Reflecting Upon Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom pt. 2

Freedom With

Professor Snyder begins his book, On Freedom, by countering the concept that one can have freedom from something, though he concedes it is a generally accepted premise for defining freedom. “We think we would be free if not for a world outside that does us {me} wrong.”

Such a perspective,is what Dr. Snyder calls a negative conception of freedom. Not negative as the opposite of positive, but negative in the sense that one’s freedom becomes contingent upon the actions of others. Thus freedom is often seen as the concept of removing obstructions, or blockades that prevent one from being free to act.

In point of agreement, I think the Professor is quite correct. Let us say we agree we need rules of some sort. I, at least, believe we need rules of some sort in in order to behave properly towards each other ( & towards our environment). We may disagree with what those rules are, it is not the rules themselves that are necessarily oppressive, or the blockades that prevent freedom, “but the human intention behind it {the rules}.”

Similarly, Dr. Snyder says we are not free because we have a constitution. After all the People’s Republic of China has a constitution; for a time Mussolini reconstituted the Italian Constitution, before simply abandoning it. But the constitution of his {Mussolini’s) time gave him dictatorial powers for one year, Mussolini gave up the constitution after that year to maintain his dictatorship.

I also agree with Dr.Snyder that constitutions must be continually reconstituted; or that a constitution needs to create a process for governance rather than mere rules for obedience to governance; human intent still comes into play.

I’m also pretty sure both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton would both totally agree with Dr. Snyder, although they would strongly argue against each other on the manner for this reconstitution.

Madison thought the constitution was crafted in such a manner it would never need to be amended, and was actually opposed to the clause allowing for its amending, arguing at the convention that the purpose of the constitution should be to craft the document in a manner that it would always be able to meet the expected needs of the future by being capable of self-amending. (Madison’s own notes from the convention seem to have been rewritten several times before they are were released and in these changes in the notes, I think we might be able to see Madison’s own reconstituting the convention in his own reinterpreting of his notes within the context of the forty or so years between the convention before he released

those notes.)

But it is in his early letters post the convention, I believe, where he suggests amendments shouldn’t be needed because the conveners had been able to craft it in such a manner that it could always be amended through the process they had created in the constitution. A blueprint that would enable the changing needs of the nation it was attempting to create to be able to adapt to their future needs by and through the very process of governance they had created.

Madison soon realized he was wrong and became a champion for adding amendments at the Virginia ratifying congress, and then in the first legislative session of the nation’s congress. What Dr. Snyder is saying,however,as I perceive it is that it is not the constitution nor any laws that are capable of granting more than this negative freedom. If freedom remains only what we are not restrained from doing it loses itself as a meaningful concept.

It is such, as well with our ideologies of rightness or wrongness; or what constitutes good behavior. Bad behavior exists only with the definition of good behavior; or perhaps good behavior might be what is not defined as bad behavior, or good behavior is not behaving badly.

Of course consequentialist ethical propositions are meant to address that. But there still remains a wrong choice. I have a luncheon date with my old friend flying into town at a certain time when I already have a luncheon date with my spouse. Can either choice be ethically viable if I must either disappoint (act badly towards) either spouse or friend.

So no matter the citation of good even basing morality on consequences alone may still harm some and switching to the idea of negative utilitarian ethic of the least harmful outcome for the most is simply trying to sidestep that any ethical choice creates discomfort for some and it really is not more ethical if it harms fewer, if it still harms some.

So I am going to sidestep a moment into the moral problem that morality itself presents because I believe that this conception of morality, along with the conception of freedom that Dr. Snyder writes about, is not simply mis-understanding of the concepts, but is deliberate mis-teaching of the concepts for the purpose of enabling the devaluation by some; that when entered into the framework of teaching the notions of freedom and goodness created a mis-directed learning. That is, that it created in our earliest observations as an infant a methodology of learning value judgements not just on the things in one’s environment which primarily doesn’t come until the child is much older; but valuations on individuals; and of course as the child negotiates (this is actually the proper term for early childhood learning, it is a process of observing the human environment.

