“[I]t is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . . And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real.” [Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed]
Probably the most important fact, in a space-time continuum filled with facts of every kind, is that things change. Everything. Le Guin’s insight above is fundamental to all kinds of thinking. The past is real; we experienced it, we remember it, and we can see its consequences around us. The future, too, is real; we plan for it, however ineptly, and work to achieve it according to our values, priorities, and understanding of cause and effect. But the present is more ephemeral than the mayfly. It’s gone before we can finish pronouncing its name.
(I’m not endorsing the Anarrestis’ hostility to property here. That was Le Guin’s fictional device to create the contrasts and clashes that animated the novel. It’s a fine tale, but an anarcho-syndicalist society in which property is completely abjured would be less stable than communist egalitarianism. History has spoken on this subject. So have I.)
Yet everyone seeks stability. Stable homes, stable incomes, stable relationships, and stable societies with stable laws and customs. It seems to be a consequence of Man’s nature as a “project pursuer.” (Cf. Loren Lomasky.) For every project aims at an end state, with all that implies. Yet upon the instant that end state is achieved, it begins to change. There’s no escaping it.
If any kind of stability is achievable, it must be one in which the dynamics of time and change actually work to preserve it. However, while we can theorize about such a dynamic stability, we haven’t any idea about how to produce it. Among other things, we cannot answer the question “Just what would that variety of ‘stability’ actually stabilize? What aspects of it would not change?”
The freedom advocate faces an unpleasant reality:
Freedom in these United States lasted roughly until 1900. For the century-plus from the Founding to the Oklahoma Land Rush, there was a frontier to which people unsatisfied with the constraints of “civilization” could escape. The availability of that frontier was critical to freedom elsewhere, for politicians and their hangers-on had to remain aware that they were escapable. Once America’s land frontier was closed, the State could advance upon us, gradually whittling away our supposedly guaranteed rights.
Today, freedom is only a memory. All human action is hemmed in by laws, regulations, taxes, and the efforts of busybodies everywhere to compel us to conform. As C. S. Lewis put it in Screwtape Proposes a Toast:
Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool-shed in his own garden.
Do not imagine that any society, however organized, can escape the State’s best friend: the busybody.
A means of escaping the busybody is the best guarantor of a tolerable degree of freedom. It is not permanently stable; nothing is. But it’s the best-enduring chance we have. That implies that until we regain a frontier:
- That’s reachable by common men;
- That provides access to places where the State does not rule;
- Such places being habitable, perhaps with technological help, by those who go there;
...freedom will only be a sound we make from time to time. A word in the dictionary whose meaning has no referents in objective reality.
Just now, that frontier does not exist. Yet it existed in the past. It might exist again in the future. But whereas its past form was a feature of terrestrial geography, its future form will be harder to bring about, and for a time will be accessible only to a fortunate few. Elon Musk had better find some inheritors who share both his vision and his passion for it.
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