A short note on freedom & excellence

In a recent NY Times op-ed, “There’s something better than happiness”, Mark Edmundson, a UVA professor, argues that students should devote themselves to a life of freedom through the pursuit of self-creation: determine your own values and make them manifest in the world. Pursue your own uniquely determined excellence.

It sounds good, but, taken as stated, it’s pure folly.

How is a university student, still unformed, still unshaped, supposed to “determine their own values?” A self that hasn’t been shaped will only have the ambient values of the culture to draw upon.

Students who follow his counsel will find themselves over-determined by two far more powerful mechanisms — the market and technology — and will live lives of corrosive consumerist individualism, always seeking affirmation for their choices in the mirror of the market and the screen.

The only real path to excellence -- and, freedom, it turns out -- is submission to a rule.

After a long period of apprenticeship comes mastery and with mastery, the first glimpses of freedom. Someone who is only a year or two into playing piano cannot improvise. They need to master all the scales and chord progressions. They need to learn to really hear and anticipate what others are doing. Only after building such a durable base, trained into the fingers and beyond the mind, does play become possible.

We’ve lost the instinct for “formation”: the slow and durable process of shaping ourselves in community, devoted to a corpus of knowledge or practices, and with obligation to one another and to someone who knows more.

We see this in all spheres of life: love, ethics, and work.

• If you want the deep experience of love, submit yourself willingly to a vow — marriage or committed partnership of some sort — and stay devoted to the other over the long haul. There’s no shortcuts there.
• If you want to become truly good and ethical, submit yourself to diligently following an ethical code and your habitual violations and attempts at rationalization will teach you.
• If you want excellence and freedom in your job, pick a sphere and submit to it. Follow your betters day after day. Soon enough, you’ll find new and spacious paths in front of you.

The critical move here is vow. *A vow is freely made once; its power comes not from reshaping the vow daily in response to market feedback but in staying, submitting, and staying, again and again.

A vow is freedom spent versus freedom hoarded.

Spending your freedom requires submission to something outside yourself, because otherwise you will follow your whims, always unsteady and always shaped by the forces around you. (And, not incidentally, this is also the path to meaning, contra Edmundson.)

I’ve recently started studying the coding author and teacher, Kent Beck. He did this work as a coder. He submitted himself to the form of the code in a long practice of mastery. (His book, Tidy First, is on its way and I’m excited.) And here it gets really interesting: in April of 2023, after seeing ChatGPT, he wrote “**90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $0.” **In this quote, he was talking about his writing, but the machine would come for his coding too, soon enough.

So, what did he do? He started submitting himself to learning the workflow of the agents, as a beginner. Here we see a master opening himself to beginner’s mind — and seeking a new rule.

In my own 6-month old immersion into building software products, I’m very early days on the same path, but my submission now is to the path of agentic engineering, rather than to coding. This is a new discipline and the workflows suited to agents are not the same as the workflows suited to humans. And, given there isn’t an established body of authoritative practice and experts, the rule I submit to is the evidence: the instruments, the record, the outcomes.

I’ll write on this next in the context of Kent Beck’s corpus.