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Is the Open Road Really That Open?

photograph of motorcycle group riding as sun sets

Each November, hundreds of thousands of bikers descend upon the Gulf Coast city of Galveston for Texas’s Lone Star Rally. They’re drawn not only by the city’s picturesque sandy beaches, New Orleans-style houses, and open highways but also by the numerous bike-centric attractions, music gigs, and general revelry accompanying the rally.

The scale of the event, compared to Galveston’s size, is remarkable. The city’s average population (of whom I am one) is roughly 53,000. But, in 2021, over 400,000 bikers attended the four-day event – nearly eight bikers for each resident. And they make their presence felt with road closures galore, traffic accidents aplenty, and the noise of motorbikes reaching deafening levels. Needless to say, for the first weekend of November, the bikers dominate the city, with many residents hunkering down at home or leaving for the weekend.

Alongside hard-hitting cowboys, rugged gold prospectors, and hardworking farmers, the image of a rebellious biker barrelling along America’s seemingly unending highways holds a prominent place within the nation’s cultural mythos.

They represent freedom in a multitude of forms, be that in their mode of transport (free from the confines of a car), their ability to travel (free to explore America’s highways), or their refusal to conform to societal expectations (free to do what they want, when they want). While such freedoms may or may not be accurate, it is hard to contest that, on a symbolic level, the biker is free in a way that others are not.

But, whether this is true in a philosophically political and legal sense is questionable.

Popular fiction often portrays bikers as rebels, rejecting everyday living’s confines and carving out their own path free from political or wider societal influence. Two recent examples are Sons of Anarchy and (maybe surprisingly) Bob’s Burgers. However, in real life, bikers must play by many of the same rules as the rest of us or face the consequences. When on the road, they must obey the laws governing motor travel, like someone driving a car, RV, or big rig. Similarly, they have to pay taxes to help maintain the very roads on which they ride. They must avoid motor collisions like anyone else (if not more so). Beyond the confines of riding the bike, they, much like you or I, are slaves to their body’s demands; they have to eat, sleep, drink, seek shelter when cold, heal when hurt, and go to the bathroom when nature calls. In the broadest possible sense, bikers are either as free or confined as anyone else. Being a biker doesn’t relieve you from biological or social existence’s material facts and constraints.

So, why do bikers always talk about the freedom they feel when they ride? Why do they equate their preferred mode of transport with unparalleled liberty? According to Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (one of the best-selling philosophy books of all time), the answer comes from the fact that freedom is not understood in the absolute but in the relative:

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

Riding a motorbike and participating in the biker lifestyle doesn’t inherently provide you with a level of freedom unobtainable to everyone else. Instead, it puts everything else into perspective and offers the feeling of freedom that makes the rest of life appear confined. Riding a bike helps put life’s worries – bills, relationships, deadlines, fights, and the rest – to one side. It barricades these things out of one’s conscious mind, leaving the rider at the moment where the bike and the act of riding it eclipses everything else.

Whatsmore, this is more than a mere perspective on motorbike riding’s merits. A 2021 study investigating how biking affected sensory perception revealed that

riding increases focus, heightens the brain’s passive monitoring of changes in the sensory environment, and alters HPA axis response. More generally, our findings suggest that selective attention and sensory monitoring seem to be separable neural processes.

In other words, riding a bike has a neurological impact associated with a heightened focus on the here and now. Biking isn’t simply a symbol of freedom. It is instead an act that increases the perception of the latter by relegating those things that consume and dominate our mental efforts to the background.

Somewhat paradoxically, then, riding a bike provides a sense of freedom not by removing tensions and constraints but by establishing them. Biking doesn’t relieve the external pressures placed on us by the non-biking world. Instead, it generates a feeling of liberty by making internal boundaries; by creating a border in which one’s frame of focus is reduced and outside which life’s worries fall away. People who feel free when riding a bike aren’t necessarily freer than everyone else. They simply have an activity that provides a feeling of freedom by drawing them away from those other things that might concern them.

