Freedom

I’m often uneasy with popular songs because my respect for words is such that an accompaniment obliterating ‘lyrics’ displeases me. The only way to pick up what the song’s about is to examine the words getting through the sound. One can, by doing this, collect the ideas proliferating in our time. One of them is most certainly freedom; this word can be heard all over the place, but to sing its praises is to cheat a little, because who, these days, will admit to being opposed to freedom? We’re all in favour. Memorials exist in many parts of the world to patriots, soldiers, heroes, who lost their lives in fighting for it, protecting it, et cetera.

But when, where and how frequently is it true to say we’re free? I ask because an idea that can’t be decoupled from freedom is that of inevitability. If a thing is inevitable, then it is the outcome of a process which eliminates the more popular idea of freedom, is it not? Inevitable: let us look at the word to see what it means. The prefix, in, means not; the suffix, able, means what it says; and the middle of the word, evit, comes from the French éviter, to avoid. Not able to be avoided. The word is not exactly an opposite of freedom, but it certainly implies a restriction, a limitation, on what it means to be free. Thinking about these words has set me wondering how free we are, and if we are too often inclined to salute the idea of freedom, thinking we have it when we are more restricted than we care to believe.

I now want to look at some occasions in my life that have caused me to question the idea of freedom and ponder the degree of unavoidability, or inevitability, in the situation being described. I’ll start with the first section of the first book I ever published. It’s called Hail and Farewell! An Evocation of Gippsland, it was published in 1971 and it’s available on my website – trojanpress.com.au – if you want to look at it.

The first section of the book is called ‘The Men From Snowy River’ and it’s about a man whom I call Lochie McLellan. I shaped this first section of the book carefully to show how getting to know Lochie was a liberating, apparently ever-expanding experience by which I was able to immerse myself in the ways and values of an earlier Australia still alive in the region where I was working – Gippsland, the eastern part of Victoria. This was a little over fifty years ago; let’s say 1958. I was so full of my own young manhood that I didn’t realise that masculinity’s limits are along the line, wherever it may be drawn, with femininity. Men can hardly be men without women, and, regrettably for many women, the opposite is also true. The poem whose title I borrowed (see above), by concentrating on the doings of a mountain horseman, ignores the need for the daring young rider, or anyone else, to build his life on a satisfactory connection with women.

‘The Men From Snowy River’. The famous poem already existed, so it was an influence known to the reader as much as one embodied in the people I described. Like most Australians of my generation, I was carrying what the poem represented in my system, a tragic, inbuilt limitation, something like a disposition to a particular illness which will surface one day when the carrier’s vulnerable: our diseases pick their time! The poem carries the idea that a man can be made a man by daring, and the related idea that manhood can be conferred by other men when something admirable’s been done. Hence the story of a wild and daring ride after horses, with not a woman in sight. The poet thinks that men can set their own framework of judgement for conferring manhood on a male; this, to my mind, is a poison in the system of our society …

… but more of that some other time. The Men from Snowy River: here’s how Lochie died:

As the drinking entered the second carton, Lochie started looking for a diversion. There was always the pleasure of terrifying Ellery. He found his revolver (…) and a dozen bullets. He said he was going to blow the light out, and blasted off a shot. It missed and made a hole in the ceiling. Ellery protested and was told to be quiet. The shooting went on. When the first six shots had bored holes in the hut (…) Lochie refilled the magazine, despite Ellery’s protests. He kept firing, and Ellery’s complaints were exactly the incitement he needed. Somehow he couldn’t quite hit that light. It is not hard to imagine his gloating smile as his shaky hand brought the barrel into line with the light and his stupefied anger when he missed again. Ellery’s whimpering brought out a domineering streak in Lochie. He said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you,’ no doubt getting satisfaction from Ellery’s fear. Ellery’s reply, though hang-dog in tone, was fateful. ‘Why don’t you shoot your bloody self?’

