Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (8 page)

In addition, there are the contributions of government to freedom, both freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from involves protection. Everyone agrees that government should provide protection. But what is protection to mean? Is it military protection, police protection, disaster protection, protection from illness, protection from financial disaster? Is freedom from want included?

Freedom to involves access—access to resources that allow one to achieve one’s goals. But what counts as access? Is it access to education (early childhood education and public higher education), access to opportunity (via a federal role in job creation), access to public health institutions, access to the resources on public lands (grazing rights, timber harvesting, mining, oil drilling), access to lucrative government contracts, access to the public treasury (via subsidies and tax breaks)?

A higher-level question governing both cases is this: Should government promote the common good by lumping together the common wealth (taxes) to create a commonly available infrastructure? This is a progressive idea built on the view that we are, and should be, interdependent, that we can’t and shouldn’t go it alone, that we are all in this together.

Or should the government maximize privatization, building on the conservative idea that everybody is, and should be, on his or her own?

Then there is the role of institutions. Institutions (say, corporations)
tend to be viewed metaphorically as people. Which of the rights of people should be guaranteed to corporations? Corporations in other respects act like governments; they rule many aspects of people’s lives, but without accountability. Is that democratic?

And what is self-government like? It is agreed that it should maintain order, produce prosperity, and keep records. Is it order produced by authority or order produced by cooperation, responsibility, and trust? Is prosperity to be measured by the assets of the wealthiest, or by the distribution of wealth across income brackets? Is government to be open or secretive? Are its records freely available or locked up?

Finally, how does our national government relate to other governments and to individual people around the world? Does it see itself as part of a world community or as running the world? Does it promote the same freedoms for others around the world as for us?

It should now be clear that there is an uncontested concept of simple political freedom that has a rich collection of oversimplified attendant concepts and a rich logic. It should also be clear that each of these attendant concepts is highly contested.

Finally, there is general agreement on other major ideas and their relation to freedom—at least if one expresses them in uncontested terms.

• Democracy
  is the freedom of a people to govern themselves.
  

• Opportunity
  is the freedom to take part fully in civil society—to earn a living through work, to participate
  in civic organizations, to run for public office, to have access to public accommodations, to get an education, to have a chance at fulfillment in life.
  

• Equality
  requires the same freedoms for all.
  

• Fairness
  is when no one has more freedom than anyone else.
  

• Education
  provides the information needed to sustain freedom and the ability to acquire such information.
  

• Health
  keeps illness and other bodily harm from impinging on our freedom.
  

• A
  free press
  provides free access to the information necessary to preserve freedom.
  

• The
  free market’s
  proper role is to provide the freedom to engage in trade and to earn a living.
  

• Religious freedom
  keeps us free from the rule of any church and free to practice any religion, or none.
  

• Civilian control of the military
  keeps us free from military rule.
  

• Academic freedom
  allows free inquiry.
  

• Personal freedom
  defines a realm of “private life,” where individuals are free of the state, where the state cannot interfere with individuals pursuing their goals.
  

Here we can see just why freedom is our most important idea: It is at the center of all other important ideas.

Yet each of these cases is also open to contestation. What counts as being free from the rule of any church? Or from military rule? Or from state interference in private life? In each of these cases, there are very different views of freedom on the part of progressives and radical conservatives.

A crucial aspect of the logic of freedom is what it means to negate freedom. We constantly hear of threats to freedom, attacks on freedom, defending freedom, achieving freedom, spreading freedom, instilling freedom, expanding freedom, losing freedoms, taking our freedoms, regaining freedom, denying freedoms. And with these come ideas like repression, dictatorship, tyranny, oppression, and slavery. How do these enter the basic logic of freedom?

What, for example, is a threat to freedom? It can be a threat of coercion, or harm, or injustice; a threat to security, property, rights, or to the rule of law; or a threat to what is seen as the proper bounds of competition or nature. It can also be seen as a threat to any or all of those things tied to freedom: democracy, opportunity, fairness, equality, education, health, a free press, a free market, civilian control of the military, academic freedom, religious freedom, and personal freedom.

And most important for this book, a threat to free will is a threat to freedom, the imposition of a dangerous worldview without public awareness. When free will itself is threatened, that is the ultimate threat to freedom.

We have just worked through the logic of simple, uncontested freedom. That logic specifies the interactions between the uncontested version of freedom and the uncontested versions of all of the ideas that constitute our understanding of simple freedom: harm, coercion, property, rights, human rights, justice, law, nature, competition, democracy, opportunity, and fairness.

As we have begun to see,
all
of the above concepts are contested. But they tend to be contested in systematic ways—according to the frames of conservative and progressive world-views, which, we will see, are based on two very different ideas of the family.

It is hardly surprising that nations are conceptualized metaphorically as families. As children, our first experience of being governed is in our family. We are “ruled” by our parents. We are protected in our homes and told what to do, what rules to follow, how to interact with others, and that we must respect our parents. Our first loyalty, of course, is to our family.

In monarchies, the royal family
is
the government; the king
is
the father. We know about monarchies and other patriarchal forms of government, which means we know about how parents can also be rulers. In the Catholic church—God’s Kingdom on Earth—the ruler of the church is called the Holy Father. And countries around the world are called by names such as Mother India, Mother Russia, and the Fatherland.

