Freedom

Throughout the night and throughout the day, Baghdad and Basra and Kirkuk ring with the shattering assault of machine guns and mortars and tomahawks and F15s and cruise missiles, sent, all of it, in the name of freedom. But it is a conflicted set of images that confronts us.

A quarter of a million young Americans and Britons place themselves in harm's way today to defend freedom, to give the Iraqi people the gift of freedom. Most of those young recruits believe it; those who do not are not free to say so or just go home.

Millions of Iraqis and a gigantic multitude within the Arab and Muslim world feel their freedom under grave threat, even if by freedom they mean simply freedom from foreign domination, even while many of them live under the most brutal dictatorships, not merely in Iraq. Everyone who lives under a demonic tyranny is degraded by it; degraded morally, compromised in order to survive, unfree in ways we never thought of. Had not the sanctions program made 13 million Iraqis, more than half the population, utterly dependent on state food aid, they might have overthrown him. Now he is their saint and hero.

And the great American liberator — well, in Baghdad and Basra, they know our history in the region is less than inspirational. They know how little their freedom meant when the United States needed Saddam. They might have noted that this promised freedom has already brought huge contracts for Halliburton and Bechtel.¹ They remember promises so easily broken. So what is it, freedom?

What is American freedom? Who is free?

v

Erich Fromm wrote: "The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privileges to defend."²

But when it is those with privileges to defend, such as the privilege of expecting an unlimited supply of cheap oil so they can, for instance, drive an SUV, and any number of other privileges not shared by most of the world's people — when those with these privileges claim that they fight for the freedom of oppressed people, there is a great danger of self-deception.

Does this nation now fight for the freedom of the Iraqi people? People whom we have ourselves betrayed when it was convenient to do so, when it was in our interest to support and promote Saddam Hussein?

I don't know.

I do know that the minds of those now making national policy are captive to the same economic system and privilege that are now creating new vistas of injustice and inequity at home. I do know that our track record is poor. I do know that when these oppressed Iraqis and Kurds did fight for their freedom, we made their fight impossible — first by the great double-cross of 1991, and then by the debilitating sanctions which made the Iraqi people dependent on the oppressive state.

We may hope that the Iraqi people will come out of this more free. But it seems too likely that much of the world will come out of this far less free, when the terror and death unleashed on Baghdad shall have engendered more bitterness, produced a new generation of suicide terrorists, done its damage to the fragile bonds between nations and peoples. We must insist that Iraq's reconstruction be an international effort, not an American occupation led by President Bush's choice, Jay Garner, a retired general who is president of a weapons technology company involved in the invasion of Iraq.

But in a day when we're being told that all this is about liberation — the day of freedom-fries and fictitious promises — I want to talk about freedom.

v

There is that in us that wants it, and that in us that fears it and flees from it.

The Administration that talks so much about it is the Administration that gives us John Ashcroft, and the Patriot Act and Operation Liberty Shield and the proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act. And you can be sure that a new Shariah, a new Christian theocracy as mean and deadly as the Islamicists' Shariah, waits behind them. The flag-waving public elected them and would, according to polls, just as soon do away with the Bill of Rights.

v

Erich Fromm reflected about the human flight from freedom in his Escape From Freedom. He observed that once humans had overthrown external domination — by the church, by an absolutist state — they got it into their heads that — Fromm's words:

The abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom of the individual.³

We should know by now that just to abolish external domination is not in fact sufficient to attain and sustain a state of freedom. No foreign power seriously threatens us. Yet we feel afraid, and have built up an overwhelming military force that is many times over that of all other nations combined.

The founding spirit of American Unitarianism reflected about this word, freedom, too. That is why, in his great election sermon in 1830, William Ellery Channing noted:

We may learn that the chief good and the most precious fruit of civil liberty is spiritual freedom and power, by considering what is the chief evil of tyranny. I know that tyranny does evil by invading men's outward interests, by making property and life insecure, by robbing the laborer to pamper the noble and king. But its worst influence is within. Its chief curse is that it breaks and tames the spirit, sinks man in his own eyes, takes away vigor of thought and action, substitutes for conscience an outward rule, makes him abject, cowardly, a parasite, and a cringing slave.

The sermon is called "Spiritual Freedom." So might this. Another Unitarian, John Dewey, would later write:

The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here — within ourselves and our institutions.⁴

Fromm speaks of wars that seem to liberate humanity from tyranny, and then notes: "But only a few years elapsed before new systems emerged which denied everything that men believed they had won in centuries of struggle."

I am nearly obsessed with trying to comprehend the monster that dominated the twentieth century, Nazi Germany. How is it that Germans — of all peoples — were so eager to surrender their freedom, as eager to surrender it as previous generations had been eager to fight for it?

