The Freedom of the Damned

By Roger Rosenblatt

Not long before dawn on Aug. 26, Robert E. Chambers Jr., 19, and Jennifer Dawn Levin, 18, strolled into New York City's Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Something happened between them. Chambers allegedly strangled Levin, then remained nearby as morning rose and the body was discovered and removed. Even shockproof New York sat up straight and stared. Something about a killing on a summer night in the park, the brooding sweetness of the shadowed grass. Something more about two upper-middle-class teenagers walking casually into a nightmare reserved for naturalistic American novels: sensational grief, sensational murder trial, relentless public glare.

This sort of story was not supposed to happen to privileged children who command the city with their lusty self-assurance; who shop at Benetton's and Bergdorf's, have plenty of style, plenty of clothes; who do not leave home without American Express. But they do leave home. Breezy, noisy, they lope about the fashionable streets like flocks of orphans in Brazil or in Beirut, like the earth's poorest children -- hanging out, swooping into saloons where no one looks twice at the doctored ID cards; the kids' money is good. Don't blame the saloonkeepers, say the sociologists. Blame the moral carelessness that parents pass off as the gift of freedom as they cut their children loose like colorful kites and wish them an exciting flight.

What is this perversion of freedom about? In an enthralling series of articles on the Levin killing, Samuel G. Freedman of the New York Times observed that rich parents and poor parents are alike in their promiscuous freedom giving. The poor let their children hustle for subsistence. The rich buy them off. It is as if parents are afraid to touch the people they created; and in a sense this may be so. By the time parents are old enough to have adolescent children, they often are undergoing second-adolescent turmoils of their own. The elder teenager beholds the younger and sees his biography in the making -- tumultuous prelude to a tumultuous middle. The prospect unnerves him; he disowns it.

Or parents may be confounded by the fact that children are blatantly freer than they are themselves. A subculture of young people slide about the house, so much more alert than their parents to changes in music, movies, codes of dress; quick as terriers; loose as geese; all things that age is not. The power of parents lies in experience and work. The power of children lies in the freedom from those things. Parents, who cannot retrieve that sort of freedom, may regard it with bewilderment, even resentment. They keep their distance.

The central trouble seems simply that too many parents have forgotten that freedom gains meaning from restraint. In this they are creatures of their times. For thousands of years, various, and very different, definitions of freedom -- Aristotelian, Cartesian, Augustinian, Kantian -- have all related freedom to significant choice. Over the past 20 years, the idea of freedom has evolved like a mutated animal, involving the absence not only of significant choice but of moral or rational restraints. Without a context of limitations, freedom has become dangerous and meaningless. If freedom has no restraints and embraces everything, then it risks becoming tyranny, since logically it must include tyranny among the things it embraces.

So senseless a definition could prevail only in a time when there are few social penalties for destructively free behavior. The crime of murder carries demonstrably severe penalties, and so requires no continuous statement of community disapproval. But for the great range of social crimes, for everything from gossip to greed, no sanctions exist except those that a community informally may agree to impose: banishment, disgrace, curtailment of income. In the world these days, social crimes rarely are penalized and often are rewarded. Investment companies receive relatively small fines for major theft. Insider traders are glorified as clever. A best-selling writer plagiarizes another writer's work. He pays some dollars in a civil suit. But beyond this, his earning power is not diminished, his stature in his community is, if anything, enhanced.

What all this means to anyone watching -- say a child -- is that character no longer is related to destiny. If a community cares only for that sinister cliche the bottom line, then there is no community pressure on individuals to behave fairly and honorably. In a world of bottom lines, why should anyone -- say a child -- bother to improve a soul?

The fact is that no wide social community exists, no village of common thought, in which personal freedom may be judged, guided and made valuable. That is not true of political freedom. Throughout last July's Liberty Weekend, Americans trumpeted their personal freedoms from every stage, mainly because those freedoms have contributed to making a fruitful collective entity, a country. It may be argued that the most important purpose of political freedom is to tend toward community, since individual freedom allows one to grow toward an appreciation of others, a sense of common tragedy and the exercise of generosity. Yet, as soon as a community develops, individual freedom begins to be restricted. The result is the perpetual American balancing act, which applies to disputes on AIDS, drug testing, abortion, school prayer, to any issue or condition that would blow off the national roof were there no continuing, deliberate compromise between personal liberty and citizenship.

Odd that the basic balance of forces sustaining the country seems to have been abandoned by the American family, which is a naturally closer community and potentially a happier one. The consequences of excessive family freedom need not be as dramatic as in the Levin killing. Little murders are committed daily in homes where Mom and Dad sit planted in front of pieces of paper or The Cosby Show, while the children lie still as dolls on their beds and gaze at ceiling fixtures, like stations in a dream. See how free everybody is. The only things missing are the essentials: authority, responsibility, attention and love.

If parents really are afraid to touch their children, they must be afraid of these essentials too, as attitudes that confine their own free lives. They are afraid of the wrong things. Between parent and child there is no monster like silence. It grows even faster than children, filling first a heart, then a house, then history. The freedom children seek is the freedom from silence. The freedom they are given too often is the freedom of the damned, with which they may strangle themselves late on a summer night, in a city, in a park, where they have gone to be alone.