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THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM Essay By COREY ANTON |
We talk quite a bit about freedom in the U.S., but I’m not sure how many people really understand what freedom is or even how freedom is related to time. Consider this: people often like to reflect back upon their lives and when they do, they often try to imagine that they could have done other than they did. People commonly think to themselves, “I admittedly did X and Y but I just as well could have done P or Q.” In these kinds of reflections people deeply fool themselves; they basically pretend that they were not there.
No fooling: regarding all the things we already have done in our lives, both collectively and individually, none of them can we now not have done. We did them! And also, of all the things we did not do, none now could have been done. We didn’t do them! In a word: the past, as past, is irrevocable. Any other account tries to let us off the hook, tries to lend us what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “an alibi in being.” But we need to advance carefully here. The suggestion that the past now cannot have been otherwise does not make us victims. Rightly understood, we have a beginning sketch of a free will worth wanting.
Look back over your life. If you do not want to hear that what has been done cannot be revoked, if you feel a kind of nausea over that thought, if that idea seems too heavy, weighty, and burdensome, you may want to consider it from another angle: take those very feelings, the heaviness and weight, and swing it all around in front of yourself. Set goals and act today, taking the very weight of the past as the wind in your sails. What we commonly talk of as “the future” might just as equally be thought of as that past which is still possible. Understood in this way, the very “set-in-stoneness” of the past can be harnessed and used as a resource. We can use the sense of permanence, the sense of irrevocability, by recognizing that we are, right now, moving toward a past which will-have-been.
To illustrate this important point, consider that what we commonly call “the future” might be treated as a species of the past: it is that past we are currently sentencing ourselves to. The practical point is this: in our everyday encounters and mundane dealings, we are moving toward accomplishments that, once performed, are forever accomplished henceforth. As Josiah Royce once wrote, “the deed once done is never to be recalled; that what has been done is at once the world’s safest treasure, and its heaviest burden.” Perhaps some examples might help: Aristotle cannot have not written his Poetics, Rosa Parks cannot have not refused to give up her seat on the bus, Led Zeppelin cannot have not produced “Stairway to Heaven,” and the Bill of Rights cannot have not been created. As a less dramatic example: early each semester, I tell my students that they, when handing in their term papers, should submit a sixth or seventh draft. I tell them to give me their absolute best effort, an honest-to-goodness attempt to show not just me but themselves what their best work looks like. I also tell them that if I receive a paper that looks rushed, poorly thought out, is filled with typos and spelling errors and has other signs of procrastination, I will not think that the paper was put off and frantically done the night before. Instead, I will think and believe that was what they, in fact, were actually capable of. Seriously, who are people fooling with the thought, “I could have written something better?” There is, sorry to say, no world of “could have.” There is only what we do and that is all.
At no point am I claiming that we control all the events that shape and impact our lives, but I would argue that not all of the past is already completed. By this, I do not merely mean that the past remains open to re-interpretation. Nor do I intend to suggest merely that the past changes its meaning according future developments and outcomes. These points are not to be denied. But still, the more important insight is that there is a past that has not yet solidified, a past that is currently in the process of becoming itself. In our day-to-day lives we can perform deeds in full wide-eyed realization that we have “no alibi in being.” To understand this is to understand that in the end, once any of our decisions or deeds are finally completed, we could not have done otherwise. As beings with free will, we can call back to ourselves from the future, meaning we can transform the future into the past.
What exactly have you created today? If you didn’t create anything, don’t think for even a moment that you could have.
