Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea Page 6
The university failed in communicating its moral and educational mission to the public, while conservative opponents succeeded in framing admissions purely as a competition to be conducted fairly according to a narrow body of criteria, where unfair competition (based on race and ethnicity) compromised freedom.
Another example of contestation over what counts as competition is the issue of whether “intelligent design” is to be taught as science. Advocates of intelligent design have based their public relations campaign on the two very different meanings of the word “theory.” In everyday speech, there is a frame concerning truth. A “theory” is not an established truth and contrasts with a “fact.” “Just a theory” in this frame suggests that there is no good reason to believe it.
But science is about more than mere belief or conjecture. Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth. Science is fundamentally about freedom, freedom of inquiry into the truth without the bias of initial faith or belief. Within science as an institution, a “scientific theory” is in fact a material explanation of a huge range of data based on experiment and evidence. Within science, it is normal for theories to compete. The basis of competition is clear: amount of evidence, convergence of independent evidence from many areas, coverage of data, crucial experiments, degree and depth of explanation. The judges of the competition are distinguished scientists who have spent their careers studying the scientific evidence.
In the science of biology, evolution wins the competition, governed by the rules of the scientific method, hands down. There are no other legitimate competitors. Freedom here is freedom of objective inquiry, on the basis of evidence and explanation. Other theories are free to enter the competition, but if they do not follow the rules of the competition, they will be eliminated—fairly and justly.
Intelligent design advocates, who are often fundamentalist Christians, argue that living creatures are too well and intricately “designed” to have evolved without a designer—namely, God. Advocates of intelligent design refuse to accept the rules governing the competition. They frame science merely as belief. Their “theory” is as good as anybody else’s. In matters of belief, there should be no prejudice. Freedom here is freedom of expression, freedom to express your beliefs and have them accessible to the public.
The bottom line: The concept of competition is part of the logic of freedom. Competitions are governed by rules. If you are free to enter the competition, there is no abridgment of freedom. If you lose or are eliminated on the basis of the rules, there is no abridgment of freedom.
Intelligent design was free to enter the competition for a scientific theory of how human beings got here. It does not follow the rules defined by the scientific method and has been eliminated. There is no abridgment of freedom.
Scientists have not been very good at communicating this to the public. Nor have they been effective at explaining the threat to freedom posed by the advocates of intelligent design. It is a threat to the freedom of inquiry into the truth and to the moral imperative of science: to seek the truth without initial bias.
A single consistent logic of contested concepts is not possible. But a logic relating simple uncontested core concepts is possible. Coercion interferes with freedom is part of the logic of simple freedom. It uses the simple uncontested version of coercion—the use of force against someone’s will. We will call coercion in such a statement an “attendant concept” since it is part of the characterization of simple freedom. Other attendant concepts include harm, rights, justice, fairness, nature, and competition. These attendant concepts act like blanks to be filled in by worldviews, and when not filled in, they are vague.
Simple political freedom is about how simple freedom is affected by taking society into account, having a government, and recognizing social institutions. The logic of simple political freedom has additional attendant concepts—still more blanks to be filled in, as we shall see.
SIMPLE POLITICAL FREEDOM
Simple political freedom begins with the question of how a government can best serve the freedom of its citizens. It further recognizes not just individuals but also institutions: governmental institutions, business institutions, educational institutions, nongovernmental organizations (advocacy groups, think tanks, foundations), religious institutions, political parties, informal groups.
Given the massive political differences in our nation, it is remarkable that there is an uncontested version of political freedom. Political freedom begins with the idea of self-government: Tyrants and dictators can be avoided if we choose those who govern us and make sure that none of them has overriding power. The attendant concepts to simple political freedom are self-government and its democratic institutions—within the national government: Congress, the administration, and an independent judiciary, with a balance of powers and similar structures at lower levels; within civil society: free elections and political parties, a civilian-controlled military, a free market, free press/media, and free religious institutions.
At this level of oversimplification, all of this is uncontested. The details are, however, thoroughly contested: what counts as a balance of power, what is an independent judiciary, when are elections free, what is civilian control of the military, what is meant by a free market. The contestation has been very public: The president has declared a “war on terror” with no end and has taken on war powers indefinitely. He has claimed the authority to spy on American citizens without court orders and to overrule certain laws passed by Congress. Does this upset the balance of power? Is a judiciary independent if a majority of judges are chosen to fit a single political ideology? Is the freedom of a “free market” enhanced or abridged by government regulation, progressive taxation, class action lawsuits, unions, and businesssupplied health insurance? Is the air force civilian controlled when the air force academy is controlled by fundamentalist Christians and when the high-ranking military officers are largely conservatives? Is the press free when there is massive media consolidation, when there is little competition among major media outlets, and when control of major media organizations is in the hands of radical conservatives? Is there freedom of religion when fundamentalist evangelicals have gained the power to rewrite the laws of the land and impose their religious beliefs on the nation?
