Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea By George Lakoff (Farrar; Straus & Giroux, 277 pp., $23)
The field of linguistics has exported a number of big ideas to the world. They include the evolution of languages as an inspiration to Darwin for the evolution of species; the analysis of contrasting sounds as an inspiration for structuralism in literary theory and anthropology; the Whorfian hypothesis that language shapes thought; and Chomsky's theory of deep structure and universal grammar. Even by these standards, George Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House.
Lakoff is a distinguished linguist at Berkeley who trained with Chomsky in the 1960s, but broke with him to found first the school of generative semantics and then the school of cognitive linguistics, each of which tries in its way to explain language as a reflection of human thought processes rather than as an autonomous module of syntactic rules. Recently he has been cast as a savior of the Democratic Party in the wake of its shocking defeat in the 2004 election. He has conferred with the Democrats' leaders and strategists and addressed their caucuses, and his book Don't Think of an Elephant! has become a liberal talisman. Whose Freedom? is the latest installment of the linguist's efforts as campaign consultant. It is a reply to conservatives' repeated invocation of "freedom" to justify their agenda. It, too, is influencing prominent Democrats, to judge from its endorsements by Tom Daschle and Robert Reich.
Lakoff's theory begins with his analysis of metaphor in everyday language, first presented in 1980 in a brilliant little book written with Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By. When we say "I shot down his argument," or "He couldn't defend his position," or "She attacked my theory," we are alluding to an unstated metaphor that argument is war. Similarly, to say "Our marriage is at a crossroads," or "We've come a long way together," or "He decided to bail out of the relationship" is to assume metaphorically that love is a journey. These metaphors are never stated in so many words, but they saturate our language and spin off variations that people easily understand (such as "We need to step on the brakes"). In each case, people must grasp a deep equivalence between the abstract idea and the concrete experience. Lakoff insists, not unreasonably, that this is an important clue to our cognitive makeup.
But this isn't the half of it. Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors, with beliefs determined by the metaphors in which ideas are framed. Cognitive science has also shown that thinking depends on emotion, and that a person's rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. Together these discoveries undermine, in Lakoff's view, the Western ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality. Philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge and ethics, it is a succession of metaphors: Descartes's philosophy is based on the metaphor "knowing is seeing," Locke's on "the mind is a container," Kant's on "morality is a strict father." And political ideologies, too, cannot be understood in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor "society is a family." The political right likens society to a family ruled by authoritarian parenting, whereas the political left prefers a family cared for with nurturant parenting.
Political debates, according to Lakoff, are contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames that are "fixed in the neural structures of their brains" by sheer repetition. In George W. Bush's first term, for example, the president promised tax "relief," which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain. The Democrats were foolish to offer their own version of tax relief, which accepted the Republicans' framing; it was like asking people not to think of an elephant. Instead, they should have re-framed taxes as "membership fees" necessary to maintain the services and infrastructure of the society to which they belong. Likewise, the lawyers who are said to press "frivolous lawsuits" should be reframed as "public protection attorneys," and "activist judges" who "legislate from the bench" rebranded as "freedom judges."
And now, in his new book, Lakoff takes on the concept of freedom, which was mentioned forty-nine times in Bush's last inaugural address. American conservatism, he says, appeals to a notion of freedom rooted in strict-father morality--but this is a hijacking of the traditional American concept, which is based on progressive values of nurturance and empathy. The left and the right are also divided by another cognitive style: conservatives think in terms of direct causation, where a person's actions have an immediate billiard-ball effect (people get fat because they lack self-control), while progressives think in terms of systemic causation, in which effects fall out of complex social, ecological, and economic systems (people are fat because of an economic system that allows the food industry to lobby against government regulation).
There is much to admire in Lakoff's work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or references (just a generic reading list), and cites no studies from political science or economics, and barely mentions linguistics. Its use of cognitive neuroscience goes way beyond any consensus within that field, and its analysis of political ideologies is skewed by the author's own politics and limited by his disregard of centuries of prior thinking on the subject. And Lakoff's cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons fails on both intellectual and tactical grounds.
Let us begin with the cognitive science. As many of Lakoff's skeptical colleagues have noted, the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not imply that all thinking is concrete. People cannot use a metaphor to reason with unless they have a deeper grasp of which aspects of the metaphor should be taken seriously and which should be ignored. When reasoning about a relationship as a kind of journey, it is fine to mull over the counterpart to a common destination, or to the bumpy stretches along the way--but someone would be seriously deranged if he wondered whether he had time to pack, or whether the next gas station has clean restrooms. Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly. It must use a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic--progress toward a shared goal in the case of journeys and relationships, conflict in the case of argument and war--while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.
