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

by George Lakoff

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Deep frames are where the action is.

  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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Frames trump facts.

  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.

  • 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.

  • Contested concepts have uncontested cores.

  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.

  • 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.

  A HIGHER RATIONALITY

  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 “fr
ee 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.

  Free will is thus not totally free. It is radically constrained by the frames and metaphors shaping your brain and limiting how you see the world. Those frames and metaphors get there, to a remarkable extent, through repetition in the media.

  If this sounds a bit scary, it should. This is a scary time.

  Cognitive science, by making us at least aware of alternative frames and metaphors, acts in the service of extending the range of free will.

  Beyond writing as a scientist, I am also an advocate. I believe that one version of freedom is traditional and important to keep for the deepest moral reasons. I believe that the other version of freedom is dangerous to our democratic ideals and to the moral system behind the founding of our nation.

  My task in this book is to open up a discussion of these two views of freedom, to describe them as accurately as possible, and to discuss how to take back the progressive view of freedom that lies at the heart of our democracy—and to do so honestly, using framings, both deep and surface, that we really believe and that reveal the truth about our social, economic, and political realities.

  Traditional American freedom still reigns in the American mind. Nonetheless, the right has made serious inroads: Tens of millions of Americans now think about freedom through the right wing’s framing of the idea, and the evidence of that is in elections, in polls, in legislation, in judicial decisions, and all around us on radio and TV. There is a real danger that the right will succeed. They have control of all branches of government. They have a tight control on political infrastructure. They have the bully pulpit of the presidency. They have control of an important segment of the media (Fox and Clear Channel). And they have framed just about every issue in public debate so thoroughly and invisibly that even very intelligent, well-educated, savvy journalists don’t notice. No, they haven’t won, but they are making steady progress—and virtually without discussion.

  The danger is not just a matter of words, a quibble over semantics. This is a war over an idea. If the idea of freedom changes radically, then freedom as we have known it is lost. The reason is that people act on their ideas. Ideas are not abstract things. They are components of action. They define ideals. They create norms of behavior. They characterize right and wrong, and accordingly change our understanding of the past and the present, our vision of the future, and even the laws of the land. Ownership of the word means ownership of the idea that goes with the word, and with it, domination of the culture defined by that idea.

  Moreover, that domination does not end at our borders. The United States is the most powerful country on earth and it is dedicated to spreading its idea of freedom. Whose freedom will that be? If conservatives define foreign policy and control the definition of freedom itself, then the idea that they spread will not be the traditional American idea of freedom, but in many ways the very opposite.

  The radical right knows the stakes. The culture war they have declared is real. All the outrages I listed above are real: the Iraq War and its death and destruction, the destruction of our environment, the shrinking of our civil liberties, the devastation of our economy, the weakening of our educational system—all real, too real.

  THE PROGRESSIVES’ MYSTERY

  What progressives see as outrages conservative extremists hail as actions promoting freedom. Many progressives explain this by saying that conservatives are just greedy and mean. For the most part, I disagree. Some may be greedy and mean, but mostly they understand themselves as moral—but with a different morality.

  Freedom, as they are redefining it, is the keystone at the base of this morality and its political agenda. It unifies radical conservative positions on issues across a wide spectrum of domestic and foreign policy. Progressives tend to fight issue by issue, while for the right, Bush’s favorite phrase, “defending freedom” galvanizes the fight on many issues at once. Progressives are at a disadvantage against this worldview if they don’t recognize it—and then counter it with a coherent and articulated vision of their own.

  To illustrate this alien worldview, consider a line from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address: “Self-government relies, in the end, on the government of the self.” What does it mean? Why should it have a prominent place in his inaugural address?

  I am not here to discuss mysteries for mystery’s sake. If Americans are to hold on to freedom as they grew up with it, as they have come to know it and love it, then they have to understand that there is a radically different and frightening notion of what extremists on the right call “freedom” shaping our culture and our political life.

  You can’t stop it if you don’t see it.

