On Freedom and Slavery

Day 15

I recall reading a speech denouncing slavery once. The author gave a defense of freedom that I had never heard before, arguing that people owned their bodies. This wasn't an attack on slavery based in talk about good and evil, but rather based in economics. In the right to property. It seemed to me an interesting idea, proposing a dissolution on a certain type of 'property' in our society based on or understanding of property itself. I don't recall the exact argument or the means by which he reached the conclusion that slavery was bad, what what I do remember was this – that he based the idea of the freedom of a person on their ownership of their own body. He didn't argue that certain races were inferior or inferior, he didn't make a claim about religion, intelligence, or any difference between any kinds of people. He didn't paint the slave-holders as evil, but as thieves. We can imagine why this argument didn't get very far historically speaking, because all a slaveholder had to do was to deny humanity to their slaves, but to me the idea and attempt itself was interesting. I need to read the speech again after I write this, but for now I want to just jabber on and see what comes out. My ideas here are probably not his ideas, and this is less of a statement of fact and more like an exploration of concept I once ran across..

What is ownership? Is it not something as basic as control? Ownership of a thing is often personal, and almost always societal. You feel that you own something like a ring or an idea when you made it, when you have it with you all the time, when you control it. Why do we feel that own a dog? Partially because it comes when called. Cats do not always do so, which is part of why people sometimes say that their cat owns them. The kind of ownership is recognized by society, and is also based on control. If I control something, then I can make it do what I want it to do, or I can make things happen to it that I want to happen to it. I can use the power of society to return it to me if it is lost, to punish those who hurt it, or to to let me keep it if I don't want to give it away. The ownership comes with a cost though, where I am in return pressured by society to act the same towards the things of others. This is a small part of the concept of property rights, or the idea that we, as individuals, as societies, can own things.

The second type of ownership is almost unlimited, bound only by the powers of people and the laws that can be passed. This ownership may not always be successful, as rebellions by slaves and children across time have shown, but it makes the attempt. It can control things for a while, though it cannot force forever a population to lie in chains or a bridge to stand. There are other powers and forces in the world besides us. The concept of ownership that I think Emerson is talking about is the first one. So we ask – in what sense can we own our bodies?

We can first of all own our bodies by our power over them. This is obvious, that we can direct and command our feet to move and our eyes to open. Yet this power is limited – we cannot force ourselves to heal, to move when we are too tired, or to escape iron chains that bind us. Thus, power is a limited ownership. This of course goes the other way as well – at the end of the day, if we are tortured and enchained, how many of us have simply given up and died? There was always a horrible and terrible choice to be made – do you want to live, or do you want to die? What do you choose to do? So that at the end of the day, the very fact of your existence upon this world is somehow, at the end of the day, a part of your choice. Yet how is this so, if power is not unlimited? Between the power that chains and whips, poverty and injustice, can have over you and the power over your own body and life, there lies a sort of gap. There is something that cannot be crossed over, and your body always has two powers fighting over it, the inner and the outer forces. This matches the inner and the outer unknowns of the world, almost poetically so.

We already have suggested the idea that the body and mind are part of the world. Thus, the body and mind can be effected by the world and seemingly controlled in some fashion. I'm tempted to say that in the old days this control was thought to be more limited than it is today, but I don't think that was actually the case. Today some of the most frightening ideas about our growing powers over the world are not the advent of our nuclear strength to obliterate life, but the subtler worries we have about how we can manipulate life. Mind controlling drugs, biological nightmares, psychological conditioning, are all new bogeymen. In the old days they were thought to be the purview of devils and spells, but now they have begun to enter the domain of science. We always thought we could do them, but I think that many of us were either not quite sure, or thought that could only do the with certain types of help. Some people doubt even today that we can achieve so much power over minds and bodies, and that we will never really move beyond new types of iron chains, into the realm of chains on the mind. Yet I feel that this has always been the case, and assaults to, and damage on, the mind have been a part of our history from its earlier days. Torture is not just scaring the body, it can also be absolute solitude, or being forced to live in a constant fear and dread.

