by Eric Schechter (TAP webmaster)
What first gained linguist George Lakoff widespread attention in the progressive community was his short 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. He has written some other books since then, and I think his writing style has moved toward a more general audience. His most recent book, Thinking Points, may be his most readable so far, and it combines many new ideas with restatements of many of his best earlier ideas; it is the one that I would recommend to most Lakoff beginners. (By the way, it is available for free download at http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/thinkingpoints.) I’m eagerly awaiting his new book, The Political Mind, coming out in early June 2008.
Lakoff had already been writing about the cognitive semantics of politics for years before Elephant. I’ve just recently been reading parts of his much longer 1996 book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (admittedly not all of it; I’m a slow reader). That book is devoted entirely to the dichotomy between the two political viewpoints. I can’t say it’s fun — its writing style is not much more exciting than that of a dictionary. On the other hand, a dictionary is enormously informative, and I was greatly informed by Moral Politics. My new understandings may soon enter the revisions that I am constantly making in my political essay web page. Below is my summary of this book, combined with a few of my own reactions.
If you don’t know the term “cognitive semantics,” think of Lakoff as a psychologist. His breakthroughs are as deep and profound as Freud’s. Freud talked about how people were unaware of some of their own motivations, particularly sexual ones. Freud got some of it right and some of it wrong, but at any rate Freud made our society more consciously aware of our sexual motivations. In an analogous fashion, Lakoff makes us more consciously aware of our political motivations.
People are sometimes motivated partly by what they think is practical (e.g., economically efficient), but to a much greater extent politics is motivated by systems of morality — i.e., what people believe is “the right thing to do.” But most people adhere to a moral system, in both their actions and their voting, without being fully aware of what that moral system is; it may be something quite different from what they think it is. Consequently, they argue from the gut while believing that they are arguing logically. This kind of “rational debate” is not likely to change anyone’s mind, any more than you can persuade someone to change his or her favorite flavor of ice cream.
Moreover, liberals and conservatives have drastically different moral systems, far more different than they realize. Admittedly, some people have mixed values — liberal on some issues and conservative on other issues — and are labeled “centrists” or “biconceptuals.” But many people are mostly liberal or mostly conservative, because the many liberal ideas all have a shared theme, and the many conservative ideas all have a shared theme. And those mostly-liberal and mostly-conservative people can’t agree on much of anything, because their systems of “right” and “wrong” are nearly opposites. Indeed, each of them may see the other as evil.
What are those “shared themes”? That’s what Lakoff’s book, Moral Politics, is mostly about. Lakoff devotes hundreds of pages to extensive description and examples of the dichotomy between liberal and conservative; but I will sum it up my impression of it all with just two indicative sentences:
Progressives / liberals see themselves as nurturing and their opponents as bullying.
Conservatives see themselves as disciplining and their opponents as coddling.
The point here is that nurturing (a virtue) is nearly the same thing as coddling (a vice), while disciplining (supposedly a virtue) is nearly the same as bullying (a vice); thus the two camps are nearly opposite. They differ, not so much in perception of factual events, as in the assignment of significance to those events. The dichotomy determines not only the answers to yes-or-no questions (e.g., are you in favor of increasing or decreasing the military budget?), but even the meaning of words (e.g., does “freedom” mean freedom from toxins in our foods, or does it mean freedom from regulations in the production of foods?).
The two moral systems — nurturing or discipling — can be found in families, the first interpersonal relationship system we experience in our lives. Lakoff sees that as primal and says that we experience other interpersonal relationships metaphorically in terms of the family. Our view of human nature determines what we believe will motivate people. Our attitude about welfare or prisons is much like our attitude about cookies or spankings. Admittedly, some biconceptuals choose different answers in the home and in politics, but the questions are essentially the same.
Each of the two moral systems (nurturing or disciplining) is internally self-consistent; there is no way to find a contradiction in it (with one possible, arcane exception noted below). Thus, there is no purely logical or objective way to say that one moral system is right and the other is wrong; one can only choose morality from within one of the moral systems.
Lakoff worked hard to stay “neutral” throughout all of parts I through V of the book, to simply describe the two moral systems and not say which one is “correct.” He largely succeeded for hundreds of pages (though there were a couple of times where I thought he slipped up and a slight wisp of his bias crept into his writing). The book is written in a nearly symmetric fashion, as though each of the two systems is equally valid. That notion is supported by the symmetry of the terms “left wing” and “right wing” in our language.
THE END OF THE BOOK.
But the book is in six parts, and in Part VI Lakoff finally says, okay, those are balanced descriptions of the two systems, but personally I’m a liberal, and here’s why. He attempts to do this while still standing outside the two moral systems; he claims that he is not arguing from his gut like the rest of us. I think he partly succeeds, since he is more conscious and articulate about these matters than most of us are.
In Chapter 20 he lists five reasons for being a liberal, though he only numbers the first three. The last two are barely mentioned, because, as he says, they have been widely discussed elsewhere in the literature. But his first three reasons have not, and so he explains them in detail in Chapters 21, 22, and 23. I’ll try to summarize all five to the best of my understanding, which admittedly is imperfect.
