Maxine Greene: The Dialectic of Freedom Chapter 2. American Paradox, American Quest

In this chapter Greene sets out to define an American paradox of freedom. The Negative freedom. A “freedom from” which in reality pens in the American psyche and limits the American people. The quest of the American identity is to strive toward a realization of freedom, but that freedom isn’t freeing.

Green embarks on her journey of exploration in this chapter by trying to define freedom and its place in cultural contexts:

“Uncertain though people may be about the meanings of freedom in attentive though they may be to what it in tails, no one can deny their concern for freedom is a leitmotif of our time… the modes of seeking liberation differ, along with the means of resistance. What is common to all is a determination to act against what is experienced as oppression, coercion, injustice, exclusion, neglect. The watchword for most is indeed freedom; but the meanings vary almost infinitely. They are religious definitions nationalist ones economic and political ones.… It has become nearly impossible to associate freedom as a goal with any trans cultural or universal concept of what is right or good” (p.24)

Greene points out that along with this endless variation in the motives for and definitions of freedom that there is little evidence about the universality of freedom. We think all people desire freedom but Greene points out that there are cultures everywhere that choose oppression, or acquiesce to oppression in return for prosperity or peace. She points to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, To the fascist public of Hitler’s Germany, and she takes a passage from a book to draw us closer to the American paradox of trading a positive freedom of community for an negative freedom of individuality.

“another instance of compliance ( albeit of a different kind) can be found in Paul Nisen’s novel Antoine Bloye. Antoine is a railroad worker son who, by playing the "wide monkey, "wins a prize at a regional contest for secondary schools in France at the start of this century. After graduation, he attempts to read the book he received as a prize for a scholarship.

“Man is free” he reads “he is ever aware of his power not to do what he does do and what he does not do”

Antoine reflects on these words and on some others besides. He ill understands them. Is his father free not to be poor, not to work nights, not to go where he does go? Is his mother free not to have her back ache from work, not to be tired out and old before her time? He himself- in what way is he free? to be free means simply not to be poor and not always ordered about. The rich enjoy a kind of freedom. People with an income….. he shuts M. Jules Simons’s gilt edged book never to open it again. “

This is a familiar sentiment to me. The idea of freedom is meaningless when the ability to act on that freedom is constrained. I feel this all the time. Am I free to become anything more if it means the risk of destitution. Is that freedom? The freedom to choose which misery to endure? Greene seems to see this in american societies too, although she sees it as a symptom of capitalism and commodification. I think maybe it has deeper roots than that and is part of the American character. I think she will get there too as we read on.

“This can and does occur in American society as more and more people are absorbed in commodification, regulated by beauraucracies, and deprived of participation in a public space. The great difference is that freedom is still taken to be a given in this country: to be american is to be endowed with freedom, whether or not one acts on it or fights for it or does anything with it. An American Antoine Bloye today would probably feel that his parents poverty and fatigue represented infringements on their rights, erosions of their endowment. And he might comfort himself, as many Americans still do with an evocation of an old myth- “for example the myth of the frontier, of perpetual new beginning, the future as boundlessly open to self-creation” it is unlikely given the present circumstances that he would try to come together with others to transform the lives they lived in common” (p.26)

There is something here that Greene is almost getting to but isn’t quite nailing down and to me its a pretty big part of american society: Prosperity Gospel/Meritocracy/ Moral Failing. I wonder if an American Bloye would recognize the poverty or fatigue represented a momentary lapse on the journey to self reinvention, the temporarily embarrassed millionaire mentality, or if An american Bloye would actually take the poverty of his parts as evidence of their moral failing. So much of how poverty is framed in this country is as a product of individual failure and often it carries a moral element as well. What would Joel Osteen say to mama and papa Bloye?

Indeed this idea is the flip side of something Greene writes later on the same page!

