Then I looked over my shelves to see if there was some other memoir type book, preferably short, that I could read before returning to another big science tome. I found this, by the same author as TRIBE, which I read and reviewed some five years ago. This book is less a personal memoir than a meditation on a theme, that of the title. As in that earlier book, this one considers its titular idea from different perspectives, three in this case.
It’s a memoir to the extent that Junger, with a small group of friends, spent a considerable amount of time walking the railroad lines in Pennsylvania. (Not consecutively, he mentions.) They’re hobos of a sort, sleeping outside, avoiding towns, avoiding the security police that monitor the tracks. It’s an experiment in freedom, in a sense; the book is a meditation about the tension between community and freedom.
(Simon & Schuster, May 2021, 147pp)
Book One: Run.
Junger, three buddies, and a big dog, wander the eastern US, living off the land, walking along railroad tracks. There’s lots of description of the countryside, the tracks, those who live and lived there. One idea of freedom, p23: “Good people and bad have maintained their freedom by simply staying out of reach of those who would deprive them of it.” Until the past century, most people who traveled, walked. How Indian tribes were forced to walk. Cain and Abel and how the sedentary world looked at envy on the nomadic world, p29, recalling that book I’ve never finished. Yet we necessarily rely on each other, p33:
People love to believe they’re free, though, which is hard to achieve in a society that has outsourced virtually all of the tasks needed for survival. Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one–literally no one–refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone–including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government–depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.
An apt consideration after reading EDUCATION! Folks who wish for smaller governments, be careful what you wish for.
And, in this system, freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed, p34t:
That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all — rationing water during a drought, for example — are forms of government tyranny. [[ Diseases, one might mention — vaccines, masks, public safety! Which conservatives thought government tyranny. ]] They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children own nothing.
He goes on reflecting on Coronado, Texas, how the Apache scattered and could not be caught, while the Navajo were rounded up and marched to an internment camp. A Yahi man named Ishi survived until 1911, near Mount Lassen, the last of his tribe; he was taken to Berkeley and put under the tutelage of Alfred Kroeber, and died in 1916. [[ Well-known in sf circles because Kroeber was the father of famed sf writer Ursula K. Le Guin. ]]
Book Two: Fight.
(Coincidentally, I read this chapter the same day I wrote up Pinker about violence, here.)
Author and friends continue to walk. Author reflects on the immigrants who settled this part of now Pennsylvania, Dutch and German and Swiss “and finally the notorious Scotch-Irish.” [[ Coates ! ]] How they marked their territory, how lone families had to fight off Indian raids. The Indians used tomahawks, would scalp, torture, kill. Boys were taught to fight at an early age, i.e. fire rifles. Freedom away from populated areas was a kind of mirage; the more ‘free’ you were, the greater the danger, and the more you relied on your neighbors for survival. You just followed different rules. Disputes were settle with fistfights. Freedom was about the ability and willingness to fight.
The railroad lines are where the settler roads had been, where the Indian trails had been before that, and where the Juniata River cut through landscape 250 million years ago. (You can check a map to see where they were walking.) The rails were built in the early 1800s, part of a massive project to make America competitive; building them was dangerous work (many examples). Individual rights to own land, one kind of freedom, competing with the government’s right of ’eminent domain,’ to maximize the nation’s prosperity. Train disasters were taken in stride. Page 76b:
The temptation to ignore reality while believing in a divine benevolence that will protect you from harm has gotten a lot of people killed over the ages. What truly *is* benevolent through—what will save you over and over, or often die trying—are other people.
And here are more examples about how, in disasters, people are helpful, even sacrifice themselves for others. Junger provides several examples, then ponders the idea of immediate groups vs outsiders who could be tortured, enslaved, or killed at will. How this was true throughout most of the world until recently. Only in the 17th century did Grotius attempt to define rules of warfare, based on natural law, the religious idea that all human beings had a right to live. (Unless you define others as subhumans, which many did, and still do — see current news, about JD Vance, for example.) Page 81:
Enshrining human rights as the apex of international law is one of the greatest achievements of Western society…
Then there’s this startling idea. Among humans, unlike other species, larger males do *not* invariably win out against small ones. (Because of size/weight ratio, how small guys can move more quickly, etc.) And:
Were this not so, freedom would effectively be impossible: Every group would be run by a single large male, and the world would be dominated by fascist mega-states, like the Ottomans, that could easily crush insubordinate populations.
Similarly, large armies are less efficient; they wear themselves out more quickly. Thus Afghanistan, for example. which neither the Soviets nor the US ever managed to subdue. Much as the Apache survived the whites.
There follows a long discussion of boxing techniques, along analogous lines.
This section concludes, page 94:
However it is defined, freedom is due, in part, to the fact that powerful nations do not always win wars and powerful men do not always win fights. In fact, as often as not, they lose.
Book Three: Think
And this section is about how modern society has been able to think things through — in my terms, to think beyond tribal morality — to establish higher principles.
Page 103:
The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own.
Democracy is an attempt to balance power and freedom. Other cultures have tried. Christianity considered itself a high moral system yet permitted medieval kings to murder without consequences. Early kings marched with their troops; that ended with King James IV in 1513.
Page 105:
In a deeply free society, not only would leaders be barred from exploiting their position, they would also be expected to make the same sacrifices and accept the same punishments as everyone else. [[ Not according to the US Supreme Court, in 2024! ]] .. But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, thought: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.
(Though this book was published in May 2021, there’s no explicit mention of T**** or Jan 6th.)
Junger talks about the gap between the rich and the poor, and cites the “Gini coefficient,” an economic measure of inequality in which a score of zero means everyone earns the same amount. Neither extreme is desirable. The US has one of the highest in the developed world, of 0.42. (Other examples.) Lower would be more equable. Yet oddly, societies with high Gini coefficients dominate world history: the ‘one percent’ societies. How, in those, do ordinary people protect their freedoms?
Then a long example about the Easter Rising revolution in Ireland, beginning 1916. Rebels generally believe they are fulfilling a kind of historic destiny. And the Lawrence mill strike in 1912. Author notes, p122: “Rightly or wrongly, society tends to value women’s survival more than men’s, and this makes machine-gunning them problematic.” [[ This is an elementary conclusion from the evolutionary rationales of Pinker and others, which progressives are reluctant to admit. ]] Then another example of a strike by steel workers in Pittsburgh; eventually union rights were passed. Democracy and freedom won, but the legislation wasn’t fought for, it was *thought* for. “It was arrived at through a rational process that came to the conclusion that all humans are free and equal…”
Page 126:
At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with—and may even hate.
Junger ends with his final wanders. His endurance wears out, and in the town of Connellsville, he decides he’s had enough, and needs a place to be at home.
