The Future of Freedom
This is an essay by one of my professors that I greatly admire, Corey Anton. A brief excerpt followed by a link to the full essay:
We talk quite a bit about freedom in the U.S., but I’m not sure how many people really understand what freedom is or even how freedom is related to time. Consider this: people often like to reflect back upon their lives and when they do, they often try to imagine that they could have done other than they did. People commonly think to themselves, “I admittedly did X and Y but I just as well could have done P or Q.” In these kinds of reflections people deeply fool themselves; they basically pretend that they were not there.
No fooling: regarding all the things we already have done in our lives, both collectively and individually, none of them can we now not have done. We did them! And also, of all the things we did not do, none now could have been done. We didn’t do them! In a word: the past, as past, is irrevocable. Any other account tries to let us off the hook, tries to lend us what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “an alibi in being.” But we need to advance carefully here. The suggestion that the past now cannot have been otherwise does not make us victims. Rightly understood, we have a beginning sketch of a free will worth wanting.