I have a love-hate relationship with the word freedom. I fully realized why only recently while teaching a short story called “Pain” by Carlos Fuentes. The main character of the story is a Mexican college student studying at Cornell University. Juan is bothered by the extreme sloppiness of other students. One in particular pushed him past his usual reserve:
One day, an athletic boy, blond, with pinched features, ordered a plate of spaghetti and began to eat it with his hands, by the fistful. Juan Zamora felt an uncontrollable revulsion that obliterated his appetite and forced him for the first and perhaps only time to criticize a fellow student. “That’s disgusting! Didn’t they teach you how to eat at home?” “Of course they did. My family’s pretty rich, for your information.” “So why do you eat like an animal?” “Because I am free,” said the blond through a mouthful of pasta.
Although I don’t particularly like most of the short story, this small scene struck me as a profound revelation of something that has gone wrong with America and with the concept of freedom.
It may be a terrible oversimplification, but it seems that to avoid being destructive and disgusting, freedom needs to get two prepositions right. First, we must rightly understand what we are free from. Second, we must rightly grasp what we are free to. It is essential that these parts of freedom are not separated. If we only celebrate what we are free from, we do whatever we want because we are free from the restraints of others. This sometimes happens to college freshmen who are freed from the oversight of parents but have no vision of what they are actually free to do.
The Quakers and pilgrims that came to America not only grasped that they were free from religious oppression and persecution, but that they were now free to worship. American soldiers coming back from WWII had seen the tyranny America was free from and had a keen sense of what they were now free to do. They were free to raise families, to start businesses, to get elected, and to build a nation. They got to it with great energy.
I have colleague who came to the United States from Ethiopia. After ten years and a Ph.D., he became a proud American citizen. He is still amazed, however, that more Americans don’t take advantage of all their freedoms and opportunities. In Ethiopia he sometimes had to wait in long lines to get a textbook. They were precious and costly. He observed that although financial aid pays for many students’ books, many students never open them. He doesn’t understand why. Of course, they are free not to—it is their right.
The rights language that pervades our society is mostly about freedom from stuff: from discrimination, from censorship, from moral judgment, from any restraint of our appetites. We disapprove of anyone who might tell us what we should do with our freedom. Increasingly the only “to” we attach to freedom is “to do whatever we want.”
Paul expresses the importance of the “from” and “to” of freedom in Galatians 5:1-13. Paul argues long and hard that Christ has freed us from the law: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” But twelve verses later Paul adds, “You are called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; but rather, serve one another in love.” In other words we are free from law to love.
The from and the to must go together, but in much of our culture they have become untethered. For many Americans, freedom has become what Fuentes observed: the freedom morally, artistically, and socially to eat spaghetti with our hands.
