictable, that predictify us. For thousands of years of literature, from ancient Greek poems through contemporary science fiction, writers have been concerned that we might create such machines. As this is now happening, we are forgetting the traditions meant to protect us.
George Orwell saw vocabulary as enabling what we are calling sovereignty and unpredictability. The plurality of virtues is real, but in his novel 1984, people lack the words to name them. People are unfree not simply because their bodies are always observed but because their language is famished. In 1984, the reduction of the number of English words is a cumbersome affair, drudge work carried out by people in offices. In our lives, social media reduce our vocabulary (and thus our references) at terrifying speed. Colonized on our couches, we accept a pidgin of English.
In Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, firefighters burn books while everyone is expected to spend leisure time in front of a screen. Its protagonist, a fireman, is able to gain distance from what he is doing as he reads books and regains words. The story closes with his escape to a wandering group of people who preserve literature by learning whole books by heart. The small band of people doing this are articulate, humble, and spontaneous. They have decided to stick together. This is how the greatest of books arose and endured.
One such was the Iliad, the story of a Greek attack on the city of Troy, preserved for hundreds of years by groups of poets and performers before it was set down in writing. For this chapter, a word I needed was nemesis: our own self-involved actions now create for us an enemy that can overcome us later, in a way that we darkly deserve, and that we can overcome only by knowing ourselves. That notion of nemesis comes (for me at least) from the Iliad, and from the Greek dramas set after the destruction of Troy. The long poem was codified in about 500 b.c. Its Greek manuscript was then preserved by hand copying for about two thousand years. A few copies reached Italy from Constantinople a few years before Byzantium fell in 1453. After the Iliad was finally published, heroes such as Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus populated tapestries, paintings, and poems.
In the Odyssey, a story that follows the Iliad, crafty Odysseus faces a series of trials as he seeks to return home after the victory at Troy. One of these was the Island of Lotus Eaters, where endless pleasant stimulation extinguishes personality. Odysseus was held on another island by Calypso, who gave him everything except the freedom to go where he wished. The most apposite test was that of the sirens. Their song was irresistible because they adapted it to each listener—like the algorithms of today. Anyone who yielded to their summons would die, as the skeletons on the shore of their island attested. We are drawn by what seems to be about us, even to entities that we know we cannot trust.
Odysseus wanted to understand the sirens, but he also wanted to live and move on. He knew how vulnerable his body was, but also what it could do. He made a plan with his men. He had his sailors stop their ears with wax and tie his body to the mast. He heard the sirens, he felt his limits, he learned, and he persisted.
That is where we are. Like Odysseus and his ship, we have the technology we need to live and move. We have also created a digital siren song that will tell each of us what we want to hear, until we are no more, forgotten skeletons on a nameless shore. Together, though, we can understand our nemesis and ourselves, and move on.
It took him twenty years, the time we need to become sovereign and unpredictable. But Odysseus made it home.
Mobility
Wolf’s Word
As a little kid, I was lucky to have a babysitter, Donna, who told me Greek myths as bedtime stories. Later I checked out books of mythology from the public library. I read Edith Hamilton’s summaries under my desk in elementary school. The Iliad and the Odyssey followed, first in summaries or illustrated abridgments from the public library, then in full form. I read a few of the Greek dramas that began where the Iliad ended, such as Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. My father thought I should get out more.
And I was fortunate to grow up in a family that took me on journeys, whether I wanted to go or not. My parents knew Spanish and were comfortable in Latin America. As a fourteen-year-old on a trip to Costa Rica, I felt free, thanks to them. In the cloud forest of Monteverde, in May 1984, my brothers and I hiked every day, guided by a local kid, Ian. We walked or ran the paths from morning to evening, water and food and knives in backpacks, feeling self-sufficient and happy. We saw sloths and monkeys and the elusive quetzal.
One day Ian promised us something special, a mysterious quest. We walked on and on, but he remained taciturn. After three hours or so on a dirt road, we wandered through a maze of cloud forest paths, some visible, some of which seemed only to exist in Ian’s imagination, some where I wished I had brought a machete. Then we heard the rush, everything opened up, and we saw the waterfall. It had a clear pool, both in front and behind, where there was a cave. We could swim into the cave and look out at the green world through tons of falling water.
That evening, too tired to speak myself, I sat at the edge of a conversation of older men. I heard a term that fascinated me after a day on the paths. The people my family knew in Monteverde were Quaker Cold War refugees who had managed to establish a dairy commune on a plateau. The English they spoke was right out of the Midwest, in some cases right out of my parents’ home county in Ohio. The topic was the protection of habitat.
Two of the older gentlemen (Roy Joe and Wolf) got to talking about a path in the cloud forest, about whether it was available for public use. The term they used was right of way: Was this path a “right of way”? Did anyone have the right to use it? They pronounced the phrase like “right away,” which only added to its appeal.
