On Freedom, page 31
On Easter Sunday 1988, I was standing in the shade of the sycamore tree with my friend Danny Gubits. I was waxing on, looking down the hill toward the road, about all that my grandfather had achieved unaided. Danny corrected me: “He had the color of his skin.” I remember the first flush of resistance, the warm blood in my face, my desire to describe an America where skin color did not matter, at least on a farm. And then I saw the absurdity of that and conceded the point.
The history of the land did not begin with the arrival of my maternal ancestors in 1806, or with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, or with the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619. Who left the arrowheads turned up each year by my grandfather’s plow? The mastodon tusk hanging in the porch implied a still longer timeline. Who had hunted those giant mammals down? And what about the far older fossils that my grandmother had found and labeled? We cannot reason our way to freedom without the past, including the deep past.
We are born at a certain moment, which we neither control nor know in advance, and which we cannot even begin to grasp until much later in life. And yet we can, with experience, learn to place ourselves in longer histories, to think in time. We cannot be free until we have a certain sovereignty over ourselves, which requires us to understand that the present moment is not the only one, and that its impulse is not the only thing we have. We live freely in a moment insofar as we can get beyond it and see ourselves in it.
Freedom rings like a bell, startling and declarative. When I pulled the cord, I was doing something of my own, something loud and true. But I was calling to others using an instrument forged and preserved by others. I had just leapt from a swing hung from the shading limb of a tree, a small comrade of its equilibrium. Freedom also rings like a tree, transforming the unliving into the living, grading and growing, aging and adapting, recording and renewing.
Grasp
That summer day on the farm, six-year-old me made a little choice. I could have kept swinging on the swing, using my energy and my kid’s understanding of physics just to have fun. Instead, I jumped off the swing, trotted away from the tree, and took my place in line to ring the bell.
When my turn came, I inhaled and held my breath while pulling the rope, then exhaled as I released. Leaning back and gripping the rope, I used a bit of my own energy, which I owed to plants and to the sun. My ultimate debt was to gravity, since solar gravity created the fusion that allowed the plants to grow and me to thrive. A more immediate debt: in leaning back, I borrowed Earth’s gravity, turning it to my own purposes. I had practiced ringing the bell like that; doing so came naturally. We are free to do what we can do, when we know why we are doing it.
The rope in my hands tugged the top of the bell, even as its clapper, hanging freely on the inside, remained still. An object in motion tends to stay in motion; an object at rest tends to remain at rest. The lip of the moving bell struck the clapper. The vibrating iron compressed nearby air, pushing out waves at the speed of sound. They reached the ears of everyone on the farm, and all knew what the sound meant: time to gather and eat. And because our minds are more than survival guides, some of us thought of something else: freedom.
It might seem that everything that happened when the bell rang is predictable, subject to description as science. Waves of one kind of energy became waves of another kind of energy. Through the mediation of different kinds of matter (solar plasma, photosynthetic plant cells, human mitochondria), electromagnetic energy (or light waves) became kinetic energy (or sound waves). The sun shone, corn grew, I ate it, I acted. Photons from the local star excited electrons in leaves, setting off chemical changes that supplied a young Homo sapiens with the energy needed to pull a rope and make one bit of iron strike another.
As I hope I have shown, that is not everything. A universe with electromagnetic energy is not the same as a universe with eyes that see via light waves. A universe with kinetic energy is not the same as a universe with ears that hear via sound waves. A universe with physical regularities is not the same as one where beings, such as a human child, apprehend them and turn them to their own purposes. A universe shaped by gravity is not the same as a universe whose creatures can mindfully hang bells with a thought to their purpose. A universe where levers work is not the same as a world where a boy makes a lever of himself. A Körper is not the same as a Leib. Gravity can become grace. I had my own six-year-old’s grasp of physics, and I had more than that: an incipient idea of freedom.
What I lacked was an understanding of what freedom might mean for everyone. I did not feel, hands grasping the rope, that the world was against me. What I needed to understand was all the cooperation that it took to get me to a state of freedom. What I have argued for in this book, and perhaps you have come along with me, is that we can all get to a better state, together.
