This month, we mark the 248th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the day the United States declared itself to be \u201cfree\u201d from Britain. But what does it mean to be \u201cfree\u201d? What is freedom and to what extent does it exist? In honor of Independence Day, we asked four faculty members from different academic disciplines to share their thoughts on the concept of freedom.<\/span><\/p>\n Yuri Corrigan, associate professor of Russian and comparative literature, studies the intersections of philosophy, religion, and psychology in modern Russian and European literature. He is also the convener of Russian for the Department of World Languages & Literatures.<\/span><\/p>\n Jawwad Noor, associate professor in economics, is a decision theorist with research interests at the intersection of economics and psychology. He has penned theories about temptation and self-control, time preference, and beliefs and learning.<\/span><\/p>\n Heather Schoenfeld, associate professor of sociology, studies the origins and development of mass incarceration in the United States. Her teaching and research areas include the sociology of law, crime and punishment, and public policy.<\/span><\/p>\n Loren J. Samons II, professor of classical studies, studies Greek history in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., as well as Athenian democracy and imperialism. He is also executive director and founder of the Institute for Hellenic Culture and Liberal Arts<\/span><\/p>\n John Straub, professor of chemistry, investigates fundamental aspects of molecular dynamics and thermodynamics underlying the structure and function of complex material and biomolecular systems, including the kinetic and thermodynamic properties governing protein aggregation, computational algorithms for enhanced sampling of conformational ensembles, and computational approaches for the exploration of reaction dynamics.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In honor of July 4th, here are three very brief meditations on how to cultivate inner freedom \u2014 from Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky \u2013 all of whom had a healthy respect for the near-invincible forces of determinism, but who held, nevertheless, in different ways, to the possibility of being free.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Nietzsche had contempt for the notion of human autonomy \u2014 the presumption that my little conscious mind is some kind of military general calling the shots. So much of what I think I want, after all, is decided for me by a multitude of drives and compulsions that I can\u2019t even begin to fathom. What I can hope for, Nietzsche suggests, is not to be a general, but a <\/span>gardener<\/span><\/i>. The gardener doesn\u2019t control the weather; doesn\u2019t decide what grows or dies. A gardener pursues a long, slow game of cultivation, of nurturing certain impulses, guiding them in a thousand tiny ways, listening to them, much like those ancient Greek heroes who felt the gods acting through them and upon them. \u201cWoe to the thinker,\u201d says Nietzsche, \u201cwho is not the gardener, but only the earth for the plants that grow in him!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Tolstoy\u2019s intuition was similar. He was annoyed by the Napoleons of the world, people who thought that they were driving history forward, whereas they were actually riding the current with fake steering wheels. We can do very little to change the external circumstances of our lives. What we can change, according to Tolstoy, are the things we choose to live by, or to live for, those invisible things that ground our actions \u2014 and it turns out these things are more effective in changing the world than any Napoleonic attempts to reorganize it by force. This was Tolstoy\u2019s view, against the grain of his own intellectual milieu: if you awaken something at the core of another person, that person\u2019s life will change, along with all the lives of all those whom this person affects and awakens in turn. And people who read and were inspired by this \u2014 including Gandhi and Martin Luther King \u2014 showed through their examples that he was at least partially right.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dostoevsky, for his part, saw modern concepts of autonomy as fraudulent. The more we fight against the laws of nature, or against the power dynamics of our society, the more (like Oedipus running from the oracle) we tend to empower them. But he also observed that there were some people who were <\/span>less susceptible<\/span><\/i> to the crush of determinism than others. These people, he noticed, had something in them that they would not allow themselves to betray or relinquish. They carried stories that they\u2019d preserved from childhood. They nurtured memories, both personal and communal, that served as anchoring roots to their personalities, and because of these resources were like plants whose roots wouldn\u2019t allow them to be whisked about by a passing wind. Our ability to cultivate these kinds of inner resources, for Dostoevsky, means that we have our own well \u2014 that we can pour good water into the murky currents around us, to change the constitution of reality. This also means, according to Dostoevsky, that all the evils out there are happening in some way because I didn\u2019t do this inner work soon enough. Which means that not only am I <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> powerless against the crush of fate; I\u2019m actually responsible for all the ills of the world!<\/span><\/p>\n By analogy, a state (from a small Greek city-state to a larger republic, kingdom, or empire) that found itself controlled to some degree by another political entity could consider itself no longer \u201cfree\u201d, even if the degree of control exercised by the more powerful entity was relatively mild by modern standards. The extent to which this motivated action by individual citizens may be doubted, but it certainly motivated some on occasion. We know, for example, that the Greek city-states that resisted the Persian empire AND those that resisted Athenian imperialism analogized the control by an outside force to the loss of \u201cfreedom\u201d and thus to a kind of slavery.