In addition, there are the contributions of government to freedom, both freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from involves protection. Everyone agrees that government should provide protection. But what is protection to mean? Is it military protection, police protection, disaster protection, protection from illness, protection from financial disaster? Is freedom from want included?
Freedom to involves access—access to resources that allow one to achieve one’s goals. But what counts as access? Is it access to education (early childhood education and public higher education), access to opportunity (via a federal role in job creation), access to public health institutions, access to the resources on public lands (grazing rights, timber harvesting, mining, oil drilling), access to lucrative government contracts, access to the public treasury (via subsidies and tax breaks)?
A higher-level question governing both cases is this: Should government promote the common good by lumping together the common wealth (taxes) to create a commonly available infrastructure? This is a progressive idea built on the view that we are, and should be, interdependent, that we can’t and shouldn’t go it alone, that we are all in this together.
Or should the government maximize privatization, building on the conservative idea that everybody is, and should be, on his or her own?
Then there is the role of institutions. Institutions (say, corporations) tend to be viewed metaphorically as people. Which of the rights of people should be guaranteed to corporations? Corporations in other respects act like governments; they rule many aspects of people’s lives, but without accountability. Is that democratic?
And what is self-government like? It is agreed that it should maintain order, prod
uce prosperity, and keep records. Is it order produced by authority or order produced by cooperation, responsibility, and trust? Is prosperity to be measured by the assets of the wealthiest, or by the distribution of wealth across income brackets? Is government to be open or secretive? Are its records freely available or locked up?
Finally, how does our national government relate to other governments and to individual people around the world? Does it see itself as part of a world community or as running the world? Does it promote the same freedoms for others around the world as for us?
It should now be clear that there is an uncontested concept of simple political freedom that has a rich collection of oversimplified attendant concepts and a rich logic. It should also be clear that each of these attendant concepts is highly contested.
THE UBIQUITY OF FREEDOM
Finally, there is general agreement on other major ideas and their relation to freedom—at least if one expresses them in uncontested terms.
Democracy is the freedom of a people to govern themselves.
Opportunity is the freedom to take part fully in civil society—to earn a living through work, to participate in civic organizations, to run for public office, to have access to public accommodations, to get an education, to have a chance at fulfillment in life.
Equality requires the same freedoms for all.
Fairness is when no one has more freedom than anyone else.
Education provides the information needed to sustain freedom and the ability to acquire such information.
Health keeps illness and other bodily harm from impinging on our freedom.
A free press provides free access to the information necessary to preserve freedom.
The free market’s proper role is to provide the freedom to engage in trade and to earn a living.
Religious freedom keeps us free from the rule of any church and free to practice any religion, or none.
Civilian control of the military keeps us free from military rule.
Academic freedom allows free inquiry.
Personal freedom defines a realm of “private life,” where individuals are free of the state, where the state cannot interfere with individuals pursuing their goals.
Here we can see just why freedom is our most important idea: It is at the center of all other important ideas.
Yet each of these cases is also open to contestation. What counts as being free from the rule of any church? Or from military rule? Or from state interference in private life? In each of these cases, there are very different views of freedom on the part of progressives and radical conservatives.
NEGATING FREEDOM
A crucial aspect of the logic of freedom is what it means to negate freedom. We constantly hear of threats to freedom, attacks on freedom, defending freedom, achieving freedom, spreading freedom, instilling freedom, expanding freedom, losing freedoms, taking our freedoms, regaining freedom, denying freedoms. And with these come ideas like repression, dictatorship, tyranny, oppression, and slavery. How do these enter the basic logic of freedom?
What, for example, is a threat to freedom? It can be a threat of coercion, or harm, or injustice; a threat to security, property, rights, or to the rule of law; or a threat to what is seen as the proper bounds of competition or nature. It can also be seen as a threat to any or all of those things tied to freedom: democracy, opportunity, fairness, equality, education, health, a free press, a free market, civilian control of the military, academic freedom, religious freedom, and personal freedom.
And most important for this book, a threat to free will is a threat to freedom, the imposition of a dangerous worldview without public awareness. When free will itself is threatened, that is the ultimate threat to freedom.