  PART I

  UNCONTESTED FREEDOM

  1

  FREEDOM IS FREEDOM IS FREEDOM

  We all have what cognitive scientists call “folk theories,” implicit understandings of how things work. How does a thermostat work? Or an electric lightbulb? Or color vision?

  You might think that color is out there in the world and we just perceive it. That’s a folk theory that virtually everyone has. In reality, there are no colors out there in the world. None! Objects reflect wavelengths, but wavelengths aren’t colors. The experience of color is created by four factors: the wavelengths reflected by objects, the surrounding lighting conditions, the color cones in our eyes, and complex neural circuits in our brains. The activation of certain neurons is experienced as a given color. It may look to us like colors are out there in the things we see, but colors are really created through seeing with a body and brain.

  For most people, it doesn’t matter if their folk theory of color vision is false. They can go through life seeing colors, and even painting and mixing paints, perfectly well without ever knowing how color vision really works. But if you want to design a new color television or computer screen, you have to know more about how it really works.

  We also have folk theories of language and thought. They too can be mistaken. For example, it is commonly thought that words have fixed meanings, and that their meanings are given by what they refer to in the world. The theory arises partly because of the way we learn words as children—parents say the word and point to, or hold up, the object. The theory—let’s call it the single right meaning theory—says that there are clearly delineated sets of chairs and trees in the world, and “chair” refers to chairs, and “tree” refers to trees—and “freedom” refers to, well, freedom—a single, well-delineated condition in the world.

  This is the common folk theory behind Elaine Kamarck’s remark “Freedom is freedom is freedom,” or Rush Limbaugh’s refrain “Words mean things.”

  But in fact language is more complicated than that. “Over,” for example, has over one hundred meanings, as, for example, in walk over the mountain, paint over the graffiti, overqualified, look it over but don’t overlook anything, and get over it! These happen to be systematically related in a complicated way but are still distinct.

  “Freedom” is even more complicated. It is not a case where the word has many distinct meanings that we all agree on, like “over.” The problem is not with the word but with the idea, the very concept of freedom. The idea of freedom has different interpretations, depending on your moral and political worldview.

  But the folk theory of language, unlike the folk theory of color vision, has political consequences of the highest order! If most people think that the defining concept of this nation—freedom—has only one meaning, when it really has two almost opposite meanings, we are in an explosive situation, and one that can be manipulated by the side that is in power and has the most sway over the media, in this case, conservatives. It matters politically that the single right meaning folk theory is false.

  A really obvious example where a given concept has multiple contested interpretations is art. Classical Western art is realist, depictive, and representati
onal—art as imitation, paintings of landscapes and people, historical or mythical scenes, and everyday life. Modern art has challenged just about every precept of classical art, moving from realism to impressionism (the image is in the mind, not on the canvas), to abstraction (no depiction at all), to surrealism (depiction of the unreal), to abstract expressionism (expression of emotion), to field painting (exploration of color fields), to conceptual art (the art is in the idea), to performance art (the art is in what the artist does), and on and on.

  Classical art is still the reference point from which other traditions diverge, and its traits define what is contested and changed. Those traits include form, color, an artist implementing an idea, a viewer’s perception of the artwork. Think of the traits as blanks to be filled in, and the way they are filled in provides us with the various different understandings of what art is—realism, impressionism, surrealism, conceptual art. As we shall see, the concept of freedom works in a similar way: It too has an uncontested version and blanks to be filled in that produce different versions of freedom.

  We owe a great deal to W. B. Gallie, a professor of political science at Cambridge University in England, who provided a deep insight into concepts like art and freedom in his classic essay, “Essentially Contested Concepts.” Such concepts as freedom, democracy, and art are inherently subject to multiple interpretations, depending on your values, concerns, experiences, goals, and beliefs. Essentially contested concepts include such nonpolitical concepts as medicine (Western vs. Eastern; allopathic vs. homeopathic), economics (Keynesian vs. trickle-down), and even science itself (predictive, like classical physics, vs. explanatory, like evolution). Even the concept of a chair can be contested by competing schools of furniture design with different values, experiences, and goals. Can every concept be contested? We don’t know for sure, but it would not be surprising.