Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (3 page)

Free will is thus not totally free. It is radically constrained by the frames and metaphors shaping your brain and limiting how you see the world. Those frames and metaphors get there, to a remarkable extent, through repetition in the media.

If this sounds a bit scary, it should. This is a scary time.

Cognitive science, by making us at least aware of alternative frames and metaphors, acts in the service of extending the range of free will.

Beyond writing as a scientist, I am also an advocate. I believe that one version of freedom is traditional and important to keep for the deepest moral reasons. I believe that the other version of freedom is dangerous to our democratic ideals and to the moral system behind the founding of our nation.

My task in this book is to open up a discussion of these two views of freedom, to describe them as accurately as possible, and to discuss how to take back the progressive view of freedom that lies at the heart of our democracy—and to do so honestly, using framings, both deep and surface, that we really believe and that reveal the truth about our social, economic, and political realities.

Traditional American freedom still reigns in the American mind. Nonetheless, the right has made serious inroads: Tens of millions of Americans now think about freedom through the right wing’s framing of the idea, and the evidence of that is in elections, in polls, in legislation, in judicial decisions, and all around us on radio and TV. There is a real danger that the right will succeed. They have control of all branches of government.
They have a tight control on political infrastructure. They have the bully pulpit of the presidency. They have control of an important segment of the media (Fox and Clear Channel). And they have framed just about every issue in public debate so thoroughly and invisibly that even very intelligent, well-educated, savvy journalists don’t notice. No, they haven’t won, but they are making steady progress—and virtually without discussion.

The danger is not just a matter of words, a quibble over semantics. This is a war over an idea. If the idea of freedom changes radically, then freedom as we have known it is lost. The reason is that people act on their ideas. Ideas are not abstract things. They are components of action. They define ideals. They create norms of behavior. They characterize right and wrong, and accordingly change our understanding of the past and the present, our vision of the future, and even the laws of the land. Ownership of the word means ownership of the idea that goes with the word, and with it, domination of the culture defined by that idea.

Moreover, that domination does not end at our borders. The United States is the most powerful country on earth and it is dedicated to spreading its idea of freedom. Whose freedom will that be? If conservatives define foreign policy and control the definition of freedom itself, then the idea that they spread will not be the traditional American idea of freedom, but in many ways the very opposite.

The radical right knows the stakes. The culture war they have declared is real. All the outrages I listed above are real: the Iraq War and its death and destruction, the destruction of our environment, the shrinking of our civil liberties, the devastation of our economy, the weakening of our educational system—all real, too real.

What progressives see as outrages conservative extremists hail as actions promoting freedom. Many progressives explain this by saying that conservatives are just greedy and mean. For the most part, I disagree. Some may be greedy and mean, but mostly they understand themselves as moral—but with a different morality.

Freedom, as they are redefining it, is the keystone at the base of this morality and its political agenda. It unifies radical conservative positions on issues across a wide spectrum of domestic and foreign policy. Progressives tend to fight issue by issue, while for the right, Bush’s favorite phrase, “defending freedom” galvanizes the fight on many issues at once. Progressives are at a disadvantage against this worldview if they don’t recognize it—and then counter it with a coherent and articulated vision of their own.

To illustrate this alien worldview, consider a line from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address: “Self-government relies, in the end, on the government of the self.” What does it mean? Why should it have a prominent place in his inaugural address?

I am not here to discuss mysteries for mystery’s sake. If Americans are to hold on to freedom as they grew up with it, as they have come to know it and love it, then they have to understand that there is a radically different and frightening notion of what extremists on the right call “freedom” shaping our culture and our political life.

You can’t stop it if you don’t see it.

We all have what cognitive scientists call “folk theories,” implicit understandings of how things work. How does a thermostat work? Or an electric lightbulb? Or color vision?

You might think that color is out there in the world and we just perceive it. That’s a folk theory that virtually everyone has. In reality, there are no colors out there in the world. None! Objects reflect wavelengths, but wavelengths aren’t colors. The experience of color is created by four factors: the wavelengths reflected by objects, the surrounding lighting conditions, the color cones in our eyes, and complex neural circuits in our brains. The activation of certain neurons is experienced as a given color. It may look to us like colors are out there in the things we see, but colors are really created through seeing with a body and brain.

For most people, it doesn’t matter if their folk theory of color vision is false. They can go through life seeing colors, and even painting and mixing paints, perfectly well without ever knowing how color vision really works. But if you want to design a new color television or computer screen, you have to know more about how it really works.

We also have folk theories of language and thought. They too can be mistaken. For example, it is commonly thought that
words have fixed meanings, and that their meanings are given by what they refer to in the world. The theory arises partly because of the way we learn words as children—parents say the word and point to, or hold up, the object. The theory—let’s call it the single right meaning theory—says that there are clearly delineated sets of chairs and trees in the world, and “chair” refers to chairs, and “tree” refers to trees—and “freedom” refers to, well, freedom—a single, well-delineated condition in the world.

This is the common folk theory behind Elaine Kamarck’s remark “Freedom is freedom is freedom,” or Rush Limbaugh’s refrain “Words mean things.”

But in fact language is more complicated than that. “Over,” for example, has
over
one hundred meanings, as, for example, in walk
over
the mountain, paint
over
the graffiti, overqualified, look it
over
but don’t overlook anything, and get
over
it! These happen to be systematically related in a complicated way but are still distinct.

