“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention, 1787
I am writing from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Every morning, I drink coffee as bald eagles fly outside my apartment window, symbols of freedom in my American imagination. I am a short walk away from vistas of not-so-distant snow-capped mountain ranges, the Salish Sea and gulf islands, and beach shorelines that run into temperate rain forest with giant trees and ancient ferns. All of this, mind you, is visible within a single view on a clear day. It is beautiful. In the summers of my youth, I spent a lot of time in Southwest Colorado, fishing rivers and lakes and running through meadows. That was beautiful, too. I studied in a small town nestled in the Austrian Alps for a semester, with fat delicious trout in every pool of every stream that ran through town (I may have caught a few of them by moonlight). It was glorious.
But, truth be told, nothing speaks to me like the Texas Hill Country. Dove and deer season, hunting for rabbits on Sunday afternoons, spotlighting at night, fishing creeks, rivers, stock tanks, and lakes, I did it all. When the San Saba River is swollen with fresh water and the Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush are in full bloom, just before the summer heat sets in — there is nothing more glorious to me than this. I’ve seen a lot of country and I live in a natural paradise, but I still dream of the Hill Country. There is just nothing like it for me. My heart remains in the Heart of Texas.
This past summer we took a family vacation to a trout lake in the Okanagan. Every evening, my kids and I went to gather firewood. Up here in Canada, there are not many snakes and almost none of the few around are poisonous. Instead of a snake-bite kit, people here carry bear spray. But even after all these years, I have not recovered from learning how to move through brush and grass and water in Texas. I have a “snake reflex.” One evening, a mouse ran through some dry brush and sent me jumping ten feet into the air. My kids still tell that story at my expense, laughing.
As beautiful as the Hill Country is, it taught me a lot about life and death. I learned a lot of lessons about how to not get yourself killed. Some of them I learned the hard way or the getting lucky way. I’ve been stuck in a canoe during a tornado warning. I’ve gotten my butt chewed out for shooting birdshot too close to a stock tank with people fishing. I’ve had a friend shoot and kill a five-foot rattlesnake I didn’t see after I must have walked right over it. I’ve driven my car too fast on a dry caliche ranch road and gone over a small creek bridge, rolled through a fence, and ended up in a horse meadow, with three rifles and ammo in my truck. I’ve had a water moccasin on my stringer of catfish, trying to steal my catch, and I’ve waded next to small and deadly copperhead floating in shallow water. I may have shot a few deer on the other side of the fence.
There is a key insight in these lessons I learned that extended from gun and hunting safety to common-sense precautions, cautions that endure in my “snake reflex” to this day. That insight is this: freedom can kill you. In other words, just like the kid from the book “Into the Wild,” who ran off to be free and ended up dying of poisonous mushrooms, or the “Grizzly Man” who sought freedom with Alaskan grizzlies only to have himself and his girlfriend eaten by them, I learned that if I wanted to enjoy the beauty and the glory of the Texas Hill Country, I needed to learn how to walk and how to listen and how to dress and how to be careful and how to not take a shot in the wrong direction. I learned that being free entails self-control and respect and concern for safety.
I am afraid that today there are a lot of people in the USA, and even in the Texas Hill Country, who seem to think that freedom is an “Into the Wild” or “Grizzly Man” fantasy. I call this “Braveheart Freedom” because it is an idea of freedom that thinks that freedom simply means the absence of external restraint or control. “FREEDOM!”, yell these William Wallace wannabes.
“Braveheart Freedom” will get you killed, even the movie proves that much. If you run happy go lucky into a thick patch of bluebonnets, without a care or concern in the world, you are not truly free and your false sense of freedom holds you in a certain kind of bondage, like ignorance holds the fool. You may think and believe that you are truly free, but your presumption of freedom imperils you. And, if you run into that same patch of bluebonnets with a child who doesn’t know any better, then things are morally even worse because your idiotic “freedom” now imperils others, too.
