The meaning of freedom now under threat

For more than two centuries, Americans demanded successive expansions of freedom — progressive freedom. Expansions of voting rights, civil rights, education, public health, scientific knowledge, and protections from fear and want: These all made us freer to follow our dreams. These were the ideals of freedom that I grew up with.

They are now all under threat, not by guns or bombs, but an under-the-radar redefinition of freedom and liberty to suit right-wing ideology. And it is taking place under our noses, with the complicity of the media, where there has been little noticeable questioning of the president’s use of “freedom” and “liberty.” The mechanism of redefinition is cognitive. It is in our brains. We can’t see it. Freedom is what cognitive scientists call an “essentially contested concept,” which means there will always be distinct and disputed versions of freedom that are inconsistent with each other.

There is no single, universal, and objectively “correct” meaning of freedom. There is a single, uncontested, but limited, core meaning of freedom that we all agree on. But that is the limit of consensus. Progressives and conservatives have different value systems that extend the uncontested core in opposite directions... Progressives must reclaim not merely the words “freedom” and “liberty,” but the ideas that made this a free country. To lose freedom is awful; to lose the idea of freedom would be worse. Excerpted from a comment by George Lakoff in the ‘Boston Globe’, July 4 editor@expressindia.com Wednesday, July 5, 2006