Freedom First

By LANCE MORROW

Daydreaming of freedom, one thinks of it as a clear blue light, like the frictionless intelligence of God. A sudden act: a lightning shot of electrons jumps from one still object to another and brings them both to life. Thought passes through the pure medium of freedom and accomplishes . . . creation.

That is an almighty freedom, absolute. We imitate it as we can, but human freedom is a cruder business. We sometimes manage to make the miraculous happen. But we have to work at it. Earthly freedom, where it exists, is a turbulent medium, full of rough winds and ironies. It is bracing and potentially dangerous. Freedom is a powerful animal that fights the barriers, and sometimes makes people wish for higher fences.

If ideal freedom is a struggle toward the light, the U.S. is somewhat closer to it now--in economic freedoms, social freedoms and political freedoms --than it has ever been before. The obituary for the American frontier was pronounced by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. But in the American mind, the future itself is the wilderness to be settled. The U.S. still works frontiers, finding new channels, inventing new lives. By its explorations in the realms of individual and social freedoms, America is making what historians may eventually consider its greatest contribution to the modern age.

What is surprising is how fresh, on the whole, the American freedom seems. Says Princeton Economist Robert E. Kuenne: "We have forged an ever wider concept of freedom--it is a vigorous, positive freedom, and it is not self- satisfied. The dynamism has not faltered." If a pollster traveling the world asked people to tell what word they associate with the word freedom, he might find that a majority would say, "America." "Freedom exists only in the land of dreams," wrote Schiller. Many people still believe that America is exactly that.

Consider the chaotic abundance of free ideas:

In the U.S., there are 9,144 newspapers, 11,328 periodicals, 9,824 radio stations, 941 commercial TV stations and 300 public TV stations. Every kind of subject, from sex to childbirth, from economics to how to build a house, from politics to gardening to baseball to Lyndon LaRouche, is printed and aired and ventilated. This almost preposterous tide of information and opinion is not censored or jammed. American book publishers offer some 50,000 titles every year. One can have all of Shakespeare in paperback for a few dollars--or for the same price can go to see the revenge fantasies of Sylvester Stallone.

Americans like mythy energies and exemplary deeds. H. Ross Perot builds Electronic Data Systems into a $947 million business before selling out to General Motors in 1984. When two EDS employees are imprisoned in Iran, he plans a raid that gets them out--something that the U.S. military could not manage for the hostages at the U.S. embassy. Seeing that children in Texas are not being educated well enough, Perot organizes a movement to change the system. Even a character like Lyndon LaRouche, in his peculiar way, dramatizes the openness of the American political process, the way in which a man who believes that Henry Kissinger is an agent of the KGB can acquire fame, fortune and a measure of political influence.

The Eskimo has 100 words for snow--such are the subtleties he detects in its color and tone and depth and temperature. On that principle, we should have 500 different words for freedom. Freedom has many tones and temperatures as well. In the beginning, the founders were interested in freedom from, specifically from the evils of repressive governments. They thought little about the freedom to. Christianity, embodied in small, homogeneous communities, laid down the rules regarding that. Moral and social behavior was prescribed and even legislated. Misfits and nonconformists were free to go elsewhere--to go West, more than likely.

Freedom animated the American drama, gave it the passionate vividness of hope. Freedom canted the nation toward the future always, so that old failures, old fatal patterns of family and class, might be overtaken by the headlong possibilities of tomorrow, the adrenal rush of expectation. It is one of the charms of Americans that unlike, say, Russians, they are not a fatalistic people. Americans are brought up in an ideology that is the reverse of fatalism: everything can change. Luck and individualism and freedom and energy will make things happen. History is bunk. Tragedy is bunk. Fate is bunk. In the comparative pastlessness of the New World, even blood hatreds would tend to be transient and depthless, unlike the generations-long unappeasable tribalisms of, say, Ireland or the Middle East. Freedom turned America into an epic of improvised life. It made the Americans a race of new creatures in the world and lent an ennobled shine to a national enterprise that was also crass and bloody.