We have just worked through the logic of simple, uncontested freedom. That logic specifies the interactions between the uncontested version of freedom and the uncontested versions of all of the ideas that constitute our understanding of simple freedom: harm, coercion, property, rights, human rights, justice, law, nature, competition, democracy, opportunity, and fairness.
As we have begun to see, all of the above concepts are contested. But they tend to be contested in systematic ways—according to the frames of conservative and progressive world-views, which, we will see, are based on two very different ideas of the family.
PART II
CONTESTED FREEDOM
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THE NATION-AS-FAMILY METAPHOR
It is hardly surprising that nations are conceptualized metaphorically as families. As children, our first experience of being governed is in our family. We are “ruled” by our parents. We are protected in our homes and told what to do, what rules to follow, how to interact with others, and that we must respect our parents. Our first loyalty, of course, is to our family.
In monarchies, the royal family is the government; the king is the father. We know about monarchies and other patriarchal forms of government, which means we know about how parents can also be rulers. In the Catholic church—God’s Kingdom on Earth—the ruler of the church is called the Holy Father. And countries around the world are called by names such as Mother India, Mother Russia, and the Fatherland.
It should not be a shock that we Americans also conceptualize our nation metaphorically as a family. We have Founding Fathers. We send “our sons and daughters” to war. We have organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution. Groups in the military think of themselves as “bands of brothers.” In America, we have “homeland security,” where the nation’s landmass is seen as “home” to the nation seen as a “family.” And conservatives are clear about the centrality to their politics of “family values.”
What is not at all obvious, though, is that the family metaphor should play a deep conceptual role in our politics—a role so deep that it defines the shape of our politics and the major ideological rift that our nation now faces. And yet, the way we idealize families is central to our politics. In the nation-as-family metaphor, the family corresponds to the nation, the children correspond to adult citizens, and the parent corresponds to a national leader.
Political thought is complex. The range of issues and policies is vast, and new ones arise every day. Yet there is a system that ties people’s political views together. There is no objective reason why one’s views on abortion should have anything at all to do with one’s views on taxation, or on environmental regulations, or on owning guns, or on tort reform, or on torture. And yet radical conservatives tend to have the same views on all of these. And progressives tend to have the views opposite to those of radical conservatives on all these. What makes these two sets of views hang together?
The answer lies in the fact that Americans have two very different models of what an ideal family should be: a strict father family or a nurturant parent family. Whether or not one’s real family was like either of these—and real cases do exist by the millions—we all, nonetheless, acquire these ideal models as part of growing up in American culture. They are represented not only in our homes and communities but also in our movies, TV shows, novels, plays, fairy tales, and everyday stories. Strict and nurturant parenting are part of the fabric of everyday culture in America. When these two ideal family models are projected onto the nation by the nation-as-family metaphor, what results are two visions of what our nation should be: The strict father model is the basis of radically conservative politics and the nurturant parent model informs progressive politics.
As we shall see, the strict father and nurturant parent models are powerful. They not only shape and organize the major political ideologies of our time. They also apply systematically to the uncontested simple, but vague, concept of freedom, filling in the blanks in that concept in two very different ways, to yield two very different—and quite contested—concepts of freedom. It should not be surprising that the same metaphorical ideas—strictness and nurturance—that organize our systems of political thought shape the concepts of freedom that fit into those systems of thought.
Frames have emotional as well as intellectual content. The difference between strict and nurturant families is not merely structural, but also visceral and powerful because our experiences with our own families and families we have known are highly emotional.
Those frames govern how we reason.
A simple family frame can provide the basis for a whole worldview, a way of seeing every aspect of life.
Metaphors can project the same family-based frames onto different areas of experience—say, economics and religion—organizing these different areas conceptually in the same way.
Family-based frames and metaphors seem utterly natural and commonsensical—and hence true!
Family-based frames and metaphors are mostly unconscious, which makes them hard to examine consciously. Their very invisibility gives them power.
It is essential to note that these are idealized models of how a family should work—as opposed to how any particular family does work. Just about every member of American culture has, in his or her mind, versions of both strict and nurturant models, either actively or passively. Passive versions are not acted on, but rather are used for understanding cultural products like movies, TV shows, and novels. Thoroughgoing progressives use the nurturant model in every active part of their lives and the strict model only passively. Thoroughgoing conservatives use the strict father model in every aspect of their lives and the nurturant model only for understanding cultural products produced by progressives. But many Americans are partial progressives and partial conservatives, using both models actively, though in different parts of their lives.