Lochie said he might. ‘You wouldn’t be game.’ It was the challenge, the absurd idea couched as a dare. Lochie said, ‘Alright, I will,’ and put the gun up near his own head. No doubt he did it intending to fire off a shot behind himself, after which he would collapse groaning on the floor. Ellery would run screaming outside and Lochie would race to the door to fill the night with lusty guffaws of raucous laughter, clowning and teasing always. But his arm, which could waver and wobble without spilling a drop, even at the end of a long session, had lost its steadiness. Perhaps he thought there were no more bullets? I think not. I had seen him looking into the darkness before, and I think he meant to challenge it, to prove himself to it, half in love with it. Session after session, bout after bout, he returned to this cottage on the fringe of settlement, unfulfilled, until the thing he was most aware of was the awful darkness that surrounds human life. I can see his smile, gorging himself on the easeful thought, not of surrender, but of letting himself challenge what enveloped him. In a last gesture he fired and the gun in the wobbling hand chanced to carry out fate’s intention. He did fall; and Ellery did run outside. He leapt into the Holden—Ellery, who had never been known to drive before—and somehow managed to bring the van through the five gates, past the three neighbours, down to the mill. He woke the men there and the word was out.

Rereading what I wrote forty years ago, I notice the words ‘fate’s intention’. Fate is a word often used to explain the inevitable. When fate intervenes, there’s no escape. If something happens and we can’t see how it could have been avoided, we describe it as fate. This is probably tautologous, but it does reveal our thinking – that forces outside our control are acting on us. The person subject to fate, in this case Lochie, has only to continue acting in character, and something dire will happen. The last stages of this process are usually so distressing that we concentrate on them, rather than ask when, or how early, the process became inevitable, unavoidable, that is to say, when the slide became so slippery that there was no way back.

In Lochie’s case it seems fairly clear that he became aware fairly early of the likelihood of a violent end to his life and chose defiance, rather than personal change, as his way of coping. Numerous car accidents littered the path of his life, with jokes about each and every one. Jokes – but no change in his driving. Defiance, and no plans to avoid what it was likely to bring on. He lived his life, as all of us must, in the shadow of his eventual death, and did nothing to dodge it. This means, I think, that he knew it was coming and in some way, possibly hidden from himself, he welcomed it. Even as he lived, he wanted to die. The misunderstanding, as I now see it, was in the minds of those around him rather than in his own. His friends, not so aware as he was of what was hovering close, thought that if they restrained him, diverted him, they might keep him out of trouble, not realising, or only partially realising, that the danger they wanted to keep away was what he most desired. I think, therefore, that his death was inevitable, and that this had been the case from somewhere in his adolescence, some point now lost but discoverable if we could replay his teenage years, looking for the moment when realisation entered his mind.

One’s death may be caused by a bullet, a faulty heart, or a disposition to drink too much but every bit as important, it seems to me, is the moment when the mind becomes aware that a force which will not be pushed aside is pursuing it. Some of us treat such moments with denial, Lochie with defiance, other people in other ways no doubt, but each and every one of us has, I think, some sense of ourselves and the forces we have to cope with. Lochie, as the passage about him which I’ve already quoted makes clear, had to submit to what was happening inside him. His end was brought about by his own doing. Desperately sad as it was, almost everyone who knew him would have said that what happened in the last moments of his life – the drinking, the ‘carelessness’ with a gun – was in no way avoidable. He would have pulled the trigger and blown away the back of his head no matter what anyone had done to prevent it – if they’d been able.

I want to move now to another sequence of events, closer to myself, which span thirteen years of my life and again I’ll quote from my own writing, this time from Mapping The Paddocks (1984). Here’s how the book begins:

The sun shines down on New South Wales. A boy crosses a road. Two paddocks await him, and a dam. Its clay banks are bare. One of the paddocks is full of wheat stubble, the other has been ploughed and left fallow. Brown and broken, it submits to weather. The boy has a plan for it, to do with the sheep that have been pushed across the road for a few days. Wanting green grass when there is none, they search the paddock for hours before returning to the dam. The earth is hard where they pass through the gate. In the immemorial pattern of sheep, they follow each other in lines, the leader’s nose bent to earlier paths. The boy has noticed that, like railways radiating from a colonial metropolis, they push out hopefully, more widely spaced as the distance from water increases, and never quite reaching the western or northern fences. There is no grass, and the sheep, discovering this, have to return eventually to drink, and to content themselves with the golden stubble of December’s harvest.