So, next time you see a biker espousing how their bike provides them with freedom, don’t forget that the unabashed sense of freedom they describe might be simply the establishment of internal barriers.

Banning Furs and Plastics: Vital Progress or Unjust Restriction of Liberty?

photo of animal pelts on a table.

It is easy to forget that our choices as consumers have significant consequences beyond satisfying our material needs or desires.  Many of us make purchasing choices with little regard for how those choices affect other people, non-human animals, or the environment.  In many cases, the stakes are tragically high. One proposal worth consideration, then, is that certain purchasing options should simply be off the table or should, at a minimum, be highly regulated.  

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Evaluating the Ethics of Paid Organ Donation

A photo of surgery within the operating room

Actress and singer Selena Gomez recently posted to her Instagram account that she received a kidney transplant because of her lupus; the transplanted kidney was donated to her by a close friend. For people facing kidney failure, transplantation of a healthy kidney from a living donor often presents a much better option than the alternative of dialysis. According to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, dialysis can only replace 10 percent of the work performed by a functioning kidney. On average, patients who received kidney transplants lived longer than those who remained on dialysis. The kidney donor also does not face significantly increased health risks from donating a kidney. There are the expected risks of going through a major surgery, as well as some increased risk of kidney failure, but there is no evidence that donating a kidney decreases life expectancy.

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Growing Pains in the Rapid Rise of eSports

On August 7-12, the Dota 2 Championships are taking place in Seattle, Washington. Eighteen qualifying teams will compete for a combined prize pool currently estimated at $23.8 million. The large prize pools, and high participation and viewership, make Dota 2 rival more traditional sports: the International’s first prize last year was comparable to cash rewards in sports like tennis, cricket, and golf, out-pacing them all in terms of grand prize. Thus, though Dota 2 isn’t competing with the most lucrative sports like football, there is a real sense that eSports are rivaling the traditional, physical sports. Since 2014, more people watched the League of Legends world championships than the NBA finals.

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Seeds of Doubt: The Under-Regulation of Televangelism

What if I told you that you’d have a miracle at this time tomorrow if you shouted “Fear not!” three times, counted down from ten and then called and sent money to a television network?

These were the exact instructions of one of the ministers during this year’s Praise-A-Thon, one of the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s many fundraising efforts that elicits donations across the country annually; the television network is one of the leaders in televised ministry and has provided an outlet for recorded and live services. Stakes are usually much higher, however, for contemporary televangelists; though their heyday has undoubtedly passed, these ministers still make millions in their pursuit of televised salvation.

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Freedom and the 2016 Electoral Season

‘Tis the season for politics, once again, in the United States of America. And while some surprising new topics, like the size of candidates’ hands, have cropped up in this cycle, some of the mainstays of American political rhetoric are also at the rendez-vous.

Take Donald Trump, for instance.

In January, one of his campaign rallies featured the following performance:


While it features somewhat dated nationalist lyrics (including verses like “Come on boys, take them down!”), slightly updated for promoting Mr. Trump’s bid in the 2016 presidential contest, it also highlights a theme that is about as central to American political rhetoric as apple pie is to American cooking: freedom.

Whether freedom has been invoked as an empty rhetorical trope, as in this case, or whether it has been used more substantitvely, it has so completely permeated electoral discourse as to become inescapable.

Whether they have talked about government regulation, trade, national security, tax reform, education, abortion, or immigration, freedom has been Republican candidates’ preferred frame of reference.

Meanwhile, on the left of the political spectrum, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been quite as single-minded. While Clinton has spent a great deal of her time trying to square away her commitments to free trade and to an equalitarian progressive politics, Sanders has explained his commitment to democratic socialism as meaning “that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.” “True freedom” according to Sanders, “does not occur without economic security. People are not free, they are not truly free, when they are unable to feed their family.”

