[FRIAM] summer reading

Wed May 18 14:52:11 EDT 2022

At the suggestion of JennyQ I am (re)reading Russel Shorto's "Amsterdam: 
A History of the Worlds Most Liberal City"... in response to the topic 
of you interviews and e-mail here, I liked the way he spoke of "freedom" 
and "liberty" in the context of the formation of Amsterdam and the 
Netherlands in general.

An important distinction seems to be between "freedom from" and "freedom 
to".   Both Right and Left (being political intrinsically?) seem 
overworried about "freedom from", looking at *who* or *what* 
(institution) is going to obstruct one's "pursuit of happiness" whether 
it be taxation or regulation or making various (somewhat private) acts 
such as abortion or gun-ownership or 
helmet/seatbelt/healthcare-insurance (non)use illegal (obstructable and 
punishable).  It seems that the from/to duality is at the crux of 
this.   When I am in a healthy frame of mind, I am much more focused on 
what/how/why I want to do than I am about who/what/why I am going to be 
stopped.  As I negotiate the foreignness (to me) of public transport 
(short and long haul) I can lose sight of my goal which is to get from 
one place to another and become obsessed with the (appearance of the) 
failures of the given system (bus/train/taxi/etc) and the supporting 
materials (signage, phone apps, schedules, people-who-advise) and lose 
sight of the idea that I really just want to get where I'm going 
(freedom to) and railing against the various stumble-stones (they seem 
huge when you are too clumsy/ignorant to lift your feet or walk around 
them) instead (freedom from).

Feudal Europe had a lot of systemic constraints on the common man, but 
when living within those constraints there was often a lot of freedom.   
What Shorto describes about Amsterdam/NL is the emergence of the idea 
that an individual *can* or *should* have the freedoms to do many things 
*without* the constraining interferences of church and state at the 
time.  He also describes how the formation of common share stocks and 
exchanges both yielded a "freedom to" (invest in short and long lived 
ventures) while creating a new set of ways to exploit.  The "victims" of 
the VOC (dutch east india Co) were wide and varied and the "freedom to" 
by those who benefitted from holding stock in it's ventures and/or being 
employed or facilitated by it's operations was balanced but hidden from 
those who would need "freedom from" the various exploitative strategies 
employed by the "management" in the name of "freedom to".

Our modern hyper-capitalistic first-world seems to be this in spades.  
For every "freedom to" we have (say, eat avocado toast daily or buy a 
new pair of name-brand athletic shoes monthly), someone else may well 
suffer mightily to make that happen (drug cartels owning the Avocado 
farms in MX and child-labor in indonesia constructing sneakers for a 
month's pay equal the price of one pair retail in the US or EU).

On 5/17/22 11:49 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Dear FRIAMMERS,
>
> I am off to the Mosquito-Infested-Swamp (Hereafter, “MIS”) soon and 
> probably won’t be able to participate in THUAM this Thursday.  I will 
> try to rejoin you at least by the second week of June, if for only as 
> long as my car battery can hold out.
>
> I leave you with two podcasts from Ezra Klein.  I can hear your eyes 
> rolling because there can hardly be anybody more elitey than Ezra 
> Klein.  And nothing is more eye-roll inducing than 
> elites-interviewing-elites.
>
> Still, I think he is on to something here. The first interview is with 
> a hard right notre dame professor, and the second is with Anne 
> Applebaum,who I guess is a liberal historian.  Both speak to a manner 
> in which the right and the left might seem to agree.  That all the 
> talk about freedom both on the left and on theright  misses the point 
> that “freedom is just another word for nothin’ much to loose.” Modern 
> society has become cytolytic and the internet has become a kind of 
> centrifuge that spins out the cell fragments into an organization 
> alien to their form.  Universities are kinda like that.
>
> https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-does-the-post-liberal-right-actually-want/id1548604447?i=1000561003813
>
> https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anne-applebaum-on-what-liberals-misunderstand-about/id1548604447?i=1000561763183
>
> Applebaum, channeling Arendt, speaks of “loneliness”, not as a 
> phenomenon of not being around people, but of having lost a sense of 
> common purpose in the people around one.  Hence this atavistic longing 
> for the Good Old America.  Now what nobody in this conversationseems 
> to remember is that these cells were often bound to gether by hatred 
> of one another.  When we moved into the MIS a half a century ago, 
> there were two camps, two well defined THEY’S which were not 
> accompanied by equally well defined WE’S.  But one said was loosely 
> catholic and the other loosely protestant, and so they each had a 
> church to go an grumble in.  Now, even those camps have been dissolved.
>
> I am wondering if there was ever such a thing as a community that was 
> not, in significant part, based on a hatred for the communities around 
> it.
>
> Nick
>
> _ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com_
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
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