“ Not for the first time, the conservative attachment to [negative freedom] meshes with the libertarian enthusiasm for freedom as absence of all state interventions and controls. This in turn, feeds a general taken-for-grantedness with respect to personal and civic liberties. It makes it possible to replace social compassion with an insistence on each persons capacity and responsibility (and freedom) to “make it “ on his or her own” p.26 (emphasis added)

This is the view that I think pervades American society. We are all on our own to rise and fall, then to tell the story of our deed as if we alone achieved it. The failures of the individual are the responsibility of the individual and, because we are all out here on our own, every other person is competition for the prize of prosperity.

Greene sees this too but doesn’t say it as bleakly as I do.

“Self-reliance, independence: these are part of our legacy, many believe, if they think about it at all. It is sometimes forgotten that American Revolution and the so-called war for independence it involved were carried out, not so much in the name of freedom, but to make freedom possible on these shores. Granting the fact that merchants and artisans saw the colonial mercantile policies and taxation practice as onwarranted infringements on their god-given rights to own (and control) their own property and to pursue wealth” (emphasis added) p.27

Greene might not be as pessimistic as I am but she does do a solid and point out here that the ideals of freedom for which the revolutionary war was fought wasn’t about self determination in an etherial, spiritual, philosophical sense but in an economic one. The freedom was the freedom to acquire wealth, and control wealth and people. This still feels like the root of american democracy and a central tension in our history is how we wrote a check for something we were fundamentally unprepared to cash. All men cannot be equally free in a society that stratifies or enslaves them. Past the point of their creation, a lot of inequality tends too present itself.

Greene does find some good in this project of american freedom: the idea of freedom as an action. It was a public act and could only be maintained in the public with the consent and fellowship of peers.

The main problem with this is that when the power of the peers is unequal often the result is just a different infringement on freedom. Ask the slaves. Ask the poor. Ask women. Ask Workers. Ask Immigrants.

Greene Makes these points in a series of illustrations from novels and history ranging from Huck Finn to mill girls of the northeast to expansion of the wild west.

The one that stood out to me in this section is possibly not the most engaging but it has some resonance with my interests in education. It was the story of Horace Mann and the push for the common school.

The expansion west was an open field (so long as you don’t count the Indigenous peoples- not free!) And the excesses of negative freedom so overran the public sense of decency that moral fibre was deemed necessary for the character of the nation. To that end public schooling was advocated for. This aligns with the moral education foundation for public schooling I saw in my research for the roots of music education. Mann also had the distinctly american short sightedness of someone who believes they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

“Mendel leave that education could start the tendency of "the domination of capital in the servility of labor, "since no intelligent body of men could be permanently poor. Acknowledgment of the moral law, self-control, and the kind of intelligence needed for the maintenance of a republican government: diesel protect against bigotry, violence, and profligacy. Search emails like the "anarchy" always start in the sanctity of institutions were incipient in a free society; and the young had to be deliberately (and universally) "trained" if these emails were to be contained.” P.33

This kind of moralist and economic naiveté is frustrating to me, granted this is more than 100 years ago. Needless to say I don’t agree with Mann, or his aims here. We cannot educate people out of poverty (this doesn’t mean we don’t educate the poor. The entire system of american life is an economic Caste system. The people who “make it” are the exception, not the rule. Education can’t be an equalizer in a system that is unequal. Education needs to be for the benefit of the individual and empower them to build solidarity and develop new systems to replace inequitable ones. Not promote docility and encourage place-taking.

Greene addresses this in its historical context by engaging with the thinking of Mann’s contemporaries Emmerson and Thoreau.

Let it be here known that I have a bone to pick with Emerson based largely on his concept of self reliance as he communicated it in the essay “self reliance” Found here: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/selfreliance.html

Emmerson is the product of wealth and opportunity. In the above essay he talks about self reliance (largely embracing a view of freedom that is negative. Freedom from and freedom of individual) but ignores his context that allows him that “self reliance” Emerson isn’t self reliant he is the privileged instagrammer in the field of poppies or in the greek town posting “life is for living” while their daddy pays the bill and the maid cleans their room.