The styles of freedom are various. There is the freedom that carries a briefcase filled with duties, commandments, scruples, inhibitions, the luggage of civilization. "Liberty," wrote Woodrow Wilson, "is a privilege of maturity, of self-mastery, and a thoughtful care for righteous dealing." There is the freedom that wears a gun and peers at the distance with a look of hard, abstract menace in his eye. There is the freedom that creates art and the freedom that creates pornography. Rationality speaks of the high purposes of freedom. The animal instinct knows freedom as a rising of the blood. There is freedom Apollonian and freedom Dionysian. One kind of freedom works the marble corridors of the superego; another kind comes up whooping out of the id, wild with fur-bearing desires.

Freedom should be an unfolding of discoveries about oneself. It begins with material things--the freedom from want, from cold, and so on. It progresses by stages through political freedom and the exercise of power, then on into a freedom of the mind. Finally, it reaches beyond, into the paradoxical latitudes of spiritual freedom, in which freedom, the end of restlessness, is found in a sort of empowering surrender--the surrender acting as electronic charge between the self and something larger, something other. Freedom comes full circle to fate or, if fate is too iron a word, to fulfillment.

The opposite of freedom may be slavery or captivity, but the range of unfreedoms is wide and subtle and often alarmingly interior. Ignorance and illness are unfreedoms. Unfreedom, like freedom, is often subjective. Compulsion and fear are states of unfreedom. But objective enslavement can make one strong. The soul is a cagey survivor. Prisoners in states of unfreedom contrive their own covert liberty. The Soviet writer Andrei Sinyavski, sent to the labor camps for six years (1966 to 1971) for "manufacturing" anti-Soviet works, wrote, "I measure life by the number of times my head is shaven." He thought about Mozart and Haydn. He kept a handwritten copy of the Book of Revelation in his boot, and that became his freedom.

A terrible problem arises when the prisoner can create no inner freedom for respite. Elizabeth Bouvia, a 29-year-old California woman confined to a % hospital bed by cerebral palsy, in constant pain, unable to control her body, has for several years been suing to make her doctors stop force-feeding her and allow her to die. Her hopeless condition has thrown her back upon her last freedom--the freedom to decide to die--and even that freedom has so far been denied her.

Americans in their celebratory moods sometimes behave as if they had invented freedom. They have at least given freedom a splendid home. The text of the great Fourth of July birthday party will not dwell on the ugly side of American freedom (the founders reserving freedom pretty much for white male property owners and countenancing the enslavement of blacks, for example). Nor will the star-burst rhetoric discuss the heartlessness of much American freedom, the bleak lives of those who cannot compete. Freedom has a lot of Charles Darwin's logic prowling around in it, hungry for the weaker animals. Says Economist William H. Branson: "What we've seen since 1981 is the difficulty people have if they lose. They shoot themselves. I was talking to a group in Pittsburgh, and a guy got up and said, 'My brother shot himself and his wife. What the hell are you going to do about that?' I told him I was sorry about his brother and his wife, and then I added that the problem is that the steel industry as he knew it is gone for good."

The relationship between money and freedom has always been philosophically difficult. "One need not go so far as to accept the dictum that money is crystallized freedom," wrote Economist Henry Wallich. "But it is hard to argue that money and freedom have nothing to do with each other . . . Men will die for freedom but they will not necessarily starve for it. A society that wants to be free must not expose its members to this alternative." It is troubling that so much of American freedom is economically defined. It becomes a freedom to make fortunes, to consume happily in a materialist society. But does it follow that those who do not have money are not free? Certainly. Anatole France had a scathing line: "The law in its majestic equality forbids all men to sleep under bridges . . . the rich as well as the poor." Freedom is a feast to which the poor are not wholly invited. On the other hand, one thinks of Howard Hughes in his Las Vegas hotel, naked and phobic, living in his own penthouse gulag.

