| Freedom Of Movement-The Archetype of Freedom
My diary, "Demos Reports: Airline Deregulation Isn't Good For You. Thoughts On Transportation & Freedom Ensue ", was quite intentionally removed from the subjectivity and intensity of passion. Transportation? Only confessed nerds like Rachel Maddow can excited about that!
But that's exactly why I chose it. It's such a dry, matter-of-fact, guy-culture kind of way of showing how the conservative take on freedom gets everything ass-backwards.
Plus, the beauty of talking about transportation in terms of freedom is that it's both literally and metaphorically true:
Get that?
- Develop coordinated national and regional transportation plans, with provision for high speed rail networks to eliminate the need for excessive short-haul air traffic.
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Another federal program to give Americans more freedom! More choices! More freedom of movement! More opportunity!
First interstate commerce. Then the canals. Then the railroads. Then the highways. Then air travel. Then the interstate. Now high-speed rail. Over and over and over again, the federal government has played a vital role in promoting American's freedom of movement, which is one of the fundamental foundations on which all others freedoms draw.
It's time we started crafting narratives like that, and repeating them over and over and over again. Not just because they're true--which they are--but because knowing the truth about what makes us more free helps us continue to make ourselves more free.
And, as I went on to explain:
(1) George Lakoff has demonstrated that the concept of freedom is rooted in the bodily experience of physical freedom to move.
(2) Liberals and conservative flesh out the concept of freedom in different ways, making freedom a deeply contested idea.
(3) The liberal idea of freedom has traditionally, predominated, but conservatives have harped on it incessantly for the past several decades as part of their hegemonic struggle.
(4) Lakoff argues that liberals and progressives need to reclaim the concept of freedom as their own, articulating why their concept is the better one.
(5) Transportation issues--which also involve freedom of movement--are a natural arena for liberals and progressives to take up Lakoff's advice.
(6) This can be linked to the social history of liberalism and conservatism, and the respective importance each gives to negative liberty ("freedom from" restraints) and positive liberty ("freedom to" pursue their hopes and dreams).
(7) Conservatives, descending ideologically from feudal aristocracy, regard democracy and the rule of law primarily as thefts of their "freedom from" restraints. ("What? We can't own slaves? How can you be free if you don't own slaves?")
(8) Liberals, descending ideologically from from commoners who opposed the aristocracy, regard democracy and the rule of law primarily as systems of empowerment of their "freedom to" pursue their hopes and dreams.
(9) While conservatism tends to absolutely deny the existence of "freedom to", liberalism tends to embrace both concepts, but give priority to "freedom to":
Liberals and progressives, OTOH, tend to see freedom from as a component of freedom to. For example, freedom from government coercion and restrictions embodied in the First Amendment protect ones freedom to speak, assemble and worship as one pleases. The value of the former is entirely dependent on the value of the later. It is freedom to that is essential. Freedom from is merely a means to an end--vitally important in real life, to be sure, but philosophically derivative.
(10) The logic of the liberal view of freedom is clearly exemplified in the model of transportation:
Transportation issues are one way of making the abstract, philosophical priority of freedom to quite concrete. Generally speaking, people travel much more because of positive liberty (the desire to go somewhere), rather than negative liberty (the desire simply to escape). Even the desire to escape--to "get away from it all"--is usually informed by at least some notion of where one wants to go, even if it's as vague as "out west" or "hiking the Appalachian Trail" Argentina.
More importantly, people take it for granted that getting where you are going is more important than the rules and regulations one must have in order to get there. The "rules of the road" are generally accepted as the, well, "rules of the road". And this is precisely the liberal/progressive idea of freedom in a nutshell.
All that is all well and good. It's very tight, compelling logic. Or at least so it seems to me, until someone comes along and shows me where I'm wrong. But there's one thing it lacks (even though by design): Passion. And that's where Amanda's diary comes in, "big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say.
Amanda Marcotte On Passion, Ideology And Freedom
Amanda's diary is rather complex, typically so, one might say, initially taking off from feminist critiques of tough-guy macho rhetoric that sees falling in love as emasculating, which is to say robbing men of their freedom. This becomes quite explicit in a rightwing pseudo-macho dude's Pajama Media column that Glenn Greenwald analyzes in a diary Amanda links to:
More and more often I meet young guys just like this: overgrown kids who are their grim wives' poodles. They sheepishly talk about getting a "pink pass," or a "kitchen pass," before they can leave the house. They can't do this or that because their wives don't like it. They "share" household and child-rearing tasks equally - which isn't really equal at all because they don't care about a clean house or a well-reared child anywhere near as much as their wives do. In short, each one seems set to spend his life taking orders from a perpetually dissatisfied Mrs. who sounds to me - forgive me but just speaking in all honesty - like a bloody shrike. Who can blame these poor shnooks if they go out and get drunk or laid or just plain divorced?