The success of the child’s negotiation—and we are talking about a process that starts to develop by at least six months, and by nine months is in full bloom in the child’s attempt to interact with his human environment—becomes the methodology of learning by developing the strategy the infant will utilize for the rest of his life as his methodological approach in negotiating with his human social environment.

And this methodology, developed pretty much in our pre-memory becomes not just how we will interact in social situations but our very approach to what we will be able to learn. The development as such of what we might refer to as an intellectual quotient is not marking capacital differences in our brain functioning, but the methodology our brain formed by its earliest efforts in observations and negotiations venturing into learning his way into the human community and the valuations those first months of life taught to the infant and formulated a methodology of what should be learned and what the brain might best censor.

Now that may sound silly to say that our brains control our ability to learn not by our abilities or capacities for learning; but if you really reflect upon this it may come as no surprise that that has to be the case, because otherwise our societies would have formed with the leader who could only be the observer of his community to make sure we remain unharmed rather like the gorilla. All gorillas are pretty capable of defending themselves, the leader, however has the function to observe and make sure they don’t harm each other as well as protect his community from other elements that could hurt any of the community members and so power is distributed by Goliath-ability.

On the other hand chimps are more Odyssean in their wiliness. The leader may not rise because he is stronger but because he can trick himself into becoming the mafia don and build a power block that supports his own dominance. These associate gang members can carry out his orders and intimidate, beat or kill the other chimps for him; or he can surround himself with his associates around him and do the beating into submission or killing himself. But the chimp coalition is rather Odyssean in the manner in which he frequently tricks those who might be stronger into supporting him or his coalition. The chimp leadership is a tyrannically supported coalition, but it also a community led by a great deal of thoughtful wiliness that sneaks its way into authority.

Well I am not definitive on that. I don’t admire chimp behavior and only superficially have an overall impression,primarily from Goodall. But I mention this because many have accused human behavior and leadership of being chimp like and justify that by genetic similarity. But we have just as much genetic similarity with bonobos and some have tried to suggest we should be behaviorally more similar to the bonobo.

Again we are making a mistake of genetic culturism which doesn’t hold. Wasps, I believe, are all genetically closely allied but have varied cultural species development. Some are communal and live in colonies like ants; some form more hival type structures like bees; and many wasp species, actually 98.5% of wasp species are asocial…but we think of them as if they were somehow all meaner honeybees.

The problem though this is not just misunderstanding wasps, but of bees as well. Of some 2000 species, I believe only three are eusocial and live in communities at all. And even though these three species (two of which we commonly presume are what bees are—the honey and the bumble bee) they are non-representative of bees as a whole.

So genetic similarities do not determine species culture, and none of the four great ape societies are in any way culturally similar, and the fifth-us-I don’t believe are similar either, or should be compared as if we were.

Those very, even if slight, genetic differences can create different needs to survive within different environments. And I know one of the biggest challenges for humans is to not think of themselves as superior to other species; that is pretty well not factually supported by most archaeologists or ethno-biologists, to be not the manner of our evolutionary conceptions of ourselves in conjunction with other species.

So I want to make one further comment and then refer you to my book if you are interested, in the developmental manner of human learning. There are a great deal of suggestions as to the slow maturation of humans. But once again we are claiming a false uniqueness to ourselves that is untrue.

Orangutan infants are not weaned until around eight and one of the central reasons that their culture developed as it did is that the female can barely leave the nest with the totally dependent infants that can be left alone for even shorter periods than the human infant. I can’t make similar comparisons from my own limited on strictly longitudinal studies. But even if you say the human infancy is extended to teenagerism (or beyond) then proportionately to the lifespan of our differing species the orangutan and the human are closely comparable. But if we want to measure infancy, and that’s really only til 30-39 months when the human infant is totally unable to survive without parent of caregiver, after that it has more to do with our cultural and social arrangements in contemporary life. There was a time when children of four were forced into some of our earliest attempts at mineral abstraction; and even into the earlier years of the twentieth century the frequency of four-five years olds in the workforce was quite high.

