Socratic Dialog and Freedom?
In 2004, my daughter and I took a course in Socratic dialog at UCSD Extension taught by Maria daVenza Tillmanns. I had, at that point, had very little experience engaging in Socratic dialog, but Smoo, who was 10 at the time, had been introduced to it at school. I thought it would be a great tool to add to both of our “how to learn and discern” utility belts.
Professor Tillmanns’s course was amazing. Smoo was the only minor in the class, and was just as involved in the discussion as the rest of the students. She put an incredible amount of thought, for example, into what it meant to be a hero, and despite having pretty solid opinions about the morality of vivisection and animal experimentation, was able to see the nuances presented by others. I wish everyone could take such a course as a child.
I especially wish that the Americans who throw around our overly-fetishized word “freedom” could be made to sit such a course, each class made of a good mix of belief systems. I would love for them to have to define, and then push past “freedom”, to delineate its boundaries. Should a person be free to do anything? If so, is non-vengeance-based justice possible? Are rules allowed? Who gets to make them?Where is the boundary of that rule? Is it physical? emotional? traditional? Whose body/emotions/traditions will that boundary be based upon?
So very much is assumed when the “freedom” grenades get launched. The thought-less use of “freedom” comes across as meaning “unencumbered by, and actually strengthened by the flouting of, rules of any kind.” Is it so difficult to see that this is unsustainable? It is confounding that people do not seem to understand the idea that one man’s freedom can impinge on another’s, and that this may be an important place to draw such a boundary… I am not saying that I, or anyone else, have the definitive answers. I simply think that we don’t question enough what it really means.
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