Some believe that Americans have entirely too much freedom: all engine, no brakes, the great vehicle careering all over the road, the Lowest Common Denominator at the wheel, grinning like an idiot, hurling beer cans out the window. In many minds, freedom is a license to indulge. If the old constraints of religion and manners have given way, Americans unequipped with a set of inhibitions will begin to dismantle the system for their own amusement. But one rarely hears a revolutionary cry these days to overthrow the Republic. There are rhythms in these matters. Nineteen years ago, the New York Review of Books published on its cover a diagram, with instructions, of how to make a Molotov cocktail--to be hurled, obviously, in the direction of the ruling class. Thirty-one years ago, the columnist Murray Kempton wrote, "It is already very hard to remember that, only a generation ago, there were a number of Americans of significant character and talent, who believed that our society was not merely doomed but undeserving of survival, and to whom every one of its institutions seemed not just unworthy of preservation but crying out to be exterminated."

During the 1972 presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate George McGovern discovered something about the American dream. Speaking to some workers in a rubber factory near Akron, he made a promise that he thought would make him popular with blue-collar workers. He said that he would increase inheritance taxes so the rich could leave very little to their families after their death. To McGovern's surprise, he was loudly booed. The workers didn't like the idea. They wanted to leave as much money as possible to their families. It was part of the American dream to make the next generation better.

It is perfectly American to run between extremes of self-loathing and self- congratulation. Americans have a manic habit of thinking that they are either the best of peoples or the worst of peoples. This may result from the fact that Americans tend, still, to hold a Ptolemaic rather than a Copernican view of their place in the universe. Whatever America is, best or worst, it is at the center of things. At the moment, after the long self-lacerations of Viet Nam, Watergate and the rest, Americans in the Reagan era seem in the mood for assertive self-celebration.

Some Americans think that the Reagan Administration wishes to subvert civil liberties in the cause of a majoritarian orthodoxy, that Reaganism tilts too much toward democracy and away from freedoms. Democracy and freedom, fraternal twins and sibling rivals, do not always get along well with each other. The genius of the Founding Fathers was in their construction of a legal and political system that protected minorities from the possibility of a tyranny of the majority. Says Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union: "They recognized for the first time ever--and pretty much for the last time--that individual liberty, equal rights, etc., are not assured by democracy. The flaw in a democratic system is: What about the minority, whether religious, political, sexual or whatever--members of a class who would never win an election? The Bill of Rights says what the Government cannot do. It is a set of negative limits."

The problems of freedom all arise at that intersection where competing freedoms and needs collide. In the elaborately ordered confines of Japanese society, noisy individualism is a kind of civic sin, an offense of selfishness against the totality. In Japan, space is limited, resources are scarce, and freedom as sometimes practiced in the U.S. is either a vulgar irrelevance or an inconceivable luxury. Americans have always tended to look through the other end of the telescope. They see the individual first and the imperatives of community only later.

Wasilla, Alaska, shows, as if by time-lapse photography, the evolution of a town from the hairy state of nature to a state of (barely) regulated society. Wasilla, 45 miles northwest of Anchorage, began in 1917 as a trading post for workers building the Alaska railroad and as recently as a decade ago had a population of only 300. Now it has 3,800. For a time it was the fastest- growing town in America. But Wasilla has been trying to get along without the usual restraints that limit freedom in the name of order in most American towns. No zoning, no police, no planning, no taxes. "There is considerable resistance here by people to any sort of controls over their lives," former Mayor Harold Newcomb told a Wall Street Journal reporter last February. "They move up here and buy their one acre. They build a house. They put in a septic tank and a water well. Maybe they get a power line, but that's their only connection with the outside world. They become a little kingdom unto themselves. They've got a .44 magnum, and if anybody messes with them, they become a police department too."

