Question of the Month:

The definition of Freedom should be simple. Why else would we value it so much? And many people
(especially on the right) treat it as such. But what do we mean by Freedom?

For myself, I think the best approach lies in a point made by Camus: that all arguments for
Beauty are, ultimately, arguments for Freedom. His point, if I get him right, was that engaging in acts of
Beauty are always for the sake of Beauty itself, and thereby defy the tyranny of the functional as many a
starving artist or philosopher would attest to. At the same time, I would argue the inverse to be true:
that all arguments for Freedom are basically arguments for Beauty to the extent that the experience of
Freedom is about having access to what gives us pleasure.

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Here the plot thickens. The problem, on further thought, is that one person's pleasure is

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another’s pain. We can root this in the American South in the 19th century when the justification they

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offered for owning slaves was "States Rights". This, of course, was posed in opposition to “the tyranny of
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the federal government”. It was only a matter of time before “economic liberty” became perfect license
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to exploit others. Religious Liberty became the right to impose religious beliefs on our public schools.
This is evident in their claim to the right to have “intelligent design” taught as an alternative to evolution.
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School prayer is claimed to be a matter of religious liberty when they’re perfectly free to pray in school
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as long as they don’t interfere with normal school activity. Christian employers claim the right to deny
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female employees control of their own bodies through denial of birth control and abortion through the
insurance policies they offer. And how misogynistic is that? We even see it at work in the recent
pandemic and the right’s insistence that mask mandates are an affront to personal freedom.
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The problem, I’m guessing, is one that Gregory Bateson confronted with the term “ethos” in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind: it’s just too short. The problem with this, given the hard Germanic crunch, is
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that it feels more concrete than it really is. This allows more authoritarian elements to throw such terms
around as if they, in their selves, should be the end of the argument, that the issue should be that
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simple, that resolved.

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D E Tarkington

4007 High Meadows Ln

Bellevue, NE, 68147

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