Freedom and civilization: When more is less.

Abstract

AbstractHuman freedom is seen as a negotiated meaning, constructed in a particular social and historical context, and explicated through personal narrative. Some brief examples of meanings - in - transition are presented, together with more extensive narratives which describe the construction and practice of human freedom in relation to the intricacies of a civilized world. David, a retired journalist, and Fred, a slightly aging hippie, tell their stories of negotiating, experiencing, and practising freedom.The notion of human freedom, however vague, has glowing favourable connotations for most people. It's also true that there are many conceptions of freedom which have been explored and examined by philosophers, politicians, jurists, and novelists for thousands of years. Of course, there is no last word on it. Human freedom has even been exposed to the thumb screws of experimental psychological research without surrendering its ultimate secrets (cf. Westcott, 1988).When I say I am studying human freedom, people almost always say, What do you mean by freedom? In saying this, they tacitly acknowledge that there are many conceptions of freedom, and in my reply, I acknowledge the same. I say, just the point; it's not what I mean by freedom, but what other people, individuals, mean by freedom in their daily lives. That's what I'm interested in and that's what I've been studying, in a progressively evolving fashion, for nearly 20 years.I began with tentative interviews (Westcott, 1977), moved on to more traditional questionnaire studies (Westcott, 1982), and, dissatisfied with aggregate data, I have returned to interviews and a narrative approach (Westcott, 1992). I take an explicit social constructionist perspective on this research, maintaining the position that meaningful, intentional, human social activity is governed by meanings, and meanings are human constructions, negotiated linguistically in a social and historical context (cf. Gergen, 1985). These meanings are embedded in the narratives people tell themselves, and others, making sense of their lives (cf. Bruner, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1988).Human freedom is certainly one such web of negotiated meanings, and this is why freedom means many things to many people, and why the philosophical literature can provide meanings to suit almost every taste (cf. Westcott, 1988, Ch. 1).Most of the philosophical literature is prescriptive: different authors argue for single conceptions or definitions of freedom, and these single conceptions compete. These single conceptions are ordinarily quite abstract and are at a level well above individual concrete behaviour. But freedom in individual lives is practiced and experienced in quite concrete ways by ordinary people who don't generally think very much about it -- except to reflect on some kind of presence or absence, satisfaction or longing.So I have been interviewing a variety of informants on what kind of a role freedom plays in their lives, how they experience freedom, and what they do, if anything, to enhance this much - sought - after state of affairs and experience. I take a narrative approach to the interviews, I try to avoid abstract conceptions or definitions; I discourage treatises. Rather, I seek people's own stories of how and when they experience freedom, or the lack of it, and ultimately seek some commonalities or differences between them.One may argue that this is merely an exercise in sociolinguistics. In response, I can point out that the social constructionist position is that everything is an exercise in sociolinguistics. We are talking about meanings and meanings do not exist anywhere except in a context of human communication.Freedom and InsecurityI'd like to begin with some examples of the notion of negotiating a construction of freedom. I will draw on a few quotations from the popular press, a novel, and an interview. Each of these occurs in the context of a change of the informant's circumstances. …