It is January. Summer is at its height. The heat is exhilarating to those who are used to it. The boy has decided to map the lines traced by the sheep. He thinks there is some important pattern to be discovered. The farm is his father’s, his mother’s, and his. He knows it, yet it is still to be known. He obtains a book, asks the dimensions of the paddock, and prepares an outline. He crosses the road to plot the paths. He does this twice, there is still much to do.

He has a friend to stay for the weekend, he tells his friend, one blazing morning, that they must continue the work. The friend agrees. They map, marking with pencil on paper an approximation of what the sheep do in the paddock and what humans do in New South Wales. The friend, despite the protection afforded by a sun helmet, cries enough. It’s too hot, he’s bored, he wants to go home. Like the sheep, he needs a drink.

The boy is peeved, but gives in. They drink. Once home, there is no way the friend can be persuaded out again. The project is ended.

The project is begun. I am the boy. The summer of New South Wales is the furnace from which I sprang …

I go on, in the book so started, to describe the world of my growing up. Some years after it was published, I gave a copy to a Chinese professor who, unknown to me, asked some of his students to read it, and, unknown to me again, they did so. I went to China in 1998, I visited Hefei, in Anhui Province, and my friend organised a dinner in my honour. Three lovely young women came up to me and one of them told me she’d read Mapping The Paddocks. She started to talk about it, and I was amazed. I’d grown up in a country suspicious of Asia – the yellow hordes, all that sort of thing – and here was I, an Australian farmer’s son, conversing with someone who was curious about the childhood I’d had in New South Wales. History, or some such process, had moved me into a position for which I wasn’t prepared. I don’t remember how long this discussion went on, or how it concluded, but I stayed in touch with the young woman – Zhan Chunjuan – after I returned to Melbourne. Occasional letters and then emails were exchanged, and I could see that she was still interested in the literature of my country. Then, nine years later, she told me that she’d been given a grant by the Australia-China Council and would be visiting the great south land. This excited me and I said I would show her about. In a late change of arrangements, she came accompanied by Professor Xiang Xiaohong, an older woman from Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, who wanted to set up a course on Australian women writers. I said I’d meet them at the airport, but somehow they came out of customs without me noticing, and it was Xiang Xiaohong who approached me in the area where travellers and those greeting them are mixed – the area of embraces, hugs and excitement – and asked if I was the man they were looking for. I mention this because Zhan Chunjuan, whose friend I was, at least nominally, had been uncertain of my identity.

I took them to my house, I showed them around Melbourne, then I drove them into western Victoria – the Great Ocean Road, Warrnambool, Ballarat – then home. A day or so later they flew out to Brisbane and the university where they would do their reading. They returned to Melbourne for a couple of days before flying back to China and we discussed all they’d read and what they would make of it when they got home. Two friendships were firmly established by this time.

Professor Xiang established her unit of study on our women writers and I sent her many books unavailable in her land. I began to see myself as a link between our nations and I took my role as partner very seriously. I was, I think, changing my own identity in this partnership with friends, as I now thought of them. The inevitability of Australia bonding with the nation to our north had become clear to me and I forgot the anti-Asian nonsense of my growing up. I was ashamed to think that Australians had ever thought that way. Certainly I was free of it by now and found the contact both stimulating and rewarding. Every contact with my growing number of Chinese friends was valuable. It was the area of my life where I was developing most.

