Annual Memorial Day post 2022: The Limits of Freedom

The blog is not dead yet! The annual Memorial Day posts took a break the last couple years, but it was a weird couple years, wasn't it? 

Anyway, I'm currently reading Sebastian Junger's Freedom and it makes you think a lot about freedom and how it's become sort of the rallying cry for extremists and idiots everywhere who can't think beyond the confines of their own narrow experience.

Everything is seen in tribal extremes now. One side thinks freedom means it can do whatever it wants without government interference, the other wants to do whatever it wants, but wants selective government interference when the other side disagrees with it. They're both being ridiculous.

I've pondered before the concept of freedom without some security, and Junger discusses this too in the book, observing that freedom and security sort of exist on opposite ends of a continuum and often getting one means sacrificing some of the other. As I noted before, the thing a lot of people think of when they say "freedom" is unbridled freedom where they can do whatever they want. But that also means the bad guy can do whatever he or she wants. If that's the kind of freedom you want, where you have to coexist with criminals, tyrants, and car salesmen that can operate without consequences, then that's a pretty compromised freedom. 

Junger's best quote in the book says (paraphrasing slightly for format), "The inside joke about freedom is that you're always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another."

What we really want is managed freedom, where compromise and diplomacy (as opposed to violence) are the preferred resolutions to conflicts in the exercise of individual freedoms, and meaningful consequences are a deterrent to those pondering actions of poor faith and a just denouement for those that actually do them (criminals, corrupt law enforcement, corrupt politicians, lawyers, etc.).

Why is that such a difficult concept for the modern tribes to accept? The unfortunate reality of human nature means there will always be some people that don't get the memo and will exercise their will in ways that infringe on freedoms and rights of others. People that smoke, to use a simple example. The compromise is that smokers learn to use dedicated spaces for their activity and refrain from doing it in zones marked as non-smoking. In other words, managed freedom. Yes, that's just a way to say, "life with some restrictions" but what are you going to do? To live peaceably with non-smokers, the smokers have to accept some rules. Otherwise we go back to the age of warring tribes roaming the country.

And those warring, nomadic tribes actually feature quite regularly in Junger's Freedom. He's makes interesting observations about how small bands of warriors were able to use mobility to remain elusive and defeat larger forces that opposed them. He's correct, at the tactical level, and there's an understandable admiration on his part for the success of the Taliban, the Native Americans, and the Vietnamese, all of whom defeated larger forces in historical engagements, multiple times. Junger notes many examples of how a smaller, poorer, agile group can often seem freer than the larger sedentary population that's anchored to a city and has traded nomadic traits for those of a farming community. The static community, he argues, grows fat and complacent, and becomes slave to material wealth. There are certainly truths and precedents to that. He notes that in boxing, even the lighter boxer has an advantage.

You have to be careful about treating such an observation as a tautology as the book seems to (at the mid-point; I'll revisit this sentence after finishing the book). Because in the end, the Native Americans didn't really win, even if some of them were never caught. This is because of two big things: 

1. Technological innovation: The United States eventually established a technological superiority sufficient to deny the opponent the capacity to hide, and to continuously push the advantage to a point where the differential in the societies' tech levels were too massive for the weaker group to overcome. The use of machine guns, night vision, and aerial reconnaissance reduce the value of the smaller group's mobility advantage. I'm being a bit facetious here; I don't believe the US used night vision and aviation against the Native Americans (the machine gun was enough). The point is that applied appropriately, a sufficiently advanced technology can compensate for tactical deficiencies. Perhaps not always, but often enough.
2. Culture. The larger group's culture, if sufficiently enticing, helps in two ways. First, it enables it to grow at a faster pace than the smaller group, which means that it will naturally overtake the tenable terrain. The Iroquois might not be stopped by the cavalry, but they'd be hard pressed to stop the inexorable creep of land developers and strip malls. Second, an alluring culture will even win converts from the youth of the small group. The only bulwark against this happening is education and parenting, and both of those things are slow long roads to haul; it doesn't matter what group or country they're from, teenagers are teenagers. Even if you managed to do well with it, Father Time is undefeated, and the old will give way to the young. When it comes to who wins the hearts of that youth, the stronger culture will win with few exceptions. As much as I laud the discipline and resourcefulness of the Native Americans, their youth did not universally shun the Caucasian ways. 

Ah, but wait, the Taliban did win in Iraq and Afghanistan, no? True, but it's a matter of perspective and how you define winning and losing. Some would say that wasn't a war at all but a mistake that the American's finally gave up on; admitting to a mistake is a win, painful though it might be. And tactically, I think it's fair to say that the Taliban didn't win so much as outlast the United States, just as they had with the Russians. The term "lose" applies only to a limited slice of history here. The Russians and the Americans are alive and well, just with a lot of eggs on their faces. They'll wipe that off ... and probably endure many more omelet facials before they're done. But let's be fair here; the Native Americans, for all their mobility and cleverness (and I too admire their history and culture), are not the reigning authority in North America.

What of the Vietnamese? Didn't they soundly outlast the French and the Americans? Yes, at that slice of time in history. And as it was in the gulf war, it was a horrific embarrassment in lives and money, but America lives stronger today than the day it "lost" in Vietnam. Better yet, Americans and Vietnamese have seemingly healed much, and veterans of those tragic days have traveled to each other's countries to reminisce and repair. Vietnamese that moved to the US have become some of the most successful Americans. In one gentle irony, Vietnam successfully transformed a bit of American culture. Nearly everyone I know loves Vietnamese cuisine.

While I may have some different thoughts about the book, I find Junger's observations fascinating, and Freedom does a great job of making the reader think. Clearly, for those that take the time to think about it, freedom is complicated and difficult. People that don't fight for it or that don't appreciate those that do and did, take it for granted. I think that's a big part of the problem we have today. Especially today.