I'm the old-fashioned King of the Castle type: my wife knew it when she married me, she knows it now, and she knows where the door is if she gets sick of it. And you can curse me or consign me to Feminist Hell or whatever you want to do. But when you're done, answer me this: why would a man get married under any other circumstances? I'm serious. What's in it for him? I mean, marriage is a large sacrifice for a man. He gives up his right to sleep with a variety of partners, which is as basic an urge in men as having children is in women. He takes on responsibilities which will probably curtail both his work and his social life. If he doesn't also acquire authority, gravitas, respect and, yes, mastery over his own home, what does he get? Companionship? Hey, stay single, dude, you'll have a lot more money, and then you can buy companionship.
So, marriage = loss of freedom? Check!
Marriage = businesses contract? Check!
Man gets to be the boss? Check!
Contract as a "meeting of the minds?" You've got to be kidding, right? (Women don't have minds!)
This is straight out of the Middle Ages, just like I said above.
Pulling back from that raw display of id, Amanda's diary itself begins by calling attention to how the Sanford scandal differs from all the sex scandals preceding it-instead of following the macho "love'em and leave'em" script, it follows the romance novel script, producing suitable consternation:
I really enjoyed these two blog posts at Broadsheet examining what might be the most shocking thing of all about this Mark Sanford scandal, which is that it actually fits the standard adultery narrative, where the cheater falls in love. And what's fascinating is how much people are embarrassed for him because of it, which doesn't make much sense to me, since I thought the emails that were published weren't anything unusual, though definitely private.* But as Amy Benfer notes, that Sanford is in love with a woman has been treated like it's somehow emasculating.
Keith Olbermann compared his prose style to "The Bridges of Madison County" while his guest, comedian Christian Finnegan, said Sanford's love letters were so perfectly attuned to the romantic fantasies of middle-aged women that Sanford was likely to see his fans wearing T-shirts that read: "I am a 45-year-old depressed housewife and I vote!"
Ah yes, the idea that men could be breathlessly in love is a fantasy only held by sheltered, naive women. Real men prove it by treating women like sex-and-housework-dispensing appliances, and certainly don't debase themselves by admiring or, god forbid, even respecting women.
However, before going further into Amanda's diary, we should note some added complexity here. In Olberman's defense, elsewhere in the same conversation he expressed a very different view, not putting down Sanford at all for falling in love, but instead referring to him in terms of being "lucky in life":
OLBERMANN: Now listen, I have to say, having read these things, on a human level, those of us who are lucky in life, we have had these feelings or we get them or we seek them. I don't want to deprecate the feelings here. But, you know, if you want to disappear with the love of your life, this really is the way you feel, don't you-isn't the correct sequence is you resign as governor first, and then you disappear with her into the vast wild fields of Argentina, not some other way around or to try to keep both the wild world of Argentina and oh, by the way, governor of South Carolina? This is not the way to do it, correct?
FINNEGAN: Well, yes, Keith, I do believe that's the way a true Goucho would handle things. It's too late for that. I think now that these e-mails are out, I don't think he has any other choice but to run away with this woman, because at least then he becomes like a martyr, a tragic figure. He gave up the presidency for love. As we all know, Latin chicks love that stuff.
OLBERMANN: Well, that was the king of England in the 1930s. I mean, it was I can't, without Mrs. Simpson, without the support of the woman I love. You're absolutely right. There actually is a political out for it, for him.
FINNEGAN: Absolutely.
The difference between Sanford and the King of England, I would argue, was matter of deep attitudinal preparation--or lack thereof. What I mean by that will become clear as Amanda delves into it with considerable acumen as we shall see below. But first:
The lightening strike passionate love relies heavily on mutual, intense admiration, and that's a little bit different than the "men are from Mars/women are from Venus" recommendations for mating that Christian wingnuts endorse.... where it's assumed that men and women have so little in common that the best they can hope for is to create a marriage on hard work and a lot of compromise, because the kind of easy affection that friends have for each other is beyond men and women. Plus, as the writer that Greenwald eviscerates explains, men and women don't even have sex in common. According to Andrew Klavan, men have sexual desire, and if women want to understand what that feels like, they have to think about how they feel about having babies. I often joke that men who say things like this have never had a moment of true sparking passion with a woman in their lives, but honestly, until this Sanford thing exploded, I never honestly thought that was true (except for the deeply closeted gay men, for obvious reasons).
