Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea Read online

  Strict father morality comes with the idea of the moral order, with man over nature, people over animals and plants—with the idea that nature is there purely for profit, to be exploited, not preserved. That is why conservatives frame the issue as owls versus people. The conservative frame of the moral order gives the answer: People are more important than owls. Trees are there for our profit.

  Profit, moreover, is taken in the narrow sense of direct causation: cut down the trees (direct causation), sell them (direct causation), and do it efficiently by clear-cutting to maximize profit—for logging corporations, their management, owners, and investors.

  But when systemic causation is brought into play, our understanding of profit changes. Forests prevent flooding, which destroys homes. Natural beauty brings tourists, who spend money on local businesses. The wealthy prefer vacation homes in and near forests, and they too spend money there on local businesses. That raises property values. Living and working near forests is healthy and enjoyable. “Profit” from forests need not mean just cutting down trees for corporations to sell.

  Conservatives tend to approach ecological issues in terms of direct causation—short-term jobs lost, profits lost. For what? A few owls. Progressives tend to look at ecological issues in terms of systemic causation over a long history and an indefinite future. Cost-benefit analysis uses direct causation implicitly. Do a calculation over a reasonably compact circumscribed region, a short-term starting and ending point, with only certain measurable things entering the calculation, with the values translated into monetary terms and based on the short-term corporate profits and costs. It’s all direct causal thinking, not the systemic thinking required by ecological issues.

  Conservative ideology questions the significance of global warming and even questions its existence. Global warming is the granddaddy of all systemic causation issues. Without a grasp of systemic causation, it cannot be comprehended at all. It is not surprising that it is conservatives, not progressives, who are in denial over the existence of global warming.

  CAUSATION, IDEOLOGY,

  AND PUBLIC POLICY

  Hurricane Katrina is a perfect illustration of systemic causation and the freedom issues that arise from it.

  We know that the strength of a hurricane depends on the amount of heating over the surface of water. As a result of global warming, the heating of the gulf waters has been rising steadily over the past few decades. The rise in 2005 indicated, via statistical correlation, that the heat of the gulf would produce an extraordinary number of class-four and class-five hurricanes. A certain percentage of those hurricanes head toward New Orleans. With more and more violent hurricanes in 2005, the odds were high that a class-four or-five storm would hit New Orleans. The warning came well in advance. But it was complex and systematic, not a direct prediction of a specific storm with a particular force on a particular date.

  The issue was moral and political action. The Bush administration ignored the warnings. Increases in the odds of a class-four or-five hurricane hitting New Orleans had been predicted for years. Hurricane experts noted that the levees needed repair. Funds were allocated—and then cut by the Bush administration and designated instead for two directly caused acts: the Iraq War and a specific tax cut, mostly going to the wealthiest Americans. Political ideology, under the cognitive governance of strict father morality, ruled the day. Direct causation won out over systemic causation.

  The right-wing attack on science is not an attack on all science. The sciences attacked are those that rely the most on systemic causation: evolution and global warming. There is no attack on Newtonian physics—no attack on billiard ball causation, conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, or even gravity (you drop something, it falls).

  CAUSATION AND TORTURE

  I wondered for many years how conservatives got away over and over with the bad apple defense. Take Abu Ghraib. We know that the people who carried out the torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and elsewhere were working from guidelines prepared by higher-ups, perhaps even at the level of the secretary of defense. Investigations have shown the systematic involvement of people in the military high command. Yet only some of the people actually doing the torturing have been tried and punished. The higher-ups have gone scot-free, on the bad apple defense: It was just some lower-level bad apples that caused the trouble. Why?

  The people prosecuted and punished were only those involved in unitary direct torture. They were not people in a system of torture policy, all of whom played a causal role. Systemic torture policy is pooh-poohed and ignored by conservatives. It seems not to fit their system of thought.

  CAUSATION AND SIN

  The distinction between systemic causality and freely willed direct causality occurs repeatedly in many disputes.

  My wood burning isn’t responsible for the woodsmoke pollution in my city.

  The water taken from the river for my farm won’t kill off all the fish in the river.

  The old-growth redwood I am buying for my deck won’t kill off the old-growth redwood forests.

  My smoking won’t give you cancer.

  In each case, the problem is systemic causation to which everyone contributes a little freely willed direct causal action that, in itself, has no noticeable effect; but the little causes in a system add up to a huge cause.

  Conservative populism, as discussed in Chapter 8, makes partial use of direct causal reasoning, pooh-poohing the progressives who are reasoning systemically and empathetically in terms of how the freedom of others is violated through systemic causation. Should you feel guilty for your small direct act that, in itself, adds up to little? A sin, in the typical case, is disobedience to a clear moral directive performed in a freely willed single direct act. A sin is something you have individual responsibility for. Where there is massive systemic causation that you contribute a tiny unnoticeable part to, is that a sin? Not from a strict father perspective. That’s one of the reasons that conservatives talk about “environmental wackos.” They tend not to count small systemic contributions as sins or immoral acts because there are no discernible consequences of the single freely willed direct act.