Also, most metaphors are not processed as metaphors as all. They may have been alive in the minds of the original coiners, who needed some sound to express a new concept (such as "attack" for aggressive criticism). But subsequent speakers may have kicked the ladder away and memorized the idiom by rote. That is why we hear so many dead metaphors such as "coming to a head" (which most people would avoid if they knew that it alludes to the buildup of pus in a pimple), mixed metaphors ("once you open a can of worms, they always come home to roost"), Goldwynisms ("a verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on"), and figurative uses of "literally," as in Baruch Korff's defense of Nixon during his Watergate ordeal: "The American press has literally emasculated the president." Laboratory experiments have confirmed that people don't think about the underlying image when understanding a familiar metaphor, only when they are faced with a new one.
Lakoff's way with brain science is even more dubious. It is true that "the frames that define common sense are instantiated physically in the brain," but only in the sense that every thought we think--permanent or transient, rational or irrational--is instantiated physically in the brain. The implication that frames, by being "physically fixed" in the brain, are especially insidious or hard to change, is gratuitous. Also, cognitive psychology has not shown that people absorb frames through sheer repetition. On the contrary, information is retained when it fits into a person's greater understanding of the subject matter. Nor is the claim that people are locked into a single frame anywhere to be found in cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes that people can nimbly switch among the many framings made available by their language. When Becky shouts across a room to Liz, an onlooker can construe the event as affecting Liz, creating a message, making noise, sending a message across the room, or just Becky moving her muscles in a certain way.
The upshot is that people can evaluate their metaphors. In everyday conversation they can call attention to them, such as the deconstruction of the "time is space" metaphor in the African American snap "Your mama's so dumb, she put a ruler on the side of the bed to see how long she slept." And in science, practitioners scrutinize and debate whether a given metaphor (heat as fluid, atom as solar system, gene as coded message) accurately captures the causal structure of the world, and if so, in which ways.
Finally, even if the intelligence of a single person can be buffeted by framing and other bounds on rationality, this does not mean that we cannot hope for something better from the fruits of many people thinking together--that is, from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science, which have been explicitly designed to overcome those limitations through open debate and the testing of hypotheses with data. All this belies Lakoff's cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality.
It undermines his tips in the political arena as well. Lakoff tells progressives not to engage conservatives on their own terms, not to present facts or appeal to the truth, and not to pay attention to polls. Instead they should try to pound new frames and metaphors into voters' brains. Don't worry that this is just spin or propaganda, he writes: it is part of the "higher rationality" that cognitive science is substituting for the old-fashioned kind based on universal disembodied reason.
But Lakoff's advice doesn't pass the giggle test. One can imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff's Orwellian advice to rebrand taxes as "membership fees." Surely no one has to hear the metaphor "tax relief" to think of taxes as an affliction; that sentiment has been around as long as taxes have been around. (Even Canadians, who tolerate a far more expansive government, grumble about their taxes.) Also, "taxes" and "membership fees" are not just two ways of framing the same thing. If you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will stop providing you with its services. But if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail. And even if taxes were like membership fees, aren't lower membership fees better than higher ones, all else being equal? Why should anyone feel the need to defend the very idea of an income tax? Other than the Ayn Randian fringe, has anyone recently proposed abolishing it?
In defending his voters-are-idiots theory, Lakoff has written that people do not realize that they are really better off with higher taxes, because any savings from a federal tax cut would be offset by increases in local taxes and private services. But if that is a fact, it would have to be demonstrated to a bureaucracy-jaded populace the old-fashioned way, as an argument backed with numbers. And that is the kind of wonkish analysis that Lakoff dismisses.
Now let us consider the metaphor "a nation is a family." Recall that in Lakoff's account, conservatives think of a strict father and progressives think of a nurturant ... well, here Lakoff runs into a wee problem. The metaphors in our language imply that the nurturing parent should be a mother, beginning with "nurture" itself, which comes from the same root as "to nurse." Just think of the difference in meaning between "to mother a child" and "to father a child"! The value that we sanctify next to apple pie is motherhood, not parenthood, and dictionaries list "caring" as one of the senses of "maternal" but not of "parental," to say nothing of "paternalistic," which means something else altogether. But it would be embarrassing if progressivism seemed to endorse the stereotype that women are more suited to nurturing children than men are, even if that is, by Lakoff's own logic, a "metaphor we live by." So political correctness trumps linguistics, and the counterpart to the strict father is an androgynous "nurturant parent."
Lakoff's theory is aimed at explaining a genuine puzzle: why the various positions clustering in left-wing and right-wing ideologies are found together. If someone is in favor of laissez-faire economics, it's a good bet the person will also favor judicial restraint, tough criminal punishment, and a strong military, and be opposed to expansive welfare programs, sexual permissiveness, and shocking art. Conversely, if someone is an environmental activist, it is likely that he or she will favor abortion rights, homosexual marriage, and soak-the-rich taxes. At first glance these positions would seem to have nothing in common. Lakoff argues that the two clusters fall out of the competing metaphors for the family, with the strict father demanding personal responsibility of his wayward children and punishing them when they misbehave, and the nurturant parent showing empathy and emphasizing interdependence.