And so what we have learned, however, through experimentation and observation is that the reason the infant is slow in developing physical coordination (walking,etc.) is not that the little bugger is incompetent but that the human social environment is so important to our evolutionary development to be able to survive that the child must be able to absorb and interact within that social environment is much more important for the human infant to be able to navigate within than its need to development its mobility. And for whatever one may think of Noam Chomsky, his pointing out that we humans master language and communication before we can tie our shoes does that tell us a great deal about the how our brains became structured as they did and why they became structured as they did.

What we now know is that our large cerebellum is not where we storehouse memories, thoughts etc., or even information take in by our senses that needs to relay that information and receive input from other parts of the brain in order to comprehend the sensory input—except language, which is somehow visually processed while we are hearing.

And this becomes evident in the fact that while the left hemisphere of the brain is primarily where language is heard, but it then is processed visually through the right hemisphere where the sounds become visualized. If you see a dog, the brain sends queries to the hippocampus, neocortex, and prefrontal cortex in order to determine what one is seeing and what one's interpretation of the sight of the dog means, growling, barking, wagging its tail and whatever one’s memories of dog in any of those poses, the size of the dog, and what if anything we might know in our memories of that breed.

But if you don’t see the dog first, and instead hear the bark or growl from behind you, the left hemisphere sends that sound immediately to the right. There is a startlement created, one might jump, experience a momentary inability to comprehend the sound because we might be in the true presence of the tiger and to fear momentarily is appropriate until this process just described can be visualized. (This is true in 90% of right handed people. The other ten percent of right-handedness and most left-handedness seem to have hemispheric reversal.)

Now I call fears tigers because we ate often taught as children to fear tigers. But ninety-eight percent of us will never encounter a tiger. But despite that it seems imperative we teach fear of the not known. But as I’ve just described, teaching fear is never necessary because the prime reason our brain exists is neither to be smarter than others; nor to be capable of establishing values and placing categorizations upon things. It is to protect us and ensure that—as an entity of life we continues to exist as that entity of life.

Fears come from learning to fear what we needn’t fear because actual danger will cause the brain to refocus its energies if it senses a true danger. Much of what the child observes, however, is concerning what could be fearful based on values placed upon others and objects that create dangers by the manner in which they are valued.

Most of our brain’s day we are totally ignorant of. The brain is not spending most of its day in thought….nor does it spend a great deal of its time worrying about whose the greater tiger, this candidate,or that candidate. And while you might believe you are exerting all of your brain’s energy in making this decision, consider that your brain, though only two per cent of your body weight expends twenty percent of its energy by the exertions of the brain. The frontal lobe, forty per cent of the brain mass, expends only five percent of the brain’s energy. Ninety-five percent of the energy used by the brain is completely unconcerned with whom you are going to vote for.

We simply are not the intellectual giants we think we are.

But we could be a great deal more intelligent if we realized that the infant, in his first six months is completely concentrating on discovering as much as possible about his social environment and unlike a species who might get up and start walking around shortly after birth, the infant human brain has to expend all of its excess energy not on navigating its physical environment, but its social one.

Around six months of age the child begins his first efforts at attempting to negotiate with the caregivers. The infant can’t talk, he can’t walk, he still has a great difficulty in feeding himself. But he is now capable of expecting play to be negotiable, an interaction that now can begin to draw the caregiver into interactions that the child initiates to engage the interaction. One of these first interactions might possibly be food play. I don’t see much of this type of play in canidae, though a domesticated dog might kill and not eat the kill, the social behavior of canidae is extremely dependent on learning to hunt in group formations, but the feast afterwards is not exactly the free for all it might seem, but is a socially designed etiquette designed around community rank.

But for young felines the hunt, which will mostly be a singular activity, must learn hunting from experiences with the caregiver, almost always the mother, while not yet independent of the mother. The first presumption is mother will always provide and so their initial approach in felines is often playful movements towards attacking and retreating, corralling and pouncing.

