A Short Soliloquy on Freedom and Fishing

When I was a student, deep down behind the Iron Curtain, an event took place that shaped my thinking about freedom for the years to come.  I was invited to a boozing party organized by the local university students.  The times were the 1970s and it was chic to be a political dissident, so the conversation centered on kvetching about “the system.”  Alas, there was a fellow there, a student at the local Higher School of Agriculture we were told, who remained silent. 

For those unfamiliar with the Eastern European scene, a word of explanation is in order.  There was a steep social stratification between the cities and the countryside.  The cities were urbane and high culture, the countryside was parvenu.  By extension, higher education institutions training for urban professions were high class, while those training for rural pursuits, such as agriculture, were déclassé.  There was even a derogatory term for the latter derived from the acronym for “Higher School of Agriculture” which, when pronounced in a certain way, connoted defecation.  To translate the situation into the American scene, it was like a duck showing up at a cock fight. 

As the empty bottles piled up, the ag school guy finally broke his silence and asked “Why do you guys hate our country so much?”  Onerous silence followed.  It was taken for granted in the Eastern European intelligentsia circles that “the system” sucked.  No further proofs or explanations were needed or expected.  Asking the “why” question was, in fact, a form of the breaching experiment pioneered by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, a violation of an unspoken social norm that leaves everyone perplexed and bewildered.  People looked at each other, not sure what to say, but the challenge needed to be countered.  A bunch of philosophy students not being able to answer a simple question posed by a peasant meant defeat and humiliation.  So shaking my grey cells from the alcohol induced stupor I spurted “There is no freedom here.”  The ag school guy was quick to reply.  “What do you mean there is no freedom?  You can do what you want.  You can meet who you want, you can travel places, you can go fishing ….”  The “fishing” – undoubtedly high on the agricultural agenda - was nonetheless one word too many. The poor peasant should have finished with travel.  The crowd burst with uncontrollable laughter “Ha, ha, ha you can go fishing and you are free, ha, ha, ha”. 

The challenge was deflected but I knew that “we,” the urbane philosophy students at an elite liberal arts school, had lost to a lowly peasant from the Higher School of Agriculture.  Unable to answer his simple question, we simply laughed the guy out of the stage.  That is what country bumpkins do when challenged with philosophical questions.

Freedom is like god, a word that people like throwing around on every occasion, but nobody really knows exactly what it means. Or rather it means whatever one wants it to mean, that is, nothing in particular.  They are like Rorschach blots onto which people project their thoughts.  Their appeal lies not in what they denote, but what they connote, or to be more precise, in the feelings they evoke in the audience.  Such words are the building blocks of what the philosopher Harry Frankfurter calls “bullshit.”

To be sure, much ink has been spilled on the subject of freedom.  Academic distinctions and careers have been produced, lofty speeches delivered, crowds enthused, fortunes made, people swindled, sent to prison or shot, places ransacked, wars fought, empires created – all that in the name of freedom.  Yet, as the philosopher Edmund Burke aptly observed, freedom is as common as air or water – everyone has it save those few who are locked up and chained.  All people have air, water and freedom regardless of their wealth, residence, social standing, religious beliefs, political convictions etc.  What varies is the price they have to pay to use them.  If a dictator proclaims that people have to pay for the water they drink or be whipped and jailed for crossing a line in the sand or saying things offensive to the dictator – the people did not lose their water or freedom.  They still can drink and do or say what they want – all they have to do is to pay a higher price for their choices.  If they find the prices imposed by the dictator too high, they can move to another land which itself entail a cost, so the decision they face is the choice between the price they pay to the dictator, the price they pay for moving to another land, or refraining from actions that they deem outside their price range. 

What distinguishes freedom from air, water and similar nearly inalienable things is the connotations that the former evokes but the latter do not.  Uttering the word “freedom” creates warm glow, the feeling of something good and desirable which, it is often hoped, will be extended from the utterance itself to the person uttering it.  When I say “freedom” I in fact say “trust me, I am a good guy, I like good things in life.”  It was this connotation that prompted me to counter the peasant’s challenge with uttering the word “freedom.”  “Us” are the good guys because we like freedom, but “them” the functionaries and the apparatchiks are the bad guys because they do not.  That also explains why most demagogues liberally dispense the word “freedom” at the sight of a slightest challenge.