  A typical example is the “What would Jesus drive?” campaign against SUVs. Here is the text of a progressive Christian anti-SUV ad from the January 2003 edition of Christianity Today:

  To some, the question might seem amusing. But we take it seriously. As our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ teaches us, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31).

  Of all the choices we make as consumers, the cars we drive have the biggest impact on all of God’s creation. Car pollution causes illness and death, and most afflicts the elderly, poor, sick and young. It also contributes to global warming, putting millions at risk from drought, flood, hunger and homelessness.

  Transportation is now a moral choice and an issue for Christian reflection. It’s about more than engineering—it’s about ethics. About obedience. About loving our neighbor.

  So what would Jesus drive? We call upon America’s automobile industry to manufacture more fuel-efficient vehicles. And we call upon Christians to drive them.

  Because it’s about more than vehicles—it’s about values.

  This ad campaign originated with the Evangelical Environmental Network, publishers of Creation Care magazine. EEN is concerned with getting progressive Christians to understand the moral imperative of environmental issues—saving God’s creation, cleaning up pollution, and preserving the environment. One of their challenges is getting evangelical Christians to comprehend systemic causation and that it involves individual choices, which hence are matters of individual moral responsibility. Though the ad is overtly about SUVs, the issue is symbolic, intended to raise the general issue of individual responsibility for care for the environment.

  Specifically, the ad raises the religious question of whether you are morally free to pollute, or whether pollution, by causing harm, impinges on the freedom of others, and hence you are not morally free to poll
ute. Is your small freely willed contribution to systemic pollution a sin?

  The right-wing fundamentalist responses make fun of the very idea that contributing to pollution could count as a sin. If you want to get into heaven, you should avoid the real sins, things the Bible says not to do, the freely willed directly causal acts. Polluting doesn’t count as sin because, first, it is not a direct sinful act, and second, because pollution is the natural state of the earth since the Fall and you shouldn’t expect it to be pure.

  Here is Terry Watkins of Dial-the-Truth Ministries:

  This world is polluted.

  And it’s polluted bad. Very, very, bad …

  The REAL pollution took place 6,000 years ago in the garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve rebelled against the will of God and ate the forbidden fruit—this pure, clean, sinless, earth became polluted, cursed and dirty. This earth is a cursed, polluted, corrupt environment because of the rebellion of man …

  But God loves you SO much … More than you can even begin to conceive. He loved you SO much that He gave His only begotten Son to remove and cleanse the pollution of your sin. Jesus Christ came into this world to die on a cross, shed His precious, sinless, pure, unpolluted blood for you.

  Another response showing that contributing to pollution isn’t taken as sin is belittlement via punning. Here is Terry Watkins again:

  In Jeremiah the Lord drives the children of Israel in His Plymouth Fury:

  Behold, I will gather them out of all countries, whither I have driven them … in my fury … (Jeremiah 32:27).

  The fundamentalist response makes a joke out of the very idea.

  The libertarian response is interesting in another way. It reframes the question in terms of the market and consumer choice. Here is William L. Anderson of The Free Market, the Mises Institute monthly:

  they want the government to make sure you cannot spend your money where you would like, at least when it comes to purchasing automobiles … we are willing to trade some gasoline mileage for the safety and comfort that the vans provide. I do not think our choice was between sin and righteousness, but rather between one set of costs and another.

  Framing the choice in terms of the market removes moral responsibility. The market is seen, via metaphor, as both natural and moral—moral because the invisible hand (its natural mechanism) guarantees that it will maximize benefit for all. Operating within the market is therefore not harmful to anyone and cannot interfere with the freedom of others. This is free-market freedom at work. The act of choosing could not have been a sin simply because it is in the market—a market-based choice, not a direct violation of a biblical commandment. In the market, the issue of sin is moot—you cannot sin by buying an SUV.

  What is particularly interesting here is that the market is a causal system—an extremely complex system where it is difficult to determine the effect of any one choice. It inherently involves systemic causation. But the metaphor of the market—if each person seeks his own profit (direct causation), then the profit of all will be maximized (by the invisible hand)—turns a complex system via metaphor into a system governed by individual direct causation. Even the metaphor of a single invisible hand having the causal effect is a case of direct causation.

  You can see why the “What would Jesus drive?” campaign never caught on with conservative Christians.

