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

  Besides Orwellian language, conservatives also speak to bi-conceptuals using uncontested versions of contested concepts, as we saw in the case of freedom. In short, they use words like “opportunity,” “security,” and “fairness” in contexts that fit their uncontested senses. The effect is to be compatible with whatever meaning those in the audience have, no matter what their politics.

  THE BIGGEST RATIONALIST MISTAKE

  Because rationalists see reason as conscious and literal, they miss framing and worldview effects. If you don’t believe that there are different, metaphorically defined worldviews, and if you don’t believe there are deep fundamental frames that determine how people reason across issue areas, then what are you to make of the enterprise of reframing? You are going to see it as a form of spin or propaganda, of using words to fool people. This is the worst rationalist mistake of all, because it hides the entire conceptual dimension of politics—all the frames, metaphors, prototypes, and narratives that give political thought and language its moral and emotional depth, complexity, and color.

  In short, there are five major rationalist mistakes:

  Believing that you can argue effectively against established frames with raw facts—that is, thinking that the truth will set you free

  Believing that voters vote on candidates’ positions on the issues, rather than on identity, values, trust, and authenticity—and on the symbolic value of the issues

  Believing that candidates should follow the polls, rather than try to change them

  Ignoring how biconceptuals work

  Believing that reframing is just spin or propaganda, rather than a means of telling deep truths effectively

  Does the failure of the rationalist myth mean that we should give up on reason and truth? Not at all. Instead, we should pay attention to cognitive science and get reason right so people can better see the truth about our social, political, and economic realities. What we need is a “higher rationality.”

  FREEDOM ISN’T FREE

  Freedom isn’t free. It isn’t something that was won for us back in 1776. We can’t take it for granted or just pass it on effortlessly to our children. The progressive freedoms that have defined our country have been expanded over time with great effort and sacrifice, and they are being beaten back and taken from us. Not by foreign enemies. Not by terrorists. But by radical conservatives, who are fellow Americans. It would be easy to say that they are hypocrites, not meaning what they say. Sometimes they are; many of them do lie and use Orwellian language. But on the whole, they do say what they mean. It would be easy to say that the radical conservatives are all evil, or greedy, or cruel, or irrational, or just plain stupid. But they are no more like that than the rest of us. It would be easy to say they are immoral. But they function with a morality of their own—one that we find immoral. It would be easy to say that they are not loyal Americans, not patriotic, not freedom loving. But they consider themselves even more patriotic than we are, and sincerely use “freedom” and “liberty” as their watchwords. It would be easy if we controlled the language of “freedom” and “liberty”—the language of our deepest values. But we don’t. They have commandeered our words and changed their meaning. We must take back the words, restore their meaning, and then do the hard work of taking back our government.

  There are two kinds of work that must be done. The first is political—uniting, organizing, recruiting candidates, training candidates and campaign workers, canvassing, building coalitions, and working though the media. Political work is relatively well understood and just takes money, organization, dedication, and hard work. Winning elections is crucial. But winning more elections—even taking back the House, the Senate, and the presidency, however necessary—is not enough. We must take back the very idea that defines our country—freedom. Unless that is done, the culture wars will continue, they will keep our country divided and make it less likely that elections alone will serve the cause of real freedom.

  Beyond the political work is the cognitive work—working on your own mind. This requires changing your brain, thinking in ways you have never thought before, understanding what you have not previously understood, and talking and listening in new ways. The cognitive work is more difficult than the day-to-day political work—partly because the political work is more familiar, and partly because cognitive work just is difficult.

  A HIGHER RATIONALITY

  What makes the cognitive work so hard is that it requires a new, higher rationality. We are used to thinking without thinking about it. We now have to become aware of how we and others are thinking and talking. We grew up assuming common sense. We now have to understand that one person’s common sense is another’s oppressive political ideology. We grew up thinking that freedom is freedom is freedom, that the word names a single common idea. We now have to be aware of contested concepts, that “freedom” means something radically different to the radical right—and so do other important words like “opportunity,” “fairness,” “responsibility,” “harm,” “compassion,” and even “God.”

  “SHOCKER!”

  On January 24, 2006, The New York Times’ Science Times section ran a story with the headline “A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious.” It was a report of a study by a team led by Drew Westen of Emory University.

  Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

  In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.

  The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.

  The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.

  After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The “cold reasoning” regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.

  To cognitive scientists this is hardly a “shocker.” Results of this sort have been known for more than thirty years, though it is wonderful to have MRI confirmation of what we would expect from three decades of research. The Westen team is to be congratulated. We knew that deep-seated frames would trump the facts. The role of cingulate and other brain regions was not known in advance, but it is not a surprise.

  What is sad is that the Science Times found it “A Shocker” that “Partisan Thought Is Unconscious,” when results about the unconscious nature of thought have been commonplace for three decades. The question is, How long will it take for the news and editorial departments of the Times to catch up to the science section?

  The problem, of course, lies less with the Times and other media than with the universities that train the journalists, pundits, candidates, staffs, pollsters, and strategists. Students of the social sciences and of communications rarely learn about even the most elementary properties of mind and brain. Public political discourse—in government, in the media, in the think tanks, and in the universities—has not incorporated
even the most basic facts.

  Perhaps the hardest reframing problem is reframing our own minds.

  FREEING FREE WILL

  What makes cognitive work so urgent and vital is that it affects free will itself. You can’t will something if you have no idea what it is. Before free will can operate, you must be able to conceptualize what you are willing. Since you can’t conceptualize without concepts, you can’t take back progressive freedom unless you know what progressive freedom is, that we are losing it, and what is replacing it.

  This book is about more than freedom in the political and patriotic sense. It is just as much about free will, about how we have begun to lose it and how to regain it. Parallel to the right-wing political machine is a right-wing mind machine. It works via language in at least two ways. First, via words and idioms, like “death tax,” “tax relief,” “judicial activism,” “war against terror,” “liberal elites,” “defending freedom,” “pro-life,” “tax and spend,” “legislate from the bench,” “cut spending,” “up-or-down vote,” “homosexual lifestyle,” “ownership society,” “cut and run,” and so on. Second, via arguments, such as “It’s your money. You earned it. You can spend it better than the government can.”

  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.

  PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND THE MEDIA

  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 hi
nt. 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.