Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (5 page)

Free will, understood in this way, is central to simple freedom, which is viscerally grounded in the freedom to move. Both freedom from and freedom to have their metaphorical sources in motion toward a goal. It is free will that chooses that goal. And it is free will, following the dictates of reason and judgment, that chooses rational and reasonable goals. And since a purposeful life is commonly conceptualized as a lengthy journey on which many decisions as to direction must be made, free will is used over and over.

The will is internal; what keeps it from operating freely is also
understood as internal—usually as some form of passion or emotion. Thus we speak of “emotional blockages,” irrational forces that constrain the will.

Another impediment to freedom of the will is metaphorical slavery, being a slave to drugs, to sex, to religion, to one’s job, to peer pressure, to money or fame—to anything that rules over the exercise of one’s free will, rationality, and good judgment. The slavery metaphor characterizes a systematic weakness of the will with respect to a given factor. In the metaphor, the will is enslaved and too weak to overpower the master, and so has no choice but to do what is commanded by some kind of passion: sexual desire, greed, a need for peer acceptance, religious fervor, or duty.

One’s will may also be overwhelmed momentarily or occasionally, say by sexual desire or peer pressure or drugs—as if engulfed by an unexpected wave of irresistible force. Both metaphors characterize real experiences, but there is a difference in social acceptability. It is usually seen as normal to be occasionally overwhelmed by unpredictable experiences seen as exerting real force over one’s normal behavior. But it is less socially acceptable to be “enslaved” by any experience, since it is predictable. It is assumed that, if an experience of weakness of the will is predictable, one can develop the strength of will to free oneself. Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” campaign was a denial of both metaphors with respect to drugs. It was assumed that one’s will was always strong enough to resist.

What keeps an individual from acting freely in the simple everyday situations?

• Internal impediments: emotional blockages, slavery to passions, or being overwhelmed, that is, a will weak in the face of some emotion or passion
  

• External impediments: an external authority, an enemy, or a lack of access (a lack of ability or resources)
  

These are all cases in which your exercise of free will cannot govern your actions, for one reason or another. Thus, freedom, in simple everyday cases, consists in the ability of free will to govern one’s actions—in accordance with the force of reason and good judgment, and free from both internal and external impediments.

A political metaphor used to characterize the internal aspect of freedom is that of self-rule or self-government: having a will that is able to overcome emotions and passions and act freely, to govern one’s own choices and actions. That is, freedom requires free will: government of the self by the self. Since the goals of a free person are set according to free will, they are goals for oneself. Thus, freedom requires government of the self, by the self, and for the self. In short, there is a metaphorical parallel between freedom for an individual and freedom in a democracy.

We can see such a parallel as well in the metaphor of the body politick, which has played an important role in our political tradition. The idea of the society of mind may seem anachronistic today for talking about a person, but it has had important historical effects. In the body politick metaphor, the society of mind maps onto politics roughly as follows: Reason is the legislature (which makes the laws), will is the administration (which executes the laws), and judgment is the judiciary (which resolves disputes). A rational, well-functioning society is one that follows the rule of law, where will acts in accord with reason and good judgment—just as a rational, well-functioning person would.

This metaphor is the rationale for the infrastructure of a democratic government in a free society. It involves more than just a separation and balance of powers to prevent the tyranny of the will, that is, the administration that executes the laws. It is also a definition and separation of functions required for a rational, well-functioning free society. When new democracies are formed on the model of older democracies, this is the structure that it seems natural to impose.

Thus the idea of simple freedom for a person in everyday situations translates into simple political freedom via a set of common metaphors.

Simple freedom, as we are characterizing it, is the uncontested version of freedom shared by both conservatives and progressives. It leaves blanks—ideas that are unspecified and that distinguish progressives from conservatives. One of those blanks is the nature of the capacity for self-government, both in the individual and in society. Does it come about by domination (strength of the will) or by a cooperative balance of powers (of reason, will, passion, and judgment)?

Interestingly enough, even with all the blanks left unspecified, there is a logic of simple freedom, which is the subject of the next chapter.

It is important to recognize that uncontested simple freedom does not include certain historical forms of contested freedom. The idea that free will should be constrained by what we normally mean by rationality and good judgment has been repeatedly contested. Versions of freedom exist that are overtly antirational (surrealism and dadaism in art) or that see freedom, not slavery, in the use of drugs (“Tune in, turn on, drop out”) and unconstrained sexuality (sexual liberation and libertinism), or in “slavishly” following religious dogma. On the left, these are commonly part of one form of counterculture politics (anarchism) or certain art movements. On the right, they are typically forms of radical laissez-faire capitalism, extreme militarism, fascism, or radical fundamentalism based on pure faith and revelation. All of these cases are real—and important to bear in mind. Both the right and the left like to parody each other in terms of the other’s real, but extreme, antirational movements.

Such movements are outside of both the progressive and conservative norms that we will be discussing. It is common for progressives and conservatives to label each other in terms of such extreme cases. So far, the right has been more effective, labeling
liberals falsely as “doing what feels good” and advocating a breakdown of morality, or as potheads and airheads. The far left has been less effective in characterizing conservatives as fascists.

Simple freedom at its most visceral is physical and nonmetaphorical. It is freedom to move to achieve physical purposes (either reaching a destination, getting an object, or performing an action). But simple freedom is extended metaphorically to achieving any kind of purpose—typically in a social realm, including morality, politics, business, art. A further metaphor—the society of mind metaphor—projects freedom onto the will, properly governed by reason and judgment, but pulled in a destructive way by passion.