  Many questions of freedom come down to questions of causation—systemic or direct. Because of the details of the strict father versus nurturant parent models, radical conservatives and progressives tend to see causality—and with it, morality—in very different ways. Moral responsibility is, of course, about freedom, about the question of what you are morally free to do. Differences in perceptions of causation have everything to do with differences in judgments about freedom and hence about what is moral.

  Suppose it is true that those using strict father morality tend to favor direct causation in moral decisions and largely ignore systemic causality, while those with nurturant parent morality readily admit systemic causality into moral decisions. What follows is a major split in our understanding of what is real—a split along moral and political lines!

  It is hard to overestimate how important this is. Our understanding of causation defines what we take to be real in the world and what we take to be the consequences of our actions. Political decisions affect reality. What is disturbing is that political ideology can so deeply affect the understanding of what is real and so thoroughly hide the real consequences of so many political decisions.

  I should point out, in conclusion, that the argument in this chapter—and in this book as a whole—is based on systemic causation. Conceptual systems are systems, after all. There are systems of conservative and progressive thought, and I am endeavoring to describe their causal effects. The irony, in this case, is that I am using systemic causation to study the difference between systemic and direct causation. It makes me wonder whether such a book could be written only by a progressive.

  PART III

  FORMS OF FREEDOM

  8

  PERSONAL FREEDOM AND POPULISM

  In political speeches, freedom is often spoken of in grand terms: self-government, free elections, freedom of speech and religion—the great ideas of American democracy. What is lost in this rhetoric are the nitty-gritty personal freedoms of everyday life, often unnoticed until they are gone.

  Liberals and conservatives have very different ideas of what constitutes nitty-gritty personal freedom. Indeed, in many cases what are freedoms for liberals contradicts what counts as freedom for conservatives. Understanding this difference is politically important, since it lies behind much of conservative populism—the idea that ordinary working people are under attack by a liberal elite and that conservatives represent the values of ordinary folks. This flies in the face of the liberal idea that liberals are the true populists, defending the material interests of the working poor and the middle class. Socioeconomic liberals wonder why poor and middle-class conservatives vote against their material self-interest; they recommend a populist electoral strategy without understanding conservative populism and the role that the conservative notion of personal freedom plays in it.

  Conservatives have a litany of lost freedoms, a litany that serves as a call to arms against the “liberal elite,” the snobs who, according to conservative orthodoxy, look down their noses at ordinary Americans trying to exercise their God-given freedoms. In the culture wars, the liberal attitude is called “political correctness,” a snide term suggesting that liberals think they know what’s right and are trying to impose it politically on ordinary people, who know better.

  WHAT IS CONSERVATIVE POPULISM?

  So far as I have been able to tell, conservative populism has several factors. The first is the ordinary people frame, in which there is a contrast between the elite and the ordinary people. In this frame, the ordinary people are the good people and the elite are their oppressors. The elite are snobs who look down on the ordinary people, and especially look down on their values. Snobbishness can have many parameters: wealth, education, body image, language, social position, body language, and taste in clothes, food, forms of recreation, consumer goods, places to shop.

  Populism is about identifying oneself as an ordinary person, oppressed by the elite. The ordinary person is poor, uneducated, hardworking (doing manual labor), physically strong, religious, patriotic, uses bad grammar, has loosely articulated pronunciation, and has a traditional sex role.

  Men fit certain stereotypes: in the South, good ol’ boys; in the Midwest, farmboys; in the West, cowboys. The word “boy” is not accidental here. There is a notion that “boys will be boys,” that a certain male naughtiness is part of the stereotype.

  Marketers have picked up on the stereotype. Music: country western. Recreation: Nascar races, football, gambling. Drink: workingman’s beer, namely, Bud, Miller, Coors. Car: SUV. Dress: jeans. Food: fast food, meat. Religion: fundamentalism. Shoes: boots (preferably cowboy boots).


  Conservative populism takes advantage of this stereotype and brands liberals: limousine liberals, Hollywood liberals, Volvo-driving Birkenstock-wearing latte-sipping sushi-eating liberals.

  Conservatives have politicized populism. Conservatism identifies the ordinary person as an ordinary American, a conservative patriot with conservative values (strict father morality). And they have identified the elite as the liberal elite, with liberal political and social values: feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, peace, protection, safety, anti–death penalty, high culture. Liberals are portrayed not just as effete social snobs, but as political snobs who tell people what to believe about politics—what is politically correct or PC.

  Conservative populism is significantly about freedom. Part of liberal oppression is the intrusion of liberal PC values on personal conservative freedoms.

  LIBERTY

  The word “liberty” tends to be used more by conservatives than by progressives. And the conservatives who use it tend to be populists. This entry in the Mac dictionary explains why: “Liberty” is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.

  “Liberty” may, like “freedom,” refer to the state of being free. But “liberty” comes with a very different frame than “freedom.”