Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (2 page)

In thinking this way, progressives are blinding themselves to the real and constant progress by the radical right toward cultural and political domination. It is tempting to dismiss Bush and members of the radical right as liars and hypocrites—but this is too easy. It is much scarier to think of Bush and others on the right as meaning what they say—as having a concept of “freedom” so alien to progressives that many progressives cannot even understand it, much less defend against it. Even more troubling is that the right’s gradual takeover of the idea of freedom is going by unnoticed by a great many people.

Most Americans believe that “freedom” has only one meaning. It serves the purposes of the right when the public believes that conservatives and progressives are using the same idea, disagreeing only over which side is its more vigorous champion. It serves the purposes of the right to say that there is no theft, not even a challenge, going on. The longer the attempted theft remains invisible, the better its chance of succeeding.

Even Democrats with impeccable liberal credentials are helping the radical right by engaging in denial. I was a guest on an NPR program just after Bush’s second inaugural, discussing the remarkable repetition of the word “freedom” in the speech. The guest who followed me was the brilliant and articulate Elaine Kamarck, an important figure in the Clinton administration, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She denied that there was, or could be, more than one meaning of freedom. “Freedom is freedom is freedom,” she declared with utter assurance,
echoing Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose.” The right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh soon echoed Kamarck: There’s one idea of freedom and only one. If Bush-Limbaugh freedom is the only idea of freedom in America, then the radical right has won.

But they have not won, not yet!

If they had won, if freedom had been redefined throughout America in their terms, if our freedom were gone and theirs were in its place, then there would be no need for them to repeat the word over and over and over. The point of repetition is to change not just people’s minds but also their very brains. If they had succeeded in getting their view of freedom into the brains of all, or even most, Americans, then they could simply take freedom as they define it for granted.

I will be approaching the idea of freedom from the perspective of cognitive science—the interdisciplinary study of mind.

There are many excellent books on freedom written from various intellectual perspectives: intellectual history, political science, public policy, sociology, law, philosophy. The history of attempts to understand the idea of freedom has a great deal to teach us, and I am deeply grateful for the important scholarship in these areas. Nonetheless, these studies have limitations. Freedom and other political ideas are products of the human mind. They are inescapably the results of human mental processes. Cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, as these fields have developed in the past three decades, have given us a new and deeper understanding of mental processes and the ideas they generate, including political ideas.

Cognitive science has produced a number of dramatic and
important results—results that bear centrally on contemporary politics, though in a way that is not immediately obvious.

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We think with our brains
.

The concepts we think with are physically instantiated in the synapses and neural circuitry of our brains. Thought is physical. And neural circuits, once established, do not change quickly or easily.

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Repetition of language has the power to change brains
.

When a word or phrase is repeated over and over for a long period of time, the neural circuits that compute its meaning are activated repeatedly in the brain. As the neurons in those circuits fire, the synapses connecting the neurons in the circuits get stronger and the circuits may eventually become permanent, which happens when you learn the meaning of any word in your fixed vocabulary. Learning a word physically changes your brain, and the meaning of that word becomes physically instantiated in your brain.

For example, the word “freedom,” if repeatedly associated with radical conservative themes, may be learned not with its traditional progressive meaning, but with a radical conservative meaning. “Freedom” is being redefined brain by brain.

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Most thought is unconscious
.

Because thought occurs at the neural level, most of our thinking is not available to conscious introspection. Thus, you may not know your own reasoning processes. For example, you may not be aware of the moral or political principles that lie behind the political conclusions that you reach quickly and automatically.

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All thought uses conceptual frames
.

“Frames” are mental structures of limited scope, with a systematic internal organization. For example, our simple frame for
“war” includes semantic roles: the countries at war, their leaders, their armies, with soldiers and commanders, weapons, attacks, and battlefields. The frame includes specific knowledge: In the United States, the president is the commander in chief and has war powers; war’s purpose is to protect the country; the war is over and won when the other army surrenders. All words are defined with respect to frames.

Thus, declaring a “war on terror” against an elusive and amorphous enemy gave President Bush special war powers that could be extended and used indefinitely, even against American citizens. The Iraq War framed Iraq as a threat to our nation, making anyone against the war a traitor; when the United States marched into Baghdad, the war frame said the war was over—”Mission Accomplished.”

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Frames have boundaries
.

Iraqi soldiers, tanks, and planes, and Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, were inside the war frame, since they fit the semantic roles of the frame. Outside the war frame were ordinary Iraqis—killed and maimed by the tens of thousands—the resentment in Iraqi families caused by those deaths and maimings, the damage to the Iraqi infrastructure, the Iraqi jobs lost because of that damage, the resistance to the American occupation, Iraqi culture and religion, the “insurgents,” the ancient artifacts in the Iraqi museums, the relatives of American soldiers, American social programs cut, the mounting American deficit, the attitudes toward Americans around the world. When you think within a frame, you tend to ignore what is outside the frame.

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Language can be used to reframe a situation
.

The Bush administration first framed the Iraq War as “regime change,” as though the country would remain intact except for who ran the government. Saddam Hussein would “fall”—symbolized by his statue falling, an image played over and over on American TV—and a new democratic government would immediately
replace the old tyranny. As the insurgency began to emerge, it became clear that the old frame was inoperative, and a reframing took place: Iraq became “the main front in the war on terror.”