That’s what I wanted, at fourteen. I wanted a right of way, right away. I wanted to know that there would be a path. As I didn’t quite then understand, someone else would have blazed it. I took what I could get. A public high school was awaiting me in Ohio, with a few teachers who could deal with me, and a debate team with a patient coach. The country highways, empty at night, invited me to speedy calm, as they had my father. And when the time came, I claimed my right of way, my right to get away, my little American Dream.
I visited Costa Rica twice more, once in my early twenties and once in my late forties. During those later visits, I continued to appreciate the beauty and gave some thought to the politics. Here is a country that designates more than a quarter of its territory as park or refuge, that generates its electricity from renewable sources, that provides health care to its citizens. Costa Ricans live longer than Americans. Their political system scores much higher on freedom than the American one (on the American measures kept by the American organization Freedom House).
Costa Ricans do far better than Americans on all the happiness scales. And though it is impossible to quantify, people there do seem to feel more free.
Life’s Arc
When I was hiking in Costa Rica as a kid, it was the paths through the cloud forests that liberated me. They existed, of course, only because of the work of other people, and they opened to me thanks to a guide and encouraging adults. If a trail is blazed, then someone else blazed it; if you blaze a trail, it’s for someone else. It’s still true that moving my body helps me to be free, to the point of enabling me to write. That I can do so, though, is the result of the labor of others.
We all need a right of way. Mobility is the third form of freedom: capable movement in space and time and among values, an arc of life whose trajectory we choose and alter as we go. For all of us, mobility means access to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways, to help us make what we can of our bodies. Access includes safety: we are not free to go where it is not safe to go, especially when we are responsible for children.
For some of us, mobility means the time and encouragement to take care of our bodies. For others, it means more substantial support for our ability to move. None of us is capable of mobility without assistance. Those who require more assistance remind us of our general condition. We all need some help; beyond this general realization, it is all a matter of degree.
Although the individual Leib is mobile, mobility for all can be achieved only together. Mobility for individuals requires collective political attention to the logic of life: the risk of injury and illness, the progression from infancy to old age. Mobility is a form of freedom because we are free when we structure society with this in mind. It is not so much a final state as an accumulation of capacities and imaginings over the course of a life.
One of my relatives is blind and has limited movement. The better the technology around her, the better she can express herself. My friend stricken with ALS was more free, I like to think, when we were together doing something. Physical presence could generate a sense of spiritual freedom. But as I learned to operate his gear, another simple truth struck home: he was freer when he had a functional wheelchair (and would have been freer still had it been provided by American health care). Soldiers in Ukraine who have lost limbs to artillery are aided by prostheses and time and care. Rehabilitation belongs to freedom, and so does attention to aging. As the average population age, geroscience—preventive treatment of the afflictions associated with old age—becomes important to our liberty.
Care is important, as is the prior confidence that it will be there. We are more mobile when we can count on certain basic human requirements being met. If we knew that we had access to health care and a retirement pension, we would live more interesting lives. Lacking such confidence, we will be stuck where we are. Most Americans report receiving medical bills they cannot pay, which means being stuck in illness. For middle-class people, dependence on private health care makes it difficult to change jobs. This drastic restraint on mobility—and thus on freedom—is, sadly, taken for granted in the United States.
Poverty forces people into their most probable states. It impedes mobility. This is a point my students in prison made repeatedly. My student Marquis called poverty “the daily basis of unfreedom” and said that for many people he knows, freedom would begin with three meals a day and a decent school.
The first three forms of freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, and mobility—should be present throughout our lives. There is nevertheless an order of development. In childhood, we attain sovereignty, with the help of others; in youth, we sustain unpredictability as we realize our own combinations of values. As we become adults, we need somewhere to go and the ability to get there.
Mobility is the challenge of maturity. To break free means to move in all five dimensions. It means having a waterfall to find or a mountain to climb, a day to do it, another to reflect on it. In the romantic imagery of freedom, we get to that idyll ourselves. In reality, all of us have help.
I love the places I am from, but I am glad that I could leave when I did. We all need mobility, but young adults need it in a special way. If everything goes as it should, they become sovereign and unpredictable, then break free of the structures (and the people) that allowed them to become so. But when those structures of mobility are not present, or when the structures are designed to immobilize and humiliate, rebellion takes on a different sense.
Can You Imagine?
Irene Morgan came of age in America during the Second World War. In 1944 she was a working mother. She commuted from Maryland to work for a defense contractor in Virginia that was building American bombers. In Maryland, she could sit where she liked on the bus, but in Virginia, she was required by law to move to the back. One day, particularly tired after a doctor’s appointment, she was asked to yield her place in the back of the crowded bus to a white couple. She was then removed by force from the bus and beaten. But her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and she won. In 1946 segregation in interstate travel became illegal, in theory. Nothing much changed in practice.