True freedom entails responsibility. If I want to hunt and fish, I have to accept responsibility for myself and everything around me. If I am with others, I have to keep on eye on them, too. If I am on someone’s land, I need to respect that. Plus, I need a license and more. Anyone selling freedom without a big helping of responsibility is selling snake oil. They are selling “Into the Wild” and “Grizzly Man” types of freedom. This “Braveheart Freedom” is the sort of freedom that gets people killed.
Freedom is more than freedom from restraint or control or authority. Freedom, in its deepest sense, is for something. True freedom of this kind, freedom for happiness or the good life, can even face unjust restraint, control, or authority and retain the dignity of being free. The only way a person can find freedom from unjust restraint or immoral control is because they first have this internal sense of freedom for something. The person who has this internal sense of freedom can never be a slave, even if they are in bondage. When freedom is just the absence of authority, it quickly can lose its sense of responsibility and sense of what it is for. This kind of freedom becomes purely external and loses the real internal soul of freedom. This is the “Braveheart Freedom” that will get you killed.
I wish this was all just a trip down memory lane with some preachy ideas about freedom. It is not. Right now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are a lot of people selling snake oil across the USA and even in my beloved Texas Hill Country. These snake oil salesmen say that quarantine measures, enforced by the rule of law, are a violation of their freedom. Well, in a way they are right. If you think that all there is to freedom is this kind of “Braveheart Freedom,” then every single imposition you face can be framed as a violation and harm. But this is a false and dangerous idea when it prevents you from protecting yourself, your loved ones, and your community. When freedom is not only divorced from responsibility but also makes us irresponsible, then, it is a truly poisonous thing.
Some of these people claim that Benjamin Franklin is on their side because of this quote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Here is the thing: Franklin was not advocating for a reckless idea of freedom here. He was advocating for the just taxation of the Penn family for the frontier defence expenses that they were incurring and were unwilling to pay. I won’t go into the details, but Franklin is treating both Liberty and Safety here on fairly equal terms when the quote is put into its proper context.
Another source people are citing is a long passage from C.S. Lewis’ essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” where Lewis is arguing for the preservation of capital punishment in England. The first line of the passage is “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” In context, the victims here are, literally, people on death row. I don’t think we need to take the point any further.
Of course, these unwitting defenders of “Braveheart Freedom” through the decontextualized words of Franklin or Lewis don’t care about the context at all. They just want to find some source of external authority to give their juvenile “Into the Wild” and “Grizzly Man” idea of freedom a credibility boost. Do not buy this snake oil. It is poison.
Worst of all, these freedom lovers often make fun of people who do not share their idea of freedom. They seem to think that the person who has a fuller idea of freedom in mind (an idea of freedom that includes responsibility and the greater goods that freedom is for) is, somehow, a slave or coward or even un-American or anti-American. They seem to think that “Braveheart Freedom” is the only version of freedom the USA has to offer. Make no mistake: There is nothing necessarily American, in the best sense of the word, about a willy-nilly fetish for a sense of freedom that no one would have recognized in 1776.
There is nothing remotely brave in telling people to just run through the bluebonnets with no concern for rattlesnakes. I may look ridiculous jumping up scared in front of my kids, but I hope that it teaches them a lesson that a certain degree of fear has a place, sometimes, like just about everything else. In the absence of such healthy fear, which for many religions would include fear of the Lord, there is no true freedom. Fear for one’s own life can be good in the right measure and fear for the life of someone else can also be good. Lacking either in any measure does not make you brave.
You should reserve some of this healthy fear for “Braveheart Freedom.” Any freedom that seems too cavalier about life and death or seems to lack responsibility or greater goods that freedom is for, is a freedom that you have good reason to be afraid of. Like a snake hiding in a field of flowers, this kind of freedom can get lost amidst the sheer glory of the moment, but none of that beauty and grandeur are a good enough excuse to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. My fear of snakes does not prevent me from loving the beauty and wonder of the Texas Hill Country.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there are a lot of snakes in the thick and downright gorgeous flowers of motivational American slogans and sentiments about freedom. Don’t get snakebit by COVID-19. Keep your loved ones safe, too. My prayer for those who are selling snake oil during this pandemic is that they all live to regret it. If they do, and I truly hope they do, they might learn an important lesson about the true meaning of freedom.
