(gentle upbeat music) - [David] The cherished concept of freedom is our proudest value, the one for which we are ready to sacrifice everything.

So that we find ourselves inclined to sacrifice liberty of speech, and even liberties of action, lest we be ever suspected of opposing freedom.

Like most Americans, I shrink from the thought of subservience of mind and our person.

And I too cherish the word freedom, but I want to be free to be painstaking if I want to, to be responsible, to be involved, to be free to exercise whatever intellect I may have.

And I consider both discipline and craft indispensable to freedom.

- So David, I wanted to ask you what liberal education is education for freedom?

So what does that mean in real life?

What kind of freedom does education cultivate?

How does it work?

- So to me, freedom is a fundamental value, and it's a fundamental human value, and it's a fundamental American value.

And it stands with equality and justice as, I guess, three core values that triangulate into what makes us Americans and what makes us human beings.

Liberal education, to me, means education in freedom.

Now, freedom as an absolute idea just could devolve into anarchy.

But the reason that I was thinking of this Ben Shahn quote, is that you have to have craft and you have to have discipline with your freedom.

And that makes it, that makes you able to stand behind it and makes the words incarnate.

So I don't think that when we, Americans won't, as de Tocqueville said, we won't give up on freedom and we won't give up on equality, but those two ideas conflict in the absolute.

And so we have to live them in order to make them real.

And the liberal education, I think, is living out those ideas.

- I was struck by the word painstaking in Ben Shahn.

"I want to be free to be painstaking."

Am I meant to think there's a tension between being painstaking and being free, or being disciplined and being free?

What's the force of his seeking to be painstaking?

Is there a danger that freedom makes us sloppy or casual or in some sense, not, that we lose a bit of our humanity in it, being too loose or something like that?

- Yeah, I think that's right, Zena.

I think that, if we were just simply to let everything go and think that we didn't have to have any discipline or any skill, then we would devolve into something more animal than human.

And there's certainly have been periods of history in which that has occurred.

And similarly with a community, if a community behaved that way, lawlessly, there would be a lot of vice.

- Does it matter, for the purposes of education, what we are painstaking about, what the discipline is in?

Are there, I mean, can I be painstaking about my career training or painstaking about my preparation for a career on Wall Street?

Or the kinds of things which people think, generally, education is directed at these days.

Can I be painstaking about those things too or does it matter for liberal education, what we discipline ourselves in?

- So I don't think liberal education is limited to any particular career or any particular life that one might lead.

One could have a liberal education and apply it to being on Wall Street, as you say, or living in a monastery or being an artist and blowing glass for the rest of your life.

But I think that it helps, it shows you the way to be a human being and be all those things.

So in a culture in which we're being forced into how we can market ourselves and how we can become a commodity effectively in a culture, I think it gives us a deeper place.

It's more solid place to stand.

- I was gonna ask you about that also.

I was gonna ask you about what subservience of mind is and where you see it in our contemporary world and how certain kinds of education might help us out of it.

What is subservience of mind?

- I think it's tyranny.

So the opposite of freedom is, one of the opposites is tyranny.

And so the American experiment, and I think the experiment in liberal education is how do you avoid that tyranny.

And some of it's very obvious is when, you know, uniformed special police roll in.

But another is that, there are all sorts of tyrannies over the mind and the heart and the soul that sometimes just creep and we don't pay attention to them.

And I think the commercialization and the materialization of modern life and the attempt to make you into a worker, working person rather than a human being who works is a problem.

- I've had this thought that one of the problems with thinking that education is only job training, and there's nothing, I agree with you, nothing wrong with job training, but thinking that that's all there is in education is that, especially in a culture like ours where there's a economy controlled by very few people, that you end up, a few people end up deciding what needs to be learned.

And there's a kind of very concrete subservience where you prepare for the job that someone else has designed.