Time passed, then Chunjuan told me that her government had given her a grant to support her for a year at Latrobe University, close to where I live. She would study Australian identity through our contemporary literature, a matter of great interest to me. Again I went to the airport and we knew each other well enough this time. I took her to bookshops and, remembering her response to areas we’d travelled through on her previous visit, I began to drive her about. Bendigo, in northern central Victoria, then another trip to Echuca, Deniliquin in south-east New South Wales, and, the following day, we travelled towards the town of Finley, where my parents had had the farm where I was reared as a child. We drove slowly and the features of a place once part of me began to reappear. We stopped beside a huge redgum that had been just as big when I was tiny, seven decades before. My earliest memory is of my mother holding me on her knees in a car under the selfsame tree. I decided we wouldn’t go in to see the present owners, but I took Chunjuan around the edges of the farm. I showed her a fence that I and a friend had built in a university holiday, still standing, though much repaired, after fifty-something years. I took her to what we used to call ‘the back lane’, a road separating two back paddocks from the bulk of our farm. I pointed out the house where I’d lived as a child, run down now, but still surrounded by pepper trees, grown older as I had myself, and I pointed in the opposite direction to show Chunjuan the paddock that I had ‘mapped’, all those years ago. My own words came back to me – ‘He knows it, yet it is still to be known.’ A powerful feeling came into me of surprise that I should have been able to link my first meeting with Chunjuan, in Hefei, China, with the scene of a childhood exploit. There we were, the two of us, sitting in my little Toyota, both of us wondering, I think, what exactly had been brought together, and how, and why. We drove a little further and we stopped at what had once been my family’s back gate. There were now two gates, but one of them was the gate I’d opened hundreds of times in my childhood, looking as if it would still swing freely, old but still in use. Farmers don’t throw things away while they still work. I felt very old. This thing of my childhood seemed further from me than anything else around. I wondered why I’d brought Chunjuan to the gate, and the paddock I’d mapped, all those years ago. Something felt completed, but what? Connections had been made, but again, what were they? I looked at my friend, getting ready to take a photo; she was interested enough, but she couldn’t feel the things that were going through me, but then again, why not?

The fact was that in bringing her to the paddock I’d mapped as a child I felt I was linking her to the experience she’d told me about when I first met her, in Hefei in 1998. I also felt that we would go on from this moment, memorable as it was, for me at least, so that it was not a point of closure but some sort of second beginning, a milestone along the way on a journey yet to be made. Lastly, I felt that some force, inside myself, perhaps – I didn’t know – had been bringing the two of us to this moment. Simple as it sounds – showing a visitor my country, giving her an idea of what the place was like, and how people lived their lives here – I felt I had coupled myself, unwittingly perhaps, to some chain of connection I’d only been dimly aware of until the paddock had re-presented itself on my right, and my childhood home on the left. Chunjuan’s presence made the connection stronger because she’d ‘seen’ the paddock through my eyes thirteen years before. Had she been bound to visit the place she’d read about? Surely not, and yet I’d brought her there. Had some force been bringing her to this place she’d read about but never been likely to see until I got it in my mind that I must show her?

Who can say? Yet I invite you to consider an old man in a car at a place he thinks has importance in his childhood with, beside him, a Chinese woman half his age who, by some combination of forces, also has connection with the place. Why is this so mysterious to me? Perhaps it’s only because I haven’t had time yet to pull the experience apart, to analyse it, to see what its inner workings were? Chunjuan had read Mapping The Paddocks, I had brought her to see the paddocks, so our presence in the back lane, sitting in my car, seems simple enough, but for me the feelings of fulfilment, partial closure followed by partial re-beginning, were so strong that I wondered if forces outside myself had brought us to where we were …

Or was it simply that forces inside myself which I’d not sufficiently thought about, and therefore hadn’t understood, had done the job?

Inside myself, outside myself, this seems to be the question. In the case of Lochie, discussed earlier, the forces that brought him down were certainly inside himself, since nobody but he was killed. Those who had loved him, cared for him, or bothered about him, attended the funeral. Only one body was laid in the grave. The rest of us went on, speaking of the inevitability of what had happened. Lochie hadn’t been smart enough. He hadn’t woken up. It was my view, when I came to write about him, that he’d long sensed what was going to happen, and had responded with defiance, as stated earlier. So why do we call this fate, suggesting that an outside force is operating? If so, where is it? When does it intervene and when does it hold back? Can it only operate if we allow it, does it force itself on unwilling humanity, or does it need, like traitors in wartime, some of us to be compliant with what it intends? Some people, in the presence of great danger, feel challenged so far that their only escape is to open the way for what they fear to enter. We see this when bushfires threaten our summers; some people retreat to their homes and organise their defences, while others let the enemy in by lighting a fire. Lighting fires! Surely this is the last thing anyone would do, but no, there are always people whose weakness responds by letting loose flames of their own. Cowering in the face of superior strength, they escape their fear by changing sides. The enemy, the thing they fear, becomes their love, their principle for a moment, and they do something terrible. They set a match to grass. They gain immeasurably by letting loose a power beyond belief. Their weakness allies itself with strength and their problem, the thing in themselves they fear and can’t understand, has a mighty ally; they gained a feeling of sovereignty when they let in the darkness – the fire.