Well, of course it's true. But maybe this is just one of those few rare things that women really can't understand without such a rare blinding moment as this. You almost have to be a guy, subject to the innermost stupidities of guy culture to really know how hollow it is at the core. For real guys, sex is the opposite of passion. Passion is the most frightening, terrifying thing in the world. It means losing control, nothing could be more terrifying, since men are never in control. That erection could vanish at a moment's notice, for all the braggadocio, it's the last thing you can control. (See Stephen Ducat's discussion of femiphobia in The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity.)
Amanda continues:
But if you really do buy into Jenny Sanford's view of love (and probably Mark Sanford's, before this happened), where it's a tense partnership to be monitored and worked on to fit god or society's plans---and that love is willed more than felt---then it probably is possible to go decades, or your whole life really, without feeling that lightening strike. Because you're not standing outside in the rain, which is to say that you haven't opened yourself up to the possibility.
That's putting it mildly, to put it mildly. In fact, for many, they've built their whole lives around closing themselves off, hiding in fear from the very possibility of lightening. Isn't that the very essence of their "punitive God" worldview? Of course it is! And Amanda knows it very well, as she dives into the heart of the subject of preparation I alluded to above:
A lot of falling in love happens because people want it to happen---they seek out people that they have a lot in common with, people that might present an opportunity for passion. They also work on making themselves people who value passion, developing pleasures and interests and personality traits that make it easier for passion to enter their lives. Which is the sort of thing that Mark Sanford was alluding to when he praised his mistress for being sophisticated. But the whole right wing Christian culture discourages those things that might inflame passion---perhaps they're effective in that (though not so much in shutting down sex altogether, but they probably do succeed in making it less fun). If you never feel that sort of passion and suddenly it enters your life in middle age, what would you do? You'd probably freak the fuck out, I'd guess. Your entire worldview would change. You'd babble about how much in love you are during a press conference.
"[P]robably freak the fuck out"? Like I said, lack of preparation.
Four observations here. First and foremost, what Amanda is talking about here is philosophically exactly the same thing I was discussing...but it's intensely personal and passionate. If you're one of the countless millions who never quite got the meaning of the phrase "the personal is political", this is at least one facet of what that means. What could possibly be a more significant matter of choice, of freedom to than the freedom to share one's life entirely with one's beloved?
Indeed, there's nothing arbitrary at all with bringing together the two realms of love and transportation. One of the first extended metaphors that George Lakoff discussed in the 1980 book that launched the whole idea of cognitive metaphors--Metaphors We Live By, co-authored with philosopher Mark Johnson--was LOVE IS A JOURNEY. Some common metaphoric entailments of that basic metaphor are:
* Look how far we've come.
* We'll just have to go our separate ways.
* We can't turn back now.
* This relationship isn't going anywhere.
* We've gotten off the track.
* It's been a long bumpy road.
Of course, it's not just love that is mapped onto by the journey metaphor "source domain" as Lakoff and Johnson called it. Any relationship or even just a shared project can be described by the journey source domain. It makes perfect sense, once you think about it. If physical freedom of movement is the most basic experiential foundation for our notion of freedom, then intentionally directed physical movement is an almost equally basic template for any form of intentional activity, which is to say, for any form of pursuing one's freedom to. Romantic love is simply the most intense, yet commonly shared example.
Second, the dichotomy Amanda describes is both a cultural and an historical one, as explained by social historian Stephanie Coontz in her book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. The limited openness to passion is precisely what traditional societies require in order for marriage to serve stabilizing social functions as opposed to liberating personal ones. The shift toward love, and openness to passion is an integral part of the late modernization process.
Third, this also fits well into the Robert Kegan's framework of cognitive development, with the emergence of autonomy at level 4, in contrast to the unreflective social construction of the self at level 3. Indeed, the novels of Jane Austen, progenitor of the romance novel, are particularly concerned with struggles for autonomy in various permutations.
Fourth, the fact that love is shared between two people entails a shared imagining of who we are, a co-self-creation. Which is part of why women having their own work lives is so crucial. If men alone have work lives outside the home, then the scope of co-self-creation is inherently quite limited. It is not merely personal, but purely domestic. Which means, in essence, that man retains a sphere apart that is his own creation, while woman is totally a creature. The full realization of romantic love is that both partners enter Kegan's level 4 of autonomy together.
Pachacutec's Point About Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Back in the old days at MyDD, there was a blogger, ultraworld, who brought up the issue of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which I tended to downplay simply from a statistical point of view. I didn't deny it was there as part of the mix, but it seemed to me that it was the larger, more pervasive influence of rightwing authoritarianism and social dominance orienation that needed our primary focus. Now, however, with the policy framework of conservatism in total shambles, and everything they stood for discredited by any rational standard, the continued hold of conservative narratives and continued viability of conservative actors on the national stage does indeed call out for a renewed focus on NPD, particularly in terms of its influence on a wider dynamic, as Pachacutec put it:
Not everyone in the system is an NPD type, but the milieu, the culture and tone, is set by the dynamics of the personality type. And the personality type requires a large coterie of weak egos who try to attach themselves or associate themselves with the dominant personalities and thereby feel big and important themselves. So, they flatter and follow the power to manage their own deeply felt insecurities.
