Anthony Esolen on Practical Freedom

 I keep returning to Anthony Esolen in these times of plague and social upheaval like a desert wanderer returning to a well. He's convinced me to "do more human things" (see post below) and now he consoles me with "practical freedom" in a time when our freedoms seem so imperiled. He writes:

In this time of plague, when children cannot be together, why are they not roaming the outdoors? I walk the trail in the woods behind our neighborhood, and see only the prints of dogs and men’s boots in the snow; no children. At every pass we have absorbed laws, not of morality, which are liberating, but of etiquette, which is a curb on adventure and genius, and of security and sloth, which deaden the soul.

One of those absorptions is the notion that everyone must graduate from high school. For many young Americans, high school is little more than an antisocial sandbox, a terrible waste of youth. 

I worry about our young people and the deadening effects of postmodernism and its bastard step-children critical race theory, scientism, "social justice" (as opposed to actual justice), and secular "humanism" (as opposed to religious humanism of the made-in-the-image-and-likeness of God sort), among others. What, really, is so "educational" or human-fulfilling about public K-12 education followed by a debt-driven four or five years at university in America now? Not much, I would argue. 

In Practical Freedom, Part II, Esolen compares modern life for America's young to the past lives of cartoonist Chuck Jones and the father of gynecology, Horatio Storer, and he notes:

Though the malady may now be acute, this constriction of life has been going on in the United States for at least 50 years. In 1983, I visited for the first time my cousins in a rather poor region of Calabria, in southern Italy. By then I could speak Italian, so I asked my great aunt Concetta why she had left us so soon after coming to the United States in 1976 to visit her brother, my grandfather, whom she had not seen since 1920. She had planned to stay more than a month, but two weeks was all she could endure. Her answer took me aback.

“You have no liberty in America,” she said.

And:

I am not describing an idyll [in Italy circa 1983]. That is the point. You can have life, or you can have safety at all costs, but you cannot have both. 

Here's the thing. Chuck Jones didn't even know he was risk-taking when he traveled cross-country with a friend at age 14, or when he dropped out of school and became a janitor at the studio he would one day dominate with his art at age 15. Storer didn't think it was out of bounds to build a log cabin with his friends at age 10, or enter Harvard and at 19 voyage around the storm-tossed seas of the North Atlantic as a naturalist. It was all normal to them.

Think how stunted our kids are in the "new" normal. Some of us remember when at least one neighbor friend would have a cast to sign every summer from falling out of a tree or playing tackle football sans helmets and pads. I remember playing kick-the-can with maybe ten other kids well into the summer nights, and even running across the sloping roof of a neighbor's modern home built into the hillside. We were wild -- and free. Creative expression was a thing, even in the now cancel-worthy un-pc name-calling we'd do and the consequences we'd learn from. Maybe even a bloody nose.

So, why am I consoled by the disturbing contrasts Esolen highlights? Because it's still possible to do
human things. Tree climbing and summer nights spent outdoors are not monitored and regulated by either Big Tech or Big Government, despite Gavin Newsom's best attempts. Maybe you have to get permission from the farmer down the road for your 10-year-old to build a log cabin in his woods with his buddies, but it's possible. Sign a promise that you won't sue him if someone gets hurt (and damn the lawyers and insurance companies). 

We've tried the "safe" life with our kids, and you know what? Life is still full of tragedy and suffering. Might as well grab on and live it to the full. And get your kids and grandkids to go climb a tree.