What it does not explain, however, is what happened next in my story – the uncontrollable laughter caused by uttering the word “fishing” after the word “freedom.”  The easy answer to this puzzle is that the laughter was provoked by the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane – a common literary device used to produce comedic effects.  But that merely begs another question, why one ordinary activity (fishing) is construed as a profanity in the context of sacred freedom, but another ordinary activity (taking a train or a bus) is not.  In fact, Karl Marx mentioned fishing as one expression of individual freedom in the communist utopia, juxtaposing it with writing poetry at some later time of the day, so there is clearly something about freedom and fishing that appeals to human imagination. 

One answer to this puzzle lies in the idea of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.  Durkheim was grappled by a problem originated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant answering the ages old question whether human knowledge is subjective or objective.  His answer was “both.”  There are subjective and objective elements in human knowledge, and indeed all human perceptions of reality.  What we feel and sense is objective, that is, reflections of what is “out there” rather than figments of our imagination as idealist philosophers maintained.  However, how all our perceptions and indeed all our thoughts are organized into coherent wholes is subjective, that is, controlled by apriori forms of perception and reasoning residing in human mind rather than “out there” in reality, contrary to what realist philosophers maintained.  Kant’s solution, while ingenious, nonetheless posed a pernicious question about the origins of those apriori forms themselves.  Since different people use different apriori forms to organize their perceptions and thought process, asking about the origins of these forms is a legitimate philosophical pursuit.

Durkheim’s answer to this question was probably one of the most fruitful inventions in social science.  Apriori forms are ingrained in human mind by society in which individuals live, by ritualized forms of social behavior, such as religion or ceremonies, which in turn, reflect the idealized form of social organization, that is, how different roles, functions, statuses, rewards, etc. are distributed among members of that society.  If a biological analogy can be used here, apriori forms of cognition are imprinted in human brain, just as behavioral patterns are imprinted in the brains of young animals by following their parents or their flocks.  A duckling will treat any large bird it sees around after it hatches as its “mother”, and there are indeed reported cases of ducklings following hens or even humans if the mother ducks were absent.  Of course, human brain is far more complex and flexible than that of animals, so it is capable of acquiring and holding many imprinted forms during its life time.  However, once “imprinted,” the apriori forms organize human thinking and perceptions in a manner that can be compared to photographic lenses – they alter the image we see by focusing on certain elements of the image, and blurring or filtering out other elements, but they are neither a part of that image nor visible in it.  This invention led to the emergence of modern cognitive science as well as theories of organizational behavior.  The famous “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” postulating the influence of language on variations in human perceptions of the world is another example of this idea.  The speakers of a language that lacks the concept of snow are very bad at perceiving variations of snow when they encounter it.  It is not that they cannot see differences in, say, snow consistency but rather they do not know whether these differences are relevant. 

But what does that have to do with freedom or, for that matter, fishing?  Freedom, like god, belong to the category of nondescript feelings and conceptions grounded in general human experience. When we are born, we are totally dependent on our parents for survival, food, protection, etc. which imprints in us the idea of an omnipotent human-like being that watches after us, aka “god.”  This is a generalized nondescript feeling that gets specific and manifest shapes from the cultural environment in which we grow up.  If we happen to live in, say, India our conceptions of god take the form of dancing men and women, or monkey-like figures, if we happen to live in a Catholic country, then our conceptions of god take the form of an old bearded man on a throne or a youngish guy nailed to a cross, and so on.  What matters here is that our generalized experience of god – which originates in general human condition of growing up – is shaped by our cultural experience that presents some empirical forms as legitimate manifestations of god while other as illegitimate.  Portraying god as a monkey is perfectly legitimate in India, but it is a sacrilege in Catholic countries. 

