Freedom From, Not Freedom To Do
I would be remiss in my writing if, on the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day I did not write something, though more than the social pressure of doing so is a bone-deep appreciation for the trials and tribulations such a man went through without recourse to violence. For all my talk of serenity and humility, my work on the reduction of anger and judgment, all it often takes is a few minutes behind the wheel of my car and that journey is takes a sharp turn in a distinctly un-serene direction. Here is a man who was hit, spit on and suffered enormous indignities that most of us today would consider fictional were they not so well documented, such is our abject disgust for the actions. I could not and do not hope to achieve the eloquence and sheer magnetic quality of King’s speech but one message that stands out to me today is this:
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Technological innovation has ushered in an age which provided for us the Enlightenment and Renaissance, the Romantic Period and what I may very take to calling the Age of the Internet. Until recently however the technical and scientific enterprise, without denying the profound help that it has brought to the physical welfare of very nearly the entire human race, did more than help us differentiate our ways of knowing and parse out nature into ever-more manipulatable finer points but it dissociated us from each other and denied the underlying spiritual truths that religions often merely brush by, picking up particles but never the whole thing. Freedom has long been characterized as the ability to do something, leading a character in the movie “Jurassic Park” to remark that we only focused on the fact that we could do something, not on whether we should. We soar with wings of titanium and forget the glory of the birds, we land on the moon and forget that our place in the universe is but one far-flung speck in the universe, and we cure disease and map the genome and yet forget that we are all truly and incredibly interconnected in an integral reality.
The current age, that of the Internet or Information or Knowledge, holds the promise of bridging the divide brought about dissociation and remind us of our integrated differentiation, of parts that create by nature of their being ever greater wholes. As Wiliam Ury notes in The Third Side, “Humanity is returning to a dependence on a basic resource that is, as in hunter-gatherer times, an expandable pie. We are returning to the horizontal relationships that existed among human beings for most of human evolution. The network is once again becoming the defining social organization for the human community.” This is not to make the mistake of so many liberal mystics and decry technology for a return to nature as of old. The hunter-gatherer is not a way of life without problems; very little freedom from tyranny, very little freedom from superstition and fear, very little freedom of self-expression for women and minorities and very little freedom from ignorance. What is simply being acknowledged is an appreciation of a world in which the principle resource object was expandable and the networks that characterized such a reality. Information is now our expandable resource, breaking barriers and old ways of thinking, undoubtedly why the few despotic regimes that still exist attempt so hard to control it. But like roving bands following the movements of their food/clothing source, so the human race can and does find ways to access the sum-total of human knowledge, whether through smart phone or wind-up-powered computer.
I have spoken here in terms of freedom from and want to explain further. We can travel faster and farther than ever before and hence possess and freedom to do something, but it is small in the face of being free from oppression and ideological despotism, where one’s sense of importance and grandeur is forever dampened by the darkening influence of a philosophy of separation and brokenness. Whether this takes the form of conservative religious ideologies or political/social form like fascism, the result is a limiting of space to hold real freedom. We may have the freedom, some of us, to play video games for hours on end or watch endless television shows, having the technological know-how and acumen to do so, it is for naught if we are doing so to escape the terrifying reality that we do not possess the freedom from moral and existential castration, of being cut-off from our human potential.
This freedom from is precisely what Obama in his inaugural address today spoke to when he said: "The commitments we make to each other -- through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security -- these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.” Such programs and the underlying social cohesiveness that underlies them addresses both the reality of a social experiment in which none of us progress without the usage of resources that we all provide and had a hand in creating and a recognition that the greatness of the human condition is made possible by the freedom from caring about basic needs and thus to use our ever-widening conscious power to create.
What a focus on the freedom to do does is limit our imagination for we expend our awareness only on the myopic vision of a single action, forgetting that everything we do not yet know is an infinite expanse awaiting its realization and instantiation. This is why dialogue or communal action is the foundation of a truly free society, taking from the infinite resource of information and expanding into the frontiers of the until-now unknown. As William Ury states, again from The Third Side, “…dialogues aim not to convert others or to reach agreement on the issues, but rather to promote mutual understanding and build relationships that can prevent escalation into violence." The freedom to do something, while often fully valid, is not the greater freedom, it merely points to the view we hold of the world, whether it be one of limit and dissociation or one of expansiveness and integration. We can, as King noted, learn to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.