And it sounds like what you're saying is, that the kind of freedom that you might be able to get is the freedom to be an agent in your world, to build your own community, to imagine your own life, and maybe to check out from the commercial world as far as you can, if you'd like, if that's what seems best to you, if that seems like the way for you to live a meaningful life.

Whereas if everything is, if everything is done through this kind of high commercial culture, there's no way out.

Does that seem right?

- Yeah, I think it's not just preparing for the job, although that's rightly said that someone else has decided that you're going to fit in.

It's designing yourself to fit into the straitjacket of somebody else's sense of who you are as a human being.

And that's now established materially and commercially, and it's technologically driven.

So the problem with having the kind of attention span that enables you to think through an idea, thought, or have a experience in community where you can sit down and think with someone else, I think the technology and the commercial structure, the fact that one is attention span is continually reduced in the interest of the commercial enterprises to, I mean, if they can get it down to six or seven seconds so that you're just clickbait for whatever the next commercial purchase that you need to make is, then that would be ideal for those who are controlling the.

- Right.

So that also connects back to discipline and painstaking this.

It's a sustained attention, might be something that we recognize now as something that we need to be fully human, to be free in some way.

A short attention span leaves us with the mercy of our handlers, so to speak, the people who are trying to buy things off of us or what have you.

Do you have an experience, this is a bit of personal question, but do you have an experience from your own education where you felt a sense of being liberated from something?

Is that something which you can recover in yourself as something you've done happened to you?

- I guess I've always felt that education is liberating.

- [Zena] Right.

- And that liberation is important, and that's a constant battle and struggle to be free.

But, and that freedom comes practices in the community, but it also comes from being open to ideas and open to what really interested in what other people are thinking and who they are.

- Right.

- So I guess I wouldn't, you know, think of a moment of conversion like that so much as if that's what you're looking for, but maybe, I don't know.

I'm just understanding the power of the imagination in reading a novel and seeing the connections to philosophical ideas, to spiritual ideas.

So in terms of your former question about whether there's a particular discipline, I think the discipline of attention or attentiveness is the discipline.

It's not the discipline of a department, which we now tend to call disciplines, but the ability to contemplate, to be able to focus and think without being disturbed by the thoughts that are coming in and the pressures that are coming in around you, and that, you know, that could be done in a, you know, sitting zazen, but it could also be done in any moment in one's life.

If one can pay attention to what one is doing, it seems to me that the possibilities are there for freedom and for love.

- So what's the connection between books and liberal education?

'Cause I hear what you're just saying that, I love what you just said about how if you're attentive to whatever is going on, so you're attentive to the people that you're working with, you're attentive to the, even the materials that things are made out of, that there's something liberating and humanizing in that.

But why books?

Why are books the thing that liberates?

We have this motto, right?

We make free adults out of children by means of great books, and at great isn't in there, books in a balance.

So yeah, what are books have to do with it?

- I don't think books are essential.

I can think someone could be liberated who was illiterate and, but I do think that in the world which we find ourselves, the book gives you the advantage of attention, quiet, calm, careful attention that the other electronic delivery devices don't give you where you are, your attention is, their goal is to take the attention away from you.

And it seems to me, the printed text allows you to focus that attention.

It also gives you a way to talk to people who are no longer here and to think about people in other generations.

So there's a conversation that goes on with ideas and thoughts that are fundamentally human and not simply based on the context.

So you'll have many people telling you, these are the same people that say that you have to be up with the latest fashion, you have to be, keep yourself in context.

These are the folks that will tell you that you don't understand something unless you understand its context.

And all that is a commercializing motive.

But the book enables you to have a conversation, to think about ideas that are not based on context but simply based on your soul and your heart and your humanity.

That's universal.

- Yeah.

It's funny when I taught philosophy at ordinary universities, I would, I always have this experience of, you ask a question, a human question, and the classroom comes alive, and then you start telling people stuff and the classroom just dies because what really, there's such a desire for that reflection on what it means to be a human being and for contact, as you're saying, with people of the past, with the people around them to reflect on these things.