The business of living, the cultural context, the day to day relations that foster the ability to delude oneself into an idea of self reliance aren’t dealt with. The privilege that Emerson has by virtue of his race and class aren’t dealt with. This guy is born in the end zone and thinks he scored on his own.

His writing reflects that idea, Greene uses this iconoclastic quality of his writing to examine Mann. I truly believe they are both wrong in different ways (and some similar ways)

Greene poses that “Emerson was fully aware of the effects of trade and the reliance on property.”

I will give her the benefit of the doubt but I read Ralph and perceive a big old blindspot when it comes to the things that afford his genius. The reliance on property is bad for thee but not for me.

Greene writes of Quotes Emerson’s thinking:

“Society everywhere is a conspiracy agains the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity”

Again I wonder if old Ralph thinks of himself as someone at the board meeting or someone who is surrendering liberty and culture. From where I am in the lower middle classes, he is definitely on the earnings call.

Greene says of this passage:

“ Treating individuals in the aggregate- as groups without classes- was, like attempts to impose controls from without, and undermining of freedom.”

Was this what was happening? I don’t think so, but again I am not as knowledgeable. I think there has always been class division and the illusion of equality was prevalent from the beginnings of american society.

Greene then returns to quoting Emerson

“The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The Scholar is Decent, indolent, complacent”

Again I return to my early bone to pick with Ralph. Here he seems to be saying “I know what to do! Be born rich and free and seize your unearned opportunity and privilege to forge a questioning individualism that is totally the product of circumstance and isn’t actually a good model for society. I did it and so can you!”

Greene sums up his position like so:

“ Personal freedom could be gained only through the use of intuition and imagination; it required the capacity to bridge between the immediacy of each moment to the Divine, the “over-soul.” Through “naming” through “seeing” through his/her spontaneous effort, the individual could come in touch with the transcendent wholeness of the ideal. Freedom had to do, then, with a commitment to the ideal with regeneration, with self reliance, and with the eventual attainment of communion with other should. .. [Emerson believed that] the good society could only emerge when persons began reaching out for their own integrity, when they could say as individuals “ we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds”

Emerson doesn’t really think that institutions and social structures are important to this arrangement. He seems to me to be echoing Nizam, saying to an American Bloye; Free yourself. Without answering the questions of how one does this and survives. What freedom comes from this anarchy? Its also interesting that he strives for individual expression but uses the collective pronoun.

Greene appears to share my skepticism about the class consciousness of our mutual friend Ralph.

“ .. We can not but ask ourselves whether Emerson could have made humselve understood by Lucy Larcom or the other mill girls at the Lowell mills. Could he have made himself heard by the “sheet-white girls,” by the men on the docks, by the steamboat captains, by the Jay Goulds and commodore Vanderbilts and the gatsbys of the new world”

Light ‘em up Maxine.

Greene does point out that the question of whether freedom can be attained apart from institutions and social arrangements is a persistent question. This seems wild to me. I don’t think that individual conceptions of freedom are a viable long term solution unless you’re looking for frontier anarchy.

Reinhold Neibuhr would counter that all societies are inherently unjust and curtail freedoms for some. I would agree but counter that centering the needs of the individual in a positive freedom context would at least mitigate some of that harm, and fostering cultures of community and co-operation would encourage collective action as a check on injustice. In history collective action (violent and non-violent) has been the primary actor for societal change. That is why an individualist national character is counterproductive to social cohesion and progress.

Greene uses Thoreau as a counter to Ralph. She quotes Henry as saying:

“ Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant… what is it to be born free and not to live free what is the value of any political freedom but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves , or a freedom to be free of which we boast?”

