DECEMBER 31, FRIDAY

FREEDOM

I’ve tried to write this post a couple of times and realize that I have bitten off more than I can chew. Partly this is because I am confused, and partly it is because the subject is so big and so complicated that I feel as if I am feeling my way through a swamp.

What led me to wonder about freedom was driving back from Rehoboth Beach on Thursday through the decaying Eastern Shore of Maryland and parts of Virginia and comparing this to drives in Greece and Germany where everything was ordered and immaculate.

What has been growing on me is a slow awareness of American freedom. I come from the home of the brave and the land of the free. But I haven’t faced this freedom head on. What are the consequences of unconstrained freedom?

The first settlers and the waves of immigration that followed were Europeans that were discontented with the rigid social structures, the ritualistic church traditions, the economic system that bound people in work that was demeaning. They were the hardy ones, the adventurous ones, the people who were satisfied or cowed stayed at home. They were in search of religious freedom, not for others but for themselves, economic freedom, not for others but themselves, freedom to make a good life for themselves. America with its seemingly endless empty land and endless opportunity offered this.

And I think this is still central to who we are as Americans, who I am as an American. Like all Americans I revel in the freedom to do things in as informal a way as I please, to be able to start over again when I fail, to be as free as possible of the constraints of society and culture. People in other cultures including Greece and Germany and all of Europe and India and China don’t have our freedoms, our ability to do as we please.

I think this explains the Tea Party who raised such a ruckus during the Obama years, the rural resentment at city life and city jobs and city politics, the anger at big government in all its forms from first social security and Medicare, which gradually became accepted, to the fury at Obamacare, which has also become accepted. And it certainly explains the fury at being forced by the government to wear masks and get vaccinations. There is such a deep suspicion of big government and educated experts telling us what to do that the science of vaccinations really doesn’t matter. And of course this explains for me the need to have a gun to protect yourself, not only from thieves and bad people, but from big government itself. Militias are standing up for freedom and make sense to many people. Even the storming of the capital to defend our basic American values from the elite forces that would destroy these values, makes sense when seen this way.

And I remember that all of my life I have chafed at being forced into conventions, any kinds of conventions ranging from academic conventions to domestic conventions to religious conventions to political conventions. I don’t like big government either. I don’t want to belong to any tribe. I have always wanted to be free to do my own thing. So maybe I am being a hypocrite when I find fault with anti vaxxers, stormers of the capital, fundamentalist Christians or people with a gun strapped to their waist.

But there is a catch to all of this that I have never been able to deal with.

I notice that when I pass two teenage girls on the street that they are using the same words, the same order of words, the same intonations as I do. We are bound together in the conventions of American English. In what matters the most I am entirely conventional and this conventionalism extends not only to language but to all that language conveys. I am an American, not only in my speech, but in my basic beliefs about what it is to be human, and certainly in my feeling that freedom is a good thing that should be protected.

Imagine, actually it is impossible to imagine, that you are Helen Keller who doesn’t know that there is language because she can’t hear or see. She is a wild child. But then she discovers through her teacher that language exists and she soaks up language with great delight and is a changed person. But imagine in addition that there was no language to discover. There was no way to communicate. There were other humans who also couldn’t communicate. Maybe over time you would develope a few grunts and yelps to indicate your feelings and whack people when they got in the way.

But we are born into one of hundreds of fully developed languages which we learn as a child and beyond the words we learn our culture through language and conventionalize and conventionalize and conventionalize ourselves in the richness of our language and our culture until we become Americans, or Germans or Greeks.

The houses and villages I so admired in Germany and Greece were the product of culture just as much as their language is. They are part of a long tradition in which ways of living together are developed and followed by everyone within the culture. That is why Naousa is all white and blue houses with only, in the whole town, one defiant orange house and why German houses with their red tiled roofs huddle together in villages leaving forest and fields untouched.

But I am coming to the realization that the freedom that I prize so deeply as an American is also the reason that the countryside on the way back from Rehoboth Beach was lined with decaying houses with unkempt front yards with dead automobiles parked in them with billboards everywhere and every big box or little box chain store looking impermanent, a stand set up to sell as much as possible as cheaply as possible, exemplified by Dollar General boxes with different Dollar names everywhere. That is what unregulated freedom leads to. My town, Swannanoa, with a beautiful Native American name, is a strip mall, haphazard decaying little town with no bank or grocery story or barber shop except along the strip of Route 70. A few years ago Swannanoans had a chance to incorporate and to have a town government which would try and develop the town into a livable community and voted proudly against it because it would lead to government regulation and taxes and end up like thriving beautiful Asheville where the property taxes are three times as high. Freedom.

So that is the tension. Freedom from culture and the rich complicated traditions of culture which do, just as the Swannanoans feel, hem you in and restrict what an individual can do in order to increase the social welfare of the community, to build a rich but constraining culture.

This is a tension between individualism and socialism and

America has chosen individualism.

This is the tension that I have lived with all my life. Culture seems an almost artificial social construct. Our language is invented, our religion is invented, our art and music is invented, our politics are invented, our economic system is invented over time by a culture. And yet when it comes to language I am the most conventional of persons. What I am doing right now is completely conventional.

So how can I live within this culture or any culture and think that I am free to do as I please? I am constrained by my culture, even constrained by the idea of freedom. On one hand I am impelled along by visceral feelings as any animal is, driven by emotions that I have little choice about or control over and at the same time outwardly, in order to communicate and get along with other humans, I am driven by being embedded in a culture that has been developed by others into a fabric into which I have to fit. And yet, somehow, in the middle of this I persist in thinking that I am free and independent and am making my own individual way along.

And if that tension between independence and living within set conventions is true of me, it is true of the Tea Party as well who are no more free than I am, but just as certain that they are right.