And yet, these invocations are largely based on outdated conceptions of what freedom is. The idea at the back of Sanders’ viewpoint, that economic independence is the necessary precondition for democratic citizenship harks back to Thomas Jefferson’s glorification of the yeoman farmer, as historian Eric Foner was already noting in his book, The History of American Freedom. And as sociologists have been observing since the 1950s, such an ideal of economic independence is woefully inadequate to the corporate economy in which we live.

But it is just as true that the thesis that deregulation of international trade or of the labor market will result in greater individual freedom is based on the idea, first defended by classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, that government power threatens individual liberty. Mill’s disciples in the twentieth century, intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, argued that the crux of liberal freedom consists in the absence of coercion of the individual, either by private monopolies or by government power, so that the smaller the size of the government is and the less active it is in citizens’ lives, the greater will their freedom be.

But as early as the 1960s, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram actually found, in a series of now famous experiments, that most people do not need to be coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, including engaging in actions which they are convinced will most likely result in the death of an innocent person: they will do these things of their own free will – a situation that suggests that “free will” and freedom may not be the same things after all.

In fact, a growing body of evidence has been produced in the human sciences over the past 40 years that suggests that the notion of a free-willing individual, who can make decisions independently of social and cultural contexts is a figment of our imagination. What this research reveals is that it is not the absence of context that enables individuals to act freely (whether it be the absence of a monopoly or the absence of a state bureaucracy), but on the contrary the presence of one.

This scientific research reveals several very surprising things about human nature that directly contradict the vision of human beings as rational, egoistic individuals, driven by an unquenchable lust for pleasure, money, or power, which we inherited from classical liberalism. The most recent of the great apes, it turns out, is a hypersocial being, whose subjective experience of the world is profoundly shaped by its empathetic openness to others, an openness that is not premised on any sort of fundamental or primitive goodness, but rather on the evolutionary mechanics of communication. Social psychologists, for instance, have discovered that in order to understand what someone else is saying we have to imitate the motion of their vocal chords (though in a much reduced fashion). We have to, in other words, become them. Neuroscientists have also found a specific type of neuron which corresponds to this process in the brain itself, the so-called “mirror neuron.”

Our identities, and therefore our desires, are profoundly affected by our cultural, social, and political contexts. To be free thus necessitates participating in the formation of the communicational contexts that affects and form us all. Freedom requires not only the freedom of expression cherished by classical liberals, but a certain freedom of connection – the power to shape the contexts in which this free expression happens. The freedom of choice advocated by classical liberals and their twentieth century followers confuses the fruit of freedom, the will, with its root. Likewise, those social liberals and socialists who emphasize economic independence while ignoring the other complex dimensions and processes involved in the creation of a free personality seem to be missing a significant component of the reality of the process of freedom.

This conception of freedom, if we examine it closely, suggests that democracy is not just a matter of elections or of constitutional rights (though it undoubtedly includes those concerns). Nor is the issue that of how “big” government bureaucracy will be. More fundamentally, political freedom consists in individuals and communities having the power to mutually affect each other and form each other. Democracy, understood from this perspective becomes a way of life rather than a formal mode of government, one that has consequences not only for the way in which ownership of the media of mass communication is organized for instance (a frequent complaint of the Sanders campaign is that this ownership structure is creating a bias in its coverage of politics), but also for every aspect of our lives, from the workplace to the bedroom, its fundamental principle being “equality of participation.” The aim of a “politics of freedom” in this context would be neither decreased regulation of the economy or increased government intervention but the creation of increased opportunities for participation by all members of society in both economic and political decision-making, regardless of their wealth or income level. Beyond the public funding of elections, one might imagine this agenda including decreased mediation of the mechanisms of political representation. Currently, for instance, the average ratio of representatives to represented in the US House of Representatives is something like 1: 290,000, making it extremely difficult for any but the most powerful interests to gain a hearing, regardless of the way elections are funded. And yet, there seem to be few technical impediments to cutting that ratio in half for instance. Any number of other reforms could be proposed that would enable greater citizen participation in the polity, from making congressional office-holders into recallable delegates in order to increase accountability, to instituting worker and consumer co-management councils in private corporations, legally entitled to raise concerns about the social and environmental consequences of business policies (corporations being legal entities to begin with, there seems to be little weight in the argument that this would be “undue government interference”).

