To and From

You know you’re living in weird times when you look back at Cold War spy films and think “Ah, in the past things were simpler.” I wanted to watch a spy film this weekend. Couldn’t tell you why, exactly. Maybe because in most of them, there were these obvious threats (nuclear bombs and all that). Some are glossy like the James Bond genre, or impossibly clever like the Bourne series.

I went for Bridge of Spies last weekend, thinking (correctly) that in a Spielberg film with Tom Hanks, it was likely to have clear good guys (and in this case, under-developed bad guys; it was just the DDR and USSR in general). The film shows people trying to jump over the newly built Berlin Wall and being shot. The implication is that they were willing to die for freedom.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia makes a difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to”. In the far past, we wanted “freedom from”, say, the Visigoths, so we accepted a king who promised to help organize our defense. That weighed the most in society because the people wanted the assurance that when they planted some crop in the spring, they would be around/alive/protected enough to harvest it in the fall. Later in our societies, we often wanted “freedom to” make our own choices. We chose to organize our societies, in our modern democracies, to have a fair amount of protection (to have “freedom from”) and that gave us the chance to have “freedom to”.

However, we spent an awful lot of our history paying a more or less exorbitant price for “freedom from”. We kind of like it, I think, having kings. A lot of folks look back on times with kings and dictatorships with nostalgia. In general, everyone thinks that in the past they’d be one on top and not some starving serf or whatever. In any case, we got pretty used to the cost of having an overlord in whatever form so it hasn’t taken a lot of effort by those who would like to be modern kings to if not invent, certainly demonize groups that we want “freedom from”. And so we are willing to give up a bit of “freedom to” in order to have “freedom from”. It’s the yo-yo of human history.

Democracies are expensive. They require spending money on educating people to be able to make intelligent choices. It means agreeing on what moral grounds those choices should use for base (our laws). We have responsibilities.

I think most people just want to be left alone to get on with things without ever thinking about what those things are, or whether they’re worth getting on with in the first place. I understand the “freedom from” crowd; it comes from the idea that we mostly just want to live, eat well enough, make love and children, have a roof over our heads. Once that’s achieved though (and it has been in so many places in the world that didn’t have that before, so good on us) there’s really no place for the kings. And it’s not a job that takes well to unemployment.

Foro just wants to get on with being cute. It’s a curse.