Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (20 page)

Property rights are at the center of the economic liberty myth. But for every right, there is a corresponding responsibility. And although conservatives tout personal responsibility, they say almost nothing about the property responsibilities that go with property rights. Yet property responsibilities have just as much to say about freedom as do property rights, but they are about the freedom of those affected by one’s ownership of property.

There are obvious responsibilities that go with owning property. Take real estate. Owners have the responsibility to pay property taxes (to maintain roads, sewers, schools), to keep the property up to code (for public safety), and to carry insurance (to cover liability to others as well as oneself). Business owners have responsibilities to their customers (to treat them fairly, to make sure products are safe) and to their community (to do no harm, to perform community service, to contribute like other community members). And of course they have fiduciary responsibilities to their investors (honesty, openness, producing profits). And there are further responsibilities. If there is a stream on your
property, you have a responsibility to your neighbors downstream not to pollute the stream, just as you have a responsibility to your neighbors not to pollute their air.

In short, property owners have a responsibility not to infringe on the freedom of their neighbors or the public.

In the economic liberty myth, freedom from lawsuits is a form of freedom from government interference in the market. At issue here is the civil justice system. Corporations have the power to do great harm, both to individuals and to the public at large. And as government deregulation proceeds, more and more governing power without accountability is placed in corporate hands, which gives corporations greater power to harm the public. Corporations are not subject to criminal prosecution; they cannot be put in jail or given the death penalty. But they can be sued. Only occasionally are corporate executives criminally liable and actually convicted.

When corporations harm members of the public, the civil justice system takes over where the criminal justice system leaves off. The civil justice system is best understood as a metaphorical version of the criminal justice system. In the civil justice system, the criminals are corporations, the victims are plaintiffs, the trial is a lawsuit, and there are a judge and a jury and a defense attorney. The biggest difference is that the roles of police, detectives, and prosecutor are all performed by trial lawyers, and the funding for the detective work and the prosecution all comes from attorneys’ fees.

“Tort reform” would cap compensatory damages and either cap or eliminate punitive damages. The result would be to destroy the civil justice system altogether by making it financially impossible for trial lawyers to function as detectives and prosecutors.
Given deregulation, the civil justice system is the last form of protection for the public against harmful corporate practices.

Since harm limits one’s freedom, so-called tort reform is an attack on freedom for all Americans.

The great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu studied what he called “cultural capital” and “social capital.” Cultural capital refers to the advantages in French society that come from the correct cultural background—upper-class family upbringing, having gone to the right schools, having worked in the right positions, and knowing the right people. Cultural capital also consists in things you know and know to do: how to speak well, what to wear, how to hold your fork, how to walk, what to do and not do to get ahead both economically and socially. Social capital constitutes the network of social relations that you enter into. Bourdieu pointed out that cultural and social capital play an enormous role in getting access to money and power.

The economic liberty myth says nothing of the role of cultural capital in financial success. It is about discipline, about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, not about using your family connections and your upper-class background. The reason is that the economic liberty myth is a populist myth, meant to apply to ordinary poor and middle-class people who have strict father morality—though the myth actually benefits conservative elites the most.

To put it bluntly, the economic liberty and ownership society myths are shams. They hide truths that completely undermine
them. Yet they are powerful and popular. They are powerful because they draw upon strict father morality, which defines self-identity for a great many Americans. They are popular because they have been repeated over and over for nearly thirty years by the right-wing message machine until they have changed the brains of tens of millions of Americans. The mere fact that they are fallacious is not sufficient to overcome their status as defining common sense for all those people. And arguing against them merely reinforces them.

Instead it is necessary to tell these truths in the form of a coherent progressive story. Here is an outline of what that story might be like.

• Since the days of the Commonwealths of Virginia and Massachusetts, it has been part of the genius of America to put together the common wealth for the common good to provide an infrastructure that everyone needs and can use to achieve his or her individual goals. That’s what taxes are about, and without them we would not have that infrastructure: highways, the Internet, public education, scientific research, the banking and court systems, the stock market, public buildings, levees to hold back floodwaters. Without such an infrastructure, America would break down, no business could flourish, and there would be little or no individual success. Without the commonwealth—government for our common good—there would be no America.
  

• America has always had a progressive work ethic based on fairness: If you work for a living, you should earn a living. Work is a contribution to society in general, and those who work should be compensated for their contributions to our overall well-being. The cheap labor trap is immoral and we must find a way to eliminate it.
  

• Adequate early childhood education provides an essential form of cultural capital and it should be available free to all children.
  

• The vast transfers of wealth from ordinary taxpayers to the wealthy have been unconscionable and must be stopped and, if possible, reversed.
  

• The business of America is business. Trust is central to American business practice, and trust comes from the exercise of property responsibilities.
  

• Large corporations should be understood as being like governments—using vast amounts of taxpayers’ money, bureaucratic, impersonal, often wasteful, and making decisions governing the everyday lives and the safety of the general public.
  

• Institutions that govern our lives should be accountable to the public. Governing power should not be transferred from publicly accountable forms of government to private, unaccountable forms of government.
  

• The civil justice system is there to protect us, and we must protect it.
  

