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alexrepgh · 6 years ago

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Freedom- Limits of Restraint

August 2018 was charged with many memories. These memories were cutting in ways that I didn’t put them in my diary because I believed their intensity would never die off….

First week of August…., I had an interview with the admission committee of the department of Theoretical and Applied Biology at KNUST for a position in their master’s program. At the interview, I met one of smartest girls I know. She was easy-going, smart and pretty. Getting along with her in such a short time marked the genesis of me moving out of my reticence. Many people had complained about my reserved nature, so I was happy to get out of it finally. Interestingly, another friend I cherish would bring out how I talk too much later. Different persons engrave their barometers, shaped mostly by their own experiences and expect you live by those brands. These individual level standardization aggregate to form the societal constraints on the macro level. These constraints may aptly be a class of factors that affect life’s ‘navigability’ as described by the American Legal Philosopher Cass Sunstein in his book ‘On Freedom’.

Can humans be absolutely free? There are always structures which limit the freedom of humanity. In my own life, I have not been free, to say the least. I have always wanted to be a researcher. After my bachelor’s degree, I began working at the University Hospital of KNUST as a lab scientist, or ‘labman’. Some of my co-workers could attest that I was almost always absent-minded because I kept thinking of ways to generate hypothesis from the results I get from each patient’s sample. I made certain mistakes due to my inattentive disposition. My job as a laboratory scientist constrained me from doing what I love to do. My job was to find what and how, not ask why I am getting the results. To be free, I applied to grad school, where I could be trained to pursue a career in academia.

In academia, I would be able (or supposed to be able) to think freely, at least. Free thought has been the bedrock for scientific innovations and discoveries. Free thought has its roots to the Socratic Dialectical method. Socrates lived from about 470 BC to 399 BC, in a highly hierarchical society. At that time, his proposition of a critical free thought involving the use of reason, mind, senses to evaluate and challenge, in order to arrive at the truth was met with hostility from society. He was imprisoned and finally put to death. Critical free thought perpetuated, as evidenced by scientific innovations today. What needs further exploration is his imprisonment and subsequent death.

Academics are immured by structures we call laboratories. Activities in a laboratory are regulated or monitored by others in different buildings who measure the works of researchers. These people are sometimes called administrators. Administrators use metrics to rate the performance of academics to determine who needs to be tenured, deserving a raise or needs firing for being unproductive. Upon digitization of life, these metrics which measure a researcher’s output, are likely to be found in the clouds. As delineated by Justin E.H. Smith, cloud based, algorithm driven measurement of researchers’ efficiency by social-media-like platforms like GoogleScholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu potentially divert the researcher’s attention. In the long run, they would focus on building their profiles (e.g by faking a smile behind the camera to use as a profile picture or hiring an algorithm to boost the visibility of their article in the cloud). Academics who do not live up to these metrics, are deprecated (imprisoned) or fired (death).

I do not intend to censure structures that restrain researchers’ activities or free thought. To be clear, unrestrained free thought can be very detrimental to science and society in general. A society with absolutely free living citizens may eventually crash because no one would appreciate the limit of their freedom, engendering chaos and wars. That is why there are always freedom-limiting structures to ensure living in harmony.

Life’s restraints

Even without structures, man is inherently endowed with values that control their activities. Some of these values include the desires( affections, love), will and conscience, as described by John Abercrombie (not the guitarist) in his book ‘The Philosophy of Moral Feeling‘. Man is a moral being and these values which constitute man’s morality can either be edified or corrupted. Corrupted values are despised and individuals with corrupted values are outcast from society. Edification of values, on the other hand is favored and usually citizens are encouraged to cultivate such values. Institutions are therefore created to either punish individuals with unworthy values or provide guidelines for edification of values. One institution that has served this latter purpose for eons is religion.

The influence of religion in modern life cannot be understated. I grew up a Pentecostal. Unlike others who were ‘forced’ into their denominations or religions, mostly by their parents, I was ‘free’ to choose which denomination, and religion for that matter. Up till now, I do not know my mother’s church, my father may be a traditionalist. Regardless of the religion, the main focus of religion as an institution is to shape man’s moral values.

Shaping man’s values has also been at the center of ethics, the branch of philosophy that deals with morality. Many philosophers of ethics have tried to conflate ethics, religion and humanity. Descartes mind-body dualism was an attempt to bridge humanity and ethics. David Hume’s philosophy in particular, was a kind that tried to connect religion and secularism. His was the kind that we need today, as secularism is on the rise.

Living freely- The end of restraint

Secularism is worldwide, especially in the highly cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Paris, LA or Miami. Last winter break, I took the tri-rail from Boynton Beach to Miami Airport, sitting close to the window pane where I could gaze through the moving land and ponder over my pain. I was travelling to New York for the winter break. The winter break was needed after a very daunting three months of academic work (As you may not know, I accepted an offer from Biomedical Science department of FAU ahead of offer from Theoretical and Applied Biology of KNUST for obvious reasons I don’t want to get into). The first semester was very difficult for me because I was in a new environment, experienced the cultural shock, struggling to blend in with my Asante accent, and many other constraints I intend to write about in another setting. Miami is a beautiful city. It is the first city in the US I saw. As you might be aware, the US has very nice cities which are highly adorned and painted to the outside world as heaven, but I was a bit disappointed when I first got to Miami. After all, right after getting out of the plane, I Ubered to Boca Raton, how could I see all the beauties of Miami.

