You know what freedom means

“You know what freedom means.” But did he? Or, if he knew, had he got it? No, he had not got it. He had had it possibly once, but now it had been stolen from him — stolen from him by Bigges, who was pouring out champagne, stolen by the beautiful saddle of mutton, the currant jelly, the crackling brown potatoes — stolen from him by the cheque-book in his dressing-room table, the roses in the flower bowl, and the electric wires that ran behind the boarding.

Hugh Walpole - Hans Frost (1929)

Freedom is a rum idea isn’t it? Whatever it is I don’t think many people want it which at first sight seems an odd claim to put forward. Yet suppose freedom is essentially the freedom to understand. In addition, suppose that for many people it is possible to understand too much. This is one of the great historical criticisms of the middle class – they don’t understand if it doesn’t suit them to understand. It is genuine too - they really don't understand. Or rather some do but that's a different issue. And as the world becomes more and more middle class, perhaps this is a formidable flock of chickens finally coming home to roost.

For example, simple observation suggests that many folk have no wish to understand aspects of their own ethos, especially fashionable aspects which are supposed to be swallowed whole. Perhaps this still seems odd as an angle on freedom, but it appears to work rather well. It fits well with censorship, attacks on free speech, forbidden language and political attempts to hide, confuse and misdirect. All of these are attacks on our freedom to understand.

Yet when we add up the constraints of daily life as Walpole’s character does, it is easy to conclude that we have no real freedom anyway. On the other hand, the fact that we are able to think along these lines suggest that potentially we do have freedom because we understand how we could have behaved differently and the social effects of doing so.

Walpole's character knew that the beautiful saddle of mutton, the currant jelly, the crackling brown potatoes were trivial indicators of much wider constraints on his freedom. Merely rejecting the currant jelly wouldn't count for much when it came to wider questions of his freedom to think and act.

Even so, freedom still seems to be a matter of paying close attention to our options and choices instead of freewheeling all the time. We have to freewheel some of the time, perhaps most of the time, but not all the time.

This is Spinoza’s key point about understanding things as they are including our own role in things as they are. Not things as they ought to be but things as they are. Observe and understand what is going on, be truthful about it at least to ourselves and be content with that. In this way we may come to understand how and where we could have responded differently even when we didn’t. We may even understand why we didn't.

To my mind this is the great political divide, the one which cannot be bridged. There are those who try to understand themselves and their interactions with the real world and those who merely try to justify themselves. One leads to freedom and the other doesn’t. This seems to be why woke politics, the politics of political correctness is so bleak, repressive and totalitarian.

A diffuse divide as always, but still a divide. There are people who don’t want freedom and don’t want anyone else to have it either. They know they can reject the currant jelly and that seems to be enough. It's as far as they choose to go.