(1) A study of childrearing. We don’t know for certain what motivates adults, but we have a pretty good understanding of childrearing, because researchers have been studying it for decades. The only people who still advocate the disciplining approach are conservatives like James Dobson, whose only credentials are their own conservative interpretation of the bible. Virtually all the experts who have done the research and studied the results are agreed that the nurturing approach works well and the disciplining approach doesn’t. If that’s true for children, why should it be any different for adults?
(2) A study of how the brain works. The conservative view is entirely dependent on the assumption that reality is objective, that things can be determined in absolutes, and that there are no alternatives to consider. Without that principle the entire authoritarian conservative system falls apart. But modern cognitive science shows that that objective reality does not exist, except perhaps for a few simple basics in physics and chemistry. Facts cannot be separated from their interpretations, and the interpretations depend on the worldview of the subjective observer. This point is difficult to understand — I might even call it arcane — but it’s the closest I’ve seen to a logical and factual disproof of conservatism. To the extent that cognitive science disproves the existence of absolute objective reality, to that extent conservatives lose a crucial leg of their belief system. (Just guessing from the title, I wonder if this idea is close to the topic of Lakoff’s new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, coming out in June 2008.)
(3) Theory becoming detached from evidence. (This one is subtler, and I’m not sure if I’ve understood it right, but I’ll try.) Our worldviews are abstractions of our experiences. We take our concrete experiences of the world and turn them into abstract descriptions and explanations of the world. But abstract ideas can be seductive. (I know that better than most — I’m a professor of mathematics.) If we fall in love with an abstract idea, and neglect to look at the evidence of concrete experience, our idea may go astray and become unrealistic. The conservative discipliner is more prone to that kind of error than the liberal nurturer, for this reason: The nurturing system attaches a high priority to empathy. A nurturer must share some of the feelings of the person being nurtured, and consequently the nurturer will be aware of the effects he or she has on the person being nurtured. The discipliner, on the other hand, has greater emotional distance from the person being disciplined, and consequently the discipliner may end up with a very inaccurate perception of what effects he or she actually has on the person being disciplined.
And then there are two more reasons that Lakoff mentions but doesn’t discuss in detail:
(4) Ecological reasons. The conservative system attaches little importance to our shared “commons” — both the natural ecosystem and our artificial structures (e.g., the levees of New Orleans, and the bridges and roads all across our country). Consequently those things are deteriorating. Indeed, if we continue for much longer with our present conservative system, life on earth will become extinct. But that fact in itself does not necessarily motivate a conservative. It is difficult to convince anyone of facts that are contrary to their beliefs; but even if you do manage to convince a conservative that conservatism is destroying the world, his or her reaction might be, “yes, well I guess that is an unfortunate consequence of doing what is right. Nevertheless, we must stoically push on and continue to do what we believe is right.” — Actually, pragmatism is beginning to win out over ideology; both Newt Gingrich and John McCain have recently strayed from the conservative pack and made statements about how we must fight against global warming.
(5) Humanitarian reasons. The conservative economic system perpetuates systemic poverty and makes a large portion of humanity miserable. At least, that’s how we liberals see things. But I think that Lakoff erred in including this item on his list. The conservative believes that poverty is not a systemic matter, but rather a personal matter, a consequence of laziness. Thus, humanitarianism is not “objective” or “neutral”; it is internal to the liberal morality system. I do want to end poverty, and I do believe that poverty is perpetuated by the current conservative economic system, but those assertions are consequences, not causes, of the fact that my values and beliefs are liberal ones.
By the way, I reject the metaphor of left/right symmetry, at least in my own mind (it’s hard to avoid it in conversation). Instead I see progressives as “awakened,” and I am hoping that we are beginning an era of a great awakening.
Okay, I still need to continue working on understanding all this stuff better, but I’m also ready to begin working on the next question: How do we convert more people from conservatism to progressivism? That won’t easy; as I’ve said, it’s as irrational as trying to convert people to a different favorite flavor of ice cream. And by “convert” I mean “persuade”; I am not interested in manipulating or brainwashing. Right now I have very little idea about how to carry out this persuasion process, but check back with me in a few months. Maybe by then I’ll have some ideas and opinions about this question.
Here are the two ideas I have so far:
(i) Most of us are biconceptuals, to some degree; both the nurturing and disciplining systems have tracks already in our minds. If we repeat an idea over and over, its track gets strengthened, like deepening a rut in a dirt road. The conservative news media make use of that fact when they repeat, over and over again, phrases that implicitly contain the conservative worldview as assumptions. We need to strengthen the progressive track. For example, that’s why I have a bumper sticker that says “we’re all in this together.”
(ii) I’m encouraged by the “arcane” idea that I mentioned earlier. The conservative belief system depends on its own exclusivity — its own ignorance of the structure or even the existence of alternative ideological systems. It requires authority to function, and that authority crumbles in the presence of alternative belief systems. The crumbling doesn’t require that the alternative be considered correct; the crumbling will occur even if the alternative is merely acknowledged as coherent. (The liberal system does not depend on exclusivity in that fashion — indeed, we thrive on considering alternatives.) So merely persuading conservatives that we liberals do have a coherent ideology, and are not just madmen raving at random, would be enough to win the day for us. Here’s a sweet trojan horse for our age: let’s invite our opponents to free seminars on “understanding our differences.” Or create movies and other works of art that illustrate the coherence of the progressive worldview. Can it really be that easy? No, probably not; probably I’ve misunderstood something here. But it’s something to think about.
