The point of liberty is that personality–a sense of identity, either personal, familial, communal, or national–is an emergent property of the operations of the principles and decisions free people. You cannot tell someone their name is Ray, they like the color red, and that they are enthusiastic about fixing cars, and expect it to stick, especially if they are adults. Yet, that is the project the brainwashers of the Left set themselves. You cannot be yourself, if you are not free. You do not have the space to create yourself. Identity creation is a somewhat sloppy, imprecise process. You have to fail, fall flat on your face, then get back up, and learn. If you cannot fail–if you do not have the freedom to fail–then you will always be less than a complete human being, and will always be less happy–even miserable, as one sees in “Community Development” projects the world over–than necessary.
It is interesting to contrast, say, New Orleans with some slick German city, where everything is metallic, and seems always to have been polished within the last hour. New Orleans, we are told, has “character”. In what does this consist? Is it not in no small measure the freedom to be mediocre in its own way? Katrina was many years ago, yet much of the city is still beat up. One senses that efficiency is rarely prized above style.
And what is style? Is it not a way of being in the world, an identity? And is that identity perhaps not inconsistent with efficiency, with getting things done, with, in effect, playing the role of a machine to perfection?
We don’t want to be machines. This is the dream the Socialists–heirs to the Positivisit tradition, and trying to make people as susceptible to “natural laws” as logs rolling downhill–envision for us. They want to “force us to be free” in Rousseau’s memorable phrase.
What is mediocrity? Is it necessarily the same as lacking a desire to push oneself hard all the time?
For myself, I know about GPS. I know about Garmin. They are very efficient. If one sets oneself the task of travelling from Point A to Point B with as little wasted motion as possible, they are probably the best way to do it.
At the same time, I have always found getting lost to be useful. I use maps, and in very complex cities, spend a lot of time meeting new people, and asking them for directions. The other day, I was daydreaming and got off an exit early for a place I was going. I wound up driving an extra 20 miles or so, but after I got over my confusion, then anger, I enjoyed it. I saw places I never would have seen. A man was kind enough to drive me to the closest reasonable point of embarcation, from which I was unlikely to get lost again.
We never know what we need to know to grow. We never know what random input, what random scene or conversation, or thought sparked by novelty will lead to the next step. This is the value of inefficiency, and yes to some extent mediocrity.
And we sense this, I think. Restaurants that are very nice–suburban strip mall clean–will pay a painter to paint murals of decrepit walls. Why? It adds “character”, which is the say the apparent possibility of randomness intruding into a very well structured existence, in which food never has germs, everyone washes their hands, the floors were sanitized last night, the HVAC works flawlessly, and everyone is safe from crime, floods, and anything they don’t expect.
We know we have to die. I think sometimes we want a respite from security, from the illusion of permanence.
These are a few scattered thoughts, cobbled together from some musings of today.