It should not be a shock that we Americans also conceptualize our nation metaphorically as a family. We have Founding Fathers. We send “our sons and daughters” to war. We have organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution. Groups in the military think of themselves as “bands of brothers.” In America, we have “homeland security,” where the nation’s landmass is seen as “home” to the nation seen as a “family.” And conservatives are clear about the centrality to their politics of “family values.”

What is not at all obvious, though, is that the family metaphor should play a deep conceptual role in our politics—a role so deep that it defines the shape of our politics and the major ideological rift that our nation now faces. And yet, the way we idealize families is central to our politics. In the nation-as-family metaphor, the family corresponds to the nation, the children correspond to adult citizens, and the parent corresponds to a national leader.

Political thought is complex. The range of issues and policies is vast, and new ones arise every day. Yet there is a system that ties people’s political views together. There is no objective reason why one’s views on abortion should have anything at all to do with one’s views on taxation, or on environmental regulations, or on owning guns, or on tort reform, or on torture. And yet radical conservatives tend to have the same views on all of these. And progressives tend to have the views opposite to those of radical conservatives on all these. What makes these two sets of views hang together?

The answer lies in the fact that Americans have two very different models of what an ideal family should be: a strict father family or a nurturant parent family. Whether or not one’s real family was like either of these—and real cases do exist by the millions—we all, nonetheless, acquire these ideal models as part of growing up in American culture. They are represented not only in our homes and communities but also in our movies, TV shows, novels, plays, fairy tales, and everyday stories. Strict and nurturant parenting are part of the fabric of everyday culture in America. When these two ideal family models are projected onto the nation by the nation-as-family metaphor, what results are two visions of what our nation should be: The strict father model is the basis of radically conservative politics and the nurturant parent model informs progressive politics.

As we shall see, the strict father and nurturant parent models are powerful. They not only shape and organize the major political
ideologies of our time. They also apply systematically to the uncontested simple, but vague, concept of freedom, filling in the blanks in that concept in two very different ways, to yield two very different—and quite contested—concepts of freedom. It should not be surprising that the same metaphorical ideas—strictness and nurturance—that organize our systems of political thought shape the concepts of freedom that fit into those systems of thought.

The power of these models comes from a number of sources.

• Frames have emotional as well as intellectual content. The difference between strict and nurturant families is not merely structural, but also visceral and powerful because our experiences with our own families and families we have known are highly emotional.
  

• Those frames govern how we reason.
  

• A simple family frame can provide the basis for a whole worldview, a way of seeing every aspect of life.
  

• Metaphors can project the same family-based frames onto different areas of experience—say, economics and religion—organizing these different areas conceptually in the same way.
  

• Family-based frames and metaphors seem utterly natural and commonsensical—and hence true!
  

• Family-based frames and metaphors are mostly unconscious, which makes them hard to examine consciously. Their very invisibility gives them power.
  

It is essential to note that these are idealized models of how a family
should
work—as opposed to how any particular family
does
work. Just about every member of American culture has, in his or her mind, versions of both strict and nurturant models, either actively or passively. Passive versions are not acted on, but rather are used for understanding cultural products like movies, TV
shows, and novels. Thoroughgoing progressives use the nurturant model in every active part of their lives and the strict model only passively. Thoroughgoing conservatives use the strict father model in every aspect of their lives and the nurturant model only for understanding cultural products produced by progressives. But many Americans are partial progressives and partial conservatives, using both models actively, though in different parts of their lives.

In the nurturant parent version of the nation-as-family metaphor, the family corresponds to the nation (or community); the children correspond to citizens (who are adults, not children); a nurturant parent corresponds to a national (or community) leader who cares about and acts responsibly toward the citizens; siblings correspond to citizens who care about and act responsibly and empathetically toward each other.

Avoid the trap of taking the metaphor literally. The model says that
the children in the family are mapped to adults in politics
—and that their relationships to political leaders and to each other are metaphorical, not literal, versions of family relationships. These models are part of our common cultural inheritance but may or may not have been realized in a particular person’s real family.

Given that we are adults who elect our governments, these family-based models tell us, via metaphor, what kind of governing system we should aim for: one that cares about its citizens and strives to maximize their well-being, or one that seeks to impose its idea of order, rewarding and punishing accordingly, and otherwise seeks to make citizens fend for themselves.

I am
describing
these models, not
proposing
them. To observe the existence of the nation-as-family metaphor in the cognitive unconscious of Americans is not to say that it is good or bad. It is simply there. It shapes our moral systems and our politics. It is not something we can simply change by willing it away.

There are those who think that the brain is infinitely flexible, that we can have whole new minds by simply imagining them,
and that it is possible to create whole new social orders just by fiat. It is true that radical conservatives are building—and to a frightening extent have already built—a new social order. But they have done so by tapping what is already in the brains of a great many Americans—the idealized strict father family model—and finding ways to get people to apply it to politics. Building a progressive social order will require the same insight: Start with the nurturant parent model people already use to frame many of their experiences and extend it to politics.