Understanding simple freedom in this way happens to remove classical philosophical puzzles. For example, if freedom involves satisfying desires (or achieving purposes), is freedom increased if desire is removed? No. Freedom makes sense only in the frame of achieving purposes (satisfying desires). If the frame ceases to be applicable, freedom, which is defined only relative to that frame, makes little if any sense.

Or take another puzzle: Suppose I desire to be a slave. Do I become free if my desire is fulfilled? No. The frame in which freedom is defined requires access and lack of impediments. Once you become a slave, the frame, when applied, says you are not free.

The point of these examples is that freedom is a frame-based concept, defined within a mental structure and not just free-floating. And even in its simple uncontested form, it is thoroughly metaphorical, which means that, though it is abstract, it is grounded viscerally in bodily experience. The apparent paradoxes above emerge from a false theory of mind and language that assumes that freedom can be defined abstractly on its own terms, frame free and metaphor free.

Freedom is not a simple matter. The progressive and conservative versions are radically different. But they do share a core idea and a core logic, which we are calling simple freedom.

Characterizing the uncontested version of the most central—yet the most contested—concept in our national life is an achievement. Avoiding contestation often means leaving details vague and unspecified and avoiding the hard cases. Thus, the logic of simple, uncontested freedom will not cover all the cases—only the uncomplicated cases.

For example, the idea of simple freedom involves the idea of harm, as in freedom from harm. But harm itself is a contested concept; it means very different things to progressives and conservatives. The logic of simple freedom also involves ideas like nature and competition. These ideas too are contested and mean very different things to progressives and conservatives. But as long as one sticks to the uncontested cores of these concepts, a logic exists.

I’ll be discussing that logic in this chapter, which is divided into three parts:

• First, the logic of imposing on someone’s freedom. This will include a discussion of harm, coercion, security,
  property, rights, justice, order and rule of law, fairness, and equality.
  

• Second, the situations where freedom does not arise as an issue, that is, where an interference with someone’s achieving his or her purposes is not normally seen as an infringement on freedom. We will discuss the important cases of competition and nature.
  

• Third, there is political freedom. Here we will discuss how freedom enters into just about all of our basic political ideas: fairness, equality, opportunity, self-government, and so on.
  

Harm, coercion, nature, competition, fairness, equality, and all the others are, in the versions discussed in this chapter, simple uncontested versions of contested concepts. They are vague components of the concept of simple freedom—blanks to be fleshed out in contested cases. Discussing how they can be fleshed out will make it strikingly clear why freedom is a contested idea and how two different versions of this idea have emerged in our polarized nation.

The most basic assumption of simple freedom is that
being free does not make you free to interfere with the freedom of others
.

This is clear in the simple cases. You are walking down the street. Others are not free to step in front of you and stop you. Except of course if they are serving the greater cause of freedom (for others) by doing so, for example, if you are a fugitive from justice and the police stop you and take you in.

Other cases are equally obvious. Your freedom does not make you free to enslave other people, or to grab them and tie them
up, or to keep them from earning a living, or to keep them from speaking freely or freely associating with others.

The contestation arises over what counts as interference and whether other factors override the no-interference condition. For example, are you free to burn a fire in your fireplace if the smoke badly pollutes the neighborhood and makes it hard for your neighbors to breathe? That is highly contested in many places in America. Are you free to jump right in front of someone walking down the street and throw him off balance and make him fall? Usually not, but if you are trying to keep a child from running into a busy street and being hit by a car, then yes. Overriding factors do exist.

•
Harm (sufficient to interfere with normal functioning) is interference with freedom
.

If someone breaks your leg, she is interfering with your freedom to move. If someone kills you, he is interfering with your freedom to live your life.

The matter is trickier with metaphorical harm. There is, for example, economic harm. Suppose someone steals your money or your property and it interferes with your normal functioning (spending your money or using your property). You may not be physically hurt, but we typically count this as harm.

Then there are other forms of metaphorical harm—psychological or emotional harm, for example. Or harm to one’s reputation. If severe enough, they may count as interfering with your freedom as well.

Again there is a question of what counts as harm. Many conservatives believe that social programs harm people because they make them dependent on the government, while progressives tend to believe that they help people. Many progressives believe
that a low minimum wage harms workers, while conservatives tend to believe that raising the minimum wage would harm business.

One of our major metaphors for the freedom to engage in purposeful action is the freedom to move to a desired destination. Purposes are understood as goals, as places you’re trying to get to. It’s harder when someone stands in your way, or holds you down, or holds you back, or forces you to go somewhere you don’t want to go. When someone purposefully does any of those things, he or she is interfering with your freedom of motion. An important case is coercion. Coerced action is, metaphorically, forced motion to an undesired location.

•
Coercion interferes with freedom
.

Coercion is a major theme in discussions of freedom, and it comes in many forms. Further metaphors map physical coercion onto economic coercion, social coercion, and religious coercion. In short, forms of coercion occur in any domain where there are goals and forces that can interfere with them.

What counts as coercion is contested. If an atheist child is forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance containing “under God” or forced to listen to Christian school prayers, is that coercion? Even if there is no physical force, but “merely” peer pressure? Is a teacher in a public school subject to coercion if she can’t discuss intelligent design?