The sort of people I’m referring to reveal themselves every summer in this country, but are they an aspect of the earlier question I raised, that of fate, freedom, inevitability, et cetera? In changing sides, in allowing fire to damage the people surrounding them, have they asserted a freedom, however destructive, or have they simply given in, and relinquished their freedom to another force they fear? Was it that freedom was too much for them so they passed it to the force that threatened? Every summer, from the top of New South Wales to the bottom, along the Great Dividing Range, people start fires and they’re rarely caught. In forest areas all over the country, people do the same and it’s something we do little to prevent: clearly, there are people who need controlling, but those who know about them, who know the danger contained in them – or do they: it’s something I don’t think we understand – don’t stop them doing what they do. Their destructive impulse isn’t diagnosed, foreseen, they aren’t prevented … Or am I wrong, are family members checking their loved ones but saying nothing for fear of them being locked away?

It’s something nobody talks about, in public at least. Freedom is a mobile, unstable thing, ever so attractive in its early, primitive forms, but leading to places, results, that nobody ever thought about. Take the modern motor car. Take it where, you may ask. It will end up in the tip, or perhaps a pile of crushed metal, ready for recycling, perhaps a crushed and battered wreck, photographed against a tree after the bodies have been removed. These images of accidents reverberate against the glamorous ads in our magazines, persuading us to buy the latest, most exciting products on offer from our car companies. They’re lovely to sit in, or drive at speed, but so frustrating when there are thousands of them, grid-locked on city roads, or sitting bumper to bumper, practically stalled, on our highways when holidays have ended and everyone’s trying to get home.

The allure of the car, the glamour it brought to our lives, in the days when the earliest vehicles were tended by loving amateurs, was partly in the new-ness of the machinery and therefore of the concepts it created in our minds, and partly in the freedom it offered mankind from what had been its limits. We were no longer stuck wherever it was we found ourselves. We could get away. Remember the thrill of going on holiday? Mum, dad and kids, a picnic hamper packed? Sydney and Melbourne within reach, thundering down the highway? Trucks roaring through the night, bringing anything from anywhere? The outback open at last to people in their four-wheel drives?

Freedom, hey?

Freedom … We’ve only to look around to make us wonder where it went. It isn’t there any more.

You don’t know what I mean? Yes, you do, you haven’t been driving around with your eyes shut. The freedom machines of a century ago have developed into pests, things our society would be better off without, but who will suggest bringing them to a halt? Societies depend on cars, nowadays, not only for movement, but for providing jobs. Economies rest on the production, maintenance, repair and insurance of cars. No cars, no motels. The oil industry, over which nations go to war, depends on cars. They liberated us and now they keep us as their slaves. Men photograph their women leaning on cars (naked on their bonnets, occasionally). Youngsters aspire to get their own car because it’s the entry to adulthood. The car can be a sexual place for those still living at home, restrained by parents. In this sense it’s still a liberating machine, but notice that when it’s used as a bedroom it’s not moving; the freedom it gives is of a different type. The car, driven noisily or assertively, is a statement that its driver has arrived at maturity when the very making of such a statement proves the opposite. Freedom? It’s hardly more than a claim, the making of which proves that the freedom that’s been desired, and claimed, is never going to happen. I’m thinking of a time, many years ago, when I saw a man in a powerful car, full of children, stopped outside a milk bar, arguing with his charges about what ice-creams they’d be allowed to have. He was flustered. Angry. The women of his household had sent him off to make the children happy, and he couldn’t. So what for the motor car’s power? In the end, the driver went into the shop to buy the ice creams, putting himself apart from his car, beginning – perhaps, who knows? – the business of liberating himself from the thing he’d expected would liberate him.

Give him his freedom!