One thing that starts to make the link between ourselves and our world-bodies clear is the intrinsic and essential linked nature of them. Ourselves are only apparent through world-bodies, and if we did not have world-bodies, physical arms and mental lenses, then we might or might not know that we exist. There wouldn't be a world as such, and so perhaps we would not be able to know anything – for to know something is to have its gem or shard fit in the world. To be apparent in the world is to make a choice. We recognize our-self by the choices that we make, and our assumption of free will is a intrinsic part of that recognition of the self. So, if we do not have free will, then we do not exist. A complete control of our minds and bodies by some biological nightmare is like a death. It may be a death that we can come back from, if we can figure out how to revive zombies, but it is a death nonetheless. It is the cessation of any apparent power of choice we have in the world. Thus, if we exist still, we exist somehow in that unknown core, that almost-a-bit-of the world that is unknown, and which while maybe a part of the world, is also not clearly inside the boundaries of the world. Thus, while we live, we have some measure of power, and some measure of responsibility. If I live in the world,, I always have a choice. Thus, if there is a complete control of a person by some other thing in the world, then they are dead. If you totally owned somebody, you would not own them at all. Thus, you cannot totally own somebody. Your ownership of your body is part of the intrinsic nature of the world, and those property rights cannot be extinguished by any power of man. You can own somebody's body, but you cannot own a person.

This is why the denial of person-hood is so injurious to this idea, because if you deny the person-hood of the person, if all you care about is their body and not their mind or self, then it appears that you can own somebody. I still persevere that this is a willfully ignorant way of seeing the world, one where certain facts are denied, certain powers that nearly all human beings have, is denied. There is an interesting consequence that comes out of this as well – that ownership is impossible of any living thing, and maybe of anything at all. After all, I once said that it might be possible for rocks to talk. It also seems that cats and dogs, horses and sheep, also all have minds of their own. Put another way, ownership is always partial and never total. If energy cannot be created or destroyed, then something of everything is always floating around. There appear to be absolute limits to our powers, absolute limits to the level of mastery that we can reach. There are limits of this power toward everything in the world, other things as well as ourselves. Just as we don't know how to escape the world, we do not know how to crush the dual unknowns, how to get rid of even the possibility of life and freedom.

This disability is a disability in either of the two ways of claiming ownership. The second, of social power, is always on a precipice and is never confirmed. The first, of responsibility, doesn't work if there is any belief in life at all. After all, if you own something, then you are responsible for all of its actions. If at any point you decry it, you claim that the rock fell on its own, that the slave ran away against order, or that that the child disobeyed because it was willful, then you give up any claim of ultimate ownership. As you give up power and responsibility, you also inherently recognize the unknown at the heart of a thing, the will, and the free will. You recognize that there are limits to yourself in the world. To do otherwise, to claim that you totally own something, is to say that everything that happens is your fault, and your fault alone – a heavy enough burden to crush anyone, and especially when things keep happening that you can't control. A single glare, a single purposeful mistake, a single small rebellion, is enough to demand a level of freedom. Thus, all ownership is revealed to be a sort of partnership. One with very unequal partners sometimes to be sure, one where one of the sides has all the powers of whip and brand, and the other has only the powers of silent mind and hidden heart, It seems absurd to follow the old poem that a 'free man sets himself free', especially in an era of lynchings and whippings, so that a literal understanding of this poem is, on the face of it, absurd, but there is a less literal way to understand the ideas suggested. That way to see that if a man thinks he is owned, if he denies himself completely and blocks off any belief in his own soul, then he cannot be set free. What is needed, first, most important, and most vital of all, is a belief in the existence of the self. If you can say or think that 'I exist, I live', then that is the requisite beginning for the recognition of freedom. We cannot bring back the dead, but perhaps we can heal in the world of the living.

That single cry is enough to open the gates of possibility, and is a foundation on which to build a world. All the powers of men and gods bent upon your slavery cannot silence the sound it makes in the heart.