Why is it that millions of Americans today seek ways to escape from freedom, choosing exponents of Christian Shariah and theocracy — leaders with so little grasp of this idea, "freedom"?

v

I have written this, and suddenly, I have to stop. I am shaking, about to black out. My blood-glucose has dropped to 67. I have to stop and immediately attend to this emergency. I am angry. This is unfair — this new designation they gave me at the hospital, this stupid diagnosis; this paraphernalia I have to carry around with me everywhere, how am I going to get through the airports, this necessity of manually regulating the supply of insulin because my body won't make it anymore, testing blood, calculating carbohydrates and dosages, figuring out what to eat and when, injecting this stuff in restaurants — Christ!

v

Back to my desk. I had been writing something — What was it about ? — Oh. Yeh.

That quickly, the idea, "freedom," is brought down to right here. Isn't that what I lost? — freedom?

v

But — only in the most superficial of ways, freedom only the shallowest sense.

It is obvious that our great and vaunted American freedoms can be taken and embraced in the most superficial of ways, too.

So Channing says,

The chief benefit of free institutions is clear and unutterably precious. Their chief benefit is that they aid freedom of mind, that they give scope to man's faculties, that they throw him on his own resources, and summon him to work out his own happiness. It is that, by removing restraint from intellect, they favor force, originality, and enlargement of thought.

There are circumstances beyond our control, particularly the social system in which we live, that work either to promote or to constrict freedom. It isn't fair, but you and I enjoy greater possibilities for freedom, in its fullest sense, than the subjects of dictators or the prisoners of poverty.

Conditions of coercion deprive us, to some extent, of ourselves, of our human capacities. They might make us strangers to ourselves, without access to our own inner resources. They might make us false, in order to survive. Sometimes, to be alive in Iraq and not in prison can mean that you didn't protest when they executed your neighbor.

v

But freedom from external domination does not make us free: it merely allows us more possibilities for freedom.

What is it to be free? How free am I?

Is it possible to feel free in anything like the sense in which Walt Whitman was always writing about it? The freedom he claims in "Song of the Open Road" ?

Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute . . . ,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

How free am I? By what am I enslaved?

Life is not fair. In an important sense, the possibility of freedom varies directly with the power a person has, and power is not distributed fairly or evenly. But — it's way too easy to define freedom in superficial terms.

Take William Ellery Channing. How free was he?

He wasn't free to roam open roads like Whitman because he was never healthy. It took him most of the week to recuperate from preaching so he could get up and do it again. He did little else during the week than study and write. He was not popular with his colleagues, partly because, owing to his frail health, he was not free to socialize with them or attend their meetings, or, for that matter, attend the theatre, or very much else.

Nor was Channing free to preach against slavery at Federal Street Church because his Board ordered him to keep silent on the topic. So he simply stopped preaching at Federal Street Church, and took to the lecture circuit for the rest of his days.

Yet they knew him as the most revered figure in Boston. His life was full and, in magnificent ways, free. After he died, Emerson wrote of him:

Dr. Channing, whilst he lived, was the star of the American Church . . . We could not then spare a single word he uttered in public . . , and it is curious that his printed writings are almost a history of the times; as there was no great public interest, political, literary or even economical, on which he did not leave some printed record of his brave and thoughtful opinion. A poor little invalid all his life, he is yet one of those men who vindicate the power of the American race to produce greatness.

We have not begun to realize the possible dimensions of freedom until we have contemplated Nelson Mandela, or our own Norbert Çapek, or for that matter, at this moment, our own Jason Lydon, held as political prisoners, yet transcending their external conditions, their spirits bouyant and free.

v

But freedom isn't easy. Not the real thing, not the farthest reaches of human freedom. It is perhaps our greatest life-project: for individuals and for nations. So it was that Emerson wrote: "for really the world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty which begins with liberty from fear."

But to get the "science of liberty" right, we have to understand the paradoxical but necessary connection between freedom and duty. I am free when I understand and accept my place in this world, and the work that is mine to do. The great 19th-century Transcendentalist Samuel Johnson was speaking of that connection when he wrote:

"I will" has nothing to do with "thou shalt"! To will means distinctly and definitely, "not to be compelled," but to act voluntarily. Moral volition comes when one undertakes to be loyal to the law of spiritual being as the liberty of his own human being; when he looks beyond his own interests to what is right and fit in itself and therefore in him.

The law of spiritual being, fidelity to what we are and where we find ourselves in this world. Not mere obedience to others, or to society's expectations.

Sometimes freedom, in its grandest sense, means a seamless flow from thought and conviction to action. Sometimes you know what it is right away; sometimes it takes time and reflection — but when you arrive at it, it commands. That, too, is freedom.

v

We all know the tyrannies that prevent us doing what is most true to our inmost selves, true to our deepest truth of our lives. David Snail speaks of the great difficulty of doing that when it means changing our fundamental approach to life:

Behaving in radically new ways challenges deeply embedded certainties, contradicts everything we have learned to expect and undermines an 'expertise' which we have built up perfectly validly over the years. That this expertise no longer serves us as it used to can be discovered only through a act of faith, for otherwise we have no evidence at all that doing things differently will result in anything but the catastrophe which seems most likely."⁵

Freedom can begin in a moment's perception of what is real and true in life, but those great moments usually lead to tough, challenging work. Drawing on a resource we are not used to drawing on; walking away from patterns that are as familiar and comfortable as they are disastrous; challenging false authority and refusing to comply when doing so leaves you feeling vulnerable and alone; risking an unpleasant outcome on the chance that you've got it right and it will come out differently this time; — all this takes practice and learning. The forces within our own personalities are very formidable. The structures of the world in which we live are pretty overwhelming. Changing ourselves and changing the world is hard.