_______
“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is available on Kindle and Nook. It is a collection of the entries from 2012 organized into themes and them put in order to help with the flow of information.
_______
CRNJ4Y3SJJR7
[image error]
Technological innovation has ushered in an age which provided for us the Enlightenment and Renaissance, the Romantic Period and what I may very take to calling the Age of the Internet. Until recently however the technical and scientific enterprise, without denying the profound help that it has brought to the physical welfare of very nearly the entire human race, did more than help us differentiate our ways of knowing and parse out nature into ever-more manipulatable finer points but it dissociated us from each other and denied the underlying spiritual truths that religions often merely brush by, picking up particles but never the whole thing. Freedom has long been characterized as the ability to do something, leading a character in the movie “Jurassic Park” to remark that we only focused on the fact that we could do something, not on whether we should. We soar with wings of titanium and forget the glory of the birds, we land on the moon and forget that our place in the universe is but one far-flung speck in the universe, and we cure disease and map the genome and yet forget that we are all truly and incredibly interconnected in an integral reality.
The current age, that of the Internet or Information or Knowledge, holds the promise of bridging the divide brought about dissociation and remind us of our integrated differentiation, of parts that create by nature of their being ever greater wholes. As Wiliam Ury notes in The Third Side, “Humanity is returning to a dependence on a basic resource that is, as in hunter-gatherer times, an expandable pie. We are returning to the horizontal relationships that existed among human beings for most of human evolution. The network is once again becoming the defining social organization for the human community.” This is not to make the mistake of so many liberal mystics and decry technology for a return to nature as of old. The hunter-gatherer is not a way of life without problems; very little freedom from tyranny, very little freedom from superstition and fear, very little freedom of self-expression for women and minorities and very little freedom from ignorance. What is simply being acknowledged is an appreciation of a world in which the principle resource object was expandable and the networks that characterized such a reality. Information is now our expandable resource, breaking barriers and old ways of thinking, undoubtedly why the few despotic regimes that still exist attempt so hard to control it. But like roving bands following the movements of their food/clothing source, so the human race can and does find ways to access the sum-total of human knowledge, whether through smart phone or wind-up-powered computer.
I have spoken here in terms of freedom from and want to explain further. We can travel faster and farther than ever before and hence possess and freedom to do something, but it is small in the face of being free from oppression and ideological despotism, where one’s sense of importance and grandeur is forever dampened by the darkening influence of a philosophy of separation and brokenness. Whether this takes the form of conservative religious ideologies or political/social form like fascism, the result is a limiting of space to hold real freedom. We may have the freedom, some of us, to play video games for hours on end or watch endless television shows, having the technological know-how and acumen to do so, it is for naught if we are doing so to escape the terrifying reality that we do not possess the freedom from moral and existential castration, of being cut-off from our human potential.
This freedom from is precisely what Obama in his inaugural address today spoke to when he said: "The commitments we make to each other -- through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security -- these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.” Such programs and the underlying social cohesiveness that underlies them addresses both the reality of a social experiment in which none of us progress without the usage of resources that we all provide and had a hand in creating and a recognition that the greatness of the human condition is made possible by the freedom from caring about basic needs and thus to use our ever-widening conscious power to create.
What a focus on the freedom to do does is limit our imagination for we expend our awareness only on the myopic vision of a single action, forgetting that everything we do not yet know is an infinite expanse awaiting its realization and instantiation. This is why dialogue or communal action is the foundation of a truly free society, taking from the infinite resource of information and expanding into the frontiers of the until-now unknown. As William Ury states, again from The Third Side, “…dialogues aim not to convert others or to reach agreement on the issues, but rather to promote mutual understanding and build relationships that can prevent escalation into violence." The freedom to do something, while often fully valid, is not the greater freedom, it merely points to the view we hold of the world, whether it be one of limit and dissociation or one of expansiveness and integration. We can, as King noted, learn to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.
_______
“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is available on Kindle and Nook. It is a collection of the entries from 2012 organized into themes and them put in order to help with the flow of information.
_______
CRNJ4Y3SJJR7
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