I began this essay talking about freedom’s relationship with inevitability, and I spoke also of masculinity trying to assert itself, define itself separately from the lives of women. This, I said, was a poison in our society, the danger of the idea being that it creates what people once called false consciousness, that is, a way of understanding that leads inevitably to misunderstanding, that is, it puts in front of us the very thing it was supposed to steer us around. Words are dangerous, if we use them, because they build themselves out of thoughts already available, while freedom, the thing we seek, is a state where we are no longer imprisoned, that’s to say, something of a void, an emptiness, yet to be filled. Freedom is a place where previous experience no longer binds, and this is a place of danger as much as promise. The notion of freedom invites us to consider humanity without its past, and this is dangerous because history teaches as often as it imprisons. What do we want to be free of? Restriction, of course, and because it’s often odorous in its origins, evil, malicious, or unfair, we do well to wish to be free; but, after the blissful moment of release, where are we then? If freedom is more than a moment of release – a moment, note, no more – then it needs to be definable, so that we can build on it, make something useful of it, surely. Is this possible or not? Can freedom give us anything more than a pause before we take on a new set of restrictions, having found that an unbound life’s impossible?

I find my mind filling with questions that are hard to define, let alone answer. I’ve brought my argument to the point where freedom seems little more than an interlude between pressures that can’t be avoided. It’s a thing you sing about, full of yearning for what you’re not going to get. Perhaps it’s an idea that’s impossible to define except by its opposites: that’s to say, your freedoms are defined by your restrictions. The restrictions are firm, definite, and your freedoms are the space left over? Can it be that freedom is no more than this? A plea for release from whatever’s pressing?

Let me put those difficulties aside for a moment and return to the examples considered earlier, to locate the degree of freedom and inevitability in each of them – Lochie’s self-destruction; my return in old age to the paddocks of my childhood; arsonists out of control; and social movements beginning in one place but leading somewhere else entirely. Lochie first.

He had a farm. His situation, had he married and worked his property well, would have been enviable. Yet he couldn’t control his drinking and that was because he couldn’t control himself. He didn’t want to control himself. He embraced defiance as the central posture of his life. That must mean that he was a man surrounded. Unable to find a pathway to take himself forward, he refused any pathways offered. He sold his property, saying he would go to the Ord River in Western Australia but he didn’t get there. He killed himself. He was never going to get to the Ord. It would have meant starting again, and he was approaching his end, not a new beginning, which wasn’t in him. The Ord River, had he got there, would have offered him the ‘freedom’ of a new beginning, which he didn’t want. His situation, then, was dreadful. Fatal, and the fatality was inevitable. In using the word ‘fate’, however, to describe it, as I did years ago, I was wrong. Fate, insofar as we can understand it, is something that lies outside ourselves and Lochie’s problem was within the brain that he destroyed with a gunshot. He protected the problem as he protected himself. One couldn’t exist without the other, and the problem died when Lochie died. There was no other end.

The paddocks of my childhood, revisited in old age with a Chinese visitor, are very different. The question here is something to do with my response on seeing what I had done, in bringing Chunjuan to see a place she’d read about, years before and thousands of kilometres away. She raised her camera in salute to the paddocks but it couldn’t capture the sense of wonder that my return delivered to me. What do I think was happening when I showed her a place of significance to me from seven decades before? I’d brought my children to the same place, I’d brought a lover to see it too, so she’d be able to see into the formation of the person who loved her, and this, I hoped, would give her the freedom to move around my inmost feelings; now I’d brought a visitor from another land because I wanted her to understand my land, and in an intensely subjective way I felt that the best way to do this was to show her one of its mysteries, and – this was a joyous event – I had a mystery to show her which she’d known about for years because she’d read about it when Australia was as foreign to her as China was to me. The surprising thing for me was that the opportunity had appeared – the door had opened, revealing an unexpected chance – to let her share the mystery in a way that could be simply understood. This was not inevitable. I made it happen, and I’m glad I did.