Lakoff does not mention that others have pondered this question before him, going back at least to Hobbes, Rousseau, Burke, and Godwin. The standard contemporary analysis sees the political right as having a tragic vision in which human nature is permanently afflicted by limitations of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and the political left as having a utopian vision in which human nature is naturally innocent, but corrupted by defective social institutions and perfectible by reformed ones. The right therefore has an affinity for market economies, because people will always be more motivated to work for themselves and their families than for something called "society," and because no planner has the wisdom, information, and disinterest to run an economy from the top down. A tough defense and criminal justice system are needed because people will eternally be tempted to take what they want by force, so only the prospect of sure punishment makes conquest and crime unprofitable. And since we are always teetering on the brink of barbarism, social traditions in a functioning society should be respected as time-tested workarounds for the shortcomings of an unchanging human nature, as applicable today as when they developed, even if no one can explain their rationale.
The left, by contrast, is more likely to embrace George Bernard Shaw's (and later Robert Kennedy's) credo, "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?', I dream things that never were and ask 'why not?'" Psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, which should be scrutinized, morally judged, and constantly improved. Economies, social systems, and international relations should be consciously designed to bring about desirable outcomes.
This Enlightenment-inspired framing has a natural counterpart in Lakoff's nation-as-family metaphor, because different parenting styles follow from the assumption that children are noble savages and the assumption that they are nasty, brutish, and short. Every thoughtful parent struggles to balance discipline and compassion, and one can imagine how a dialectic between these extremes might be the mental model behind right-left debates on welfare, crime, and sexuality. It is less clear how the metaphor would handle economics, since family members do not transact business with one another, or defense, since other than the Hatfields and McCoys most families do not wage war against other families. And it cannot be reconciled with the concept of a democracy, in which citizens consent to be governed by representatives rather than being the infantilized dependents of their parents. But at least it is conceivable that a discipline-compassion dimension could shed light on our political psychology.
In any case, this is not the conceptual analysis that Lakoff provides. His nurturant parent marks out not the indulgent pole of the continuum but the ideal balancing point, setting "fair but reasonable limits" and being "authoritative without being authoritarian." His strict father, on the other hand, lives by Lewis Carroll's advice: "Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes." According to Lakoff, the ideal parent in the conservative worldview loves and cares only for those of his children "who measure up," and believes that "affection is important, either as a reward for obedience or to prevent alienation through a show of love despite painful punishment." Lakoff provides no evidence from linguistics or from surveys to show that this ludicrous ogre is the prototype of fatherhood in any common American conception of the family.
This put-up job is typical of Lakoff's book. While he ostensibly offers a scholarly analysis of political thought, Lakoff cannot stop himself from drawing horns on the conservative portrait and a halo on the progressive one. Nowhere is this more egregious than in his claim that conservatives think in terms of direct rather than systemic causation. Lakoff seems unaware that conservatives have been making exactly this accusation against progressives for centuries.
Laissez-faire economics, from Adam Smith to contemporary libertarians, is explicitly motivated by the systemic benefits of the market (remember the metaphor of the "invisible hand"?). Lakoff strikingly misunderstands his enemies here, repeatedly attributing to them the belief that capitalism is a system of moral reckoning designed to reward the industrious with prosperity and to punish the indolent with poverty. In fact, the theory behind free markets is that prices are a form of information about supply and demand that can be rapidly propagated through a huge decentralized network of buyers and sellers, giving rise to a distributed intelligence that allocates resources more efficiently than any central planner could hope to do. Whatever distribution of wealth results is an unplanned by-product, and in some conceptions is not appropriate for moralization one way or another. It is emphatically not, as Lakoff supposes (in a direct-causation mentality of his own), a moral system for doling out just deserts.
Likewise, cultural conservatives, from Burke to our own day, play up the systemic benefits of cultural traditions in bestowing unspoken standards of stability and decency on our social life. The "broken windows" theory of crime reduction is an obvious contemporary example. And both kinds of conservatives gleefully point to the direct remedies for social problems favored by progressives ("war on poverty" programs, strict emission limits to fix pollution, busing to negate educational inequality) and call attention to their unanticipated systemic consequences, such as perverse incentives and self-perpetuating bureaucratic fiefdoms. Now, none of this means that the conservative positions are unassailable. But it takes considerable ignorance, indeed chutzpah, for Lakoff to boast that only a progressive such as himself can even understand the difference between systemic and direct causation.