• The great engines of wealth creation in America are public education and the diversity of ideas that starts with cultural diversity and the creativity it fosters.
  

• Markets are constructed and they are inherently moral instruments that should serve the common good.
  

These are the minimal guidelines for economic freedom, progressive style.

Religion has taken center stage in American politics. But it isn’t just any religion: Fundamentalist Christians have made political issues out of abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research, school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, evolution (and science in general), the separation of church and state, the right to proselytize, and even … Christmas! And they have done all this in the name of “freedom” and “liberty.”

The basic difference between progressive and fundamentalist Christians is in their central metaphor for God. If God is seen as a nurturant parent, you get a progressive Christianity. If God is understood as a strict father, you get a fundamentalist Christianity.

As we have seen in general in the case of strict and nurturant moral models, we all have both models, either actively or passively. And many people are biconceptual, having one model active in some aspects of their lives and the other active in other aspects of life. We expect nothing less of religion: views in which God is conceptualized as fully nurturant (the Unitarian Universalists), views in which God is conceptualized as fully strict (the fundamentalists of various denominations), and views where God is conceptualized as nurturant in some respects and strict in others.

Fundamentalists are a minority of American Christians, but
they wield enormous organizational, political, and media power. One of their most powerful weapons is language—language that makes it seem as if they are not just the typical Christians, but the real Christians, the ones who read the Bible literally and correctly and act from moral convictions to promote the Truth of the Gospel. They deploy a simple logic: Americans are mostly Christians, fundamentalists are both typical Christians and ideally moral Christians, therefore they are both typical and ideally moral Americans. They seem to want the word “Christian” to mean fundamentalist. And they are in the process of convincing the media of that logic: To be a good American is to be a good Christian is to be a fundamentalist Christian, whose idea of freedom is the correct view of freedom—the Gospel Truth. It is all empirically false, but if they can establish this frame, the truth won’t matter.

To keep conservative Christians from dominating the religious discourse, we need to understand a set of complicated issues: What, exactly, are the differences between progressive and conservative Christianity? How does the concept of freedom differ in these traditions? And how do these differences show up in politics?

To understand these issues, even at a basic level, we will need a bit of background. The contemporary discourse about religion and politics uses ideas like virtue, character, and morality. We need to understand better what is meant by these ideas in the progressive and conservative Christian traditions. In addition, there are two ideas that are central to the fundamentalist tradition: essence and teleology.

Human beings around the world tend to have a common folk theory of nature in which everything in the world is a
kind
of
thing, a member of a category. We attribute to each kind of thing an essence, some property or set of properties that makes something the kind of thing it is. Essences are part of the nature of things; things would not be what they are without their essences. Elephants wouldn’t be elephants without trunks, horses wouldn’t be horses without hooves, chairs wouldn’t be chairs without seats (or a surface to sit on).

Essences define the kinds of things there are in the world. It is assumed that everything has a given essence or it doesn’t. That means that categories have clear boundaries. Every animal is either an elephant or it isn’t.

Essences have causal powers: They determine the natural behavior of things. Part of the essence of a tree is to be made of wood, which is a substance that behaves in a certain way: It burns, you can carve it with a knife, etc. Therefore, a tree will burn and it can be carved with a knife.

In classical Greek philosophy, essences were typically divided into substance, form, and pattern of change. Trees are made of a substance: wood. Trees have a form: roots, trunk, limbs, branches, leaves, and fruit. Trees have a pattern of change: They grow from seeds, sprout, grow tall and develop a limb structure, grow leaves, and eventually die and fall over.

The natural behavior of trees is seen as following from these essences: They burn because they are made of wood, you can climb them because they have a trunk and limbs, and you can plant and cultivate them because they develop from seeds and bear fruit.

According to the theory of essences, the oak is already there in the acorn, since the pattern of change is inherent in the acorn: The acorn will naturally develop into the oak. Apply this to people: The person is there in the fertilized egg—at conception—since the fertilized egg, in the womb, will naturally develop into a child.

This idea, as we will see, is central to debates over abortion and stem-cell research.

Teleology is the idea that things don’t just happen; they are part of some larger coherent whole that has a built-in purpose or an end state that events are moving toward. Typically, you do not know what that purpose or end state is.

Teleology for living things is bound up with the notion of flourishing, doing well given the kind of thing you are. Thus, flowers are supposed to grow and bloom, fish are supposed to swim, birds (not counting penguins and ostriches) are supposed to fly and sing their songs—and all three are supposed to grow and reproduce.

Evolution explains this without teleology, of course: Things that flourish in their habitat tend to survive. But science or no science, people will always think in terms of teleology, because that is how the human mind works. Take a sentence such as “We developed thumbs so that we could pick things up better.” This is teleological thinking. It assumes that it was determined in advance that human beings should be able to pick things up easily, and that thumbs developed so that this end state could be realized.

If you see a complex organism made up of simple parts that function in an ingenious way, like the human eye, you may well view it—using teleology—as having an “intelligent design” created by a “designer.” This designer put together from scratch all the individual elements of the eye so that it could fulfill its purpose, which is to see. In the fundamentalist tradition, that designer is God.