It was humiliating for African Americans to be segregated while traveling. Rather than simply moving from place to place, for purposes of their own, they were singled out. What should have been unreflective motion became a series of encounters (and the anxious anticipation thereof) that were meant to be reminders of inferiority. Black people had to sit at the back of the bus or in a certain part of a certain wagon of a train. At each station, they had to use a different restroom and order food at a different counter.
Irene Morgan was helping to build airplanes. During the Second World War, a few African American men were trained to fly them. As one future pilot crossed the Mason-Dixon Line on his way to Alabama for training, he had to leave one train car and board another, just behind the locomotive. He and the other Black men on the train noticed that their places were then taken by German prisoners of war. The enemy was given more consideration than they. This sort of thing was recalled by a number of African American veterans.
Leon Bass, who volunteered to serve in the army, was humiliated as he trained for service on military bases in the South. He recalled a restaurant beyond the base where German prisoners could eat but he could not.
Bass fought on the western front of the European Theater, including in the Battle of the Bulge. He ended up in a group of American soldiers who reached the German concentration camp at Buchenwald. (As a nurse pointed out at the time, liberation was not the word for it, since former inmates kept dying and the survivors needed much more than the departure of their guards to be regarded as free.) Recalling Buchenwald, Bass said, “Racism is at the root of all of this. Under that umbrella comes bigotry and prejudice and discrimination. We haven’t come to grips with that institution called racism. And we have to, because we see the ultimate of racism, which was what I saw at Buchenwald.”
More than a million African Americans served in the segregated American armed forces during the Second World War. Black veterans returning home found an unchanged Jim Crow regime, regulating where their bodies could be. Leon Bass was refused service at a restaurant. “Can you imagine?” he said. “I put in three years of my life, put it on the line to make it possible for people like that young lady and that manager or whoever owned that store to function and enjoy the rights and privileges of Americans, and they were saying to me, just like the Nazis did, just like they told me down in the South, what they told my father, ‘Leon, you’re not good enough.’ What a damnable kind of thing to say to somebody.”
Some returning Black veterans challenged customary immobility. Wilson Hood sat where he liked on a bus from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., though on the way he was threatened with murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As Isaac Woodard tried to return from a military base in Georgia to his home in North Carolina, he was severely beaten and permanently blinded. Both of his eyes were gouged out by a white man using a billy club.
Freedom Rides
In 1960 the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in bus terminals was unconstitutional. In May 1961 a group of “Freedom Riders” tested the new norm on the stops between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. This first Freedom Ride was organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. One of its founders, Jim Peck, had watched the rise of Nazi Germany from Paris. Another Freedom Rider, John Lewis, wrote in his application to join the group of bringing “freedom to the Deep South.” The Freedom Riders sat on buses and used facilities heedless of local custom and state law. In South Carolina, Lewis and two other Riders were attacked. In Alabama, one bus was bombed and set aflame, and the passengers were beaten when they escaped.
When the Freedom Riders reached Montgomery, Alabama, they took refuge in the First Baptist Church, where they were received by Martin Luther King, Jr. The church was besieged by a white mob, and the Riders were rescued only by federal marshals. When they reached Mississippi, many were arrested. John Lewis sat for thirty-seven days in a Mississippi prison.
Comparisons to Nazi Germany were made by all sides. After the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., said that “Alabama has sunk to a level of tragic barbarity comparable to the tragic days of Hitler’s Germany.” American Nazis responded to the Freedom Rides by riding in their own “hate bus.” They proposed sending the Freedom Riders to “gas chambers.”
From prison, the cause might have seemed lost. But some of the Freedom Riders pressed on to their destination and made it to New Orleans. Jim Peck, bruised and beaten, spoke at Xavier University with Charles Person. And other groups of Freedom Riders had already started their own journeys. More than four hundred people from both North and South took part in Freedom Rides in 1961, about 40 percent of them Black and about 60 percent of them white. That fall the federal government issued orders integrating bus stations.
Public Trauma
Freedom means movement, and movement means encounter. But what does it mean to encounter one another?
To enter into a public conveyance and be judged by your appearance is a common experience. When I moved to Europe at the age of twenty-two, I learned how to blend in: get rid of the Cincinnati Reds baseball cap; wear leather shoes; sit and stand up straight; keep the hands out of the pockets; save the smiles for moments of significance. My father is always asked for directions, wherever he goes. In my twenties, I found that this was true of me as well: from Cornwall to Minsk, everyone seemed to think I knew the way.