In examining the concept of freedom itself, Lakoff again makes little use of previous analyses. Freedom comes in two flavors. Negative freedom ("freedom from") is the right of people to act as they please without being coerced by others. It obviously must be subject to the limitation that "your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Just as obviously, freedom sometimes must be traded off against other social goods, such as economic equality, since even in a perfectly fair and free society, some people may end up richer than others through talent, effort, or luck.
Positive freedom ("freedom to") is the right of people to the conditions that enable them to act as they please, such as food, health, and education. The concept is far more problematic than negative freedom, because human wants are infinite, and because many of these wants can be satisfied only through the efforts of other humans. The idea that people have a right to paid vacations, central heating, and a college education would have been unthinkable throughout most of human history. (And what about air-conditioning, or orthodontics, or high-speed Internet access?) Also, my freedom to have my teeth fixed impinges on my dentist's freedom to sit at home and read the paper. For this reason, positive freedom requires an agreed-upon floor for the worst-off in a society with a given level of affluence, and presupposes an economic arrangement that gives providers an incentive to benefit recipients without being forced to do so at gunpoint. That is why many political thinkers (most notably Isaiah Berlin) have been suspicious of the very idea.
Since freedom must be traded off against other social goods (such as economic equality and social cohesion), political systems can be lined up according to where they locate the best compromise, ranging from anarchism to libertarianism to socialism to totalitarianism. For better or worse, American political sentiments tend to veer in the libertarian direction compared with other modern democracies. The tilt goes back to the Founders, who were obsessed with limiting governmental power but not terribly mindful of what happens to those who end up in the lower social and economic strata.
This brings us to Bush's invocation of freedom. I suspect it is futile to find a common ideology underlying the president's coalition of Christian fundamentalists, cultural conservatives, foreign interventionists, and economic libertarians, just as it would be to find the common denominator of the two Georges--McGovern and Wallace--in the Democratic Party of the 1960s and early 1970s. And there is no small irony in casting Dubya as a rigorous philosopher and a wizard with language. Still, there are discernible themes in his rhetoric of freedom.
Bush has capitalized on the concept of freedom in two ways. He has preserved the perception that Republicans are more economically libertarian than Democrats, and he has waged war against a foreign movement with an unmistakable totalitarian ideology. This still leaves his opponents with plenty of ammunition, such as his hypocritical protectionism and expansion of government, and his delusion that liberal democracy can be easily imposed on Arab societies. But his invocation of "freedom" has a semblance of coherence, and, like it or not, it resonates with many voters.
The same cannot be said for Lakoff's conception. "What I am calling progressive freedom," he writes, "is simply freedom in the American tradition--the understanding of freedom that I grew up with and have always loved about my country." Such an equation fails to acknowledge the possibility that Lakoff's preferences and the American tradition may not be the same thing. His understanding is pure positive freedom, while acknowledging none of its problems. It consists of appending the words "freedom to" in front of every item in a Berkeley-leftist wish list: freedom to live in a country with affirmative action, "ethical businesses," speech codes, not too many rich people, and pay in proportion to contributions to society. The list runs from the very specific--the freedom to eat "food that is pesticide free, hormone free, antibiotic free, free of genetically modified ingredients, healthy, and uncontaminated," to the very general, namely "the freedom to live in a country and a community governed by the traditional progressive values of empathy and responsibility."
"You give me a progressive issue," Lakoff boasts, "and I'll tell you how it comes down to a matter of freedom"--oblivious to the fact that he has just gutted the concept of freedom of all content. Actually, the damage is worse than that, because many of Lakoff's "freedoms" are demands that society conform to his personal vision of the good (right down to the ingredients of food), and thus are barely distinguishable from totalitarianism. How would he implement "pay in proportion to contributions to society through work"? Will a commissar decide that an opera singer deserves higher pay than a country singer, or that a seller of pork rinds should earn less than a seller of tiramisu? And his freedom not to be harmed by "hurtful language" is merely another name for the unlimited censorship of political speech. No doubt slaveholders found the speech of abolitionists to be "hurtful."
Probably not since The Greening of America has there been a manifesto with as much faith that the country's problems can be solved by the purity of the moral vision of the 1960s. Whose Freedom? shows no trace of the empirical lessons of the past three decades, such as the economic and humanitarian disaster of massively planned economies, or the impending failure of social insurance programs that ignore demographic arithmetic. Lakoff is contemptuous of the idea that social policy requires thinking in terms of trade-offs. His policy on terrorism is that "we do not defend our freedoms by giving up our freedoms." His response to pollution is to endorse the statement that "you are not morally free to pollute." One doesn't have to be a Republican to see this as jejune nonsense. Most of us are happy to give up our freedom to carry box cutters on airplanes, and as the progressive economist Robert Frank has put it (alluding to the costs of cleanups), "there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house."