That last part is key, I think, and helps explain why NPD could well become increasingly important to understanding what's going on as system failure exacerbates those deeply felt insecuritiess with an intensity not seen when it was actually a plausible group delusion that the neocon vision was going to lead us to their promised land of world domination.
In my response to Pachacutec, I wrote:
Oh, I agree that the DC culture is sick, sick, sick, and in much the way that you describe. (I used to think NPD was a minor matter compared to rightwing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, but I've realized for some time now that it's quite important in its own right.) I also think that Kevin Philips has described this rather well in American Dynasty where he talks about restoration culture and politics, which puts it into a larger cultural context.
However, I think you're talking mostly about the courtiers, and I'm thinking of everyone. In his earlier book, Wealth and Democracy, Phillips talked about cycles of imperial power, and how a period of elite excess eventually gets replaced by a democratic resurgence. I think that's already started to happen with us, and that as it grows (god willing) a good many folks--even in DC--will start behaving much, much better, simply because the environment has changed, not because they have.
Of course, it won't hurt a bit to have a lot of new blood as well.
As indicated in my response, I think that Phillips was really onto something, particularly when he wrote about restoration culture. It went well beyond DC, well beyond Versailles, well beyond politics. There was a whole cultural fascination with wealth, Dallas, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, all that. While some of that still persists, of course, we have a lot more varied narratives. Just look at the far on reality tv. It's a good barometer telling us that times have really changed. This sort of shift has happened before, of course. And the first time it happened in US politics was the election of 1800, after which the once-powerful Federalists never won a presidential election again. Instead, they retreated into a fantasy land so isolated that the son of their one and only President--John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams--not only quit the party, not only joined the hated opposition Democratic-Republican Party, but eventually was elected President on their ticket.
As part of their collapse, the Federalists glommed onto the most reactionary writing of their time, the conspiracy theory narrative embraced by the French aristocracy and their followers blaming the French Revolution on a hidden conspiracy of sinister elite plotters, featuring most notoriously the Bavarian Illuminati, who aside from being centered in Bavaria, not France, had been disbanded for quite some time before the French Revolution began.
In America, there were even fewer actual Illuminati to be found, but the absence of the real Illuminati was no real hindrance to the narrative, any more than the absence of real socialists in the Obama household is a hindrance to GOP narratives of his socialism today. And so the basic meme of conspiracism entered the bloodstream of the American body politic, never to leave again.
Although it takes on many forms, and has even been embraced by large numbers of progressives as genuinely progressive narratives have lost power for various reasons, the essence of conspiricism is a defense of traditional elites, and a projection of their shadow onto imaginary shadow elites to whom all manner of evil powers can be attributed. This is the framework that has come to dominate the GOP in the post-Bush era.
What binds the Versailles Dems to their GOP counterparts is not that narrative per se, but rather the preconditions to it--the inability to believe in the premises of a democratic politics, that the people themselves could be the authors of their own political self-determination. It's this shared disdain for the common folk, their common wisdom, and their capacity to know for themselves what they want that underpins the relative continuity of policy from Bush to Obama, the bank bailouts, the continued reliance on military power to "win" the "war on terror" (now under a new, impossible-to-remember name), the woefully inadequate climate change bill and health care "reform" that leaves all the big players with almost all that they could wish for. And, of course, the flip side of such disdain for the little people is the belief in their own superiority, their brilliance.
As Pachacutec says, it's a system, in which the weak play their parts as well as the strong. And those who are not part of the system are most unwelcome. We're talking about you, Dan Froomkin.
You see, Froomkin really had outlived his usefulness. So long as the Democrats needed him to help bring down the GOP, he had their support, and thereby some legitimacy. But if he was going to keep on criticizing the Obama White House using the same sort of standards he'd used on Bush, well, what was the point? It made no sense in the NPD world.
What does this have to do with imagination and freedom? Nothing. That's just the point. People with personality disorders cannot be free. They are trapped on the deepest levels of their own deeply damaged imaginations. What they take to be freedom is merely the illusion of some quick-fix escape from the reality of their own existence. It is utterly and completely doomed to failure. It cannot possibly work, because what they really wish to be free of is themselves.
Conclusion
What? You want a conclusion? After a final line like "It cannot possibly work, because what they really wish to be free of is themselves"?
You must be crazy!
Who do you think you are, anyway?
Imagine who you are. |
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