The Rattling of Chains

Zillions of them often know enough to cooperate with tiny stuff in mud, roots and each other in order to survive. Meanwhile, king-ofthe-beasts lions, down to a lonely few, have fewer places to hide. Evolution can be very cruel. Lovely small creatures good for us—bees and butterflies, for example—are quietly going the way of the dinosaurs. The cells in tiny beasts—bacteria and virus species—may prove “smarter” than all our smartphones combined. They may be the most fit to survive.

COVID and its new strains come to mind. We can’t see them, so it’s easy to think they don’t have strange eyes and noses for us. It’s actually dangerous to believe they don’t exist.

While all this tiny activity is invisibly going on we like to think we’re techno-savvy enough to conquer outer space without ruining or running out of garden space. What we call human progress––our “technological genius” and our “taming” and “conquest” of nature––makes us feel we’re still lording it over and in control of nature. In this view nature is our slave. We can tell it what to do, and it must obey. It’s a loser, compared to us.

The key to human success—call it also survival these days—maybe depends on how we treat the natural presences we have tried to harness and enslave to human use and ambition, sometimes also called greed. What emanates from our American history of slavery, for example, is the need—and opportunity—for empathy and cooperation. Our nation will likely fall apart if we continue to lord it over each other.

And nature continues to be treated like our slave. The story I learned as a kid about evolution and human progress is rather obviously in deep trouble. Today’s poster art depicting evolution’s real ways would be bizarre indeed. We need a better story to live by than the one in the poster I saw as a kid. Quiet and often invisible success stories normally result from empathy and cooperation. Without empathy and cooperation self-proclaimed winners make a lot of noise as they try to knock each other off. Nations becoming dictatorships experience the false version of survival of the fittest in very nasty ways.

T h e R a t t l i n g o f C h a i n s

When I’m too lazy to do anything but smell the roses, I’m not sure I’ve earned the right. I usually prefer not give my privileges much thought.

But curiosity keeps hounding me. That urge takes me into dark spaces that often make me goofy dense with more ignorance. After I follow my nose too far into the dark I sometimes feel I’m in several page-turning mysteries at once.

Curiosity’s also fun, so maybe it’s a blessing and a curse. I think I was born with it, the same way some people think they were born with sin.

I’m often curious about words, especially their relation to realities. One word, “freedom,” is out and about a lot these days, often finding its way from narrow minds into open mouths. I have trouble making sense of that word. I once read that the word “freedom” sounds like “the rattling of chains.”

I’m also curious about Humpty Dumpty, that fat egg who I have no reason to think chose to fall from a wall and thereby make a sloppy mess of his life. “When I use a word it means just what I want it to mean,” poor Humpty says to clueless Alice in her Wonderland. She questions him: Can words mean so many things? “The question is,” says Humpty, “is who is to be master. That is all.”

Humpty seems to know, perhaps too late, that those who control the meaning of words—and the stories words tell—also control lives.

How free are we if the words we routinely use make us their pawns? Should I, for example, let people call me “lazy” or “leisurely” when I’m busy smelling the flowers? Should I allow myself to be called “curious,” or “clueless,” or “nosy”? If the wrong words get stuck to me they could hurt my career.

In America we like to say everyone else is “free to choose.” The chains start rattling when I hear that. Did I choose to be a male or female, or some combination? Was I free to be born in America rather than Mongolia? Did I choose to be born a Christian in America rather than a Muslim in Saudi Arabia? Free to choose my skin hues or hair colors? Free of the prejudices

inspired by words such as “black” and “white”? Free of parental addictions, failures and prejudices? Free to make a million bucks? Free to enjoy or hate a job that pays half that much? Free to climb a ladder of success by working overtime at minimum wage? Free to make sure those minimum wages cover food, rent, health insurance, and a beer or two? In a free enterprise system am I free of promiscuous profiteering, or the algorithms devised by strangers watching and determining my private moves online?

Am I free to ignore my crooked nose and teeth?

I’m not free to say yes to all that because something compels me to say it’s wrong to lie. Radical individualists—those who think it’s a natural God-given right to give themselves freewheeling license to pursue their own selfinterests—think they’re free to disagree.

My curiosity about “freedom” gets tied in knots when I think freedom has something to do with “choice,” and the knot gets tangled when the word “choice” has the word “moral” attached to it. “Moral” usually means “thou shalt not” or “it’s not permitted to do what’s wrong.” It means you shouldn’t feel free to do anything you want. Should I be free to drive faster than speed limits allow? Free to drive when drunk? Free to be seventeen years old, not yet free to vote or drink alcohol, but free to use an AK47 during a street protest? Free to ignore “thou shalt not kill” if I’m an armed crook, police hater, or believer in capital punishment? Free to do illegal drugs? Free to avoid taxes and hide my money in foreign banks? Free to look the other way when banks launder illegal drug money? Free to charge absurdly high prices for legal drugs? Free to oppose regulations that restrict unfair business, labor and voting practices? Free to pollute the environment if there’s big money to be made doing it? Free to spread my deadly germs in a crowded room?

In the good old days we used to say we weren’t free to shout, “Fire!” in a crowded room. Moral choice said “thou shalt not.”

It’s hard to rein freedom in if you’re someone like me who believes in freedom of thought and wants to let freedoms ring musically.

Henry David Thoreau reminds me of what Thomas Jefferson said. “That Government is best which governs least.” I like that. I also like what Thoreau said in response: “That Government is best which governs not at all.”

But they both knew that the self-government we also call Democracy depends on self-control, and that self-control is not the same as addicted obedience to dogmatic beliefs. Self-control is best grounded in thoughtful individual moral choice but has collective and profound influence when expressed by business and political leaders. When leaders lie, we all have to endure the results. Many find moral choices useful, enabling, even relaxing. They also believe that control of selfish freedoms encourages social harmony and should be the basis for how we vote.

We like to think that animals still alive in nature are wild and free, and that their wild freedom is what enables them to survive. If animals could speak to us they’d probably want to discuss the laws of the jungle they have to obey in order to survive, and why so many of them these days are experiencing the rattling of chains.

As social creatures more critically threatened by our biases and technologies, we also seem to be trying to decide whether self-government— also called Democracy—is a human survival skill.