Indeed, in the course of the Fall semester, I visited Miami a couple of times with new friends I made in my new environment. The first time was to South Beach, my first time being at the beach (I come from Kumasi, a very reserved and land-locked city). We went at sun set so that the girls we went with could take pictures with the sun kissing their foreheads. Approaching South Beach, I got scared because of the tall buildings that seem to have been built on water bodies. Part of the road leading to South Beach was built on water as well and I couldn’t stop imagining scary things. When we got closer to South Beach, I saw things I couldn’t imagine. The extent of hedonism was indescribable. There were two males kissing on the streets ( TF? y’all should get a room ffs). Well, I was supposed to ‘enjoy’ the fleeting moment and continue my walk. So I took pictures with my friends.

As we were taking the pictures a couple of well-wasted Mexicans decided to join us. One of them gave me his instagram for me to follow him.I followed him and any update from him would be him displaying a new drinking bar or holding a bottle of whiskey.

Well, that’s the whole point of taking pictures now. I mean the point is to show people that we are ‘enjoying’ life to the fullest.

The next time I went to Miami was when I was travelling to New York. I was excited to be seeing NYC. When I told my friend in Hong Kong, he was so happy for me. He told me he couldn’t wait to see NYC himself (Later, he told me he visited Paris, and I told him I couldn’t wait to see Paris myself). The point of telling others about the places we’ve been is to let awaken their interest in visiting these places.

I got to LaGuardia around 9pm and I was greeted by the windy, chilling weather. This was so unlike the usual Florida weather I was accustomed to (similar to the weather I have known all my life in Ghana). I could not get out of the airport until the cab was ready to pick me. I was ushered into my new place, on the fifth floor in one apartment complex in Merriam Avenue in The Bronx.

Exploring New York was fun, partly because I did not explore alone. I was almost always with my bestfriend, Nana Aba. She was the first person to wish me on my birthday. The first time we met in New York, she had to come all over to The Bronx because she said I would get lost if I went to see her. Well, I got lost a couple of times though. Sometimes, I got on the wrong bus or train. Trains in New York are not like South Florida trains. Trains in New York are usually congested and it’s not unusual to find people standing in them. They can be found underground (subways) and they run 24/7, serving as bedroom for some homeless people, I learnt. The trains in South Florida are spacious; there are even spaces for bicycles, where people (like me) who love the planet and do not want to burn fossil to kill it can place their bicycles. Also, the seats are arranged such that you can stare into the space outside and clear your thoughts. Well, the disparate transport systems in the two locations depict the lay out of the two locations.

One day, I took the subway from The Bronx to meet my best friend at Manhattan. I met her at 59th Street, Columbus Circle after. We hired a tour guide (paid 60 dollars) to take us around Central Park. He showed us all the nice places. One particular place I enjoyed was the Bow Bridge. We witnessed about 4 proposals in the space of the three or four minutes we spent on this Bridge. As expected, I took advantage of the scene and took pictures of her. So here is my best friend at the Bow Bridge….

And if you want to see the entire Bow Bridge, I got you ( I know you could google it but its more fun if you see it here)

After touring Central Park, we went to a cinema at Broadway to watch a movie. Someone had suggested the Greenbook to me so I went to watch it with her. Imagine being the only two black people in the midst of whites, in the same room, watching GreenBook!!! Well, if you have not watched the movie, you might not get the point I’m trying to convey. It’s a good movie that you should watch.

New York was fun, in every hedonistic aspect of the word fun. I remember walking the Brooklyn Bridge in the cold. I remember going to a Korean restaurant, spending 15 dollars and being forced to eat all the food by ‘madam’ (I call my best-friend madam sometimes and you don’t have to know why). Oh! I nearly forgot when we spent all the night at Times Square enjoying the bright city lights and walking from 42nd Street to 57th Street. But like they say, all good things must come to an end so on the 31st of December, as the year was ending, I booked a ticket to go back to South Florida.

Dominance- The end of Freedom.

On my way back to Florida, I opened iBooks to read Why Nations Fail. In this book, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argued that nations fail because of factors when the economy is less inclusive or more extractive. Botswana, for instance is prospering more than the Rhodesian countries (Zambia and Zimbabwe) because the former has built a more inclusive economy. One particular event is apparent throughout the book: that the trans-atlantic slave trade was a critical juncture that would influence the economic growth of most countries in West Africa. Slavery, generally is a depiction of the quest of humans to dominate. The scenarios surrounding the success of the slave trade corroborates this assertion. Kings captured people from other tribes during wars and sold them as slaves, in exchange for gun and gun powder, that would be used to make them powerful. This would help such tribes in territorial dominance, the same way as dominating trade, commerce and industrialization was the motive of the Europeans who engaged in this barbaric act.

Even though Why Nations Fail make the case for how slavery has contributed to the current economic and political inequalities around the globe, it failed to outline how it has contributed to what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett termed Inconspicuous consumption. Inconspicuous consumption are obviously the intangibles, things we cannot see. These include knowledge, culture and to some extent technology. These are the spheres that humans are fighting dominate now. Regardless of tangibles or not, dominance is a human character which restrains others freedom. Others fight for their freedom by overcoming dominance.

Overcoming Dominance- Silver Spoon and Gold Medal

Different people have different things dominating their lives. To be free, they need to overcome these dominance. Some are born into well-to do families, where they are provided with everything they can think of. For such people, they need to overcome being fortunate. Others never get what they need. To get them, they need to break great bonds. Most of the people I know start breaking them after their Silver Jubilee. Others break them later in life. As we travel through this life, whether you were born on a silver spoon or wooden ladle, there is one motive; going for the gold medal. What is your gold medal. Mine is perhaps to write this for you. Find yours.

Till I write again……

Life After Silver… Freedom- Limits of Restraint August 2018 was charged with many memories. These memories were cutting in ways that I didn’t put them in my diary because I believed their intensity would never die off….

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