Greene offers the following commentary

“The whole point of establishing a res-public Thoreau said, was to make sure nothing happened to the Res-privita, the private state. He was not interested in government legislstation ; he was indifferent to politics. …

Walden, it is true, is a potent challenge to readers to awaken, to act to achieve their own freedom, to choose the terms on which they will associate with others. Far more than Emerson thoreau showed concern for the poor. He knew that “luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace on the other are the almshouses and the “silent poor”… but he appeared to think that if the wealthy and the “herd” that imitated them would realize that most of their luxuries were superfluous, if everyone would decide to lead a simple, even primitive, life, there would not exist such extremes between classes. There would be no need to exploit others if the advantaged ones would stop indulging and exploiting themselves.”

Human motivations being what they are the above hope is incredibly naive Reinhold Neibuhr would write in the 20th century in Moral Man and Immoral Society:

“While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant others what they claim for themselves. Though educators ever since the 18th century have given them selves to the fond illusion that justice through voluntary corporation waited only upon a more universal a more adequate educational enterprise, there is good reason to believe that the sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure or powerful, and that the rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium which is the social utopia either explicit or implicit of all intellectual or religious moralism

And

Limitation of the human mind and imagination, the inability of human beings to transcend their own interests efficiently to envisage the interests of their fellow men as clearly as they do their own makes force and inevitable part of the process of social cohesion. But the same force which guarantees peace also makes for injustice. “Power, "Said Henry Adams, "is poison"; and it is poison which blind the eyes of moral insight and lames the wheel of moral purpose

Assata Shakur, an american political activist said it more succinctly

““Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.””

Why give up the power you have for a simple life to benefit someone who is not you. The foundational drives of mankind aren’t to be kind to a stranger.

Greene also notes this:

“All depended on the autonomy and heightened consciousness of the individual; there was no suggestion of individuals coming together in public space to bring freedom into existence. There was only a metaphor for a natural emergence among human beings refusing the ant like lives, acquiescence, and conformity… Thoreau’s appeal was to the consciousness of personal agency so often obliterated by thoughtlessness or accommodation to a system or submergence in the crowd. Without the consciousness of agency, no human being is likely to take the initiative needed for the achievement of freedom . For Thoreau however his writing and his abolitionism exhausted his urge to action.” P.36 Emphasis added.

Greene makes a good point here that raising consciousness of personal agency is the first step toward a conception of active freedom. Part of raising this consciousness of personal agency should be the role of schools! (Or should it *dramatic organ music goes here*)

Greene continues outlining ideas of American freedom including the freedom that the 14th Amendment gave to corporations and set the stage for the age of robber Barrons. She points to Melville’s Moby Dick as an exemplar

“ like the factory owners and the financiers, Ahab will pay as little as possible in accord with what is considered each man’s contribution to the final product, if there were a final product and not a fated pursuit of a white whale. That is his freedom, his total freedom from constraint and control, and it is emblematic. When the ship is finally wrecked by the giant whale,Ahab Cries. “The ship! The Hearse!… its wood could only be American.”

This is again the presentation of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire, the crew- who should have mutinied and destroyed Ahab accepts that his agency and freedom are justified because of his position and their reduced freedom, even the danger they face to life and limb is part of their journey toward the freedom that ahab has. (This is not an accurate reading of Melville, but rather a metaphorical extraction on my own part.) In American society there is an Idea that everyone is “on the way” to true freedom (economic security) but that is a stuffed hare that we are all chasing around the dog track so that the truly wealthy can bet and make more money from the suffering of the majority.

Greene goes on to discuss the advent of social and economic darwinism and the ideas of determinism of station and eugenics (she doesn’t really get there but it was part of it). She also discusses the Hegelian school of thought and its impact on education through the ideas of the commissioner of education at the turn of the 20th century William Torey Harris

“Harris, too, affirmed the values of the industrial order as an upward step in the advance of civilization; and his cognitivist formalist approach to school curricula was grounded in the conviction that the young had to develop a rational world view in order to properly relate themselves to the world and the institutions that gave it visible form.”

