O Freedom!
Who gets it. Who doesn't. Who decides?
My car insurance policy renews in August. I just received the insurance company’s handy checklist to help decide whether I need to change my coverage. Car insurance is on one side of the paper, homeowner’s and renter’s insurance on the other. The homeowner/renter list of limits and exclusions is longer, but I don’t own a home or carry renter’s insurance, so this very partial list is from the car owner’s side:
Provide prompt notice when you acquire a new or used car.
Inform us of all your vehicles and licensed drivers in the household . . .
Your policy may exclude coverage if you use your vehicle to earn a fee . . .
Your policy1 may limit or exclude coverage for custom equipment . . .
It got me to thinking about all the concessions we make for our “freedom.” If my car insurance isn’t paid up, I can’t renew my car’s registration. Without a current registration, I can’t meet my state’s inspection requirements. I could drive around in an unregistered, uninspected car, but then I would not be free from the possibility of being busted for driving an unregistered, uninspected car.
Maybe “tradeoffs” is a better word than “concessions.”
The New Hampshire license plate carries the state motto: LIVE FREE OR DIE.2 The late singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey (1951–2011), born in Connecticut, raised in Massachusetts, but a longtime resident of New Hampshire, wrote a song about it. The singer begins:
I’m doing 10 to 20 in the frozen Granite State
and every day I go to work to stamp out license plates
every day I go work and every night I cry
because every license plate I make tells me to “Live Free or Die.”He advises listeners who are thinking of committing a crime to do it in another state, where the license plates say “Vacationland” or “Garden State” or “Oklahoma is OK.”
The slave song “O Freedom!” says “live free or die” in a very different way:
O Freedom! O Freedom! O Freedom over me
and before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
and go home to my Lord and be freeOdetta sang it at the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Here it is as a trilogy with “Come and Go with Me” and “I’m on My Way.”
Freedom is a major theme in the slave songs: lack of freedom (“Many Thousand Gone”), imagining freedom (“We’re Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table”), walking toward freedom (“Wade in the Water”). Freedom meant emancipation, freedom from slavery, freedom from having one’s parents, siblings, children, sold away on a master’s whim or to pay the master’s debts.
But the end of Reconstruction, the institution of Jim Crow, and the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) demonstrated that freedom could be denied even when slavery was abolished.
We who are neither incarcerated nor enslaved regularly use these conditions as metaphors. Discontented employees call themselves wage slaves or slaves to the clock. When Facebook’s anonymous enforcers restrict our posting privileges, we say we’re in Facebook jail.3 I do this, though it makes me uneasy: these metaphorical conditions are nowhere near as final or as violently enforced as either incarceration or slavery.
At the same time, freedom and unfreedom aren’t absolutes with a chasm between them. I was about to say they’re at either ends of a continuum, but that’s not true either. They’re more like a lady’s fan, with unfreedom where the spokes come together in the hand and freedom at different points on the various spokes. If absolute unfreedom has a polar opposite, absolute freedom, I can’t imagine it. Or maybe absolute freedom and unfreedom are the same thing?4
The imagery in Gordon Bok’s “The Ways of Man” clearly derives from those who make their living on the water, but most of the rest of us are governed, or at least influenced, by different winds and different tides.
The ways of man are passing strange
He buys his freedom and he counts his change
Then he lets the wind his days arrange
And he calls the tide his masterMilton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–1945 was first published in 1955. I read it for the first time for my Modern European History course, University of Pennsylvania, ca. 1973, and have gone back to it several times since. Needless to say, the Germans who thought they were free weren’t Jewish, or socialist, or homosexual. The Germans who thought they were free didn’t consider those people real Germans, or even fully human.
Some USians feel similarly about other USians. A major political party is trying to restrict access to the ballot by anyone deemed likely to vote for the opposition. And January 6, 2021, looked much more like the Beer Hall Putsch of November 19235 than like the Night of the Long Knives (June 30–July 2, 1934), but keep in mind that in the latter the Nazis were in power and rubbing out their paramilitary opposition. In other words, we’re not there yet.
On January 6, 1941, in his annual message to Congress (aka the State of the Union), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his famous “Four Freedoms” speech. Its #1 purpose was to increase support for U.S. involvement in the war against Hitler’s Germany, which was not going well for the Allies. The four freedoms were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Most of us think these are good things, at least on paper. The tricky part is making sure they all apply to everybody. And that’s where the tradeoffs come in.
NOTES
I typed “police” instead of “policy” here, knew they were closely related, but had to look it up anyway. Sure enough: police and policy (and politics and polity) all come from the Greek polis, which applies not only to the city and the city-state but to the citizens who make them up.
I just learned this from the New Hampshire state website: “The words ‘Live Free or Die,’ written by General John Stark, July 31, 1809, shall be the official motto of the state. It was the 1945 Legislature that gave New Hampshire its official motto and emblem, as World War II approached a successful end.” This helps explain why the words ring a little differently these days.
Do any husbands still refer to their wives as their “ball and chain”? I heard this a fair amount as a young person. Wives might even refer to themselves as “his ball and chain.” I just found a ball and chain flag for sale. It’s apparently aimed at male mariners: the description is headed “Ball & Chain Flag (Wife on Board).”
For sure absolute freedom for some means absolute unfreedom for others, but can a person be absolutely free and absolutely unfree at the same time? It occurs to me that if I’m absolutely free to kill (or enslave) you and you’re absolutely free to kill (or enslave) me, neither one of us is absolutely free. Gotta think more about that . . .
I just noticed that Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) took place almost exactly 15 years after the Beer Hall Putsch (November 8–9, 1923). Was that intentional?