Yuri Tarnopolsky ESSAYS
3. On
free hay trade
freedom. negotiation. Hammurabi. understanding. Use Firefox browser or see essays-complete.pdf |
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Essay 3. On
free hay trade
There is no such thing as freedom without an of.
Like transitive verbs, freedom is “transitive”: it
requires “of what.” There are freedoms of choice,
religion, speech, abortion, movement, etc. “Freedom.
Period.” is as abstract as weight and length. What can we
do with abstract weight? Or abstract taste? This is why
somebody who says “I am free” conveys his feeling, not
fact. It seems to me that the closest approximation to
universal freedom is freedom of negotiation. Two persons
offer their goods and start negotiating the exchange rate
acceptable for both. It is simple to do when one or both
goods are just money because money has a single attribute
of value, while goat, horse, or baseball player have many
qualities, hardly summarized by anything but money. We pay a price for everything: for staying married, for
divorce, for being a parent, for education, for the joys
of food and sex, for being a good neighbor and friend
(and, for that matter, being a bad one), for
breathing good air and for inhaling a bad one. We
sometimes pay a price for our words or even thoughts. We
can pay with our life for our beliefs. The price we pay
can come in the currency of poor health, gray hair,
wrinkles, and neuroses, in addition to money. We pay
because we agree to or because we don’t have any choice.
There is one currency even more powerful than money:
violence. Our courting and mating is pure negotiation with
emphasis on advertisement and packaging, with most content
borrowed from animals. Freedom is commerce. American history clearly points to the commercial roots
of American Independence. It all started around taxation
without representation and freedom of tea trade. Personal freedom means that nothing and
nobody interferes with the process of negotiating a price.
This is not always possible: oppressive systems have their
preferences overriding personal ones, and even in a free
state the government tends to impose regulations. Systems
with limited freedom set artificially fixed prices. The
law of the land does not forbid crime—it is impossible to
forbid it —but simply sets the price for some
transactions, in the currency of both violence and money.
Thus, the Babylonian codex of Hammurabi,
almost 4,000 years old, records the following rates:
25. If fire breaks out in a house, and some one who
comes to put it out cast his eye upon the
property of the owner of the house, and take the
property of the master of the
house, he shall be thrown into that self-same fire.
53. If any one be too lazy to keep his dam in proper
condition, and does not so keep it; if then
the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall
he in whose dam the
break occurred be sold for money, and the money
shall replace the corn which he has caused to be
ruined.
196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye
shall be put out.
198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the
bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold
mina.
199. If he put out the eye of a man's slave, or break
the bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one-half
of its value.
200. If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his
teeth shall be knocked out.
201. If he knock out the teeth of a freed man, he shall
pay one-third of a gold mina.
202. If any one strike the body of a man higher in rank
than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an
ox-whip in public. I cannot
accept the definition of freedom as the right of
individuals to act as they choose. This is a dangerous
misconception. Does a
non-tenured university professor have freedom of speech
in the sense that he or she is free to express any view?
By no means. Even the tenured one does not. The decision
to speak up would include a careful imaginary
negotiation with the locally existing notion of
political correctness, the unwritten codes of local
Hammurabies, and the chances of a heart attack . If the
price is too high, very few people will enact their
freedom. If somebody
violates the law, is this act of freedom? Not always,
because people can be driven by their animal nature and
uncontrollable instincts. Complete
freedom of any action is possible when the individual
chooses between two exchanges of approximately equal
value. We would not crave for such freedom. The story of
Buridan's ass that died of hunger between to equal loads
of hay, known to most shoppers as the predicament
of choosing between two equally attractive things, or to
young people as the problem of a belle torn between two
beaux contenders of equal stature seem to significantly
devaluate the pure 200 proof freedom of choice. What we mean
by freedom is freedom of trade. America is free because
the freedom of trade, business, and negotiation is
almost absolute. Be it so everywhere, would political
system matter? Communism in
Russia abolished the free trade and substituted the
state monopoly for it. If Communism did not go
as far as to abolish private property, it would
have a good chance to be accepted into the world
community from the very beginning, and, as a matter of
fact, the acceptance started with the increase in trade
in the 60’s. What follows
from my understanding of freedom is the acknowledgement
of our debt to Things. We owe our freedom to black
pepper, rubies, and indigo, as well as to telephones,
cars, and airplanes. As soon as the society became
involved into making Things for trade, the price of life
went up: a man was worth his life (not much during most
of human history) plus his possessions (Things)
plus his muscles (to make Things) plus his mind (to get
Things done) plus the future interest on the total of
the above. Under such
circumstances, it was often more profitable to trade
than to wage war. Making
Things, this demeaning, noisy, exhausting, boring,
polluting process, has been the best peacemaker.
Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin came to power in the
countries where business activity was in shambles as
consequence of revolution and war. Poverty and
underdevelopment remain the breeding grounds for war,
revolt, and political instability. The paradox
is that our freedom, which is freedom of trade, will
never be complete until we are free of trade. We are
being enslaved by the freedom-bearing trade, Things,
noise, and money. This is a sweet, dizzying, and
breathtaking slavery, but we might change our perception
with time. To be free
means to be free of freedom: not to crave it, not to
need, and not to dream about it. What is
happening with us is the same what had happened to
domesticated animals: they have lost their freedom to
the humans who can be both caring and cruel. Are there
any laws of nature, not those of Hammurabi, to
understand all that? What's next? How can
freedom/nonfreedom evolve after the present stage?
It is a convenient copout to end an essay with a
question. I'm taking the Fifth for the moment. To answer a
question of this magnitude needs some understanding, not
knowledge, because we can never know the future.
I will try to build the lower floors of this
understanding in my subsequent essays. Essay, as
Montaigne designed it, is a tool for understanding.
About the difference between knowledge and
understanding, see Essay 20. Here I am
leaving a hint. There are physical parameters that can
be defined only in terms of their opposites. For
example, order is absence of chaos. Chaos is absence of
order. In fact, chaos and order are like heat and cold,
light and darkness: they cover a certain range of a
property that has two equally usable names signifying
the opposite extremes of the scale and they can exist in
their extreme forms only in our imagination. Complete
freedom from this angle looks as the problem of the
Buridan's ass (see Essay 8) with two equal
armfuls of hay. Complete non-freedom is just one armful
of hay. If there is anything worse than complete freedom
it is no hay at all. I believe my view
of freedom resonates well with the commercial spirit of
our time. Make hay, not war. |
Page created: 2001
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Revised: 2016 Website: spirospero.net To contents email Essays 1 to 56 : http://spirospero.net/essays-complete.pdf Essays 57 to 60: http://spirospero.net/LAST_ESSAYS.pdf Essay 60: http://spirospero.net/artandnexistence.pdf |