What about the conservative conception of freedom? Here Snidely Whiplash pauses long enough from beating his children to explain it to us. As transmitted by Lakoff, the conservative conception includes "the freedom to hunt--regardless of whether I am hunting an endangered species." It acknowledges the need for "a free press, because business depends on many kinds of accurate information." Religious freedom implies "the freedom ... to put the Ten Commandments in every courthouse." Conservatives get their morality from strict obedience to their Protestant ministers, and this morality includes the belief that "pursuing self-interest is being moral," that abortion should be illegal because a woman pregnant out of wedlock has acted immorally and should be punished by having to bear the child, and that everyone "who is poor just hasn't had the discipline to use the free market to become prosperous," including "people impoverished by disaster, who, if they had been disciplined enough, would be okay and who have only themselves to blame if they're not."
The problem is that the misrepresentations are harmful both intellectually and tactically, and will backfire with all of this book's potential audiences. Any of Lakoff's allies on the left who think that their opponents are the imbeciles whom he describes will have their clocks cleaned in their first debate with a Young Republican. Lakoff's book will be red meat for his foes on the right, who can hold up his distortions as proof of liberals' insularity and incomprehension. And the people in the center, the ones he really wants to reach, will be turned off by his relentless self-congratulation, his unconcealed condescension, and his shameless caricaturing of beliefs with which they might have a modicum of sympathy.
Worst of all, by delineating such a narrow ideological province as "progressivism," Lakoff is ceding vast swaths of territory to the other side. If you think that recent history has taught us anything that requires amending orthodox '60s liberalism, if you think that free markets and free trade bring any economic benefits at all (while agreeing that they have side effects that must be mitigated), if you think that democratic governance requires finding optimal tradeoffs in dilemmas such as pollution, terrorism, crime, taxes, and welfare, then you are a "conservative." It is surprising that Lakoff is not a hero to more Republicans.
There is no shortage of things to criticize in the current administration. Corrupt, mendacious, incompetent, autocratic, reckless, hostile to science, and pathologically shortsighted, the Bush government has disenchanted even many conservatives. But it is not clear what is to be gained by analyzing these vices as the desired outcome of some coherent political philosophy, especially if it entails the implausible buffoon sketched by Lakoff. Nor does it seem profitable for the Democrats to brand themselves as the party that loves lawyers, taxes, and government regulation on principle, and that does not believe in free markets or individual discipline. Lakoff's faith in the power of euphemism to make these positions palatable to American voters is not justified by current cognitive science or brain science. I would not advise any politician to abandon traditional reason and logic for Lakoff's "higher rationality."
"The latest polls have come out," the political philosopher Jay Leno said last week, "and President Bush's approval ratings have dropped another 3 percent. In fact, he's so unpopular that the Democrats are going to have to work really, really hard to screw up this election." If they take the ideas of George Lakoff seriously, they just might succeed.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Blank Slate and editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.
A Review of: George Lakoff. Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 277 pages. $23.00.
In 1958, at the height of the Cold War and on ascending to the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, Isaiah Berlin delivered an inaugural lecture that has come to be widely and rightly regarded as a seminal contribution to twentieth-century political thought. In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin addressed his topic with a magisterial display of learning. Yet his aim was not exclusively scholarly. He spoke from a vantage point above the partisan politics of his day but with a view to the greatest political issue of the age — the contest between liberal democracy and communist totalitarianism.
At the heart of his lecture was a distinction between negative liberty, or freedom from the coercion of men and laws, and positive liberty, or the freedom to be one’s own master or participate in a particular way of life. Berlin showed that protection of the former drove the liberal tradition, while the latter had been appropriated and vigorously championed by opponents of the liberal tradition from both the communist left and fascist right. A liberal and man of the left who devoted much of his career as a historian of ideas to understanding sympathetically the liberal tradition’s critics, Berlin was careful in his lecture to bring out not only the nefarious uses to which the language and logic of positive liberty had been put by totalitarian systems, but also positive liberty’s genuine human appeal and its irreducible but limitedrole in any stable liberal and democratic order. He succeeded brilliantly in speaking both as a scholar shedding light on governing ideas and as a public intellectual keen to warn his colleagues and fellow citizens about the threat to individual freedom embodied in the Marxist temptation.
Because of Berlin’s achievement, we know that clarifying, at a historic juncture, the core idea of freedom, the variety of its meanings, and the major threats to it is a worthy endeavor. All the more reason to regret George Lakoff’s embarrassing attempt to shed light on these grand questions. A professor of linguistics at University of California at Berkeley and a partisan Democrat, Lakoff offers scarcely a word concerning the gravest threat by far to freedom in our age, that posed by Islamic extremism. Instead, he seeks to give a veneer of academic respectability to vulgar but increasingly common prejudices among left-of-center intellectuals concerning the menace of American conservatism, why progressives have lost power to conservatives, and what they can do to reclaim power and restore freedom. The result dishonors scholarship and ill serves the partisan cause Lakoff intends it to advance.