It seems to me that this view is still engaged in public education. We prepare workers. Not people. What is your role and how can you fill it is a limiting view of humanity but it is both the overarching structure of traditional education and the lens through which we approach the goal of that exercise.

Harris was a Hegelian; and the Hegelian view was that civilization is an expression of a cosmic order founded on reason and understandable by rational minds. Only the free and autonomous person can exercise reason adequately, not bounded or “natural” or purely “subjective self.” It follows that the recognition of a world order or a world spirit is the ultimate object of free will; and Harris’s apparently conservative conception of education was intended as a means of releasing persons in all their diversity to become their true, rational and autonomous selves. What remains crucial here is the connection between the attainment of freedom and the consciousness of some larger, encompassing whole”

How do you fit into the machinery of the universe? How can your autonomy address that machinery? What agency does one have? There is a kind of economic calvinism that happens inside these systems that oppress. Those lower are judged as sinners and duty bound to suffer. Their suffering is ordained and it is that suffering that is their true purpose. The chosen are chosen and because they are chosen their actions are justified.

Greene recognizes this in her thinking too saying

“Once we include the worker in our consideration of freedom (as so few educational thinkers have done) , we cannot but find the problematic intensifying.

Amen!

We then move closer to present day with the thinking of John Dewey:

“[Dewey] saw the human mind as a distinctive mode of adaptation to the environment in a world that was always challenging and always new. The invention of cultures was seen as a break with natural selection. Capable of thinking and choosing, capable of communication and transmitting valued ways of life men and women could direct the course of future evolution. No longer subject to the repetitive patterns laid down by instinct they could be educated to pose questions, to pursue meanings, to effect changes , to extend control. Making more and more connections in their own experiences of the actions they performed, they would become aware of more and more alternatives. More and more experiential possibilities; and this meant an increased likelihood of achieving freedom. The capacity for achieving it however , had to be continually nurtured, informed, and communally sustained. …

… Dewey wrote

“ The democratic idea of freedom is not the right of each individual to do as he pleases even if it be qualified by adding”provided he does not interfere with the same freedom on the part of others.” Whiled the idea is not always, not often enough, expressed in words, the basic freedom is that of freedom of mind and whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce freedom from intelligence.”

Dewey is expressing here that central nature of experiential education. The capacity for making choices in and as a culture of transmission e needs to be nurtured and informed. Without that that conscious attention we risk a return to reproductions educations that preserve without thought not the the products of instinct but the products of social orders. The choices of others attached to the living of ourselves.

Greene sees this risk and brings it into focus through Melville

“ We are reminded by Melville of what was overlooked by the great reformers, including Dewey…: not only the sense in which nature abhors slavery but the sense in which a free society (and its citizens) are morally endangered by unacknowledged mastery, by dominion of every kind.

Human beings , unlike cattle, must choose what they will do and be. We are not governed by our instincts or totally dominated by our keepers. Rather we are free and that freedom puts us under and imperative of decision and action, and each action is in time. It is taken on the knife-edge of the present and both completes a life to that point and projects it into the future.”

It is the choice, the crux of freedom, that forces us as people to bear responsibility in our culture for our actions. This responsibility is then used to cast our choices as virtuous or degenerate. The problem here is that the choices put in front of us are largely up to the structures of society and our place inside it. Without the agency to change our context and the choices available we are dominated by unacknowledged mastery of prevailing forces. Black folks know this. Its not unacknowledged unless you’re not in conflict with that master’s goal.

The freedom under that oppression is again, negative freedom. You are free to choose without interference the choices before you. The choices themselves though are products of a system you have not control over. Are you free?

