This book is an excellent critical look at the definition of “freedom” and “free will”. And how America’s traditional progressive interpretation of freedom, is being undermined by a reactionary concept of freedom. I could elaborate, but the following book reviewer articulates it much better. In short, the radical right is in the very process of redefining the very idea of freedom. What do they consider “freedom”? Briefly, what they want to conserve is the situation prior to the great expansion of traditional american ideas of freedom: before the great expansion of voting rights, civil rights legislation, public health and pensions, before worker and labor protections, before scientific discoveries contradicted religious dogma.
Don’t believe me? Google the “Constitution in Exile” and “Strict Constructionist” phrases. And then tell me these people don’t want to go back to 1792.
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Book Review: George Lakoff's "Whose Freedom?"
“Whose Freedom?”
The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea
By George Lakoff
Freedom’s just another word for ... well, completely different worldviews, according to George Lakoff’s new book, Whose Freedom?, and these differences are often unrecognized by progressives, making it nearly impossible to fight that right-wing mind machine the author dissects in detail in his newest book.
The renowned progressive linguist begins his analysis of the differences between conservative and progressive definitions of freedom with the assertion that until the rise of the modern right wing, there was indeed a near-universal acceptance of what freedom means to American citizens. He points to a history of slow but consistent expansion and inclusion of more categories of people legally empowered by the term, from the outlawing of slavery, to granting voting rights to African Americans and women, to FDR’s insistence that economic security is more than just a desirable condition for the exercise of rights. To be sure, progress has often been unsteady in practice and uneven in application, but the progressive trend is unmistakable from even the most cursory look at our past.
How is this pool of pragmatists being shrunk? By consciously redefining what Americans mean when they use the term, "freedom," Lakoff maintains. He begins with looking at what he calls "simple freedom," the place where both conservatives and progressives ostensibly agree:
The definitional confusion—capitalized on by the right wing through repetition—begins with trying to give meaning to secondary characteristics of freedom. All of the crucial parts of simple freedom are left unspecified," Lakoff points out, and then asks, "What is to count as free will, ability, and interference?" It is largely on the battleground of free will that what he calls "contested" freedom begins. If I’m denied access to a quality education through an accident of birth, am I really able to exercise "free will?" If not only desirable connections, but information itself is unavailable, how "free" am I to take action on my own behalf and exercise my rights?
At this point, one runs up, of course, against the legendary "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" school of thinking, which has increasingly insisted that Americans who can’t make it in this grand land have only themselves to blame (a perception that would be alien and surprising to the Greatest Generation, which came home from World War II and made use of the GI Bill to go to college, buy homes and use VA medical facilities to solidify the middle class). The recent conservative redefinition of freedom (often code-worded as "liberty") has succeeded in shifting the debate from public obligation to ensuring access in a competitive system, to private selection of who precisely is captured in notion of the "worthy poor" – who should shoulder the responsibility for failure in a "free" society. Lakoff points out that the nature of competition itself requires a large class of "losers" (the uninsured, the unemployed) to define the winners against.
On the face of it, Lakoff says, there is little logic to the "gotcha" vise created by the conjunction of free-market capitalists and Christian fundamentalists:
Lakoff blames an underlying authoritarian streak teased to the surface of American life with the rise of the Christian right; "morals" have entered the debate, and an increasingly narrow characterization of morality—fundamentalist Christian strict-father morality, specifically—has subtly undermined the more historically expansive and accepted notion of secular freedom.
So what’s the answer to reasserting control of the accepted definition of freedom? According to Lakoff, progressives need to school themselves in the often-resisted fact that pure rationality, explaining our policies and issues logically, simply isn’t enough.
Further, the author delivers the bad news that in his view, this rehabilitation of freedom as Americans have traditionally known it is not going to happen overnight and is not going to be satisfactorily addressed by our supposed progressive leaders.
Connecting the emotional and visceral with the rational is of utmost importance in this battle, Lakoff maintains, and one that many progressives often resist, classifying framing and metaphor as a scurrilous bastard cousin of loathed marketing, manipulation, spin and sloganeering. They often assume that such emotional/rational linkage means sugar-coating words to be acceptable to the contested middle, but Lakoff is adamant that trying to appeal to the center is, in fact, one of the major problems with progressive strategy:
There is much, much more to this book than I’ve let on to here—examination of such words and notions as "responsibility," of the Bush administration’s use of "liberty" code words to its fundamentalist base, of the neurological road maps laid down by repetition, of the disputed territory of "freedom from" and "freedom to"—and I highly recommend progressives get hold of a copy pronto so we can begin discussing the many, many aspects of the book in targeted, subject-specific diaries. There is a great deal of fodder here, some of it familiar from Lakoff’s previous work, some of it delving deeper on subjects he’s addressed in passing and some of it new. As we move ahead in what I think of as a reclamation of terms and American ideas, there is work that can be done here, right here at Daily Kos, as we ponder our own deepest metaphors and beliefs and begin to apply the linguistic and conceptual lessons to our movement.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/20/112622/592
Don’t believe me? Google the “Constitution in Exile” and “Strict Constructionist” phrases. And then tell me these people don’t want to go back to 1792.
