I just started reading another book on the mysteries of the brain and mind: “How Brains Make Up Their Minds” by Walter J. Freeman (not to be confused with Walter Freeman the lobotomy doctor). I’m only about 20 pages into it, but I already came across two lines that seem too good not to share. In chapter 2, Dr. Freeman discusses the meaning of meaningfulness (that’s about the best way to sum it up!). The first quote doesn’t sound all that interesting, but when you mix it with the second quote, you get something worth pondering — sort of like nitric acid and glycerin combining to make nitroglycerin. So here we go with quote 1:

“Meaning is closed from the outside by virtue of its very uniqueness and complexity. In this sense, it resembles the immunological incompatibility of tissues . . . “

I.e., what “means something” to you won’t necessarily take root in my mind; just as my body would likely reject transplanted tissue from your body.

Given that, here’s a second quote to ponder:

“Much of the effort and energy of our lifetimes is spent in trying to understand the meanings of others and to induce others to understand our own.”

The objective here is UNDERSTANDING about what is meaningful to different people. Understanding is a voluntary thing, it can’t be forced. Perhaps that’s what human freedom is all about, ultimately. Humans want to live and live well, and living well requires that we each find meanings that are relevant to our own particular lives and circumstances. We want others to cooperate with our own quest to find our own best meanings, and hopefully we know enough to cooperate with their own individual quests, different though they may be from ours. When meanings are forced on us, we get sick; that’s where the “immunological incompatibility” idea comes in. When someone decides that what is meaningful to them should be “transplanted” to others, much harm can be done. When the notion of freedom is valued, this generally doesn’t happen (or it is valiantly fought against; a tip of the hat today, Memorial Day, to all the brave men and women who have died defending freedom).

So that’s why FREEDOM is a good thing, although admittedly there are circumstances where it must be compromised due to urgent social concerns (e.g., you are not free to harm others, even if that were to be somehow meaningful to you). This should be a central value, not only in politics but in all interpersonal relationships. Try to avoid “transplanting” what is meaningful to you; you can and should seek mutual understandings with other people about what is meaningful, and sometimes other people will adopt your meanings. But if they don’t, don’t force it (unless it’s a legitimate matter of safety and social order, as with police enforcing the criminal laws). Remember, you wouldn’t want their meaningfulness forced upon you.

BUT THEN AGAIN: At the same time I’ve been listening to a Teaching Company lecture course on “The Wisdom of History” by Dr. Rufus Fears, and one of his key themes is FREEDOM. According to Dr. Fears – and I heartily agree with this – the United States today is a powerful nation, clearly the most powerful force in the world. We don’t have extensive colonies as most of the great empires of the past did, but our military and economic power is still felt most everywhere on the globe. Thus, the USA can’t help but act with a heavy hand, in a way that gets a lot of people upset. A lot of people in the Islamic lands of the Middle East, in South America, Africa, etc. don’t like the USA for a variety of reasons.

But as with most of the great dynasties of the past, the USA has developed a philosophical justification for its intrusive power and wealth; i.e., that we are the “light of freedom”. We have a lesson for the planet at large, and that lesson is this: that all peoples in all places should live in socioeconomic and political circumstances like ours, as to guarantee as much political and personal FREEDOM as possible for every citizen.

Well, that sounds very good; it fits in well with the “immunological rejection of meaning” analogy that I stole from Dr. Freeman. And yet, Dr. Fears indicates that it may be wrong on pragmatic grounds. I.e., it just hasn’t worked in most places and most times, and it still doesn’t seem to work with a lot of nations today. Dr. Fears is NOT taking the “relativistic” line that various liberal academicians have taken in condemning American aggression. These people (e.g., Prof. Juan Cole) feel that America has no right to impose our values on other people; that our success and power have not come from our having stumbled across fundamental truths about humanity, but from greed and luck. All of our talk about “freedom’s torch” is just a way to ease our collective conscience regarding all the wrong we’ve done in protecting and expanding our wealth and power. It’s all a matter of sociology and anthropology; i.e., our tribe has come to value freedom, but other tribes have come to value other things. We shouldn’t assume that our Enlightenment values are the right ones for the whole wide world.

Dr. Fears is not exactly saying this. What he is saying is that even though our ideology may be inherently good, most people in the world throughout history have not striven for it. And that’s not just because they don’t understand it. Dr. Fears presents many examples throughout history when huge numbers of people have voluntarily supported tyrannical rulers and despotic political / economic systems because they promised national and economic security.

Dr. Fears also recognizes that there is another philosophical factor that competes strongly with our veneration of freedom, and that is RELIGION. Many nations, societies and cultures would rather see religious values imposed by the “body politic”. Dr. Fears is basically saying, “that’s the way it is”, whether or not that’s the way it should be. Even today, huge swaths of the globe have not responded well to American notions of freedom: i.e., China, the Middle East, and lately, Russia and parts of South America. Freedom has not been ringing too well, even in places that have had a taste of it.

Going back to Dr. Freeman and his focus on the importance of “meaning” in the mind, I failed to mention that Dr. Freeman DOES have a paradigm for “social meaning”, in addition to his “individual meaning” theories. Perhaps the “social meaning” paradigm fills out the picture as to why social and anthropological forces often trump the inherent need in all of us for freedom.

Social forces seem to overcome the mind’s “immunological rejection” of externally imposed meanings. Dr. Freeman calls it “assimilated meaning”, a process by which groups of people find common ground about what is meaningful to each other, and act in concordance. As we know, humans are social animals and tend to change their own beliefs based on “group-think”. Independent beliefs (and often correct beliefs) are easily forsaken in order to “be a part of the group”. That’s why so many good people have followed Genghis Khan and Queen Victoria and Alexander the Great and King Ferdinand and Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein and Napoleon and Mao and Osama bin Laden, with their consciences very much at ease.

SO, it doesn’t look as if individual freedom is going to be ringing around the world anytime soon. The history of the USA might show that a political and economic system based around individual freedom will, in the long term, produce the most individual happiness (i.e., Dr. Freeman’s “meaningfulness”). BUT, in the short term, a lot of other societies are sticking with more ancient ideas. And we can’t force them to change without betraying our ideals of freedom (recall that forcing change on other societies is an ancient idea, the Roman Empire, British Empire and Ottoman Empire being pointed examples).

About the best we can do is to keep our own “light of freedom” shining brightly in our homeland, to reach out to those societies (e.g., India) that are seeking to implement our values, and to defend ourselves as best we can and as fairly as we can (i.e., the “enhanced interrogation” issue IS important) from those who disagree. And to hope that in another two or three centuries, the lessons from our success will sink in with them. As I said above, you can’t FORCE meaning upon others; you can only seek meaningful UNDERSTANDING.