For use: Sunday, March 11, 2001

Future Shoes: "Down with Freedom!"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

In the early 1970s I enjoyed a couple of pictures made by Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel: "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "The Phantom of Liberty." Bunuel had a ball making these weird, Goyaesque comedies lampooning middle class ways.

In one scene he reversed the sense of what is shameful, showing a soire in which the living room is full of toilets and people sit around chatting and defecating -- and then sneaking off individually to an antiseptic little room in which to gobble down some furtive morsels of food.

In another scene, perhaps from the French Revolution, a man led before a firing squad is asked if he has any last words. He pumps his fist angrily in the air and exclaims, "Down with freedom!"  I nearly choked from laughing, and a handful of others in the theater did, too.

Because while the sentiment is constitutionally unacceptable, it is desperately, deeply true. Freedom -- the prerogative to choose, and the concomitant notion that one choice is as valid as they next -- is the milk we suck as citizens. It means everything to us, on both the right and the left. But it is plainly our downfall.

I did not understand this until my dog turned five. Dogs are like laboratory universes in which you can test all sorts of propositions. Since they don’t live long, and they are behaviorally transparent, you can watch them their whole lives and understand the mistakes.

My poodle Beauregard dog was raised off-leash, Rousseau-style. He is a beautiful, comical creature when he runs, and it was tedious to have his bulk and his rhythms tethered to mine. So, despite numerous municipal ordinances and common sense, I let him roam.

Instead of a noble savage, he just grew into a savage. Though I plead and cajole, he is hopelessly dominant, humiliating other male dogs at will. While I love him to death, he is the thing I think I despise most in the world, a bully. And it's my fault, because I romanticized his freedom.

I ruined my kids the same way. Treated them like short adults from an early age. Let them watch King Kong (the original) as tots. I tried not to dictate terms or make decisions for them. Encouraged them to think, judge, express, indulge. They grew up too fast, and often out of kilter. I love 'em, and they’re good people, and I have confidence in them. 

But a huge part of the truly essential parenting they will need in their lives -- discipline -- they are going to have to provide themselves, probably in their 30s, long after all their peers have learned how to dust-mop. The freedom I gave them has in many stunted, not fostered, their growth as people.

Ruined myself the same way, but that's an ongoing story.

Another insight I had in the 70s, besides Bunuel, was with my yoga teacher, Dr. Arya. He taught me -- well, he told me, because I never quite internalized it -- that repression results in more good things than expression. This was a hard truth because I am a hopeless expressive: I seldom know my own opinion on a topic until I blurt it out. Believe me, I am usually as aghast as the rest of you.

But this truth was self-evident: people who restrain their impulses get control over their lives, and eventually, something like control over the confusion around them. Whereas, I meditated pretty much to get high.

Forget me. Look at America. Big picture. We think we're wonderful, open-hearted, straight-talking people. Our identity fixes on our generosity: in our minds we are always offering candy bars to war refugees and drilling wells for shoeless tribespeople.

While the whole world envies our freedoms, however, no one especially likes what we do with them. The "ugly" in "ugly Americans" derives exactly from this sense of thoughtless entitlement. We're pigs, basically.

Nearly every American act pivots on the primacy of choice, and our delight at being to do whatever we want. As Ivan, the liberal of the four Karamazov brothers, put it, "Everything is licit."

I tried making a list of ways in which our pursuit of freedom has screwed us up. It's an impossible list, ranging from guns to pornography to atmospheric CO₂ levels to television to predatory capitalism to school killings to the strategic defense initiative ... I'm telling you, it's a long, awful list .

Think how our sense of what is licit has corrupted the world:

• Me trumps us. My right to swing my fist beats you worrying about your nose all to hell.
• Might trumps right. We can’t discourage the rich and powerful from expressing themselves. Therefore, they rule.
• Instant gratification trumps caution. Did you know that the Robert MacNeil NewsHour, the most careful, most accurate, and least hyped of all TV news programs, has by far the fewest viewers?
• The present trumps the past and future. Tax cuts, anyone?
• Good trumps better. If we are all free, then we are all equal, and no elites know better than us. In a free society, it is nearly illegal to be wise.

Having given the rich and powerful the mega freedom to run the world, ply us with advertising, manipulate our prejudices and commandeer our time, we reserve for ourselves the pleasuring  freedoms of eight-acre lots, SUVs and jet skiing. In the free world there is no shame, and public defecation -- flight attendants know what I'm talking about -- is becoming more acceptable.

We know freedom makes us miserable, but we can’t quit. Knowing every door is technically open to us makes it all the more heartbreaking and unacceptable when we are unable to open them in practice. How many stalkings and killings occur because "entitled" people didn’t get what they wanted?

The man who cried "Down with freedom" in the movie was onto something. But our very freedom prevents us from curtailing it. It robs us of leverage to discriminate (a very bad word which used to be a very good word). How does one get a grip? Should we start right off with global warming?

Myself personally, I bought the dog a leash. And the funny thing is, he tolerates it reasonably well.

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