Yet there is method to Lakoff’s mess. His opinions echo those expressed in books and magazines in the past several years by leading lights on the left, including former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Boston College professor and prominent public intellectual Alan Wolfe, and New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart. Exposing Lakoff’s dismal performance illustrates the extent to which respectable publishing venues will go today in promoting ridiculous arguments, provided they are made by progressives in the service of demonizing conservatives and conservative ideas. It also brings into focus how, in writing about conservatives in America, leading progressives violate principles they themselves profess. And exposing Lakoff illuminates the foolishness of progressive intellectuals who make common cause with the least sober elements of their party. For if not the party’s intellectuals, who then will guide the Democrats in going beyond preaching to the converted? This should be of central concern to the party, since the formation of a governing majority in the United States still requires persuading that significant segment of the public that prefers fact to fantasy and wants to weigh evidence and arguments in an informed and cogent manner.
Lakoff came to national attention during campaign 2004 with a short book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. He applied theories that he had developed over a 40-year career in the field of cognitive science to show progressives that it is not enough for their ideas to be true and just. To win over voters they must appreciate the need to craft their message with a view to how people think and talk about politics. One would have thought that fancy academic theories were not necessary to persuade the party of Bill Clinton — whose campaigns and administrations, after all, cheerfully enshrined the term “spin” in the national lexicon — of what every high school student who has cast a vote in an election for class president knows full well: that how an issue is couched affects its popular appeal. Nevertheless, fueling the comforting conviction that their problem with the electorate had nothing to do with their message but was only a matter of how they communicated it, Democrats, after Kerry’s defeat, sent Lakoff’s stock soaring. Lakoff’s new book is meant to elaborate his advice for Democrats. It aims to demonstrate the centrality of freedom to almost all political debates in America; to vindicate the rightness in virtually all respects of the progressive interpretation and the wrongness of the conservative alternative; and to reveal the terms in which the mind grasps moral and political life so that Democrats can convince the country.
The first step is to recognize that “There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political world views dividing the country.” Enjoying the paradox, Lakoff asserts that in America, “The traditional idea of freedom is progressive.” As evidence, he observes that America is a “nation of activists” and the history of our country is marked by the steady expansion of democratic participation, the extension of civil rights, and the growth of opportunity.
True enough. Yet that same history is also marked by a celebration of rugged individualism, a devotion to free markets, a preference for local government over a far-away federal government, public moral crusades, strong religious faith, and periodic religious awakenings. In equating progressive freedom with the traditional idea of freedom in America, Lakoff commits a common error of argument, conflating a feature of a thing with its essence. Or perhaps he is slyly urging, as part of the new rhetoric of the Democratic Party, the specious reduction of the conflicting visions that constitute the American political tradition to a single progressive dimension.
The alternative to progressive freedom is not, in Lakoff’s telling, conservative freedom. Rather, it is freedom as understood by today’s “radical conservatives” or the “radical right.” However, insofar as he can find no nonradical conservatives in the present or the past worth taking seriously, and insofar as he equates radical conservatism with one of the two fundamental orientations of the American mind today, in practice, for Lakoff, radical conservatism is synonymous with conservatism.
The radical conservative concept of freedom, he says, represents the “reversal” of progressive freedom and is “in many ways the very opposite.” Its aim is to abolish the welfare state, return women to the home, keep minorities in second-class positions, and exploit workers for the sake of management. In Lakoff’s account, this second fundamental form of freedom is the hypocritical construction of the Christian right and George W. Bush. It does not appear to occur to Lakoff to consult the writings of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, William Buckley, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and George Will, among others, to determine the content of conservatism in America. Instead, as evidence of what conservatives in America believe, Lakoff offers highly tendentious characterizations of Bush administration policies and risible descriptions of social and religious conservatives. Blithely building on this severely flawed foundation, Lakoff asserts that the good or progressive concept of freedom and the bad or radical conservative concept of freedom represent alternative interpretations of a core or “simple understanding of freedom.” But what he identifies as freedom’s core meaning is neither simple nor uncontroversial: Freedom is being able to do what you want to do, that is, being able to choose a goal, have access to that goal, pursue that goal without anyone purposely preventing you. It is having the capacity or power to achieve the goal and being able to exercise your free will to choose and achieve the goal.
On this spoiled-child definition of freedom, one is unfree if one fails, for almost any reason, to obtain what one wants. Lakoff suggests that freedom is denied not only by the interference of another human being or the prohibitions of law — the core meaning of coercion in the liberal tradition — but also by lack of ability, natural obstacles, or misfortune. In purporting to put forward an “uncontested” definition of freedom, Lakoff commits one of the abuses against which Isaiah Berlin warned: collapsing the distinction between doing what one wants unimpeded by men or laws, or negative liberty, and the actual attainment of concrete goals, which is a form of positive liberty. Moreover, Lakoff puts this abuse of terms to partisan ends. He uses it to justify the assertion that individual freedom requires government not only to protect individual rights and secure certain basic minimums, but also to undertake the massively more ambitious task of guaranteeing substantive outcomes, an undertaking shown by history — a subject about which he says almost nothing — to result very often not in more freedom but in autocracy and oppression.