Fine, except that pretty soon these individualisms begin butting against one another. Five years ago, Stephen Brook moved to Wasilla from Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington. "In Reston," says Brook, "you couldn't paint your front door without going to the town council." He built his dream house with a view of the snowcapped mountains, only to have a huge indoor horse arena erected in the foreground the following year. Leaky septic tanks have begun to foul the town's two lakes and the underground aquifer that supplies the wells. Residents of crowded subdivisions complain about their neighbors' target practice with high-powered rifles. Despite increasing crime and drug trafficking, the town three years ago defeated a plan to start a police force. "Who are you going to call?" asks Brook. "You can't call the cops. I've got a Doberman pinscher and guns. I've never owned guns before in my life." When Brook erected the broadcast tower for a radio station he was starting, one local who objected came by and started blazing away at the tower with a .44.

In its reluctance to sacrifice individual rights for the common good, Wasilla has a certain scruffy charm. But other communities, especially in the Lower 48, have long since sacrificed individual prerogatives in order to keep the general peace. Most Americans accept an enormous range of restrictions on what they can do, because they don't want their neighbors doing it either. If a rooster crows at dawn in the adjoining backyard, or the man across the way turns his tool shed into a rental cottage, or the woman next door keeps 47 cats or sets up as a call girl, there ought to be a law, and there usually is.

Zoning codes can fine-tune a community with a thoroughness that sometimes seems virtually totalitarian. A homeowner will be told how close to a lot line he can build or plant trees, how high his fences may be, what additions he may build. A piggery war broke out in Bolton, Mass., a town that traditionally earned its living by raising swine. Newcomers to the town proposed an ordinance limiting new piggeries to a maximum of eight swine. They were angrily voted down. A man named Stephen Kenney was hauled before the village court in the Buffalo suburb of Kenmore and ordered to cut the growth in his front yard or be fined. He explained that the six-foot-high stand of weeds was in fact a meadow of wild flowers, "a natural yard, growing the way God intended." Wrong, said the court. The yard was a hazard to drivers and children, and too hospitable to insects and rodents. Ultimately, Kenney gave up and moved to Connecticut.

Michael Hardwick also supposedly offended community standards. While in % his bedroom in Atlanta with another man, he was arrested for sodomy. (The police originally went to his house to arrest him for failing to pay a fine for drinking in public. Hardwick's roommate, just arrived home, told the officers that Hardwick might be in his bedroom. The officers checked and found Hardwick with another man.) Although the prosecution dropped the sodomy charge, Hardwick sued for a ruling on Georgia's law that prohibits "any sex act involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another" and provides a prison term of up to 20 years. The case reached the Supreme Court this spring. A Georgia assistant attorney general argued that a ruling protecting private homosexual and heterosexual acts between consenting adults would undermine the state's efforts to maintain a "decent and moral society" and would open the way to protecting polygamy, incest, adultery and prostitution. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe countered that the case involved two precious constitutional freedoms: the right to engage in private sexual relations and the right to be free from Government intrusion into one's home. The U.S. Supreme Court is still considering the case.

Sometimes the laws simply lag behind the times. In 1979 the Labor Department, backed by unions, sued a Vermont skiwear maker who employed women to knit in their homes. The department charged the company with violating minimum-wage provisions. The law under which the department acted was passed in 1942 to prevent the exploitation of children and sweatshop workers in city tenements. The women in Vermont prefer working at home, where they can be with their children and do not have to travel to a factory, especially in winter over icy roads. Finally, the Labor Department rescinded the ban.

The freedom of communicating minds, the freedom of ideas, is fundamental to all other freedoms. But that has never stopped the candlesnuffers. The Reagan Administration has been excessively touchy about what it seems to regard as baleful intellectual influences from abroad. Travelers returning from Nicaragua have had their luggage searched and suspicious books taken from them. The State Department has denied visas to such writers as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Canadian Farley Mowat. Mowat was refused entry apparently because he once joked that he would shoot his .22-cal. rifle at American planes carrying nuclear weapons as they flew over his country at 50,000 ft. The report of Mowat's troubles with State appeared in the same edition of the New York Times that quoted Ronald Reagan on artistic freedom, in a speech at a ceremony giving out twelve National Medal of Arts awards. Said Reagan: "In recognizing those who create and those who make creation possible, we celebrate freedom. No one realizes the importance of freedom more than the artist, for only in the atmosphere of freedom can the arts flourish . . . In societies that are not free, art dies."

