Whither Freedom?

I was reading an obit of Bobby Fischer the other day. It was a couple of pages long; after the initial mandatory homage to his phenonmenal chess-playing ability, it spent most of the two pages discussing whether his lack of friends and a wife was a sign of some form of social dysfunction.

It is an odd fact that our society, which claims to be freer and more understanding of individual desires and impulses than any has ever been before, has a name for every state that is even marginally removed from what we are conditioned to think of as normal. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, did not even have a word for homosexuality. Why, if we have no word for people who have different preferences in the best way to cook liverwurst or enjoy the poetry of Walt Whitman, should we have a word for people who have different preferences in this?

Some of the greatest geniuses of the world were so far removed from traditional marital bliss that they wouldn't have been able to see it with the Hubble Telescope; in Byron's day the general public may have considered him eccentric, but by all accounts nobody went around after him with a notepad trying to decide in which chromosome the deficiency lay. If he had tried to curb his instincts he may never have been Byron; whether he would have been happier that way is debatable, and Romanticism would have lost one of its most exalted votaries.

The bloodletting over Alexander's empire after his death was, they say, caused because he was not sensible. If he'd been sensible he would have married before he left Macedon, or at least as soon as he entered Babylon the first time, and failing everything else he would have left his empire to someone other than kratistos. If he'd been sensible he probably would have done all those things, and he would not have tried to conquer Persia by doing battle on Darius's terrain with less than a tenth as many men as his enemy. If he'd been sensible there may have been no bloodletting over his empire simply because there may have been no empire.

Scott Adams has written a succint blog piece on the subject of what the chaps at the cutting-table would probably call being socially challenged; when the wheel really does come full circle, perhaps this will go back to being the kind of eccentricity that is good for a laugh at the local pub but otherwise harmless.