Freedom

The title of this book takes the adage about ‘thinking outside the box’ and inverts it. Instead of thinking outside the box, we should think inside the box, David Epstein argues. Which box? How big is this box? Whose box? He discusses these questions as well. The phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ emerges from the nine dots puzzle devised by psychologists before the first world war. There are nine dots on a page, evenly spaced, three on each line. You must connect all nine using four lines without removing your pen from the paper. A common response is to imagine that the dots form a box and to confine your work accordingly. This makes the puzzle impossible to solve; you have to think outside the box. Or not think of a box in the first place.

Anand Gopal has form when it comes to war. In Afghanistan, distrustful of President Bush’s ‘good vs evil’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us’ narrative, he did what every good reporter does: ‘I learned the language, grew a beard and hit the road like a local.’ The result was No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. In its refusal to stick to the script – especially American and British propaganda about all the ‘progress’ which later proved so illusory – the book recalled Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam exposé, Dispatches.

In what may be the only joke in this book – it is hard to tell, because quite often reading it I started to believe the whole thing was an elaborate parody – Samuel Miller McDonald begins his acknowledgements by expressing his ‘infinite thanks’ to his editors (he merits six of them) on the grounds that ‘no work can be good without good editors’. Apparently some works can’t be good even with good editors – unless the author is trying to tell us that his, like his oeuvre, weren’t especially good at all. Progress is a prolix, tendentious book, radiating self-regard, arrogance and flannel.

Just about everyone is for liberty, but we mean different things by it. Far-right libertarians want almost all constraints on their actions removed. They desire free markets, no unions, low taxes, free speech and the freedom to be very rich. The oppressed want freedom from tyranny: in extremis, they want to be free from jail and free to live without the threat of arbitrary arrest and torture. The moderately oppressed want more freedom than they have now, but within the context of a functioning democracy that is more equal, and more supportive, than the kind of society imagined by the right. They make a distinction between liberty and licence (complete freedom) of the kind that results in the pike dining at leisure on the minnows.

A friend recently moved back to the UK after living in China for ten years. Being English, he was always going to be an outsider in China, but what surprises him now is how foreign he feels in England too. He asked me whether this feeling ever ended. I told him that I suspect people like us will never fully belong anywhere again. The novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo articulates this sense of alienation exquisitely, knowing exactly what it’s like: ‘Part of me is always in exile.’ She left China in her late twenties when she was already a published author. In Radical, she tries to come to terms with being an outsider, using language as metaphor (she says she’s pursuing ‘an etymology of myself’).