October 7, 2015 - 14:53
In Monday night’s Socrates Café, we talked about our understandings of freedoms from different perspectives. People mentioned “the ability/capability of doing what you desire to do, with being mindful to others, or being constrained by some moral standards, or institutions”, “not hurting others when exercising your own freedom since that would negate other’s freedom”, “whether is freedom a choice”, “freedom as the not being oppressed”, “freedom exist in anarchy”, “freedom not solely limited within the realm of human spirit”, “being aware of context and audiences before performing or speaking”, “is there freedom with any anticipated consequences”, etc. And Joel mentioned in the middle of our conversation that we had been mostly talking about freedom from a critical aspect rather than thinking about positive freedom. Nevertheless, I would still like to focus on the more “negative”, or “critical” aspect of freedom that oppression is such a despicable persecution for it, and it is always hard for people to really see, or listen to things from perspectives different from their owns’, no matter treating other human beings, or animals.
In John Edgar Wideman’s memoir, Brothers and Keepers, he mentioned numerous times about incarceration as being a “cage”. “In a book about the evolution of imprisonment during the Middle Ages I discovered the word ‘jail’ does in fact derive from ‘cage’”, “as the net closed like a fist around Homewood, my mother couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. But instead of setting her free, the truth trapped her in a cage as tangible as the iron bars of Robby’s cell”. And when Wideman recalled their view toward black gangsters, he said “we can’t help but feel some satisfaction seeing a brother, a black man, get over on these people, on their system without playing by their rules. No matter how much we have incorporated these rules as our own, we know that they were forced on us by people who did not have our best interests at heart”. When there exists some unjust oppression over people’s lives, a “cage” is constructed simultaneously around them. If you express yourself in a rebellious way, you would definitely end up in a real “cage”. If you incorporate the system, being quietly subdued, you are still “incarcerated” in an intangible “cage”. It feels like there is actually no choice for you. There is even no use to talk about how to balance yourself between being rebellious and being subdued since neither direction can take you away from miseries.
Mentioning “cage”, I cannot stop thinking about animals in the topic of freedom which was brought up in the conversation. Someone was saying that, freedom is the right to live in the way they are born to be, and further make a point about “lions in the cage”, “dolphins in seaworld” as examples of animals’ freedom being taken away. I would not comment on this controversial issue, but I would really like to question, as Shirah questioned(maybe Shirah, maybe someone else I cannot really remember), can human beings define freedom for other species while we cannot really comprehend their world? Are we imposing the idea of freedom on them? Wideman said that “The hardest habit to break, since it was the habit of a lifetime, would be listening to myself listen to him (his brother Robby). That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms”. How can we avoid being oppressive on others and hurt others’ freedom, by breaking the habit of only listening to ourselves, or if it is hard to break this habit, by coming up with some other compensating solutions, to create a real dialogue with people different from us?