Ditto for freedom.  We get our generalized experience of freedom from our childhood, as absence of parental supervision and control.  We feel the thrill of doing new and exciting things when parents are not watching and this gives us the positive vibes associated with freedom.  This generalized positive feeling is again shaped by the social environment in which we grow up.  If we are born to a family of serfs or slaves, then the ability to change place of residence or hunt and fish on the lord’s land is indeed a legitimate expression of freedom.  If we are born to bourgeois family, however, fishing is parvenu pursuit of house servants and of little concern to us.  On the other hand, the ability to travel or grub money without hindrance from governmental authorities is of significant concern, and freedom takes the form of the unhindered ability to engage in these pursuits.  This explains why peasants see freedom as the ability to fish while the bourgeoisie see it as freedom from government regulations.  It also explains why the latter see the juxtaposition of freedom and fishing as comic, if not sacrilegious.  Fishing is one of many mundane pursuits that bourgeoisie can pursue for pleasure, and as such lacking any significance.  Using it as an example of the sacred freedom to grub money is like using the image of a monkey to express the idea of deity.  Only primitive parvenus can do it in good faith, otherwise it is a joke of the “holy shit” or “fart in an opera house” variety juxtaposing the sacred and the profane.

Americans are enamored with the notion of freedom to the point of calling their piece of real estate “the land of the free.”  I can see the historical roots of this infatuation – the indentured servants shipped off to the colonies, the slaves captured in Africa and sold like cattle to American plantation owners, the refugees escaping imprisonment by dictators or invading armies – they all dreamed of freedom understood as the ability to hunt, fish, marry and raise children without fear of someone else hindering that ability.  It was a simple, and in a way, a noble human dream to live a normal life.  But some way down the road that dream was captured, colonized, and subverted by conniving entrepreneurs, businessmen, shysters, gangsters, and sociopaths who sought a different kind of freedom – that from government oversight and social control hindering their criminal or money grubbing activity.  At that juncture, the freedom has been defined as “liberty” or lack of government oversight and social control of any kind, the ability to get what I want and to kill anyone who stands in the way.  And, strangest of all, the peasant who used to dream of the freedom of fishing to feed his family went along with this subversion.

This is another puzzle that begs an explanation.  Why do people adopt ideas and viewpoints that are irrelevant or even contradictory to their own interests?  Many answers have been given to this question, but I would like to hint one suggested by my story of the freedom of fishing – because guys like me, the aspiring intellectuals, laughed the guys who wanted the freedom to fish out of the stage.  In other words, because intellectuals stopped identifying themselves with people who work for a living, and instead became lackeys of the money grubbing entrepreneurial class, begging for scraps from their tables and aping their manners and their speech. 

I personally managed to get over the anti-statist bent and shed the libertarian/anarchist conception of freedom, not an easy feat for an Eastern European intellectual who grew up behind the iron curtain.  The drivel of the imbecilic American political discourse liberally dispensing the words liberty and freedom was a helpful push factor.  Studying sociology rather than economics or business management was a strong pull factor.  But many of my friends and acquaintances still profess this notion of freedom colonized by businessmen, gangsters, and sociopaths.  Maybe they too see the light some day.

A sociologist whose name escapes me at the moment once observed that intellectuals a peculiar socio-economic class – they have more power than they think but not as much as they think they should have.  This builds on the idea of “organic intellectuals” proposed by Antonio Gramsci.  Organic intellectuals are producers of ideas that have close affinity to particular socio-economic classes, the working class, the professionals, the bourgeoisie, and so on.  As such, they are able to draw power form the class interests they represent, and articulate and amplify those interests.  Gramsci hoped that the development of the organic intellectuals of the working class is the key to transforming a bourgeois society into a socialist one.  If there is such a thing as organic intellectuals of the working class in the US, EU or elsewhere they indeed face an uphill battle, as neoliberalism has thoroughly colonized the public discourse.  A good way to start is to take back the stolen concept of freedom that is the pivot of the neoliberal ideology.  Freedom resonates with universal human experience and liberating it from the clutches of neoliberalism will travel a long way in liberating the entire public discourse from this scourge.  We should be able to say that all we need is freedom to fish and feed our families without fearing of being laughed out of the stage by neoliberal hacks.