<\/span><\/p>\n Another factor was the ancient Greeks\u2019 and Romans\u2019 views about the way a society does, or should, influence (or control) individual actions. That is, they did not tend to believe \u2014 as moderns do \u2014 that a \u201cfree\u201d individual has the \u201cright\u201d to \u201clive however he or she chooses.\u201d Even the Athenian leader Pericles, who praised Athens in a speech found in Thucydides\u2019 history of the Athenian war with Sparta, says that Athenians do not break those \u201cunwritten laws that are shameful to break.\u201d That is, there was little to no active concept of an individual\u2019s rights against the majority or the collective; thus (for example) religious activity and beliefs could be regulated by law and by vote of the collective. There was also no \u201cright\u201d to free speech in ancient Greece, but rather the idea that \u201cspeaking freely\u201d was the duty of a good citizen. Such a duty existed despite the fact that you could be punished by the people for what you said.<\/span><\/p>\n I should note that an idea of \u201crights\u201d somewhat analogous to the modern idea did develop under the Roman empire. It is, in my view, not surprising that the notion of \u201crights\u201d tends to reflect an environment in which the state is strong and the citizens relatively weak, whereas earlier ancient Greek and Roman culture usually reflected the opposite condition: relatively weak states but relatively strong citizens.<\/span><\/p>\n Overall, for the ancient Greeks and Romans freedom tended to be seen as a quality associated with the absence of external control but not with the expression of some kind of idealized individualism that denied the claims of the collective. Ironically, perhaps, in this environment both cultures produced some of the most free thought and some of the most unusual and interesting individuals of recorded history.<\/span><\/p>\n In places all over the world today families do not have the ability to make choices about their own lives. Their freedom is curtailed by violence, poverty, hunger, authoritarianism, discrimination, climate change and more. As we celebrate Independence Day in the United States, an estimated<\/span> 1.9 million people<\/span><\/a> are in jail, prison, and other secure facilities. Another<\/span> 3.7 million people<\/span><\/a> cannot go where they want, see who they want, or control their own time because they are under community supervision. Countless<\/span> studies demonstrate<\/span><\/a> that their unfreedom does not make us safer.<\/span><\/p>\n As a sociologist, I have dedicated my research toward the work of expanding the reach of freedom. In my book<\/span> Building the Prison State<\/span><\/a>, I introduce how mass incarceration in the United States grew over the last fifty years because lawmakers made decisions to put more people in prison for longer periods time. Ending mass incarceration requires that we do the reverse: revise sentencing laws to put fewer people in prison, drastically reduce prison sentences, and make these changes retroactive. The experience of states like New Jersey and Michigan, which have reduced their prison populations by approximately 20,000 people since the peak of their prison populations, demonstrate that we can do this without jeopardizing public safety.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We need social movements in every state to create political incentives for lawmakers to take bold action on incarceration. To learn about your state visit the<\/span> Prison Policy Initiative\u2019s state profiles<\/span><\/a>. This fourth of July we are all not free. As we say at our Passover Seder, \u201cnext year, let us all be free.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So, if we end up buying the large popcorn, have we made a free choice?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n School is a curious place. We learn a curated subset of history, sometimes growing up to find that the heroes in our story are villains in another\u2019s. We memorize the map of our country, sometimes to find that its borders are drawn differently by others. The curriculum may cultivate a scientific approach or it may propagate religion. It may push a particular economic system or political philosophy. At the end of the day, the education system manufactures a member of society \u2014 manufactures because human psychology is such that most of us will grow up to believe that our worldview is superior to all other worldviews, when it is only more familiar. We will be drawn to comforting evidence and under-appreciate, if not doubt the validity of, uncomfortable evidence. Being intelligent is not all that it is made out to be: colored by feelings, higher intelligence also helps us come up with better justifications.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So, is our worldview a free choice? We were not coerced to adopt it. But, through education, an older generation in the country we grew up in sought to shape us \u2014 perhaps to replicate themselves in us \u2014 when we were blank slates. The examples do not end here, of course. People with power \u2014 from media outlets to political leaders to their donors \u2014 routinely direct our behavior and beliefs, and in the worst case manipulate us.<\/span><\/p>\n Let us assume that free will exists, so that we possess that beautiful metaphysical capacity to rebel against nature and society. Still, freedom ought to require more: you are not truly free if unbeknown to you, if in your ignorance, your choices are made for you by others.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The possibility of true freedom may be damned by the fact that we can never rule out our ignorance. But, what saves us is that we can still choose to wage an eternal war against ignorance: by always seeking knowledge and understanding of the biases in our thinking, in our upbringing, in our environment, and by learning about the nature of relationships and about the world. Every time we learn something, our choices become more our own, and in turn, at the very least, we become more free, more authentic.