Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (4 page)

In America, democracy is usually seen as the form of government that maximizes freedom through its institutions: free elections, free press, civil liberties, free markets, civilian control of the military, freedom of religion, and checks and balances on the powers of the branches of government.

A free society is one in which such “basic freedoms” are guaranteed by the state.

That is the simple story, the story in which “freedom is freedom is freedom.” If life were this simple, most Americans would agree that there is just one clear and uncontested idea of freedom.

But we don’t all agree. Not even close. The disagreement is fostered first by the vagueness of simple freedom. All of the crucial parts of simple freedom are left unspecified. What is to count as free will, ability, and interference?

The disagreements get more complex as we move to political freedom. What exactly does it mean for a state to guarantee freedom, to provide more freedom or take freedoms away? When is an election free, what is a free press, what counts as civil liberties, what is a free market, when do civilians control the military, and how can checks and balances best be realized?

Every essential component of both simple freedom and political freedom is open to contestation. They are all blanks to be filled in with greater detail, and they are all subject to argument over the best way to fill in those blanks.

Given this situation, you might expect chaos, a concept of freedom so diverse as to be utterly confusing, with no two people ever agreeing. What is remarkable is that our different ideas about freedom are
not
completely chaotic. Instead, what we find are two radically different well-structured ideas, grounded in metaphors of the family, each with relatively minor variations that have vast implications. Freedom is complex, but manageably complex. In order to understand how these two different versions of freedom emerge, we first need to look more closely at the uncontested core they depend upon.

Much of everyday thought is metaphorical, and we scarcely notice it. We think of time in spatial terms with the future as ahead of us and the past as behind us. We “look forward” to an event in the future and “look back” at an event in the past. One event may be “farther in the past” than another event. The inference is that it happened first.

Even thought itself is commonly understood using metaphors. Knowing is metaphorically thought of in terms of seeing, as in, “Do you see what I mean?” This is not mere wordplay. It is a way of understanding what thought is in terms of what vision is. If my writing is “unclear,” you won’t know what I wrote. If a comment is “enlightening,” it helps you understand. If a sentence is “opaque,” you don’t know what it means. Someone who kept you from knowing something can be said to have “pulled the wool over your eyes.” Reasoning about knowing uses reasoning about seeing—via metaphorical thought. It is indeed “eye opening” to realize that our idea of something as apparently nonphysical as knowing is grounded firmly in the physical realm.

Metaphorical thought is tied to embodied experience—the experience of space in the first case above and the experience of vision in the second. Metaphorical thought links abstract ideas to visceral, bodily experiences.

Freedom is a marvel of metaphorical thought. The idea of freedom is felt viscerally, in our bodies, because it is fundamentally understood in terms of our bodily experiences.

The language expressing the metaphorical ideas jumps out at you when you think of the opposite of freedom: “in chains,” “imprisoned,” “enslaved,” “trapped,” “oppressed,” “held down,” “held back,” “threatened,” “fearful,” “powerless.” We all had the experience as children of wanting to do something and being held down or held back, so that we were not free to do what we wanted. These bodily experiences form the basis of our everyday idea of simple freedom—for reasoning about freedom as well as for talking about freedom.

Freedom is being able to achieve purposes, either because nothing is stopping you or because you have the requisite capacities, or both. Much of what we seek to achieve is not just physical; our intended achievements normally extend to social realms: morality, politics, business, religion, communication, scholarship, art, and much more. Wherever there is an issue of setting and achieving goals, there is an issue of freedom—freedom thought of metaphorically, viscerally, in terms of functioning physically with your body in space to carry out some purposeful action.

Achieving purposes in general is understood metaphorically in three fundamental ways of functioning with one’s body:

• Reaching a desired destination (by moving through space)
  

• Getting some desired object (by moving one’s limbs)
  

• Performing a desired action (by moving one’s body)
  

Thus, we think about achievements in terms of reaching goals (desired destinations), getting things you want (desired objects), and doing things (desired actions).

The metaphorical ideas are expressed in metaphorical language. If you are physically
in chains
, you can neither move through space nor move your limbs. You can’t move where you want in space if you are
enslaved, imprisoned, trapped, held down
, or
held back
. You can’t perform a desired action or get a desired object if you are
powerless, threatened by overwhelming force
, or
frozen with fear
. Why is there a program called Head Start? Because of the metaphor that life purposes are destinations to be reached. Freedom is the freedom to
go as far as you can
in life, to
get what you want
in life, or to
achieve what you can
in life.

Freedom requires access—to a location, to an object, or to the space to perform an action. Access is a crucial idea in human thought. It can mean physical access, as when the path is clear to move to a location or an object and you have the physical means to do so. Perceptual access, as when your gaze can “reach” an object or when sounds can reach your ears, is crucial for freedom. To reach a goal, you must first see it—or “see” it in your mind’s eye. To heed a suspicion or respond to a calling, one must “hear”—literally or metaphorically.

You are not free to go somewhere, get something, or do something if access is blocked, or if there is no path (or road or bridge) to it. Freedom requires not just the
absence
of impediments to motion but also the
presence
of access. Inhibiting freedom is, metaphorically, not just throwing up roadblocks, holding one back, taking away power, imposing burdens or threats or harm, but also failing to provide access. Freedom may thus require creating access, which may involve building.

