The Limits of Liberation

How plastic are our lives?

Hope is the thing with feathers —

That perches in the soul —

And sings the tune without the words —

And never stops — at all —

—Emily Dickinson

How much say do we have in who we are?

The clearly ambiguous answer: some.

We have no choice in when and where we’re born, who are parents are, and what they name us. That said, none of these facts are destiny. We’ll have at least some agency over where we live and how we react to our times, and we can adopt nicknames or alternative names (changing them legally, if we wish). Children grow up and have some choice in how they deal with their parents, including severing ties with them, even if such relations can be more entangled than we might like.

There are many other areas in which we have a substantial degree of choice in our lives. The kinds of work we gravitate toward doing. The kinds of people we choose as friends and partners. The forms of leisure we embrace in our free time. In all these cases, there are roles we play: stances we take, personas we adopt. Such options have widened considerably in recent times.

And yet there remain real limits, even barriers. We can’t just decide to be rich, for example. Effort may make a difference, but there are structural obstacles (from credentials to inheritances to luck) that make some people more privileged than others. Wealth may also be lost as well as won.

This applies to other areas of life as well. Gender is elastic; sex is not. Yes, there is a very small category of intersex people, and yes, one can with considerable effort make biological revisions to one’s anatomy. But the dense interplay of hormones, chromosomes, internal and external sex organs are never completely fungible. And they cannot be entirely ignored in terms of their impact on oneself or others. In this regard, sex is like some other aspects of our lives, such as looks, health, and intelligence, which are parceled out to us without any input on our part and which we can leverage to a greater or lesser degree. But always amid finitude.

This can be difficult to accept, because we live in a society that valorizes choice. This emphasis can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation, which prioritized the individual conscience over the prescriptions of the priest. In the centuries since, it has secularized into a form of expressive individualism that for some represents the highest good, the very meaning of life.

But limits can also be a form of freedom. Accepting one’s circumstances can liberate one from the oppression of striving, of dwelling in a nether land between the world as it is and the world as we wish it was. (That final line of that Dickinson poem conjures up images of a horror movie, of Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven: “never stops—at all.”) But a world without hope is a hard place to inhabit: it’s the lifeblood of our days. The challenge comes in trying to manage its flow.