George Lakoff's Freedom Frame

George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist whose theories have deepened our understanding of the brain and how we think, act, talk and feel. He works in the domain of mirror neurons and cognitive systems, which may be the stuff beneath our poetry but not necessarily the stuff of poetry. Still, readers who follow him in his new meditation on the fate of freedom in America might find themselves calling up their own images from our historic struggle for freedom:

• An escaped slave lifts his eyes to the night sky, looking for the constellation of stars that will guide him north to freedom. "Follow the Drinking Gourd," he's been told in coded song;
• A woman in a high-collared dress endures the contemptuous slanders (and the spit, and the thrown rocks, and the beatings, and the jailings) from those who violently oppose a woman's right to vote;
• A sharecropper's daughter learns to read by candlelight, determined to escape the cruel, enforced poverty that threatens her family and her future.

These are pictures in the American Grain. They are part of our historical consciousness. They might even appear in public school history books, illustrating the progressive tradition of freedom that promises to all the opportunity to choose and pursue our goals, that teaches interdependence, empathy and an understanding that one's freedom is inextricably tied to the freedom of everyone else.

But it is a tradition under sustained assault from those who view freedom another way. To a conservative tradition that has never trusted the will of the people -- the unprivileged masses -- "freedom" is achieved by following strict rules, by accepting the discipline of those in authority. The "battle over the America's most important idea" is not new.

We see the two ideas of freedom -- the authoritarian and the egalitarian -- struggling with one another in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. In his new book, "Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) George Lakoff holds these competing traditions up to the light.

Lakoff's central premise is that warriors with radically different worldviews fight the war over freedom. To conservatives, their authoritarian freedom seems the only natural road to human fulfillment. People are born bad, and will remain bad and "unfree" without discipline, punishment, hierarchy, and authority. To progressives, justifying authority in the name of freedom seems little more than a transparently hypocritical justification of elite privilege and control.

As described by Lakoff, progressives believe freedom means the opportunity for individuals to set and achieve their own goals, and the recognition that freedom is impossible unless we accept responsibility for ourselves and for others. Conservatives recoil at the progressive notion of liberty and argue that the prattlings about freedom and responsibility from the left are nothing but weak pleas for leniency from the debauched and the libertine, the unworthy and the unreconstructed.

Framing the political battle in America (and across the globe, really) around the idea of freedom, Lakoff focuses attention on what really is at stake in the trench-bound war of attrition we call contemporary politics: continued expansion of human freedom or a retreat to an elite-run distopia, a kind of knaves' old world in brave new world clothing.

Lakoff became a celebrity in 2004 as the world caught up to his 1996 groundbreaker, "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think" and made "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate" a sensational bestseller.

But his ideas are fruitful in ways not understood by some of his fans and nearly all of his critics. Kevin Drum, in his review of "Whose Freedom?" in Mother Jones magazine, complains about "the political class that has uncritically lionized Lakoff." He has a grudging admiration for Lakoff's insight that the language of family life is mapped onto the political domain, that conservatives can be understood as embodying a "strict father" morality while liberals operate in a nurturant, empathetic family moral model. Drum also sees the value in the discoveries of cognitive linguists, that the brain uses conceptual systems, structural contexts hard-wired into the developing brain, which determine the meaning of words.