“Freedom” is even more complicated. It is not a case where the word has many distinct meanings that we all agree on, like “over.” The problem is not with the
word
but with the
idea
, the very concept of freedom. The idea of freedom has different interpretations, depending on your moral and political worldview.

But the folk theory of language, unlike the folk theory of color vision, has political consequences of the highest order! If most people think that the defining concept of this nation—freedom—has only one meaning, when it really has two almost opposite meanings, we are in an explosive situation, and one that can be manipulated by the side that is in power and has the most sway over the media, in this case, conservatives. It matters politically that the single right meaning folk theory is false.

A really obvious example where a given concept has multiple contested interpretations is art. Classical Western art is realist, depictive, and representational—art as imitation, paintings of landscapes and people, historical or mythical scenes, and everyday
life. Modern art has challenged just about every precept of classical art, moving from realism to impressionism (the image is in the mind, not on the canvas), to abstraction (no depiction at all), to surrealism (depiction of the unreal), to abstract expressionism (expression of emotion), to field painting (exploration of color fields), to conceptual art (the art is in the idea), to performance art (the art is in what the artist does), and on and on.

Classical art is still the reference point from which other traditions diverge, and its traits define what is contested and changed. Those traits include form, color, an artist implementing an idea, a viewer’s perception of the artwork. Think of the traits as blanks to be filled in, and the way they are filled in provides us with the various different understandings of what art is—realism, impressionism, surrealism, conceptual art. As we shall see, the concept of freedom works in a similar way: It too has an uncontested version and blanks to be filled in that produce different versions of freedom.

We owe a great deal to W. B. Gallie, a professor of political science at Cambridge University in England, who provided a deep insight into concepts like art and freedom in his classic essay, “Essentially Contested Concepts.” Such concepts as freedom, democracy, and art are inherently subject to multiple interpretations, depending on your values, concerns, experiences, goals, and beliefs. Essentially contested concepts include such nonpolitical concepts as medicine (Western vs. Eastern; allopathic vs. homeopathic), economics (Keynesian vs. trickle-down), and even science itself (predictive, like classical physics, vs. explanatory, like evolution). Even the concept of a chair can be contested by competing schools of furniture design with different values, experiences, and goals. Can every concept be contested? We don’t know for sure, but it would not be surprising.

This does not mean that concepts can be anything at all. Gallie’s great contribution was to show that contested concepts arise in a systematic way. First, a contested concept has an un-contested
core. The core concept picks out a well-known case or class of cases that is generally agreed on. Second, the concept must be evaluative, that is, it must be used to make value judgments. Third, it must have a complex structure—it must be complicated enough to allow for variations. And fourth, it has to have parts that are subject to variation; these are often under-specified, vague enough to allow details to be elaborated in more than one way.

Let’s continue with the concept of art. Great classical art, say, a painting or sculpture by Michelangelo or another renowned artist, counts clearly as art—the uncontested core. Art can be good or bad in various ways, and it can be traditional or experimental, hence it is evaluative. A painting, for example, has a complex structure: its form, its colors, its role in art history, its social importance. This structure includes parts: the shapes, the colors, the idea to be implemented, how it is seen by a viewer, the artist’s tools and techniques, its relationship to other artworks and to society. These parts provide choices among alternatives—the kinds of form, color, ideas, social issues, etc.—and opportunities for variation, and with them, opportunities for contestation. There are different ways to fill in the blanks in the complex concept. Are you painting a landscape, a person, or an abstraction? What kind of paints will you use? How will you apply the paint? Do you believe society is just? Should art reflect social conditions? Any reasonable level of complication can lead to contestation. It’s normal.

The radical right knows how to make political use of the un-contested cores of important concepts. In his second inaugural address, George W. Bush did not seem overtly to be using a definition
of freedom fundamentally at odds with that of Democratic presidents. Indeed, the speech was careful not to be obvious about the difference. Bush makes it look as if he has the uncontested versions of traditional Democratic values: compassion, opportunity, life, and freedom. His radically different versions of those values go largely undiscussed in presidential discourse.

Bush contrasts freedom and liberty with slavery, oppression, tyranny, dictatorship, racism, and sexism. Indeed, the core concept of political freedom—the one we all share—includes frames that contrast with those frames. On the positive side, Bush identifies freedom with opportunity, justice, decency, tolerance, dignity, dissent, and participation. Superficially this may sound like the same idea of freedom put forth by Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Martin Luther King.

But it is not.

To understand how and why, we must ask and answer a host of questions:

What, exactly, is the common uncontested core of the concept of freedom? Is it literal, and if not, what are its metaphors? What are its complexities? Why is it so easy for Bush to make it look like he shares traditional American values?

How does the common core get elaborated? Where are differences? How exactly, case by case, do the differences arise? What is their source? Are the differences random, or is there a systematic pattern?

There is a simple understanding of freedom. Freedom is being able to do what you want to do, that is, being able to choose a goal, have access to that goal, pursue that goal without anyone purposely preventing you. It is having the capacity or power to
achieve the goal and being able to exercise your free will to choose and achieve the goal.

Political freedom is about the state and how well a state can maximize freedom for all its citizens. A state can act to guarantee freedoms, to provide more freedom, or to take away freedom. From this perspective, states are to be judged on the basis of how well they guarantee freedoms for all their citizens and provide for as much freedom as possible, while restricting freedom as little as possible.