Now, wouldn’t the transformation of everyday life from the standpoint of such a principle of “equality of participation” be the basis for a genuine “political revolution”?

Businesses Feel the Burn of Increased Environmental Regulation

On October 1, the Obama administration released a new environmental regulation concerning smog. For those of you that don’t know, smog is an air pollutant that gets its name from a mash-up of the words smoke and fog. It was first seen in London, where clouds of smoke and sulfur would mix with fog to create a thick haze that would hang over the city. While still associated with coal burning, it is now known that VOCs and airborne particulate matter called ozone can also be responsible. The recent law limits the amount of ozone that can be released from factory smokestacks and tailpipes with the intention of reducing smog.

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Time to Give NFL’s Blackout Rule the Boot

Originally appeared in The Indianapolis Star

The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to ensure that the electronic media serve the public interest. A current FCC rule, however, works primarily to serve the interests of a few of America’s wealthiest individuals. That’s why the FCC appears poised to end its blackout rule for National Football League games.

For many years, NFL television contracts have prohibited the broadcast of any game in a local market in which the stadium is not sold out. The NFL wants to guarantee the revenue stream that sold-out stadiums provide, even though some economists claim there is no connection between broadcasting games in the home market and fan attendance.

The FCC decided in 1975 to support the NFL’s local blackouts by also prohibiting cable or satellite services from importing broadcasts of those games. Thus, the NFL, which already has anti-trust protection from the government, also has had FCC collaboration in preventing fans from seeing their hometown teams on television.

Late in last year’s football season, acting FCC chair Mignon Clyburn proposed getting the commission out of the sports blackout business. Clyburn questioned whether the blackout rules were in the public interest, “particularly at a time when higher ticket prices and the economy make it difficult for many sports fans to attend games.”

FCC commissioner Ajit Pai had even stronger words against the rule in a speech last month in Buffalo: “I don’t believe the government should intervene in the marketplace and help sports leagues enforce their blackout policies. Our job is to serve the public interest, not the interests of team owners.”

The location of Pai’s speech is noteworthy. The Buffalo Bills’ games have been blacked out more often in recent years than any other NFL team. By the way, it’s often bitterly cold outside when late season games in Buffalo are played. And the Bills haven’t had a winning season since 2004.

Current FCC chair Tom Wheeler also has announced his opposition and will call for a vote to discontinue the blackout provisions at a meeting later this month.

The NFL faces fourth and very long in its efforts to keep the rule, but that hasn’t kept it from a massive lobbying and public relations effort, complete with scare tactics and half-baked reasoning. The NFL, for example, has enlisted the National Association of Broadcasters to threaten that elimination of the FCC rule could lead to all games being telecast only on pay services, not free over-the-air channels. In fact, that could happen only if the NFL itself chose to move in that direction.

The NFL also has gotten the support of the Conference of State Legislatures and the Congressional Black Caucus to claim that elimination of the rule would hurt local economies by keeping fans away on game days, thus harming stadium employees, nearby restaurant owners and so forth. The reality is that stadiums fail to sell out when teams lose too often or inclement weather interferes. The FCC blackout rule doesn’t fix either of those problems.

The NFL generates about $10 billion a year in revenue, with the biggest chunks from television contracts and merchandise. Ticket sales aren’t as big a factor as in 1975. The NFL money machine generated $275 million in new revenue this fall by signing CBS to air eight Thursday night games. That should be more than enough to cover a few empty seats in Buffalo in December.

Virtually all NFL owners are billionaires. Meanwhile, television ratings hinge on the eyeballs of millions of fans who can’t afford to pay high prices to attend a game, many of which are played in stadiums built with taxpayer money. It is high time for the FCC to end this 40-year losing streak and win one for the fans.