Is that, so what, I'm just curious, yeah, what's the role of community in being free, or communities can be sources of unfreedom notoriously, right?

So they can be judgy, they can be exclusive, they can have their own group think.

So what are some of the hallmarks that you've seen in your life of healthy, like free communities, communities of free people or communities that promote freedom, or is that possible?

- I think it's essential.

I don't think you're going to have freedom really without a free community.

So you have to have institutions which promote freedom, or you're gonna be enslaved because you're just gonna, you know, well, ultimately, you're gonna be killed because you can't defend yourself as alone.

So there have to be those kinds of communities.

I'm thinking of something that Frederick Douglass said at the Seneca Falls Convention, which is that freedom comes out of three boxes, he said to the convention.

It comes out of the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

And if you don't have those three boxes, then you do not have a community that can achieve freedom.

- So that sounds to me a bit more like a political community in the broadest sense, a political order.

Is there, I don't always think of community in that context.

I think of order, I think of laws, I think of institutions, as you said.

Is there something to be said, like in our classrooms for instance, is there a type of community or a college campus or a town or what have you, what types of community beyond just the political?

- So I wouldn't think of it, I wasn't thinking of it as political.

I mean, it's an interesting word, polis for the city.

What is it that makes the city a good city, and what is your responsibility in your relationship to a good city?

But I would say that in, what are you willing to stand by in a community?

That's what makes a community work.

If you're not willing to stand by anything, if there's nothing you're willing to die for, you're not gonna have a free community.

I mean, classically, the way slavery works is, you know, there's war between two tribes and one tribe captures the members of another, and those guys either go down fighting and die, in which case, they had freedom until they died, or they give up, in which case, they're made slaves.

So, you know, the Ashanti say, make them slaves, and then they, or they find a commercial market for them and sell them.

So that's kind of the way life works and has worked.

And a lot of what you call politics turns out to be a kind of kleptocracy in which a few people rule and a few people garner all the wealth until they can no longer do it, until things fall apart.

But I think in America, there was a different experiment based on the ideas of liberty and equality as articulated in the Declaration by Jefferson.

And I think that was a different idea.

Not that people hadn't thought about eleutheria as the Greek word is for freedom before, but this made it something that you were endowed with by your creator.

These things were inalienable, they couldn't be taken away from you.

And these are enormous claims.

So that enables a community and people in a community to think differently.

And I don't think of it as primarily political.

I guess I, if I had to put a word on it, I'd say spiritual, but I would say spiritual in a way that is incarnate in the body.

And that's why, like what Douglas said, he said this to the women at Seneca Falls who were thinking not of asking for the vote 'cause they thought they would, people would say, "Oh, you go way too far."

And he said, "You gotta do that.

That's one of the three freedoms that you have to maintain in order to have a community."

So I don't think of it as political, I think of it as spiritual.

You've gotta be willing to have some kind of resolution, some kind of ballot in which the people are empowered, and that's in any community.

You have to have some kind of law in a community, otherwise it's just arbitrary, it's just what somebody says at the moment.

So you have to have a jury box.

And you have to be able, be willing to fight, be willing to defend.

There has to be the line that you draw where you say, "I'm not doing that."

- Wow, so that makes me think that, so if I try to think past the specific legal structures of the ballot and the jury, I guess I think about having a voice in my community, being a part of my community, having a stake in my community.

So in that sense, equality, which was one of your other words, seems really closely connected to it.

So if the idea of freedom is, you know, like at a seminar table, you know, each of us belongs there, each of us has a voice, each of us is a part of the conversation.

You have conversations with different stakeholders.

You know, not everyone always gets their way.

That's what it means to be in a community, but there's a kind of respect for all the participants.

Is that part of what you're thinking about?

I'm just trying to spell out both the spiritual and the sense of community.

