Thoughts on freedom

When we exercise it in a particular way, we ought to ask why

Consider this, if you’d like, an extension of the thought process I launched in my last post, which was a contemplation of rights.

I’m motivated to explore it further by a post I did over at Late in the Day this morning. I took to task the premise of a piece by David Dayden at The American Prospect. I felt that the disingenuousness of that premise needed to be pointed out. He wanted the focus of our inquiry into whether government participation in the country’s economic life introduced more waste or more efficiency, and whether “public investment” “crowded out” private investment.

That’s not the main point at hand, Mr. Dayden:

Here's the glaring fact that anybody without a bias for collectivism can see from the get-go: Money for "public investment" is coerced out of citizens who may or may not be on board with what's being invested in.

In a country that really valued freedom, there'd be a common understanding among policymakers - certainly Congress, but also in executive-branch entities such as the Office of Management and Budget - that taxation is a government function that ought to be handled as gingerly as possible, that government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking the first red cent from any of us.

Longtime LITD readers know that if I had my druthers, we'd go back to a strictly Madisonian model of the scope of government. We'd jettison everything that progressives have done to expand that scope in the last 130 or so years.

The argument can be made that my argument is hopelessly quixotic. It may indeed be impossible to convince the American populace at this late date that it would be better off without the myriad means by which government "improves" lives.

But someone has to inject the element of freedom into the discussion. 

As an individual, I can invest in organizations that I think will be sufficiently profitable to show me a return. But the operative term in the above sentence is "can." Any investing I do is voluntary. 

Not so with "public investment."

I’m leading with the economic front of the overall subject of freedom - well, for one thing because it triggered my present train of thought, but also because I firmly believe economic freedom is as important as such freedoms as speech, assembly, religion, bearing arms and the pursuit of happiness.

But the question of what we do with freedom is interesting and important.

Being a writer, cultural observer and someone who takes being a musician seriously, I spend a great deal of time thinking about art (using this term in its largest sense, in which it encompasses painting, sculpture, literature, drama and music).

I kind of started thinking about the relationship of art to freedom in a May piece here at Precipice on music. That piece had all kinds of links and excerpts and even excerpts within excerpts, and I won’t ask you to peel back those onion layers again at present, but the concluding paragraphs are the most relevant:

Ah, standards.

Here’s where we are: most people don’t give much thought to applying standards to music. Their relationship with it is much too passive. It’s aural wallpaper that just happens to them, and some of it catches their fancy. Why that is so is not of much importance to them.

When I go into places of business that engage with the public - banks, dentists’ offices, retail establishments - and hear the content being broadcast on the local classic-hits station, I thank God in heaven above that I no longer report to a workplace where I’m subjected to that aural equivalent of Polar Pop all day long.

I get more dismayed than I probably should when I discern, from social-media posts, what the music tastes of people whose intellects I admire, turn out to be. These are good writers, think tank scholars and the like, and what turns them on musically leaves me aghast, frankly.

I’ve gone pretty long here, and you’re a busy person. And the title of this piece promises “musings,” not firm conclusions. But I hope I’ve started a conversation.

We are an aesthetically starved culture. We have lost sight of one of the greatest gifts God bestowed upon us: the joy of making and listening to a human activity that can put us in touch with our innate nobility, a nobility that exceeds the bounds of space and time.

Consider the Swifties phenomenon. Swifties are females in the, roughly, 12-year-old to 24-year-old age range who apparently derive some deep level of validation for their feelings from the songs of a vapid and self-absorbed pop performer, Taylor Swift, to the point of harassing a music industry executive who sold the masters of her early recordings. So intensely do they identify with her that they take this as a personal affront.

Maybe if we were talking about Bach or John Coltrane there’d be a chance that it should be taken seriously. But Taylor Swift? Come on.

And if Richard M. Weaver were still alive, he’d dispute my saying there’d be a chance if we were talking about Coltrane. In Weaver’s 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, he expends considerable verbiage railing against jazz in general as an abomination that has wrecked the legacy of Western musical achievement.

As a conservative, I’m willing to not come down too hard on Weaver for this stance. While I feel jazz has built on that achievement and that the new vistas it has opened up make possible even more deeply human expressions of beauty, I understand that he was so dismayed by the casting aside of conventions and norms that jazz would have rubbed him the wrong way.

The other night, I watched a documentary on John James Audubon. It had been a long time since he’d come up in my cognitive field. I mean, he’s part of the backdrop of American culture that we all take for granted, right? He’s the guy who studied the continent’s birds and painted realistic renderings of them. But the program invites one to consider what motivated him to throw himself into such a project. And then there’s the impact that it had on the arc of his life. His wife was the family breadwinner, as a Kentucky schoolteacher, for many years as he sought an engraver and publisher to take interest in what he was doing. He finally caught on in London, came back a celebrity, and gave his wife a life of prestige and comfort for the rest of their marriage.

And the paintings! They may be photographically faithful to their subjects, but they are deeply soulful. They celebrate creation’s beauty with a quiet hallelujah.

Audubon died in 1851, 62 years before the 1913 Armory Show, which ushered in the visual-art era of using the power of expression to impose one’s subjective interpretation of the external world, often in intentionally provocative ways.

Thus did we start down the path of seeing the artist as someone who is “brave” for sharing with us what his or her personal take on the world was. No more getting oneself out of the way and conveying that world’s grandeur on its own terms. No more reverence, if you will.

We were free to do so, of course, but did it ennoble us?

Now, how about some area of human activity with an undeniable and powerful moral component? Sex, for instance.

The case could be made that, for much of human history, we’ve been overly modest about it, glossing it over with euphemisms and burying it beneath layers of vague admonishments against certain ways of employing its energies.

We’ve certainly swung that pendulum in the last century. We’ve had Freud’s whole construct of basing all manner of outlooks and behaviors on sexual cues from our infancy. We’ve been treated to the decidedly un-erotic clinical discussions of orgasms and positions of Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. We mainstreamed Hugh Hefner’s assertion that men and women were equally capable of fun, harmless casual hookups, from which they’d move on with their lives with no baggage. We then mainstreamed the bitter reaction to that put forth by feminists, who said, not without basis, that Hefnerism was a smokescreen for men wanting to exploit women as sex objects for their gratification with little regard for reciprocating that gratification. Then came another wave of feminists who demanded such reciprocation and saw casual sex as a political statement. Then homosexuals got in on the act. Then came the notion of gender fluidity.

Again, we have been free to do all this, but without a compass, a guide, a standard, an absolute, how are we to make any sense of the fallout (collapse of marriage rates, increase in teenage suicide rates, etc.)? Will we leave it to the modern-day troubadours such as Taylor Swift, who rise to the task with trivial whining about how their own ephemeral relationships have gone bad?

In a sense, we’re kind of at a familiar juncture here. We’re looking at the fundamental difference between libertarianism and conservatism. Libertarianism says that freedom is the end in and of itself. Conservatism says there’s an element of duty we must consider. We’re compelled by something transcendent, something that created us, to use our freedom to honor it. To glorify it.

We have to move in the direction of finding out more about what it is and how to go about glorifying it if our freedom is to mean anything. Otherwise, we’re enslaved by impulses and incompletely formed takes on the world we live in. We live for gratification. We become like the lab rat that ignores the piece of cheese and will stave to death, because incessantly pressing the lever instead of eating releases that dopamine bang which becomes its end-all and be-all.

The highest use of freedom is to discover that freedom is for something.

We’re not the stars of the show. That’s the context in which to think of freedom.