<\/span><\/p>\n The wide range in heat capacities of varying substances results from the differing numbers of degrees of freedom available to each system. Consider a gas of helium atoms. Each atom can \u201ctranslate\u201d in three directions by moving left-right, up-down and backward-forward. We say the atom has three translational degrees of freedom. If we have a gas of a million helium atoms, we say that the gas has three million translational degrees of freedom. The faster that the atom moves in a given direction, the more energy the atom has stored in that degree of freedom. If we want to increase the temperature of the gas, we add heat energy that increases the speed of the atoms.<\/p>\n Now consider a molecule like water, with a central oxygen atom bonded to two hydrogen atoms. The center of the molecule can \u201ctranslate\u201d and explore three translational degrees of freedom. Like a boat, the water molecule can also \u201crotate” in three directions called roll, pitch, and yaw. And so the water molecule has three rotational degrees of freedom. Finally, the bonds of the water molecule can \u201cvibrate” in three ways that we call symmetric stretch, asymmetric stretch, and bend. There are a total of nine degrees of freedom meaning that there are nine ways that the atoms of a water molecule can explore space through translations, rotations, and vibrations.<\/p>\n Degrees of freedom and heat capacity played an important role in the birth of quantum theory. Classical theories of the heat capacity of a solid like ice or crystal of salt predicted the heat capacity was proportional to the number of degrees of freedom in the system and did not depend on the temperature. Experiments upset this idea by showing that the heat capacity of a solid cooled to very low temperatures fell to zero! It was as if the degrees of freedom of the solid disappeared.<\/p>\n In 1907, Albert Einstein used the new quantum theory to show why the heat capacity of a solid fell to zero at low temperatures. The vibrations of the solid could only explore a ladder of discrete allowed energies. At very low temperatures the vibrations were in their lowest allowed energy level, and adding a little heat could not excite them to the next allowed energy level. Electrons also have degrees of freedom and contribute to the heat capacity of a metal. Surprising jumps in the heat capacity of systems at low temperature led to the discovery of superconductivity in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, a topic of continued interest in physics and materials science today.<\/p>\n The next time you enjoy a warm or cool drink, think about how the transfer of energy excites or calms your many degrees of freedom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nYuri Corrigan<\/a>, associate professor of Russian & Comparative Literature<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"Yuri](\"\/cas\/files\/2024\/07\/corrigan-1-1-600x600-1.jpg\")
There are at least two kinds of freedom \u2014 freedom in the outward political sense, to do what we want; and freedom in the metaphysical sense, to make decisions without being coerced by external forces. The problem with this inner kind of freedom is that it might be an illusion. If I am formed by my upbringing and my society; if I am a collection of biochemical processes that operate according to predictable laws; if my brain is wired to decide what I say or do <\/span>before I am even conscious of that decision<\/span><\/i> \u2014 then how could I possibly be responsible for my actions?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nLoren J. Samons II<\/a>, professor of classical studies\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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The ways the ancient Greeks and Romans thought and wrote about \u201cfreedom\u201d was probably most influenced by a couple of factors. First, we must consider the pervasive institution of slavery, which formed a part of everyday life around the ancient Mediterranean world and which provided, for many, the primary antithesis to any idea of freedom. To some extent, freedom meant not being a slave and lacking control over one\u2019s own life choices.<\/span><\/p>\nHeather Schoenfeld<\/a>, associate professor of sociology<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"Heather](\"\/cas\/files\/2024\/07\/schoenfeld-headshot17-Heather-Schoenfeld-600x600-1.jpg\")
I grew up celebrating the holiday of Passover which remembers the story of the Jewish people\u2019s exodus from slavery in Egypt. I always loved the Passover Seder, not just because it brought my geographically dispersed family together over a good, long meal, but for the values it espoused. The ritual words at my family\u2019s Seder told us that \u201cwe were all slaves in Egypt\u201d and that no one is free unless everyone is free. We all must work toward that day.<\/span><\/p>\nJawwad Noor<\/a>, Associate Professor of Economics<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"Jarwwad](\"\/cas\/files\/2024\/07\/IMG_1224-481x636.jpeg\")
In every iteration of my economics and psychology class, I ask students: \u201chow often do you end up buying the middle-sized popcorn at the movies?\u201d and they answer \u201crarely.\u201d Strange. Why isn\u2019t it offered at a lower price then? I go on to explain that the medium popcorn is not there to be sold. It is presented at an inflated price so that we look at the large popcorn and say \u201cthe large is just 50 cents more, I will get that.\u201d The medium popcorn is planted by a seller that understands human psychology better than the movie-goers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nJohn Straub<\/a>, Professor of Chemistry<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"John](\"\/cas\/files\/2024\/07\/StraubHeadShot-555x636.png\")
In molecular science \u201cdegrees of freedom\u201d refers to the number of independent ways that atoms and molecules can move and explore space. \u201cFree\u201d refers to the freedom to move and \u201cdegrees\u201d refers to the number of ways of moving. The concept was developed by mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and popularized by English statistician Ronald Fisher. The number of degrees of freedom informs many basic thermodynamic and dynamic properties, including the heat capacity: the amount of energy that must be added to a substance to increase its temperature by one degree Celsius.<\/p>\n
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