************************************************************
Book Review: George Lakoff's "Whose Freedom?"
“Whose Freedom?”
The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea
By George Lakoff
Freedom’s just another word for ... well, completely different worldviews, according to George Lakoff’s new book, Whose Freedom?, and these differences are often unrecognized by progressives, making it nearly impossible to fight that right-wing mind machine the author dissects in detail in his newest book.
The renowned progressive linguist begins his analysis of the differences between conservative and progressive definitions of freedom with the assertion that until the rise of the modern right wing, there was indeed a near-universal acceptance of what freedom means to American citizens. He points to a history of slow but consistent expansion and inclusion of more categories of people legally empowered by the term, from the outlawing of slavery, to granting voting rights to African Americans and women, to FDR’s insistence that economic security is more than just a desirable condition for the exercise of rights. To be sure, progress has often been unsteady in practice and uneven in application, but the progressive trend is unmistakable from even the most cursory look at our past.
How is this pool of pragmatists being shrunk? By consciously redefining what Americans mean when they use the term, "freedom," Lakoff maintains. He begins with looking at what he calls "simple freedom," the place where both conservatives and progressives ostensibly agree:
The definitional confusion—capitalized on by the right wing through repetition—begins with trying to give meaning to secondary characteristics of freedom. All of the crucial parts of simple freedom are left unspecified," Lakoff points out, and then asks, "What is to count as free will, ability, and interference?" It is largely on the battleground of free will that what he calls "contested" freedom begins. If I’m denied access to a quality education through an accident of birth, am I really able to exercise "free will?" If not only desirable connections, but information itself is unavailable, how "free" am I to take action on my own behalf and exercise my rights?
At this point, one runs up, of course, against the legendary "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" school of thinking, which has increasingly insisted that Americans who can’t make it in this grand land have only themselves to blame (a perception that would be alien and surprising to the Greatest Generation, which came home from World War II and made use of the GI Bill to go to college, buy homes and use VA medical facilities to solidify the middle class). The recent conservative redefinition of freedom (often code-worded as "liberty") has succeeded in shifting the debate from public obligation to ensuring access in a competitive system, to private selection of who precisely is captured in notion of the "worthy poor" – who should shoulder the responsibility for failure in a "free" society. Lakoff points out that the nature of competition itself requires a large class of "losers" (the uninsured, the unemployed) to define the winners against.
On the face of it, Lakoff says, there is little logic to the "gotcha" vise created by the conjunction of free-market capitalists and Christian fundamentalists:
Lakoff blames an underlying authoritarian streak teased to the surface of American life with the rise of the Christian right; "morals" have entered the debate, and an increasingly narrow characterization of morality—fundamentalist Christian strict-father morality, specifically—has subtly undermined the more historically expansive and accepted notion of secular freedom.
So what’s the answer to reasserting control of the accepted definition of freedom? According to Lakoff, progressives need to school themselves in the often-resisted fact that pure rationality, explaining our policies and issues logically, simply isn’t enough.
Further, the author delivers the bad news that in his view, this rehabilitation of freedom as Americans have traditionally known it is not going to happen overnight and is not going to be satisfactorily addressed by our supposed progressive leaders.
Connecting the emotional and visceral with the rational is of utmost importance in this battle, Lakoff maintains, and one that many progressives often resist, classifying framing and metaphor as a scurrilous bastard cousin of loathed marketing, manipulation, spin and sloganeering. They often assume that such emotional/rational linkage means sugar-coating words to be acceptable to the contested middle, but Lakoff is adamant that trying to appeal to the center is, in fact, one of the major problems with progressive strategy:
There is much, much more to this book than I’ve let on to here—examination of such words and notions as "responsibility," of the Bush administration’s use of "liberty" code words to its fundamentalist base, of the neurological road maps laid down by repetition, of the disputed territory of "freedom from" and "freedom to"—and I highly recommend progressives get hold of a copy pronto so we can begin discussing the many, many aspects of the book in targeted, subject-specific diaries. There is a great deal of fodder here, some of it familiar from Lakoff’s previous work, some of it delving deeper on subjects he’s addressed in passing and some of it new. As we move ahead in what I think of as a reclamation of terms and American ideas, there is work that can be done here, right here at Daily Kos, as we ponder our own deepest metaphors and beliefs and begin to apply the linguistic and conceptual lessons to our movement.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/20/112622/592
