FREEDOM
By Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in eastern Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008, and to judge from his work, he has been trying to find his way home ever since. He made two documentaries about the deployment, the terrific “Restrepo” and its sequel, “Korengal,” and wrote a book, “War” (2010). Then he turned his focus to the weirdness of returning to the United States, both for soldiers and for war reporters, in a third documentary, “The Last Patrol,” and laid out his passionate, counterintuitive ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder in a small but wide-ranging book, “Tribe” (2016). The problem, he argued, wasn’t old-fashioned shell shock in many cases; it wasn’t medical at all, but existential — a loss of purpose. The brotherhood of combat forged a deep emotional connectedness that an atomized, uncomprehending America could not sustain.
“Freedom,” Junger’s latest book, begins in the middle of a mysterious pilgrimage: “The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted. We’d walked the railroad tracks from Washington to Baltimore to Philly and then turned west at the Main Line and made Amish country by winter.” These lines have a lovely roll, the tone is heroic — they made Amish country by winter. But basic information is withheld, or only obliquely shared much, much later. Who are the members of this westbound party? What is their purpose? We are never told.
But for those who have seen “The Last Patrol,” which was released in 2014, things are clearer. It’s about the same trek. Junger’s companions, at least initially, are two of the soldiers from his time in Afghanistan, a Spanish photojournalist and war reporter, and a hulking black dog named Daisy. People speak, joke, have names; you see them walking, camping, playing with the dog. They talk to people they meet. Junger makes an effort to frame their project — “a 300-mile conversation about war” and why it’s so hard to come home — which is more or less what happens in the film. That’s not what happens in the book. Here, we pass through countryside, nearly all of it in south-central Pennsylvania, and don’t hear a word from anyone till the second half. “Freedom” has a different purpose, a frame far less explicit.
Afghanistan is scarcely mentioned, although the hikers, who are walking along the tracks illegally, do seem easily spooked. They’re irrationally afraid of passing trains. They camp in defensive formation. “I kept a knife in my boots, which were loosely laced so I could just drop my feet into them and run,” Junger writes. That never becomes necessary. In fact, virtually nothing happens outside the author’s head.
There are hymns to walking itself. There are rich descriptions of landscape, full of “floodwrack” and “quarrystone” and “riverbend” — I felt as if I were camping with Gerard Manley Hopkins. There are also epiphanies: “The things that had to happen out there were so clear and simple — eat, walk, hide, sleep — that just getting through the day felt like scripture: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life.”
But the cleansing march disappears entirely for most of this short book. Junger takes us on long detours through history, anthropology, primatology, boxing, poker. It’s not easy to follow the thread, although the main theme from “Tribe” — extolling the superiority, both moral and psychological, of life in small nomadic groups (or small embattled platoons) over modernity under capitalism — appears repeatedly. The main thrust here, though, seems to be a ragged pursuit of the meaning of human freedom. The two topics overlap. “For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred,” Junger writes. “In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed.”
The nearly sacred version of freedom is often won or preserved, in Junger’s view, through asymmetric warfare. The nomadic Scythians held off the mighty Persians; the Montenegrins outfought the Ottoman Empire. We get a 10-page account of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Empires, of course, also win wars, and Junger’s meditations on the American colonial frontier include the destruction of Indigenous civilizations by the conquistadors and the spirited, doomed resistance of the Apaches. The horrors of these conflicts are front and center. In Dublin, we note every last detail of the execution of the rebel leader Michael Mallin, including his heart-wrenching last letter to his wife and children. Is this gratuitous and invasive or is it illustrating a harsh truth about freedom? I found myself asking this question at many turns.
Junger occasionally stumbles onto more humble, personal versions of his leitmotif. Frequently, he says, while he and his friends camped, “we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” He recalls the exploits of Daniel Boone, which resonated with me — I myself wore a coonskin cap as a kid. But Junger sees little hope today for what he thinks of as freedom: “Mass societies … require such high levels of obedience that sometimes even their own citizens balk. Once you have spent years digging irrigation ditches or picking stones out of a wheat field — or working at a law firm — you have almost no leverage with which to insist on your autonomy, or anyone else’s. The choice is to either rise up or submit, and many hardworking people understandably choose to submit.”
These formulations — “rise up or submit,” “insist on your autonomy” — border on the jejune. Yes, we live in a world of laws, drudgery, interdependence. But we also live in a world rife with real injustice and, like any concept, freedom is always contextual. The Black majority in apartheid South Africa, the democratic opposition in Russia today, Americans fighting to expand voting rights: All have had to struggle toward a shared vision of freedom that is contingent, social, multivalent, modern. These meanings seem to fall outside Junger’s investigation, although, to be fair, he does describe two industrial strikes in the early 20th century as episodes in the saga of the weak against the strong. I would have welcomed a discussion of the centuries-long dispute between the political left and right over the meaning of freedom. Does it pertain first to property rights or to human rights?
“Freedom” has an authority problem. That is, its own authority is undercut by breathtaking generalizations and improbable mind-readings. “There doesn’t seem to be much self-doubt among nomadic peoples,” Junger writes. Or: “Although wealthier and more stable, sedentary societies were often beset by an odd inferiority complex.” Or: 18th-century frontiersmen settled their differences with fistfights, and “once the fight was over, both men usually shook hands and forgot their differences.” These contentions read like wild guesses or sentimental projections, and they reflect the book’s structure, which feels both aimless and overdetermined. An afterword of sources and references lists a great many books and interviews, but it comes too late to solve the authority problem.
The afterword also divulges a startling fact. “The trip was done in stages and not always with the same people,” Junger confides. “I write the account as if it were one long trip. Obviously, it was not.” Well, he had me fooled, and this information carries a whiff of bad faith. I don’t care how many months they took off or who was there when (we never know their names, anyway), but this thing is presented as an epic trek. We made Amish country by winter.
On the last day of the journey, in an elegiac scene, Junger decides: “The trip was over. I was 51 years old, I had no children, I was in the process of getting a divorce.” Junger has done great, meticulous reporting and narrative writing. Not here. “It was time to go home,” he continues. “It was time to face my life.” Sounds good.
"really" - Google News
May 17, 2021 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/3w8VAdG
What Does ‘Freedom’ Really Mean? - The New York Times
"really" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3b3YJ3H
https://ift.tt/35qAk7d
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "What Does ‘Freedom’ Really Mean? - The New York Times"
Post a Comment