Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (31 page)
Read Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea Online
Authors: George Lakoff
The language evokes ideas—in the form of frames and conceptual metaphors—and complex frame sequences in the case of arguments. As the language is repeated, the frames and metaphors become activated in the brain over and over, and finally become physically fixed in the brain through changes at the synapses. As your brain and its concepts are changed, free will is changed because you can will only what you can conceptualize. If taxes are only afflictions to be removed, if education is only teaching to the test, if poverty is deserved for lack of discipline, if stem-cell research is child mutilation, if homosexuality is only a lifestyle, if religious freedom is government-supported proselytizing, if scientific theories are merely beliefs—if this is the only way you think about these matters, then your free will is severely limited because you cannot even imagine how most
Americans understand these issues, much less act on that understanding. The conservative mind-and-message machine can radically change—and disastrously limit—one’s free will, and it has been working away for more than thirty years.
Real freedom requires a higher rationality—a mode of thought in which one can recognize ideological framing, in which one can see the ideology behind the language and tell whether a phrase or an argument is based on a strict or nurturant value system. It is a mode of thought in which one can see who’s using “freedom” with what meaning, and what is meant in context by other contested concepts like opportunity and responsibility.
To serve freedom, public discourse requires a higher rationality as well. And some professions have an enormous responsibility for keeping public discourse free and open.
Journalists are crucial guardians of our freedom in this respect, and they are doing very badly when it comes to higher rationality. The political interview show hosts use conservative language as if it were neutral. Print journalists typically accept the radical conservative framing of issues—both the ideas and the language.
A quick check of Google News at this writing turned up 3,060 news stories using “tax relief” as if it were a neutral term, as well as 3,760 for “cut and run,” 1,060 for “cut spending,” and 537 for “judicial activism.”
The journalistic commentary right after President Bush’s second inaugural address showed little or no understanding that he was using “freedom” in a radical conservative sense, a sense foreign to the American tradition.
Only a right-wing think tank, the Claremont Institute, did report correctly that the speech called for the reversal of the notion of freedom introduced by President Roosevelt—freedom from want and fear. Ken Masugi writes on their Web site:
Is this an extension of FDR’s “second bill of rights,” one assuring security, which he proposed because the Founders’ political rights “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness”? FDR asserts, “We have come to the clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’” Sixty years ago FDR concluded, in his January 11, 1944, address to Congress, “unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”
Bush’s speech should be read as a reply to FDR and an attempted reversal of the process he started domestically, while affirming its international presence but bypassing the United Nations FDR supported. Bush would maintain America as a force in the world and use that commitment to bring more freedom to America.
Bush appears to be aiming at a grand political realignment here, one that questions the very basis of the Progressivism that undermined American constitutionalism.
It should not be surprising that it was an overtly radical conservative think tank, not the media, that interpreted the speech correctly as a radical reversal of previously hailed American freedoms. A quick Google check could have uncovered this, but no journalists did the check.
Moreover, even if journalists had found this analysis, they would most likely not have reported it because they had not prepared the public for the president’s hidden agenda, telegraphed in a kind of code to the right-wing base, while appearing superficially
to say the opposite. Bush had said that “by making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.” But rather than endorsing FDR’s “freedom from want and fear” via Social Security, support of unions, and social programs, Bush would “[make] every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny.” That is, he would replace public responsibility with private responsibility: privatize Social Security, eliminate unions, and destroy social programs, leaving everyone—strong or weak, young or old—to fend for himself or herself, for better or more often for worse.
Balance of sound bites is no cure because there is no background given that enlightens the reader or viewer either about issues of truth, or about how the words are being used. Here is an all-too-typical example from the
San Francisco Chronicle
(December 12, 2005). The story is about a lawsuit by the Association of Christian Schools International against the University of California for religious bias in refusing to accept certain courses at Calvary Chapel Christian School as meeting freshman admission requirements.
The lawsuit marks a new front in America’s culture wars, in which the largest organization of Christian schools in the country and the University of California, which admitted 50,017 freshmen this year, are accusing each other of trying to abridge or constrain each others’ freedom.
The reporter is right that freedom is at the center of the case. Here are the sound bites on freedom that he includes. First, the Christian schools:
The rejections, the suit asserted, “violate the freedom of speech of Christian schools, students and teachers.” … Wendell Bird, lead attorney for the schools, believes,
“This is a liberty case, the right of nonpublic institutions to be free … It’s very troubling to the largest Christian school organization in the country because it restrains freedom and could spread.”
It is never explained why UC’s refusal to accept a small number of courses for admission requirements is an abridgment of the schools’ freedom of speech, or freedom in general.
UC’s response is twofold: First, the UC attorney Christopher Patti takes the charge of abridgment of freedom of speech at face value and goes on the defense: “The university is not telling these schools what they can and can’t teach.” Second, a UC counsel responds with a counter charge: “This lawsuit is really an attempt to control the regents’ educational choices. Plaintiffs seek to constrain the regents’ exercise of its First Amendment–protected right of academic freedom to establish admissions criteria.”
What is left out are the conflicting views of what constitutes freedom, though there is a hint. One of the rejected texts,
Biology for Christian Schools
, states, “the people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second. [If] at any point God’s Word is not put first, the author apologizes.”
