Last week, redroom.com held a contest in which people had to blog about "freedom." This was my particular blog on that subject:
The minute our souls are breathed into this fleshly casing—we are bound, fettered. The sun rises and sets. Clocks tick. Our stomachs rumble with self-preservation. There are laws both seen and unseen that govern our every breath.
We emerge from the womb and enter the social and cultural constructs that will label us, categorize us, stereotype us. I am a woman. I am Caucasian. I am a brunette with brown eyes. I speak English, live in the United States, teach college. I was born in Ohio, and I reside in Indiana—a Midwesterner. My partner is female. I am Protestant. I am middle class. I tend to vote Independent. Keep checking off the boxes...
My identity was shaped before I ever recognized my own face in a mirror.
To define is to confine.
I pretend that I have choices in life. Such a thought makes a world where the hours of my life are bought and paid for a little more bearable. Shall I choose Coke or Pepsi? I will be an individual and choose Sprite. I smirk at my secret rebellions that corporations have already determined for me.
When I am sad, I cry. When I puncture my skin, a swell of blood forms, then drips.
I wake up, shut off my alarm clock, fill my hunger, shower, put on the accepted clothing styles of my day, and go to work. At the end of the day, I get into my car, only one of several that I could afford at the dealership where I bought it; I drive five miles over the speed limit, buckle my seatbelt lest I get a ticket for not clicking it, swing by the grocery store and buy my toilet paper, go home, eat my dinner, sit down on my couch and watch a movie or two. Then, it’s back to bed.
How many real choices do we make in a day?
Even the birds I envy as they glide across the sky are no less bound than I. We share many of the same needs. We both share mortality.
To define freedom is immediately to lose any chance of it.
And, in this time, on this earth, as human beings, when we talk about “freedom,” we are only children at play.
5 comments:
Don't they have a like button on this thing somewhere?
But I feel I should offer a bit more of an optimist's response. I agree with your premise that control coincides with emergence into Being. Such is the trick of language (Burke's old mantra: language attempts to reflect reality but only selects reality and therefore deflects reality). And certainly, most of us live in predetermined patterns. As I used to say to my students, if I invite you to my house for dinner, and ask you if you prefer steak or chicken, have I really presented you with a choice?
But don't we have choices over the patterns we choose to inhabit? The forms we choose to embody? Whether to check the box?
To think that we can change society is, as one former professor so bluntly put it, to spit at windmills. But that doesn't mean we cannot change the way we orient ourselves toward the rules in play. Because, though we might never be fathers, only sons (I figured a Freud reference wouldn't be out of form here? Or am I sticking to close to the old rule book?), though the cultural apparatus surrounding us is the closest thing to a parent we have, it is a parent that gives space to those who choose to take it.
My real point in responding (and, yes, I am making this up as I go--but we haven't played this game in awhile), is to be wary, in critiquing any absolute notion of freedom, to leave our lives devoid of agency. Particularly, I am concerned to keep open our local and ethical obligations--not only to others (which is often my priority), but also to ourselves.
Thank you for this reply!
I appreciate your more "optimistic" perspective. I also like the "spitting at windmills" image.
Can we draw a distinction between decisions and choices? I can certainly decide to be ethical, law abiding, to eat chicken for dinner--but have I truly made a choice?
My overall point is that "freedom" is beyond a mere human being's grasp. We are bound by our mortality and needs. Perhaps someday our souls will breathe free, but while we occupy this particular time and space, we will always be defined by society's boxes, fettered to our own fallibilities.
To me, such a notion is not pessimistic. It is simply realistic :)
Ok, I'm with you. And truth be told, I'm not really an optimist. After all, I was raised a Red Sox fan.
I do find it interesting that in your final paragraph, our bondage slips from a matter of our own being to our being a-part of society. Of course, I am sure there is a relationship between our needs and societies boxes.
I would say that I have always been more interesting in approaching the question in terms of biological and psychological needs. Those needs certainly translate into social obligations, expectations, and institutions. And I would say the crux of my work concerns understanding how (re)articulating biological and psychological needs allows us to reimagine different institutions (or, to use my theoretical language de jour, to think institutionality otherwise). Ah, the good ole days of waxing theory with Whitey. Where has all this time gone?!?
Ah, MC, our witty intellectual banter did crank out a couple of cool papers on video games :)
Truth be told, I wrote this blog in probably about 30 minutes.
I wanted to explain our bondage from inside out and outside in. Our human frailties--our needs, our mortality, our inherent "creature-ness"--can never be surmounted nor escaped. Therefore, our institutions, the societal boxes which contain us, shape us, and confine us, these societal boxes are related to our fleshly container. Our societies respond to us and box us according to what we do with and look like in our bodies.
Redroom was having us define "freedom" as if a human being ever could. My point was that we can talk about the notion but never--as long as we are human--have the experience :)
Smart talk is fun!
I like that final line there--the difference between talking of the notion (Idealism) and having the experience. Good stuff.
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