Inclusion
It is pleasant for me to think on my childhood, but I must liberate myself from its errors. The bicentennial, one of my fondest memories, drew me toward the time warps. It readied my mind for a politics of inevitability, in which all would be well simply because an empire (or something else) had been removed. It prepared me for a politics of eternity, in which any challenge to the righteousness of my place or actions would be met with a reference to a perfect past commemorated in round numbers.
James Madison praised Americans for building their new republic without “blind veneration of antiquity.” That is the attitude we should apply to the Founders themselves. Emulating them means transcending them. They were historical actors, not memory pets. They took a risk in declaring independence. Seventy-six years later, Frederick Douglass reminded Americans of that. “There was a time,” he said, “when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men.”
It is perverse to celebrate a past fight for freedom while accepting tyranny in the present. Each epoch demands a courage specific to its challenges. Speaking in 1852, Douglass was addressing slavery, into which he himself was born: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
Two hundred years after the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, some cousins rang a bell on a farm in Clinton County, Ohio. My younger brother, who was five, was also in the line. My youngest brother, who was three, had to be helped to pull the rope. It is fine to celebrate prosperity and the American Dream. I love the recollection and the family and the farm, and I would not have become myself or written this book without them. But we will not get to that future by misunderstanding the past or drowning it in myths of innocence.
My brothers and I were children of the 1970s. Our lives have been quite different, and I don’t speak for them; but I am struck, looking back, that we just barely grasped the brass ring, dodging the difficulties that came early in the next century: an idiotic war in 2003, a financial crisis in 2008, growing inequality throughout. Among the large extended family that met on the farm in the 1970s and 1980s, the younger cousins have had a harder time of it than the older ones. Timing matters, and my brothers and I were favored by the fortune of earlier generations.
Social mobility has been tougher for most Americans since my childhood, but in different ways for different people. When I was born in 1969, about 80,000 Black men were in prison. By 1990, when I watched the Reds win their third World Series in my lifetime, the figure had more than quadrupled, to about 360,000. In the early 2020s, when I began to play softball with my daughter, nearly 700,000 African American men were incarcerated. There are more people with life sentences today than there were total people in prison when I was born, and almost half of these lifers are Black men. I can speak of the different trajectories of my brothers and cousins, but no one of that generation, sixteen cousins in all on both sides of my family, has been incarcerated or shot. Nearly half a century after the story I tell, everyone who stood in that line to ring the bell is still alive. I might take that for granted, but I shouldn’t. Among the African American families in Dayton, Ohio, or in New Haven, Connecticut, the count often looks sadly different.
Seeing such inequalities is a matter not just of fairness but of freedom for everyone. Whites drawn into racial politics obstruct liberatory policies. As my incarcerated student Alpha put it, “You guys are oppressing yourselves with your own oppression.” Freedom begins with virtues, with ideas of what is good. The moment we accept that the status quo is justified, we find ourselves in the dead land of negative freedom, defensive and helpless. It hurts to say that something is wrong and that I bear some responsibility; but without that bit of courage, freedom never begins.
I can declare my own sense of America, but only if I am ready to accommodate others’ stories. I can tell my own story of the Fourth of July, but it helps me to know that Alpha’s family saw it as a holiday that belongs to others. When I imagine his family barbecue on the balcony of an apartment in a housing project, I see myself and my own memories with greater clarity. Others’ reckonings with freedom begin elsewhere, which must be acknowledged: not only as a matter of respect, but also as a matter of logic. Evan, another incarcerated African American student, wrote that “freedom is a farce in America until ‘we’ includes me.” He’s right.
I must accommodate any virtues I assert from my own experiences to virtues that begin elsewhere. My hope is that this will lead to a richer notion of liberty, to more creative policy, and to more freedom for everyone.
Chance
In 1976 the child I was leapt from a swing, waited in a line, and rang a bell. Unpredictable memories brought me back to that moment, just as an unpredictable life since then has made me free. I was full of futures then and have realized some of them, including this book. I will not be marking 2076, the American tercentennial. But with luck and labor, my children will see our country’s fourth century begin.
