"Freedom" by Sebastian Junger

This book is framed by a travelogue. The author, with three friends and a dog, walked for a year (although not all in one go) along the railroad lines in the American east, sleeping rough. It is in many ways a classic American journey: the men are emulating the pioneers, they are practising the cherished American ideals of self-sufficiency and freedom from authority.

They are a macho bunch. Four men, all experienced in warfare (Junger is a journalist and war reporter, and the friends are a conflict photographer and two veterans from the Afghan campaign), who anticipate trouble: “We were always worried about the locals and on a weekend night it seemed like a good idea to sleep at a place that was hard to find and easy to leave. If they came up one side, we’d go down the other. If that didn’t work, we’d stay on top and see how badly they wanted this.” (Book Two: Fight) Indeed, they are shot at more than once.

As they walk, Junger muses over that classic American ideal: Freedom. He and his friends feel free (“most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” ; Book One: Run) but this is a mirage because their existence is marginal and precarious. Freedom is "first and foremost ... the absence of threat. A person who can be killed without any consequences for the killers is not free in the most important sense of the word” (Book One: Run) There must be a trade-off between autonomy and security. Junger and his friends may have no obligations to outsiders but to stay safe they have to become tightly interdependent, ceding personal freedom to the needs of the group. In the same way, the American pioneers as a group were tightly bound by a code of obligation to one another because each might need the other to help when the Indians (Native Americans) attacked. This is the same bargain as that made when joining a street gang: "The inside joke about freedom ... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.” (Book One: Run) 

But surely hunter-gatherer societies are freer than others. Movement from place to place is, he suggests “subversive for the development of authority ... Adults of either sex can readily, if they choose, obtain enough food to feed themselves and are potentially autonomous.” (Book One: Run). His group of friends are like nomads but although they feel free he realises that “everything we needed—food, clothes, gear—came from the very thing we thought we were outwitting. ... Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one—literally no one—refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.” (Book One: Run) 

Most people live as citizens of a nation state and have surrendered a part of their own freedom in return for prosperity within that state. Junger realises that, counter to the opinion that freedom means the freedom to make money, a society with a great discrepancy between the poor and the rich must have limited freedom for the poor (a wage slave is still a slave). “An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don’t have to make sacrifices for you.” (Book Three: Think)

 Similarly, nations are prepared to bargain away some of their sovereignty in exchange for prosperity (as brought by mutual trading alliances) or security (achieved through common defence systems). Junger believes that in human societies the powerful cannot always prevail against the powerless, citing examples (eg Afghanistan) in which insurgencies have defeated powerful armies. He sees this as key to the development of international human rights which may curtail freedom but are essential to ensuring the freedom of citizens within societies. 

The book is also a meditation on walking. I have done some long-distance walks (though much shorter than this one - up to 100 miles - and not sleeping rough but deliberately seeking out towns, hotels and restaurants as part of the experience) and I enjoyed this aspect of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “The ancient Celtic measurement of a “league” was defined as the distance a man could walk in an hour—roughly three or four miles.” (Book One: Run)
• “The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.” (Book One: Run)
• “One of God’s great oversights is that dogs don’t live as long as men” (Book Three: Think)
• “Rightly or wrongly, society tends to value women’s survival more than men’s, and that makes machine-gunning them problematic.” (Book Three: Think)
• “History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived—especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power.” (Book Three: Think)

Freedom is an interesting, if very personal, exploration of an important philosophical concept. It's also a fun read!

August 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Science in a Free Society" by Paul Feyerabend

Feyerabend's thesis is that rationalism has too firm a grip on society and that the best medicine is a little anarchy.

He defines rationalism as "a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God." (p 20) which believes itself to be "'objective' and tradition-independent" but he suggests that although modern society bases itself on science "as uncritically as one once accepted the cosmology of bishops." (p 74) it is just another tradition fighting for itself in a world of alternative traditions. No tradition, he asserts, can judge another tradition because the values and beliefs of each tradition are different; this is a form of Kuhn's incommensurability thesis. You can't even damn a tradition on the basis that it is internally contradictory. Contradictions are not necessarily signs of a weak argument. The idea "that we do not live in a paradoxical world" so that our "knowledge must be self-consistent ... loses it authority the moment that we find that there are facts whose only adequate description is inconsistent and that inconsistent theories may be fruitful."

OK. These are serious issues. We have to acknowledge that science is 'just' another tradition and that it is difficult to make an objective judgement about whether as a tradition is is one of the best. But Feyerabend then appears to assert that this difficulty therefore means that anything ought to go.

He asserts that "a free society is a society in which all traditions are given equal rights, equal access to education and other positions of power." (p 30). Thus Hopi creation myths should be taught alongside the Big Bang Theory, astrology with astronomy, homeopathy with scientific medicine (he doesn't like scientific medicine!). Thus far he is relativist; he is also anarchist is the sense that "rules have their limit" (p 32) though he probably doesn't go on to assert that "all rules and standards are worthless and should be given up." (p 32). 

He appears to advocate the Socratic view that everything should be examined (although he places a significant restriction on the ability to examine if we can only examine any one tradition from inside). But Feyerabend does not appear to examine his basic assumption which seems to be that we 'should' live in a 'free' and 'democratic' society. 

Because if he is right that a 'free' society must give all traditions equal rights then it would follow that a 'free' society must give "equal rights, equal access to education and other positions of power" to 'traditions' such as racism and Nazism and Aztec human sacrifice. I don't think I want to live in such a society.

The second half of the book is dedicated to vitriolic attacks on those who have dared to criticise him, suggesting that he has been misunderstood. He seems hurt by the violence of the reaction to what he thinks are reasoned views but the section in which these protestations are made is entitled "Conversations with illiterates" which doesn't sound either friendly or reasoned. 

Some interesting points but the overall conclusions seem ridiculous. September 2016; 217 pages