Reviewed by Michael Broek
11.21.07

George Lakoff’s many works in the field of cognitive science have focused on how language and what we call reality shape and influence each other, often drawing a causal link between our physical bodies and the language that we use to describe the world – language that he argues is essentially metaphoric. In his most recent work, Whose Freedom?, his focus is very specific: From where does our concept of freedom arise, and how does this concept shape our views on a myriad of social and political issues, from school prayer to welfare to foreign military interventions?

In this book, Lakoff argues that there are two dominant metaphors or frames that govern what we think about freedom and how it works – the strict father frame, in which a moral authority (often but not always a father figure) establishes a set of values that command absolute (or near absolute) obedience; and the nurturant parent frame, in which a mother or a father (or both) create an environment that encourages self exploration and a respect for the needs of others. These frames are first put into place by an individual’s family, Lakoff argues, but they may also be challenged or augmented by a variety of experiences and environments, including the school classroom, the church, and the Little League game.

But this is first and foremost a book about politics, and in this vein Whose Freedom? attempts to make sense of the fractious and sometimes apparently inconsistent views of the “left” and the “right” of American politics, or as he labels them, the “progressives” and the “radical conservatives.”

“Freedom” here is the “first idea” of American democracy, and Lakoff asserts that radical conservatives have contorted the word “freedom” to fit their strict-father frame, thereby challenging and rolling back the “progressive” freedoms that had been, in Lakoff’s view, the traditional sense of freedom that had been inculcated by the Founding Fathers. He argues that it is the “progressive” view of freedom – the nurturant parent view – that resulted in the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor reforms, the modern expansions of civil rights, and the environmental movement.

According to Lakoff, the strict-father metaphor establishes a moral hierarchy with a single leader, where everyone in the hierarchy knows who they are and consequently what their role is. Morality then is a matter of obedience to a higher authority. In this metaphor, obedience is rewarded by god or the free market, or both, and disobedience is punished by hell or poverty, or (preferably) both. The mechanism for working out one’s success or a failure is unbridled capitalism, where competition, which is “natural,” hones self-discipline and selects a “winner.” Lakoff’s great insight here is to show how this single metaphor explains the radical conservative position on a wide range of seemingly diverse issues – from the war in Iraq, to abortion, taxation, social programs, and others – and how all are fundamentally linked to a certain idea of freedom.

Lakoff then demonstrates how the nurturant-parent metaphor takes the contrarian’s position on the aforementioned issues. As opposed to the hierarchical model that establishes authority outside of the self, the nurturant-parent metaphor is cooperative and centered on empathy and personal and social responsibility. Individuals must discover who they are for themselves, and morality is a matter of “doing unto others,” which recognizes that the freedom of the one depends upon the freedom of the many. The free market is a tool meant to lift all boats, not just the boats of executives and entrepreneurs, and the Christ of the Gospels provides a model of right behavior, not an excuse for bigotry.

Lakoff provides a multitude of examples drawn from contemporary debates as varied as welfare reform and school prayer, and the book is meant for the layperson rather than the academic. Whose Freedom? is a field manual instructing progressives on how to “re-frame” issue debates so as to bypass and hence nullify the radical-conservative frame, and taken as such it is instructive, even if one is not of a leftist bent. An essential question that dogged me throughout the book, however, was, “What makes one metaphor better than another?” If Lakoff is correct and our reasoning is contingent upon our frames, then how does one evaluate which frame is better? According to whose criteria? If I tell a born-again Christian that his truth is “wrong” and “dangerous” to freedom and free inquiry, I am not only not going to win the argument, I’m guilty of the same fallacy to which I’m opposed. Is progressivism “better” because it reduces harm, or enhances happiness, or enlarges free will?

Moreover, if frames become a part of our brain structure, if empathy, for instance, is encoded into our neural pathways from childhood, then how is it possible to change the brain structures, the essential framing metaphors, of millions of radical conservative adults who are themselves encoding the strict-father frame onto their children? Lakoff’s tactic – reframing the policy debate – might work for an election or two, but does Lakoff’s method address the more fundamental, long-term issue?

These questions are compounded by the author’s handling of Christianity, which he asserts has been distorted by fundamentalist Christians to fit the strict-father, moral law frame. Traditional Christianity is progressive in nature, and models itself after the example of Christ – taking care of the poor and powerless, championing the oppressed, loving one another. However, Lakoff’s argument doesn’t take into account the elephant in the room – the matter of faith – that automatically removes agency from the individual and places it onto a distant Other. The Quakers specifically locate Christ within the self, but the Quakers represent a very slim minority of the millions of Christians in the U.S. who, with the recitation of every Nicene Creed, willingly locate the seat of moral authority outside of themselves.

But these are less criticisms of Lakoff’s work than ideas for further exploration. The essential arguments of Whose Freedom? are thought provoking and insightful, particularly his clever dissection of President Bush’s second State of the Union speech. What is most helpful is the placement of radical conservatism within a context which, if not entirely reasonable, is at least understandable.

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Michael Broek is an Assistant Professor of English at Brookdale Community College. He is also a doctoral student in American Literature at the University of Essex (U.K.), where he is completing his thesis, “Were It a New-Made World: Hawthorne, Melville and the Unmasking of America.” He holds an MFA in poetry from Goddard College and his poems have been published in The Cimarron Review, The Portland Review, Verse Libre, The Sycamore Review, Sundog, Del Sol Review, Fourteen Hills, Stirring, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. His scholarly work has appeared in 49th Parallel and is forthcoming in The International Review of the Humanities. He is also the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the NJ Council on the Arts.