Fox News used the headline “War on Terror” whenever footage of the insurgency was shown. During the 2004 election, Republicans were advised not to say “Iraq War” but to use “war on terror” instead, whenever possible. At the time of the election, three out of four Bush supporters believed that Saddam Hussein had given “substantial support” to al-Qaeda terrorists, as shown in a poll a few weeks before the election by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. The reframing worked.

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Frames characterize ideas; they may be “deep” or “surface” frames
.

Deep frames structure your moral system or your worldview. Surface frames have a much smaller scope. They are associated with particular words or phrases, and with modes of communication. The reframing of the Iraq War as a “front in the war on terror” was a surface reframing. Words are defined mostly in terms of surface frames. Examples are labels like “death tax,” “activist judges,” “frivolous lawsuits,” “liberal elites,” and “politically correct,” which are used by the right to trigger revulsion.

In politics, whoever frames the debate tends to win the debate. Over the past thirty-five years, conservatives have framed most of the issues in American political discourse.

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Deep frames are where the action is
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The deep frames are the ones that structure how you view the world. They characterize moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of your very identity. Deep framing is the conceptual infrastructure of the mind: the foundation, walls, and beams of that edifice. Without the deep frames, there is nothing for the surface message frames to hang on.

As we shall see, the conservative reframing of “freedom” is a deep reframing. The surface frames that go with slogans and clever phrases are effective only given the deep frames.

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Most thought uses conceptual metaphors
.

Metaphorical thought is normal and used constantly, and we act on these metaphors. In a phrase like “tax relief,” for example, taxation is seen as an affliction to be eliminated. Moral and political reasoning are highly metaphorical, but we are usually unaware of the metaphors we think with and live by.

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Most thought does not follow the laws of logic
.

Thinking in frames and metaphors is normal and gives rise to inferences that do not fit laws of logic as mathematical logicians have formulated them. Political and economic reasoning uses frames and metaphors rather than pure laws of logic. Since metaphors and frames may vary from person to person, not all forms of reason are universal.

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The frames and metaphors in our brains define common sense
.

Commonsense reasoning is just the reasoning we do using the frames and metaphors in our brains. The conservative domination of public political discourse has been changing what Americans mean by common sense.

Our commonsense ideas may not fit the world. Frames and metaphors are mental constructs that we use to understand the world and to live our lives, but the world does not necessarily accommodate itself to our mental constructs.

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Frames trump facts
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Suppose a fact is inconsistent with the frames and metaphors in your brain that define common sense. Then the frame or metaphor will stay, and the fact will be ignored. For facts to make sense they must fit existing frames and metaphors in the brain.
Facts matter, and proper framing—both deep and surface—is needed to communicate the truth about our economic, social, and political realities.

Important national policies are made on the basis of deep frames, which characterize our most abiding values and define who we are morally, socially, and politically, and facts, that is, realities made urgent by those values. If facts are to make sense and be perceived as urgent, they must be framed in terms of the deep values that make them urgent.

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Conservatives and progressives think with different frames and metaphors
.

In
Moral Politics
, I showed in great detail how complex conservative and progressive systems of thought are organized via metaphor around idealized models of strict father and nurturant parent families. This is hard to see when you think issue by issue, but it becomes clear when we understand how issues are organized across issue areas.

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Contested concepts have uncontested cores
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Important ideas like freedom that involve values and have a complex internal structure are usually contested—that is, different people have different understandings of what they mean. In general, contested concepts have uncontested cores—central meanings that almost everyone agrees on. The contested parts are left unspecified, blanks to be filled in by deep frames and metaphors.

For example, coercion impinges on freedom. But different people mean different things by “coercion.” In the uncontested case, “coercion” is not further specified; it is left vague, a blank to be filled in.

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Rational thought requires emotion
.

It used to be believed that emotion mostly interfered with rationality. But when people lose the capacity to feel emotions,
they also lose the capacity to think rationally. Conservatives have learned far better than liberals how to take advantage of the links between emotion and rationality. They are especially adept at using fear to influence voters.

What does all this have to do with freedom? Everything.

As will become clear, freedom, like any other social and political concept, is composed of frames and metaphors. It is also what is called an “essentially contested concept”: There will always be radical disagreement about it. It has an uncontested core that we all agree on. But it is a vague freedom; all the important blanks remain to be filled in. When the blanks are filled in by progressives and conservatives, what results are two radically different ideas expressed by the same word, “freedom.” Currently, radical conservatives, as part of the “culture war” they have declared, are fighting to fill in the blanks and thereby redefine freedom in their way. Currently the right is winning this battle.

Americans need to know what is happening to their most precious idea.

I have two roles in this book. On the one hand, I am a linguist and a cognitive scientist. In this role, I am examining two very different forms of reason, in the service of a higher rationality that the tools of cognitive science provide. I believe it is vital to know how we think and to understand our forms of political discourse, to step outside of our own political beliefs and to see how moral and political reasoning work for both ourselves and others.

At stake here is the deepest form of freedom—the freedom that comes from knowing your own mind. If you are unaware of your own deep frames and metaphors, then you are unaware
of the basis for your moral and political choices. Moreover, your deep frames and metaphors define the range within which your “free will” operates. You can’t will something that is outside your capacity to imagine. Free will can operate only on ideas in your brain; it cannot operate on ideas you do not have.