In 1885, after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published, the public library in Concord, Mass., the birthplace of American freedom, banned the book on the grounds that it "is of a very low grade of morality . . . couched in the language of a rough dialect." A century later, some black leaders want it banned from libraries and school reading lists because of its frequent use of the word nigger. The book, they say, is "racist trash." Huckleberry Finn, fittingly, is the greatest book about American freedom. "Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," Huck says. "You feel mighty free." The book's last paragraph is the purest charge of American impulse: "I guess I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." "The Territory" is the mythic terrain of American psychology. It is not mere geography, but the future.

Twain was brilliant on the terrors and loneliness of freedom, and savage about its ironies. Huck, the most moral and decent of Americans, suffers terrible spasms of conscience because he is helping a runaway slave to escape, a dreadful crime against property. How low can a person sink? His conscience flays him, at war with his decency and regard for Jim, and at last Huck decides that he is willing to help Jim to freedom and then go to hell as the price for it.

Freedom is the essential American virtue because the U.S., uniquely, is a nation populated by the free choice of its inhabitants. Except, of course, for those who were brought to America in slave ships. Slavery, the American original sin, has always haunted and mocked the nation's tradition of freedom and the high Jeffersonian rhetoric about truths held to be self-evident. The formal end of slavery merely meant the beginning of another century of a different kind of unfreedom for the nation's blacks.

A number of Americans refuse to join the celebratory chorus of Ronald Reagan's second term. They feel alienated from a political system in which they feel they have no voice. They feel threatened by the elaborate technology of surveillance and intrusion now available, by the data banks, credit checks and mandatory drug tests on the job. Tom Hayden, the '60s activist who led the Students for a Democratic Society and is now a California assemblyman, takes a slightly mellower view. "I think this country is freer than I thought true in the 1960s," he says. He worries about the perennial American conflict between individualism and community responsibility. "At this point," he thinks, "we've tipped too far toward private interests." As Hayden says, the '60s were incalculably important in defining the meaning of freedom in the U.S. today. The '60s shook loose new forces in American society, vastly expanding the American sense of pluralism and possibility. Old rigidities collapsed, though not without a struggle. The '60s introduced a new experimental spirit in American life and business. The decade when institutions and old leadership and the past lost their legitimacy is paying off now. The baby-boom generation has inevitably lost youthful fire, but carries into maturity its instinct for improvisation.

The maturing of the baby boomers coincides with two other crucial factors: 1) the explosion of computer technology, and 2) the recrystallization of the American past and myth that is taking place under Ronald Reagan's shrewd symbolic leadership. For all the potentially sinister aspects of computer technology as a tool of surveillance, the brilliant new electronics can serve individuality in liberating ways. The era of mass production implied uniformity. People were said to "conform" in the way that products conformed to one another, each identical. Now computers, at the speed of light, can make distinctions among individuals. Computers can integrate the individual to the whole. So that, in a simple example, some people can choose where to work and when to work. More important, electronics takes over much of the intellectual slog and releases the mind for higher flights. There is much freedom waiting in those machines.

All of the triumphal pageantry of the 1984 Olympics, and now of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, may represent an emotional regrouping. The American character quite distinctly decrystallized during the '60s and '70s. It became alienated from itself, and Americans entertained the depressive thought that they had ceased to be themselves. The nation was taken over by Others. In the current recrystallization, Americans are asserting their past, their myths, their freedoms. They think of immigrants and New York Harbor and Ellis Island. But they fetch back, too, to a paler, sweeter image --in Robert Lowell's verse, "Main Street's shingled mansards and square white frames/ date from Warren G. Harding back to Adams./ old life! America's ghostly innocence."

With reporting by Anne Hopkins/New York, with other bureaus