“Dewey went on to say that negative freedom was justified only as a means to “freedom which is power: power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences which will result from acting upon them, power to select and order means to cary chosen ends into operation.” But purposes however could only grow through the process of social intelligence”

The question of power and freedom is one where the balance is hard to find. Whose power and whose freedom? The power of the many to gain their collective freedom? The top down dominion of one who represents freedom? To stand as an aspirational goal like your Jeffs Bezos? Your Donalds Trump?

Greene addresses this with the words of Robert Reich

“Franklin D. Roosevelt’s boldest innovation has been designating the nation as a community. At a time when the whole nation was stricken and only a massive common campaign could hope to prevail over depression and fascism, this designation was compelling to the American People”

Community identity and endeavor as an answer to that balance but that spirit of togetherness needs to be reaffirmed and renewed or else it will pass out of the national character which one can argue that it most certainly has. Writing in the 1980s of greed and Reagan, the seeds of the modern radical right wing parties, Greene is seeing that in her own cultural milieu

“It would appear from our present vantage point that, except for women groups and minorities and people traditionally oppressed, freedom was no longer a major issue for those who had been outraged (in the 60s), emptied of their faith”

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxpYW92xl2AY6PZ14EvbYm9I7d_I55b2Yr Here Brian sums it up in a family guy clip

Also “traditionally oppressed” gets a big yikes in a book about freedom. The freedom that carries a tradition of oppression isn’t a true freedom y’all!

Greene examines some of the ways people have tried to Opt out of societal freedom through libertarian formulations of negative freedom

“Is it sufficient to claim a negative freedom beyond the structures of society? What can such freedom signify without supports, without public space? Are the primary obstacles t freedom to be found primarily in the structures of the institutions in the middle class pieties, in artifices in taboos? Are they found in blindness to deficiencies in the world around us. In submergence in the everyday , in simple “ thoughtlessness”? What do whatever answers we can find signify for those who teach? …

.. what is left for us then in this positivist , media dominated, and self centered time? How, with so much acquiescence and so much thoughtlessness around us are we to open people to the power of possibility? How, given the emphasis on preparing the young for a society of high technology are we to move them to perceive alternatives, to look at things as if they could be otherwise ? And why? And to what ends?

I do not believe that a libertarian view of freedom is sufficient. Its a shrinking of ones world and a shirking of ones responsibilities. It necessitates a blindness to the suffering of others and is only predicated on the burden you create not being your problem. Its not self sufficient to disengage from society, no matter how attractive it seems. Turning ones back on a society is no better than acceptance. You denial is a privilege that allows the injustice to continue.

Green also asks directly what we should do.

The things that are left for us to do are to radically stand for and create communities of freedom. Envision and enact systems to foster the realization of that freedom and to develop ways of communicating and seeing the world and its symbols and systems that free those with us and following us from the unknowing domination of systems of oppression camouflaged as freedoms.

I think that Greene is both right and wrong about the scary nature of technology. Communications and social media technologies have created some of the most free thinking people in generations. You can google it. The worry now is how to parse the flood of information. How to understand the world when its vastness is always overwhelming. How to keep students from becoming swamped or from disengaging. The technologies that Greene is afraid of presents the alternatives itself. There are vastly many more ways of being represented today. People are freer in their individual selves and expressions and that freedom is encouraging young folks to question other things. The danger now is in helping them develop the skills to avoid the traps of negative freedom and individualism, aspirational consumerism, prosperity gospel and economic Calvinism.

This is why I included the cartoon at the top. America is all about freedom but the dialogue, the dialectic of freedom is a constant battleground. The battle in the classroom now is engagement on exactly the points Greene is raising in this chapter. 40 years ago.

Greene ends the chapter with the paradox of America freedom unresolved, as it still is but on a hopeful note. She believes better societies are possible. I don’t know that I believe that a truly just society is possible but I will come with her to the point that there is always room for growth and that capacity for growth begins in human freedom.

Education, 20th Century, Moral PhilosophyAlexander AdamsAugust 13, 2022Maxine Greene: The Dialectic Of Freedom