Lakoff contends that his two concepts of freedom correspond to two “radically different” moral and political world views, both of which are “grounded in the metaphor of the family.” The differing images of the family “play a deep conceptual role in our politics.” For progressives, all questions about freedom are framed in terms of the “nurturant parent model,” which emphasizes empathy and responsibility. In contrast, radical conservatives frame freedom in terms of the “strict father model,” which assumes that there is “absolute right and absolute wrong” and that it is the job of men to know and enforce that morality, while the job of women is to do as men instruct them. Walking among us, Lakoff says, are “biconceptuals” who apply both family models, but the existence of such individuals, who find truth in a variety of perspectives, appears to be of no particular political or theoretical relevance to him.
Despite his insistence on the role of metaphor in shaping judgment, Lakoff is no relativist arguing that morality is merely a construction of language. The progressive or nurturant family model, he believes, deserves to be realized in its fullness, while the radical conservative or strict father model is irredeemably warped and destructive. Of course, morals and politics rarely, if ever, present dichotomies as neat and clean as those Lakoff believes are undergirded by his linguistic theories. Accordingly, one would have to be mighty credulous to resist the suspicion that his nurturant parent model gives expression to an idealized self-image of the progressive mind — and that his strict father model reflects progressivism’s angry and ignorant caricature of its principal rival for power, a nasty depiction of the sort that one expects more from a petulant child than a nurturant parent.
Undaunted, Lakoff maintains that progressives and radical conservatives differ not only in their conclusions, but right down to their understanding of cause and effect in politics. Progressives, he claims, tend to think in terms of complex causation, so they accurately observe the variety of factors and the systemic forces that underlie actions and events. Alas, Lakoff’s example of progressive analysis of Iraq illustrates just the opposite: The war (a complex system) has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the maiming of hundreds of thousands of others. It has brought devastation to much of the infrastructure of the country, it has resulted in an unemployment rate of about 50 percent, it has led to women being far less free than before, and it has brought civil chaos to much of the country. In each case, the causation of lessened freedom is systemic.
Yes, Operation Iraqi Freedom has resulted in tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, but to judge the significance of this number one must know something of the complexities that Lakoff ignores: Between Iraq’s summer 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, Saddam killed approximately 250,000 Iraqis, and Unicef estimated that in 2002 alone 60,000 Iraqi children died as a result of Saddam’s theft of money under the cover of the un-backed Oil-for-Food Program. Moreover, the damage to its infrastructure from which Iraq suffers today is due in large measure to the devastation wrought by Saddam’s regime. In addition, contrary to Lakoff, the best estimates for the unemployment rate in 2005 were not 50 percent but 25 to 30 percent. Of course, these numbers are meaningless without information, of which Lakoff supplies none, concerning unemployment, wages, and opportunities before the invasion (according to the CIA’s World Factbook, no information on unemployment in Iraq in 2002 is available). As for his assertion that women were far freer under Saddam, one can only wonder which freedoms exactly he believes women enjoyed in Saddam’s brutal police state that they do not enjoy under their democratically ratified constitution and democratically elected national unity government.
Lakoff’s illustration of the “simple causation” analysis that guides radical conservative thinking about Iraq is no less preposterous: Bush toppled Saddam Hussein (direct causation in the war frame), freeing Iraqis by direct action from his tyranny. Those killed and maimed don’t count, since they are outside the war frame. Moreover, Bush has done nothing via direct causation to harm any Iraqis and so has not imposed on their freedom.
The first proposition is true. Does Lakoff doubt that Operation Iraqi Freedom liberated Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny? As for the propositions that follow, when has any member of the Bush administration ever argued that Iraqi casualties “don’t count” or that the disarray in Iraq today does not impair Iraqi freedom? Lakoff provides not one scintilla of evidence that a conservative of note or a substantial segment of the population holds such views, and so it is reasonable to see Lakoff’s arguments here as part of a zealous attempt to frame conservatives as contemptible.
Despite their inhumane moral code and false and pernicious views about causality, contemporary conservatives, argues Lakoff, have effectively stood truth on its head and managed to portray progressives as freedom’s enemies. To fight this grotesque perversion of the truth, progressives must not only vigorously insist on the wisdom of their principles, but also learn to vilify conservatives and portray them as the enemy within that they truly are: A progressive populism will also have to see ordinary Americans asprogressives and conservatives as a threatening elite — not merely wealthy and/or powerful, but as having values that represent a visceral threat to morality, identity, and patriotism: a threat to preserving the land, strengthening nurturant communities, living progressive religious values, supporting nurturant family life, making a living helping others and the community in general, finding security, identifying with one’s country, devoting oneself to traditional progressive values.