The arsonists? This looks to be a simple question, though perhaps it isn’t. Fire presents a challenge. It’s frightening. In the face of the fear that it raises, our proper response seems easy to find; we get ready either to fight it, or get out of the way. Stay or go. But the human mind is more complex than we know, and some of our number can’t see things in the ‘sensible’ way. They surrender. So stirred up are they by what’s approaching, or merely latent in the air, that they anticipate it, taking the pressure off their minds by releasing the fire. Trapping themselves, but giving it its freedom, and there’s nothing freer than a fire. Eucalyptus forest covers hundreds of kilometres. Large areas of Australia are nothing else, and the bush, once alight, can burn for days, even weeks, at a time. With a wind behind it a forest fire has no limit. Unless there’s a cool change, and rain, it can’t be stopped. Perversely – and I have little sympathy for those who loose fire on the planet – the abnegation of self, and responsibility that we find in the fire-bug, is a strangely successful way of identifying with the freedom which is normally so hard to find. It’s simple: the arsonist changes sides, identifies with what everyone else calls the danger, the enemy, and his problem’s solved … at least until he’s identified, and caught.

And what about the motor car, and the social problem it presents? Oh dear. The question this time is too big to give us any hope of answering. Humanity is clever in dealing with detail, not so good at keeping itself under control. Those early motor cars, nowhere near as reliable as they are today, offered much. People could be served by engines, wheels, cabins as comfortable as rooms. Contrast this with the rickshaw, enslaving another human being. Upper crust English people might employ a driver, but his position gave him a uniform, a cap and gloves, perhaps, a position of some dignity, certainly, in a system of social class. The car, after all, held the rank of its owners, hence the characteristic British way of building luxury cars, not entirely forgotten, even today. But the car appealed to the masses too, and nobody was prepared to argue that they should be denied, until it was too late. Now we build freeways, bridges high in the air, and all the rest of it, and what else do we do? We stop the cars with red lights so that pedestrians can cross. The cars we built for high-speed performance move in fits and starts. The bridges need new lanes. Public finance – the money available to governments to spend – is swallowed up to create the means for our cars to keep moving. We have also to educate ourselves to drive so that we don’t kill. Police spend much of their time patrolling what the rest of us do with our cars. Cities grow so large that you must have a car to move around, otherwise you’re confined to your home. Public life, social life, has expanded so much that what our homes and neighbourhoods provide isn’t enough any more. We need to get about, or we tell ourselves we do. The car has had effects we never dreamed about when the thing was being developed. Remember those early names, when the things were still under control? Hispano-Suiza, and the rest? Those were the days, long-forgotten now, unreachable because we can’t get back.

We’ve only got the future to look forward to, and if it means that the populations of India and China trap themselves as Europeans, Americans and Australians have, then heaven help us. We’re in a situation we need to get out of, but we’re digging ourselves further in. It all looks pretty bleak. How did we get ourselves where we are today? Yes, we pursued the glamour of the freedom machine, thinking it would do us good. We trapped ourselves with something that would enslave us if we offered it to all. And we did! The freedom of the motor car was so attractive that we couldn’t deny it to those who wanted it, and that was everybody. Look around, and see where we are now. We manufacture, advertise, maintain and pay the costs of things that own us as firmly as we think we own them. What we thought would give us freedom is a burden around our necks …

We can, of course, do some sort of zero-sum and say we are nonetheless better off than we were before cars were invented. But this is to dodge the question of what we might have done with all the money that’s been ploughed into cars; what public transport systems might have been developed if all that motor-car money had gone into developing them, skyscrapers connected at every level so that people could move through modestly-sized cities at any number of levels above the earth. Cars, instead, have given our bodies mobility and kept our imaginations, our public policies, enslaved. Trapped, bound, in a morass. There doesn’t seem to be a way out, unless you’ve thought of one without making it known to those who need it …

… and that’s all of us. It’s ideas that liberate, ideas that give us freedom, and they wear out after a time. We’re always in need of new ideas. Freedom only lasts as long as we think we’re free, and it’s an idea always under challenge, sometimes from something new, sometimes from our own propensity to trap ourselves all over again, once having loosed the things that bound us. We glory in our capacity to break the chains that bind us – pause for music, here – but we’re pretty good at getting ourselves enslaved again. Freedom’s an opportunity, I must admit, but, swivelling around as we decide what to do with it, I think it’s pretty clear that the human race might do anything at all, and so long as it can call it freedom, it’ll feel pretty good.