Free For All

 

            Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is wisdom.  Thus spoke the oppressors in the classic anti-totalitarian novel, 1984.  Here we are, a decade past the dread date, and the totalitarians have lost.  They lost in World War II, they lost in the Cold War.  Democracy, freedom, the right to see the world as it is, to make decisions in the real world, based on ones own perception, without adherence to any party line, these principles, these forces, grow in power.  They threaten to eventually roll through even the last great bastion of tyranny, the former Middle Kingdom.  China began this century reeling from the energies of a new age, desperately clinging to the old, and appears likely to end the century in much the same way.

 

            One actor in this great drama, the measure of whose influence is indeterminable, because he commands no armies, nor even any political forces in the normal sense, whose moral influence is nonetheless felt throughout and beyond Europe, but most strongly in his native Poland, who stood against the oppressors of Eastern Europe, is now on the other side.  Freedom is slavery, he in effect asserts.  To gain freedom to plan ones procreation is to be oppressed by materialistic secularism.  Ignorance is wisdom.  To learn of ways to control ones fertility is to learn decadence.  Better to remain unsullied, suffer in the dignity of ignorance, produce many more hungry mouths than can be fed, die young and pure, live not long enough to see the suffering of the too many children struggling toward hopeless, meaningless adulthoods.

 

            How can anyone who speaks so many languages be deaf to human suffering in all of them?  Each of us is entitled to our own opinion, and the old fellow in the robes and high pointed hat is as entitled to his as anyone.  Unfortunately, he does not advocate such freedom for others.  His opinion, based upon his own background and experience, which clearly does not include pregnancy or fear thereof, is supposed to hold sway over his 700 million or whatever member flock.  Why was his "flock" even given minds if they were not supposed to use them?

 

            A future met the past in Cairo.  For uncountable generations, the human species has sought to pull its head up out of the muck.  That which drives us, that which has pushed all life, from the simplest cell to us, offers us a new plateau of achievement, of awareness.  All we need do is cast off the shackles of the past.

 

            Keepers of the shackles, of course, resist.  In Cairo they denounce freedom as decadence, knowledge as imposition.  Once again, they place us in their garden of Eden.  Once again, they try to deny us access to knowledge.  Once again, they seek to have us not see our own reality, so that we may worship the phantoms of their imaginings.  The Eden story has always appeared suspect.  Why, of all things, should the Tree of Knowledge be forbidden?  Why would a creator give his creations minds and then forbid their use?  There has always been a painfully clear utilitarianism to the story.  Knowledge is the province of the Being for whom the prophets speak.  Which means whatever the prophets say is to be accepted without question.  Rather secures their traditional position of power, does it not?

 

            Fortunately, many nominal followers of religions that would stifle their freedoms (reproductive and otherwise) are leading their leaders.  Some people, although not enough, are thinking for themselves.

 

 

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