On a winter’s day on that same Ohio farm, my five-year-old son let a gloved hand graze across the bell’s pull, then watched with patient fascination as the rope swayed back and forth, ever more slowly, until it returned to its initial motionless equilibrium. Then he tramped off, in little blue boots, to search for fossils and arrowheads in snow-dusted fields. He found something else: a small stone worked by human hands into a cube, marked with counters on each side: an ancient game piece.
We did not make the facts about the universe that guide a die when cast. We cannot undo the law of necessity. But there is also a law of freedom, a mysterious complicity, that we can practice until we attain grace. What we cannot change we can understand and turn to our purposes. Someone very long ago, taking a hand to chance, chose to make that die, someone who was practiced at making things. Someone at a much later time found it, someone who was practiced at seeing.
On a summer day on that same Ohio farm, my son, now eleven, took turns ringing the bell with a friend who is Black. The bell rings as it always has; its flaw, that second awkward peal, set off a chain of involuntary memories. My son is not a white kid the way I was. He confronts adults in his friend’s defense. He has a chance at freedom that I didn’t have, or that I failed to take. He likes Afrofuturism because of the Black Panther movies, whose aesthetic is the work of someone whom I remember as a girl in Ohio.
Through her images, Hannah Beachler will touch more minds than anyone else who graduated from our high school. This is perhaps not what anyone would have predicted, but unpredictability is the soul of freedom.
As I try to bring this book to a close, my daughter sits across the table from me at Claire’s, an eatery in downtown New Haven. Softball practice is over, and we are supposed to be doing homework. A little plate empty of cupcake is at her right hand, a book about Greek myths at her left, the same collection I once found in a public school library as a kid. It abounds in flawed heroes, limited gods, and metamorphoses that join childhood wonder to adult dilemmas.
My daughter can throw a ball hard, like her father, like her paternal grandfather, like her paternal great-grandfather, whose bats and gloves I held in my hands, and in whose last pickup truck, a 1992 Dodge Dakota, we drove to this vegetarian restaurant. This evening we’ll watch some tapes of the 1975 World Series, which I want my daughter to see.
The Reds lost game one. They came back, though. They won the series on Joe Morgan’s single in the last inning of the last game. He was the best player of his time, and his hit won the best World Series of all time. He kept his eye on the ball, the lump of physics became his, the law of necessity became the law of freedom. I am trying to get my daughter to practice more.
Like other kids her age, she has spent much of her conscious life in a pandemic, with tyrants in power in countries she cares about. She has learned that her dad can hover at the edge of death, that good writers can be in prison, that friends can text from bomb shelters. She knows that serving as a flower girl for a bride precedes welcoming a refugee with a baby. This is the way things are, but not how things must be.
She takes it in, as does my son, our world of restraints and opportunities, along with the sports and the books and the solidarity and the truth my wife and I and others try to share with them. My children are, I hope, sovereign and, I am sure, unpredictable, as they start to think of where they will go in life.
My kids have a chance. We all do. This world could be ever so much better.
As I look at my daughter’s smiling face, I think of what I can leave behind: an idea about freedom. Our problem is not the world; our problem is us. And so we can solve it. We can be free, if we see what freedom is. We can see creativity in the past, possibility in the present, liberty in the future. We can recognize one another, create a good government, and make our own luck.
“We live in a world,” says Simone Weil, “where people can expect miracles only from themselves.” We can seize our chance. It is our last one, but it is a good one.
Appendix
Positive and Negative Freedom
Positive freedom
Negative freedom
Freedom
value of values
absence of barriers
Preposition
freedom to
freedom from
Question
why?
how?
Attitude
creative
certain
Source
people in the world
external forces
Task
becoming individuals
removing barriers
Government
must be made for freedom
must be dismantled for freedom
Speech
truth and risk
impulse and impunity
Body
Leib Körper
Others
bodies, individuals, possibilities
barriers, problems, commodities
Beginning
bloody birth
abstract adulthood
Virtues
real, plural, and challenging
irrelevant, single, or private
Truth
horizon, connector
opinion, barrier
Thought
reasonability
rationality
Science
engagement with the world
one opinion among others
Internet
politics
nature
Markets
one useful institution among others
source of freedom
Oligarchy
impedes freedom
side effect of freedom
Racism
historical, requires reflection
personal, irrelevant to freedom
Communism
important warning
too much government
Fascism
present danger