The metaphor of freedom as freedom of motion thus has two important parts: freedom
from
and freedom
to
. Freedom from concerns those things that can keep you from moving. Freedom to concerns making sure there is access. Thus you might be mentally or psychologically
blocked
, emotionally
powerless
or
threatened
, or lack the
access
that education and knowledge provide for achievement.

We can now see why freedom is a visceral concept. It is tied, fundamentally via metaphor, to our ability to move and to interference with moving. There is little that is more infuriating than interference with our everyday bodily movements. It is the embodiment of freedom via metaphor that makes it such an important and emotionally powerful concept.

Part of being an American, culturally, goes beyond achieving isolated purposes to having a purposeful life. Thus, life itself becomes structured in terms of space—goals you want to reach (where you want to be in life), things you want to get (rewards, awards, things that symbolize success), and things you want to do or achieve. Dreams are seen as lifetime purposes. “The American Dream” is based on this metaphor. Freedom then becomes being free to
live the dream
, with nothing holding you back or keeping you down.

Another important American metaphor is based on the idea of essences—essential properties (or capacities or abilities) that each person has within himself or herself. To live a purposeful life is to discover that essence and actualize it. Freedom here is freedom to
be all that you can be
, with nothing preventing us from realizing the potential to transform ourselves according to that essence.

These metaphors can be applied to any area of life: economic, social, aesthetic, political, religious, academic. For example, suppose you love art, have artistic talent, and decide you want to pursue a career as a visual artist. What does it mean to be free to do so? You will need access to an art school to develop your talent. That means a school will have to have a place for you, you will have to be admitted, you will have to have the money to attend,
you will need to be sufficiently free of personal obligations, you will have to have the fortitude to go through rigorous training, and you will have to be able to exercise your free will every step of the way without internal hang-ups stopping you. In short, the freedoms required to pursue a particular purposeful life may be extensive.

That such freedoms are needed is uncontested. What may be contested is how these freedoms are defined. Are they personal or political freedoms? Views differ, depending on what one takes to be the role of the state. For example, a state may shut down art schools in a crackdown on art as degenerate. That seems clearly an issue of political freedom. But suppose a government decided simply to defund public art programs, thinking art to be frivolous or unfriendly to its political agenda. Is that an imposition on political freedom? This would seem to be contestable, as are other cases: Political decisions about the economy may produce a depression, making it impossible for one to have the money to attend. A major hurricane may wipe out your hometown and destroy your home, or destroy the art school, because of political decisions about the priorities to be given to disaster relief. One may be a single parent of modest means requiring child care, and the state may not provide child care for single parents seeking an education. In short, the line between personal and political freedom is contestable in a wide range of cases.

The idea of a purposeful life makes freedom of central importance. Freedom—of many kinds—is required if you are to achieve your purposes in life. If you have goals, needs, or dreams, or require fulfillment in life—and Americans are supposed to have all of these—then the freedoms to achieve them become of uppermost importance, and the contestation over which of these are personal and which political is a serious issue.

Moreover, if you are a fundamentalist Christian and believe in “the purpose-driven life,” where God has a purpose for you and you have to achieve it to get into heaven and avoid the eternal
torture of hell, the freedoms required to achieve God’s purpose for you take on cosmic proportions.

At the heart of any social, moral, or political notion of freedom is freedom of the will. This is another case where metaphorical thought is busy at work.

We all do some things and not other things. Many are in our conscious control, and many are not. We cannot consciously control the beating of our hearts, the digestion of food, the feeling of pain, what sounds sound like to us, and so on. The same is true of what we think. Most thought is unconscious; as cognitive science has found, conscious thought is the tip of the iceberg of all the thinking we do. Yet we can consciously give in to a desire, make a plan, or set a priority—and we can consciously make a decision based on our evaluation of the pros and cons of our possible actions.

In the Western tradition, we have metaphorically understood this kind of decision making as if it were executed by a person-like entity residing in our minds whose job is to choose how we act—the “will.” In the Enlightenment, there was an elaborate metaphorical folk theory, called faculty psychology, in which the mind was a kind of society, with members who were individuals with different jobs. Among the members of the society of mind were Perception, Reason, Passion, Judgment, and Will. Perception gathered the sense data from the outside world; Reason figured out the consequences; Passion was the locus of desire; Will controlled action; and when Passion and Reason were in a standoff as to what Will should do, Judgment made the decision. Decision making was seen as a tug-of-war between Reason, who informs, and Passion, who just pulls us off the track. Will can be strong or
weak. To stand up to the pull of Passion, Will has to be strong. If Will acts according to the dictates of Reason, Will makes rational decisions. If Will is weak, it gives in to the tug of Passion and acts irrationally. And where there is a standoff, good Judgment is necessary for rational, sensible action. If this makes sense to you, you are still living with this seventeenth-century metaphor—as most Americans seem to be.

One of our most common metaphors for thought is motion in space, where the mind moves through space, where ideas are locations, and where reason is a force that pushes the mind in certain directions. If we are rational, we think
step-by-step
and directly, not
in circles
. If we don’t pay attention, our thoughts may
wander
. But if we think according to the force of reason, we will reach a rational conclusion.

When these two metaphors are combined, we get the idea of freedom of the will. Will is free to move in any direction, free to follow the course of reason or the pull of passion. But a person who is free, rational, and responsible uses free will as constrained by reason and good judgment. Thus, freedom in the simple case is not irrational free action or irresponsible free action left to wander willy-nilly. It is action that follows a particular path toward specific goals. The battle between reason and passion is the background to the very idea of discipline—directing the motion of our will according to reason.