As the mother teaches the human child to begin to feed apart from her, one of the first actions of the child’s negotiations with the mother, or prime feeder is to try to reinitiate the contact that had been the feeding experience to that point.

The child might throw the food in the mother’s direction.If that becomes negative experience, the child might throw it elsewhere. For the most part, the child will not succeed in reconciling the parent to feeding him as he had been fed on the breast; or perhaps the bottle while being held in the mother’s arms. So this negotiation generally fails.

One way to bring the mother back into activity with him while feeding is to drop something,perhaps the spoon. Mother picks up the spoon and returns it. This finds the child delighted that he has reconnected the mother to his feeding experience. He might now do it deliberately. The reaction of the caregiver might not be so favorable. So one of the first negotiations therefore is learning that his feeding process will no longer be at the mother’s breast, although, for the most part the severance of that feeding bond is graduated into fewer and fewer episodes of bonding and more episodes of separation.

This process is often one of the most trying for the parent, but at this age the child is learning how the other beings in his environment are responding to the child’s actions and those reactions lead to the first stage of the child’s self-developed methodology about how he needs to go about fulfilling his social desires. It is still not about his physical needs though it may seem so on its face–it is actually the first imprint on how his social environment will exert the dependence-interdependence relationship that entails the human social environment.

By nine months the child is in full negotiation mode and the art of the deal he is going to attempt to negotiate is intensely intertwined with all of the first reactions to his needs and cries, and what has brought smiles and soft voices, what has brought frowns or intemperate ugliness and loud yelling. And by nine months old this child has learned to a very large extent, not only what might bring smiles but who might be the smilers. And so the methodology that developes from these next several negotiating stages are going to take depend on the prior learning, but are now also going to be about how he sees what negotiable tactics work with what people. And the outcomes of these negotiations are also going to begin evaluating not only others but how their responses determine how he views others value him.

That is the brain that we want to judge intelligent or not intelligent but has nothing to do with the capacity for learning of the individual child, but all about what has brought the most favorable social response. And unfortunately it is often not favorable to exploration and curiosity.

Now other values of good behavior or acceptable knowledge,etc, all sprout from the determinations the child has made of his valuation of others,how he feels others value him, and of course, how he values himself. Those are extremely difficult if not impossible to alter.

You might one day change your evaluations of what is good behavior, what god you may wish to worship, or whether or not you believe in a social safety net or corporate domination.

Those can easily adapt, depending on one’s contemporary social community will adapt.

What is difficult however about changing one’s valuations of self and others, however, is that we don’t understand when these evaluations occurred; and too often we make the assumption it is a matter of other inborn qualities like intelligence; or we might think others are lesser just because they are when we don’t realize when or where we learned to value others.

But the “intelligent” might be socially awkward or despise others; and they still might have excelled intellectually because they believed they were despised by others, but they learned a methodology of learning they thought would make them feel they would be valued more or prove themselves better because they excelled intellectually. But seldom do we find this intelligent person actually becoming more favorably inclined towards others just because he might get good grades.

But this is not a disproof of what I am trying to impart. What all of our knowledge of how the brain functions show us (minus any malfunctioning parts of the brain… without a functioning hippocampus,for instant, difficulty in accomplishing, certain tasks etc.) is that the brain functions for everyone exactly the same manner but the values the brain, at this really early age, place on itself, the social ,and eventually external interpretations that I call the methodology that the brain devises for us to lead us to the manner of not how we interpret our sensory and physical experiences,but whether those sensory and physical experiences will be interpreted in one manner or another, or even at all.
This creates a Rashomon interpretation of a singular event to be interpreted different by the same participants in a single experience.

Suppose there is a prize fight for instances and there are three judges,and barring any type of external influence or pressure, they will not score any round exactly the same. But even when they do give the same numerical score, the blows they witness will not necessarily be all of the same blows that influenced the other judges.

This is the other thing about the human brain’s function. No one person, even under the most normal circumstance will witness the entire landscape of any event. There are those that suggest that the brain takes in the entirety of an experience or vision but only become aware of a limited amount of what it sees or hear. I’m not sure that can be determined.

