Bill Ayers

When Freedom is the Question…

In Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 play Galileo, the astronomer’s breathtaking discoveries about the movement of the planets and the stars fire a desire to change the world: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares boldly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves, my friend.”1 Galileo wants to free himself and others from the prison of ignorance and delusion that constrains them all, and his truth-telling is revolutionary, challenging the establishment in the realm of its own authority—the church, after all, constructs the human journey as a sanctioned and planned voyage, the steps entirely mapped out in advance with clockwork precision and mathematical certainty. All the support anyone needs abides in the institution of the church itself. Kings are meant to rule, and peasants to obey. Because free inquiry is not authorized, and free thought or free choice are not sanctioned, benighted human beings are imprisoned in foolishness and stupidity.

Galileo resolves to set us free, tilting against the unfreedom of lies and myths and credulousness.

In 1610, the nonfictional, flesh-and-blood Galileo published “Starry Messenger,” describing his observations made with a modern and more powerful telescope, and continued to provide further evidence sup- porting Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. He was asked to stop but he wouldn’t, and when the church had had enough, he was dragged before the Roman Inquisition in 1633, convicted of being “vehemently suspect of heresy,” and sentenced to house arrest until his lonely death in 1642.2

Clearly more than theories of astronomy were at stake. The ideas, surely, but also the joy, the excitement, and the reckless hope all mark Galileo as a free thinker and a freedom fighter—after all, he could have written a book, as Copernicus did, and leave it at that. But he kept pushing, not only for his ideas and his right to interrogate the world but also for everyone to experience the liberation—the freedom—that is impossible without knowledge and awareness. No one can be free with their head buried in the sand.

In Brecht’s play, Galileo’s struggle was punctuated with hope and despair, pain and pressure, and when he finally capitulated to the exquisite torture of the Inquisition, denouncing what he knew to be true, he was received back “into the ranks of the faithful” by the church, even as he was exiled from humanity—by his own words. In the end, he was confronted by a former student, one of his crest-fallen disciples: “Many on all sides followed you with their eyes and ears,” the student said, “believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching—in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”3 The right to imagine and discuss complex and dynamic truths, the right to think at all, freedom and the liberty of teaching—something that’s in deep dispute in our schools and classrooms now, and in the streets as well.

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