We can learn to look upon ourselves, each other, our spiritual community, more deeply, with a greater comprehension that each face represents a struggle, a difficult struggle, against bondages of many kinds, private and public — a long, hard journey toward freedom in its highest and fullest sense. We can make this a place where the façades can come down and the struggle can be shared and supported.

v

I think Channing has a right to speak of freedom. I'll let him finish the sermon:

I call that mind free which masters the senses, . . . which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself.

I call that mind free which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, . . .

I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused.

I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not cower to human opinion . . , which respects a higher law than fashion, which respects itself too much to be the slave or tool of the many or the few.

I call that mind free which . . . has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself though all else be lost.

I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on its old virtues, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.

I call that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.

I call that mind free which . . . devotes itself faithfully to the unfolding of all its powers . . .

So may it be.

¹ Halliburton's subsidiary KBR got the $900,000 contract to extinguish the fires at Iraq's oil wells. Bechtel and KBR are on the shortlist for the bigger contracts for infrastructure rebuilding. Contractors are chosen in a bid-free waiver deal that allows agencies to hand-pick contractors.

² Erich Fromm. Escape From Freedom. New York: Henry Holt, 1941, 1969, p.1.

³ Escape From Freedom, p.2.

⁴ John Dewey. Freedom and Culture. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939.

⁵ David Snail. The Nature of Unhappiness: How to Live Without Psychotherapy. London: Robinson, 2001, p. 459.

⁶ David Snail. The Nature of Unhappiness: How to Live Without Psychotherapy. London: Robinson, 2001, p. 459.

Readings

from Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

1

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

2

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.

5

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, s earching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

William Ellery Channing,
in his election sermon in 1830:

Spiritual freedom is the attribute of a mind in which reason and conscience have begun to act, and which is free through its own energy, through fidelity to the truth, through resistance of temptation. The essence of spiritual freedom is power. That mind alone is free which . . . governs itself, reveres itself, exerts faithfully its best powers, and unfolds itself by well-doing in whatever sphere providence assigns.

The chief good and the most precious fruit of civil liberty is spiritual freedom and power, by considering what is the chief evil of tyranny. Tyranny does evil by invading men's outward interests, by making property and life insecure, by robbing the laborer to pamper the noble and king. But its worse influence is within.

The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breast. The one who lacks force of principle and purpose is a slave, however free the air he breathes.

From an Emerson address against the Fugitive Slave Law in New York, March 1854:

Now, Gentlemen, I think we have in this hour instruction again in the simplest lesson. Events roll, millions of men are engaged, and the result is some of those first commandments which we heard in the nursery. We never get beyond our first lesson; for really the world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty which begins with liberty from fear. The events of this month are teaching one thing plain and clear . . . You relied on the Constitution . . . and very good argument has shown that it would not warrant the crimes that are done under it. . . . You relied on the Supreme Court. The law was right; excellent law for the lambs. But what if, unhappily, the judges were chosen from the wolves?

What is the use of admirable law forms and political forms if a hurricane of party feeling and a combination of monied interests can beat them to the ground? . . .

I fear there is no reliance to be had on any kind of form or covenant, no, not on sacred forms,—none on churches, none on bibles. For one would have said that a Christian would not keep slaves, but the Christians keep slaves. . . . They quote the bible and Christ and Paul to maintain slavery. . . . These things show that no forms, neither Constitutions nor laws nor covenants nor churches nor bibles, are of any use in themselves; the devil nestles comfortably into them all. . . . To make good the cause of Freedom you must draw off from all these foolish trusts on others. You must be citadels and warriors, yourselves Declarations of Independence, the charter, the battle, and the victory. He only who is able to stand alone, is qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world, to be himself the counterbalance of all falsehood and all wrong.

Meditate

We enter this sanctuary, a quiet retreat where noise of warfare cannot penetrate and shattering buildings and flesh cannot be heard and yet we hear it, it reaches us and we know the horror and grief of it.

So much that could have been so different. We grieve.

We hold in sorrowing tender care lives shattered by violence, made false by fear and pain, hurt and savaged and crushed and thwarted in ways we cannot guess; and we hold nations and peoples made to be one family of earth but rent, set one against another in great bitterness and mounting rage.

Shall love heal these wounds? Shall these grave injuries be bound up in by loving acts and deeds and words? And from the red ground shall there yet come forth a new creation, a nobler humanity, gentler, governed by the law of love, making the world new, that shall be home for unfolding human splendor?

Let it be. Let us live free of tyrannies without and within. Let us find our place and voice and work in these times, in the name of this one world of life, for the sake of life that shall be full, robust, joyous, awake, alive, free.

Let us find, at the heart of us, that Life, copious and unspent and free, in which and by which we live, always, already here, in this gathered silence.