It would have been extremely interesting to see Lakoff explain how teaching his fellow citizens to blame conservatives for all that is bad in America and to marshal resources to “destroy conservative populism” in the country comports with the empathy and responsibility that he asserts are hallmarks of progressive thought. And while he was at it, Lakoff might also have commented on how an absolute division of American politics into good guys and bad guys reflects the appreciation of the complexity of social and political life that he ascribes to the progressive mind.
Instead, he directs his conceptual bludgeon to the domain of religion. Avoiding discussion of Christian doctrine and the great disputes that have animated Christianity for two millennia, Lakoff asserts that its truth is embodied in progressive Christianity, which, when properly understood, is indistinguishable from progressive freedom: Realizing the values of Jesus in the world requires not just personal action but also political action — action through the state. The politics of progressive religion is not narrowly about matters of the church; it is about the broadest range of issues that have an effect on human flourishing. Today, following in the footsteps of Jesus means being a political activist as well as a virtuous individual. In his best of all possible syntheses, progressives are both the genuine traditionalists in America and the authentic Christians.
Needless to say, Bush’s brand of Christianity — the hopelessly archaic sort which centers around faith in God — represents the opposite extreme. Lakoff purports to finds evidence of its thoroughly corrupting character in Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, in which the president made the case for promoting liberty and democracy abroad. Yet Lakoff’s exegesis only serves to further diminish his own credibility. He contends that Bush’s “association of democracy and freedom with fundamentalist Christianity and creationism is made by referent to the ‘the Maker of Heaven and Earth,’ followed up by ‘the imperative of self-government,’ where ‘imperative’ suggests obedience to God’s commandments.”
Could it be that Lakoff is unaware that the Declaration of Independence — certainly not a document of Christian extremists — proclaims that democracy and freedom are rooted in the inalienable rights with which human beings are endowed by the Creator? Does he not realize that plenty of Christian progressives as well as Jews of all political persuasions embrace the Bible’s teaching that human beings are holy because they are made by the Maker of Heaven and Earth in His image? Can he be oblivious of the fact that Bush’s words are fully in line with the modern liberal tradition, which teaches that self-government has special imperatives that can be derived from human nature without reference to God’s commandments?
Lakoff goes on to insist that in Bush’s speech, “The fundamentalist battle of good against evil is echoed in ‘life is fragile, and evil is real.’” But one does not have to be a fundamentalist — indeed, one need only know something of oneself, observe others, and study history — to conclude that life is fragile and evil is real.
At the end of his book, Lakoff turns to practical matters. To win back America, he says, it will be necessary for progressives to achieve a “higher rationality,” which appreciates the political importance of the truths about framing laid out in his book. This will be “hard to achieve,” he warns, because of the polarization of American political life: It is hard to go beyond the Punch-and-Judy journalism where people with different world views scream past each other. It is hard to go beyond the Punch-and-Judy show of everyday life, at the office, at the holiday dinner table, with neighbors, hard not to feel anything more than frustration and anger at people you find immoral, irrational, and uniformed, and proud of it, proud of their patriotism and their common sense. It is hard to recognize that what passes for common sense can be terribly mistaken.
Even more hard to understand is why Lakoff believes that a book proclaiming that one party is the natural home of all that is good and just and the other party represents freedom’s implacable enemy will do anything but encourage the divisiveness he purports to deplore.
If, in thinking about the idea of freedom, Lakoff actually had exercised some of the empathy and responsibility with which he maintains progressives are so uniquely and richly endowed, he might have discovered that progressivism’s truths are at best partial and that it suffers from characteristic errors and excesses. This would have prepared him to make the further discovery that conservatism’s errors and excesses are not the whole story and that its distinctive priorities and expertise make a critical contribution to the theory and practice of liberal democracy in America. These discoveries in turn would have laid the foundation for understanding the many facets of the idea of freedom — the liberal idea of the natural freedom of all — on which America was founded. And that the vitality of democracy in America depends on the continuing contest in our political and intellectual life between the progressive and conservative interpretations of freedom to which the larger liberalism that constitutes America naturally gives rise.
Those who step forward to address the public on such issues of broad concern as the meaning of freedom — especially those, like Lakoff, playing up their scholarly credentials — should aim to elevate the national debate. This is what Isaiah Berlin achieved so memorably during the Cold War and what Lakoff, at this moment of peril for liberal democracy, fails so spectacularly to do. Indeed, Lakoff’s book provides an excellent example of what progressives, Democrats, and all who care about freedom in America don’t need, especially now.
Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
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