Fundamentalists interpret the freedom to practice their religion as guaranteed by the government to mean (1) the freedom to take their interpretation of the Bible as literal truth, (2) the freedom to teach that “truth,” (3) government support for that freedom, that is, for the teaching of their “truth” in public institutions and institutions that receive public funds, and (4) the freedom to teach their beliefs as if they have a right be aired on an equal footing with real science and real scholarship. Anything less is not seen as governmental protection of the freedom of religion and freedom of speech. This view of religious liberty, which lies behind this lawsuit, is almost never spelled out in the media.
Academic freedom, on the other hand, recognizes academic institutions as special places dedicated to truth and knowledge as determined by academic and scientific standards—free from religious dogma, political expediency, or other external interference. This is related to political progressivism by the progressive commitment to open inquiry and to the responsibility to fit external reality as well as possible via the use of evidence and reason.
Though the author mentions that the suit is part of the culture wars, it is never explained what the culture wars are centrally about and exactly why and how freedom has become the central values issue in this suit.
This is the kind of understanding required by a higher rationality. It is a high standard for journalism and the media to meet. But ultimately, informed public discourse will require such a standard. Now is the time to start. There is a lot of cognitive work to do, not just among ordinary citizens, but also among the journalists, political leaders, educators, and clergy who shape public discourse.
Higher rationality is hard to achieve. It is hard to go beyond the Punch-and-Judy journalism where people with different world-views scream past each other. It is hard to go beyond the Punch-and-Judy show of everyday life, at the office, at the holiday dinner table, with neighbors, hard not to feel anything more than frustration and anger at people you find immoral, irrational, and uninformed—and proud of it, proud of their patriotism and their common sense. It is hard to recognize that what passes for common sense can be terribly mistaken.
We were raised to think that words are transparent, that they have single simple meanings that directly fit reality. We were not raised to think in terms of contested concepts that have uncontested
cores and virtually opposite extended meanings. We were not raised to think in terms of frames and metaphorical ideas. And we were not raised to think in terms of alternative world-views—that our countrymen and even our next-door neighbors might see the world in a radically different way. In short, we were not raised to see certain deep truths that are essential to our freedom. Transcending the ideas that we were raised with—growing to see more—is the cognitive work of achieving freedom.
These references allow the reader to enter the literature; they are not exhaustive. They are divided into the following areas: Web sites, contemporary politics, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, and freedom/philosophy.
George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address can be found at
www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural
.
PROGRESSIVE WEB SITES USEDBill Clinton’s address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention can be found at
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/26/politics/main632008.shtml
.
Alternet, an online magazine and blog:
www.alternet.org
Daily Kos, the blog of blogs:
www.dailykos.com
Huffington Post, an online magazine and blog:
www.huffingtonpost.com
Media Matters, David Brock’s Web site:
www.mediamatters.org
Sirota Blog:
www.davidsirota.com
CONSERVATIVE WEB SITES USEDRockridge Institute:
www.rockridgeinstitute.org
(The main site for postings relevant to the topics of this book)
Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty:
www.acton.org
American Enterprise Institute:
www.aei.org
Catholic Community Forum:
www.catholic-forum.com
Cato Institute:
www.cato.org
Claremont Institute:
www.claremont.org
Dial-a-Truth Ministries:
www.av1611.org/wwjd.html
Focus on the Family:
www.family.org
The Free Market
, the Mises Institute monthly:
www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=432&sortorder=articledate
>
Global Catholic Network:
www.ewtn.com
Heritage Foundation:
www.heritage.org
Ludwig von Mises Institute:
www.mises.org
National Review Online:
www.nationalreview.com
This book is about ideas. There are many excellent books on the facts relevant to these ideas. Some first-rate places to start are John Schwarz’s
Freedom Reclaimed
, Thomas Frank’s
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s
Off Center
, and David Sirota’s
Hostile Takeover
.
Moral Politics
provides a much more detailed view of the strict father and nurturant parent models than was possible here.
Don’t Think of an Elephant
!
, is the easiest place to start reading about framing.
Metaphors We Live By
(with Mark Johnson) offers an easy and enjoyable introduction to the theory of metaphorical thought, as does Zoltán Kövecses’s introductory text
Metaphor
.
Philosophy in the Flesh
(with Mark Johnson) is a useful reference for the theory of conceptual metaphor, for philosophical issues in general, and for philosophical topics like causation, essence, teleology, and morality.
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
is an introduction to basic findings about concepts in cognitive science. It also contains a detailed survey of basic results on categorization and multiple word meanings.
More Than Cool Reason
(with Mark Turner) is a survey of types of poetic metaphors that shows how poetic uses of metaphor depend on everyday metaphorical thought.
Where Mathematics Comes From
(with Rafael Núñez) demonstrates that higher mathematics is both embodied and makes essential and very extensive use of metaphorical thought.
CONTEMPORARY POLITICSMy paper with Vittorio Gallese, “The Brain’s Concepts,” shows, on the basis of mirror neuron research, what a possible neural mechanism might be for the instantiation of frames in the physical brain.
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