Freedom from, Freedom for...

Alfredo gonalves
So Paulo, Brazil

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The yearning for freedom, over the centuries, has certainly been one of the most loyal companions of humanitys history. Literature across time presents examples, classic, symbolic, and emblematic of the human condition of doubt and questioning, of restlessness and roaming, of searching and freedom. To illustrate this, we point to the figures of Abraham, the wandering Aramean in the biblical texts, of Ulysses, brave warrior, pilgrim over land and seas, of Don Quixote, warrior against all evil, of Proust, In Search of Lost Time, among so many other experiences. Freedom, for its theoretical and practical implications, simultaneously fascinated and frightened human beings. But it was at the dawn of modern times, first with the Italian Renaissance, then later the Age of Revolutions and Age of Capital (Hobsbawm), when freedom gained daring wings and took longer flights, especially in Western countries. Together with her, individuality and human subjectivity, like her Siamese twins, grew also. Emancipated from medieval theocracies, prisoners of the notion of Christianity, the principle of reason replaced the idea of the Supreme Being as a reference point for the behavior of the individual and of peoples. Anthropocentrism takes the place of theocentrism. The cogito of Descartes, Kants categorical imperative and the philosophy of history of Hegel and Marx are relevant points in that itinerary. Moreover, with the arrival of the Independence of the United States (1776), the French Revolution (1789) and the Industrial Revolution (nineteenth century), a kind of freedom without checks, applied to economic policy and the system of capitalist production, generates its opposite: liberalism. In short, it deals with a socio-economic and political-cultural Darwinism, founded on the principle of natural selection, which ends up strengthening the strong and further thinning the thin. Freedom is transformed into a perverse coexistence between sharks and sardines, or between chicken and foxes, in the same space. Over time, the proper exercise of democracy, diverted from

its true ideals, will not continue to be a legal artifice to maintain the wealth, privilege and influence of the ruling class. The two faces of freedom In Latin America and the Caribbean too, freedom has suffered its ups and downs, with cruel reverses and blows. From colonial times to the present republics - some of them having gone through the experience of being Empire - there have been intense and complex liberation struggles. Simn Bolvar remains an icon of the Great Motherland. Freedom grows among us on hard and thorny ground. Movements; indigenous, popular and black, never stopped trying to win it over, sowing along the way countless martyrs. Depending from the beginning on the core countries for their mercantile capitalism - then industrial and financial - providing raw materials and cheap labor, our peoples have suffered as much from the sting of slavery, as the dream of freedom and peace. In fact, in the Social Movements, in the Basic Ecclesial Communities (CEBs), in the Social Pastoral or Liberation Theology (TdL) of the Latin American continent and Caribbean, the concept of freedom has been hostage to strong ambiguities. Under the boots of military repression, during martial law regimes, freedom from is privileged at the expense of freedom for. Not infrequently the conception of freedom arises as a necessity to liberate oneself from dictatorship, from the large landholding system, from colonialism, from dependency, from oligarchies, from sexism, from poverty and from hunger ... Hence liberation, its use so recurrent and the term so loaded, sinks its roots and takes on some religious legitimation in the founding experience of the People of Israel, to leave the oppression of Egypt in search of the Promised Land, as narrated in the Book of Exodus. The urgency of the liberation movements left frozen the second dimension of freedom. So much so, that reexamining the biblical inspiration, after the escape from the clutches of Pharaoh and encountering

Translation by Michael Dougherty

themselves in the desert, the newly freed people of Israel fall into a morbid longing for that time when, even as slaves, they had something to eat. In other words, freedom became a burden to them heavier than slavery itself. The fear of freedom (Erich Fromm) led the Hebrews to lay at the feet of someone else (Moses and Aaron, Yahweh) the responsibility for being free, that is to say, to assume the consequences of their own actions. The imperative placed by freedom from left in the shadow the need for them to think of freedom for. The latter was left for later, due to the necessity to provide immediate answers to such pressing problems as, for example, poverty and hunger, political persecution and torture. Perhaps that explains, in part, the difficulty of Latin American and Caribbean leftists to draft a popular project for their respective countries. Remote and recent history made us extremely capable of a profound and effective criticism, in economic, social, political and cultural terms. In other words, intellectuals and leaders of the subcontinent knew exactly what was not good for the population in general, but they continued to be reticent about what needed to be done. If, on the one hand, liberation theology and biblical-theological inspiration helped cement a theoretical organic and liberating matrix (in Gramscis terms), on the other hand, it reduced the concept of freedom to its negative dimension (freedom from). The great current challenge, both in ecclesial and socio-political terms, is to deepen the positive dimension of freedom (freedom for). This derives from the need to together build a social project in a broader context of a new civilization. It is not enough to destroy the old relations of oppression and exploitation, it is necessary to reconstruct new ties of solidarity, justice and peace. We need to rethink from the top down to family and interpersonal, community and social, political, economic and cultural relationships, in the national as well as international scope. This task constitutes a question for society as a whole and requires confronting no small challenges. We will describe some. Principal challenges The first is to combat the panacea of growth as the only remedy to the global crisis. This deals with a remedy that has serious side effects for the health

of the planet, as well for life in all its forms (biodiversity), reducing, for this reason, the quality of human life. If the diagnosis is correct, the cure doesnt provide growth without it being more and more devastating, except for new ways to redistribute benefits of technological progress. In the face of natural resources and other forms of life, human freedom has limits that become increasingly imperative. The destructive effects, in the name of growth, of accumulation and of technical progress require rethinking human freedom not as do what I want but do what leads to the common good. Maybe its time to move from anthropocentrism to geocentrism (geo, earth, understood here as the source and origin of life and its conservation). The second challenge is the growing conscience today that the various ecosystems of the planet are so intertwined that the disappearance of any species of fauna or flora, for example, has serious implications for future generations. Todays freedom cannot compromise the freedom of our descendants. We have no right to reduce them to new forms of slavery such as desertification and scarcity, natural disasters, air pollution and water, global warming, among so many others. Hence the need of a new civilization, based on more sober, responsible, caring and sustainable patterns. It is worth recalling the urgent priority of living well in peaceful coexistence and care for the planet and for each other, over the good life of luxury and extravagance for rich groups and countries. Last, but not least, there is the challenge of expanding participation in the necessary changes. This means rephrasing root democratic practice itself, which presupposes personal, social and political freedom. Democracy in its original sense cannot be reduced to the spectacular liturgy and demagogic electoral campaigns, periodic elections, the ritual of votes and ballot boxes. We need to create new channels, instruments and mechanisms of participation and control for the entire population. In political terms freedom requires a new, more direct and participatory form of democracy. Using a football metaphor, the challenge is to get the population down from the spectators stands, onto the field and taking part in the game. A passive patriotism of subordinated electors is not enough, it is necessary to advance towards an active, free and conscious practice of citizenship. q

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