Is that the kind of thing you're thinking about for freedom?

- I mean, I think that's all true.

I don't, you know- - It's not what you're thinking about?

- No, I was thinking that there is more to it than trying to have a kind of code of conduct, I guess, in a seminar.

There's much more to it than that.

And that what's really at stake is who you are and what is your own, and is there something that is your own, you know, world that's trying to tell you what your own is all the time.

- Can you give some examples of what it means for it to be our own?

'Cause I think that critics of the American Project will say, "My own is my private property."

It's connected to the materialism and the consumerism.

So what's my own, what's the relevant sense of my own that I need to really look after?

- Well, I guess I would go back to a classical text and think of one of the first lines that Antigone says to Creon when Ismene says, you know, "You are forbidden by the laws of Athens to bury your brother."

And she says, "It's not for him to keep me from my own."

Now, how does she know what her own is?

Because the law is telling her something different, and maybe her peers are, her sister is, but she has that sense of what her own is.

So where does that come from in a human being?

And I think it comes from thinking that you are free to reach your own.

And I think that's what's going on in a seminar.

I think it's something as serious as that, even though it appears to be perhaps a conversation in which there are rubrics of equality, but I think it's really about identity and what words mean and what you're willing to stand by when you speak every time you speak.

So that attentiveness that you talked about earlier, I think is always in practice.

- So can I just try to get in a little closer on identity?

'cause when I think of Antigone, I think about her own as her brother and her love for her brother.

So she's a strong sense of her family identity, but there's another dimension to it, right?

She's not just famous for loving her brother.

She's famous for that spirit of defiance, which is so beautiful and so moving that comes out in the play.

So what kind of identities are really core?

What are some of the signs of a real identity that's worth drawing a line over?

- I think that's- - That's a hard question.

I don't- - It's a question that you would have to answer for yourself, Zena.

I can't tell you what your identity is or what your own is.

- Come on.

- In terms of the play- - You've got the teacher's edition.

- In terms of the, no, I don't have the teacher's edition on this one.

I'm sorry.

In terms of Antigone, I would say those relationships with her brother, they're important, but the primary relationship is with herself and who she is, and that she is even under the threat of death, not going to diminish herself.

She's willing to risk her life for the idea that she believes in.

Maybe the ideas of a good city and a good city that extends not just to the people now living, but to the generations past, including the body of her brother, which is lying there.

- Okay, so now, I can see at least two ways of thinking about the identities.

I just wanna run them by you.

So one is that it's your, your sense of justice, the kind of city you would want to live in, your dreams, your imagination, your fundamental values, your ideals.

But the other makes me think that, and this may just, I just wanna know what you think about this.

It sounds in a way, like what you mean is, a free community is one where each person has a space for themselves, a space of self definition, a space of meaning, a space of action, which is not necessarily defined by that community.

Does that seem right?

So is it, are we meant to think of us, it's a bit of tension there, but I think it's not necessarily a bad tension.

I have my sense of myself, my inner self, and I also, that's a, it's not like I, that's in a sort of separate box.

I interact with my, I love my neighbors, I work in my community, but somehow there's something in me that no one can take from me.

And whatever goes wrong in the community, a good community has to protect that.

And one of the ways that we make a good community is by defending that, and I think about how we live that here at St. John's and my own decision to come back here to teach after teaching other places.

One of the things that I think about that I really, I think I encounter more or less every day in the classroom is that our classes are really directed by the students and the books.

And let's say, when someone sits down to write a paper, they work through some question that belongs to them, and we don't give them a script.

We don't give them a set of instructions.

And I think it's always interests me because I went to grad school after St. John's and learned the disciplines, you know, of scholarship.

And I find them very interesting and very helpful and good, nothing wrong with them, but there's something about that being left, you know, in the sort of the jungle of ideas and having to reach inside yourself and find your questions and your path through quite complicated book.

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