But if you ask me I think I saw more than you saw; simply because you did not see something I saw that means I was more observant than you. But if I am willing to listen to you, I find out that you saw something I did not see.

Our brains, frankly,are not really capable of inputting everything and whether or not we actually took in more of an experience than we are actually aware of is irrelevant if we can only become aware of a portion of that information.

And so one of the prime factors in our sociality is our need to understand our external environment—our experiences and learning–jointly. We learn more with each other than we learn by ourselves. We can also learn more from those we disagree with if we listen to them and social feedback of information is vital to completing our knowledge and is enabling our ability to complete our knowledge.

So to finally return to Dr. Snyder’s book On Freedom, he begins by describing a personal journey of how he came to recognize the incompleteness of the conception as a stand alone conception of freedom of the individual being free from restraints of the other.

He writes of the German philosopher, Edith Stein, and her idea of humanity being more than a corpus, or body, and being a leib, which in German is more than a body but a unity of a life with its spirit and soul. Never having been too attracted to Stein’s ideology as anything more than medieval drivel,I had to review what Dr.Snyder described about how this doctrine of leib became transformative to him.

Essentially my memory of Stein (and I have not yet returned to her work, but am interested in his interpretation at this stage) is that the leib reveals itself from the non-living to the living and and for human life, by granting a unifying liberation of the body by its unification with its spirit and and its own consciousness of itself. Without this unification, I believe, Stein felt the identity of an I was merely a partially constructed identity that could not realize itself.

Well that’s what I recall, prompted by Dr. Snyder to recall her at all. But Dr.Snyder takes Ms. Stein’s concept and suggests that this conception of leib cannot be realized by an individual self but by unity of selves that, acting in unity could realize in concert with each other, which I am going to attempt to describe hereout,not as a freedom from, but a freedom with.

And what I would like to suggest that in the model of human learning that I briefly described above that begins in infancy by needing to identify itself first and more essentially not with itself by observing the other and then identifying itself in concordance with those observations.

And if it is much more important for the developing human to define itself within its social context before it can even approach attempting to interact with any aspects of its external environment beyond its first social context of comprehending his being within his social world then this becomes indicative to me that if in those first months of observation that form the human child’s prime need to survive; that means that human evolutionarily designed the successful human culture as extremely socially necessary to survive together before it can even approach socially as individual beings, then the individual separated from its social community becomes unlearned as the human evolved to learn within a community.

Freedom, as such, or the longing to be free, is so intertwined with a loss from that sense of need for community, that a manner to free oneself from social constraints of the community is not just negative freedom but a negation of the very culture that enabled human evolutionary survival.

If we are longing to exempt ourself from the constraints of sociality , then the constraints that are depriving us of our sociality are telling us the individual has indeed somehow become a partially constructed I. What we are learning is not to be human, but to become unhuman. And as unhumans we are not longing to be free from our perceived constraints but are longing to be reunited with our completeness that can reside within humanity when we no longer see others as constrainers but realize our completeness comes only when we can value others equally to ourselves; but also we must realize we cannot value ourselves to be greater than or lesser than others.

I have found in Dr. Snyder’s conception of freedom an idea that is what I found missing when I studied psychology. Few psychologists have ever seen no connection between mental disturbance and the social constructs of their environment. But I felt there was an absurd backwardness to psychiatry. If mental disturbance is due to malfeasance in the environment then it seemed to me to deal with individual disturbance it needed to be done not trying to adjust individuals to the society but societies to the needs of the individuals.

So I have in Dr. Snyder’s book,perhaps, a way to view our longings for freedom towards a direction of understanding no one can be free who is mentally restrained and no one can become mentally unconstrained unless we quit tagging people as to their worth or value. Rich=Good, Poor=Bad.

Educated=Smart, Uneducated=Dumb

White=White >?

These equations, however they are formulated, make us long to be free. They can never grant us freedom until there are no more qualities of differentiation placed upon any.