On Being Free

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply

There’s a moment in Adler’s Modern Times that caught me off guard — a simple line that carries a quiet sting:

Until the mid-twentieth century, a serious education was considered necessary only for the elite.

Not because ordinary people lacked the ability to learn, but because society assumed they didn’t need to. Everyday literacy was enough to get by — read the newspaper, write a letter, manage a purchase. The deeper questions, the ones that shape law, culture, and the direction of a society, were left to a small, educated class.
And then the world shifted.

Democracy widened.
Leisure increased.

Technology placed more information in our hands than any philosopher of old could imagine.

In theory, this should have produced a more thoughtful, better-informed public.
In practice… it’s hard to pretend that’s what happened.

Scroll long enough online and a pattern emerges:
people with surplus time, surplus outrage, and surplus certainty.
Political opinions without political understanding.
Conspiracy theories without first principles.
A kind of inherited civic power used without the education that once accompanied it.

And Adler’s old question returns, landing with surprising precision:

If ordinary people now hold the power once reserved for elites, what kind of education do we need to use that power well?

Freedom begins in how we use the quiet, ordinary moments no one sees.

When Freedom Outran Education

Do Ideas Still Matter?

Adler challenges a widespread modern assumption:
that ideas from earlier ages can’t possibly speak to us now.

Economic determinism says everything is shaped by its material conditions.
Sociological determinism says ideas belong only to the society that produced them.

Taken together, they suggest that older wisdom has no place in contemporary life.

But that logic carries a quiet prejudice:
“Your insight cannot matter because your world is not my world.”
A familiar cousin to racism and classism — the dismissal of understanding based on difference alone.

Yet across centuries, human beings have asked the same things:

What is a good life?
What is justice?
What is freedom?
What is worth living for?
How should we treat one another?

The tools change; the human questions don’t.
And Adler’s point is simply this:
Perennial problems remain perennial, no matter how modern the world becomes.

Freedom As an Inner Practice

On the farm, this becomes clearer to me.

There is a difference between being busy and being formed.
A difference between being occupied and being educated.

Most of my real thinking doesn’t happen at my desk.
It happens in the ordinary, sun-warmed pockets of the day —
hanging laundry, walking the dogs along the dam, listening to horses breathe as the morning settles.

There is leisure here, but it is not idle.
It clarifies more than it distracts.

And it leads me to a question Adler never aimed at me personally but which lands on my doorstep anyway:

If I have the privilege of inherited political power and leisure, what am I doing with them?

What am I doing with the education available to me now — building on what I received as a girl, and choosing what I pursue as a grown woman?
What am I doing with the freedoms carved out by those who came before me?
What am I doing with my attention — the most political resource I have?
What am I doing with the conversations I enter, the platforms I touch, the influence I hold in my home, my work, my community?

Adler’s challenge is not complicated:

A citizen’s duty is not only to vote, but to understand.
Not only to speak, but to think.
Not only to react, but to study the forces shaping the world they live in.

And I feel its weight.

Modern leisure is so easily squandered — and yet it is the very thing that could reshape us if we chose to use it differently.

A Small, Honest Use of Freedom

Most of us won’t shape national policy.
We won’t write constitutions or lead movements.
But all of us carry a small circle of influence — our homes, our work, our conversations, our vote, our attention.

And Adler’s point is not dramatic.
It’s simple:

How we use our leisure shapes how we use our freedom.
And how we use our freedom shapes the world we live in.

So this week, take one small piece of leisure — five minutes, ten — and give it to something that strengthens you rather than scatters you.
Read one paragraph that steadies your thinking.
Sit with one question you’ve been avoiding.
Let your attention deepen instead of drift.

We become who we are becoming in these unclaimed moments.

Use them with intention.
Use them with honesty.
Use them toward the good life.

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