2005.01.14
Think of Moral Politics
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- Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives
- Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
both books by George Lakoff
I spent the best part of my vacation back east over the Christmas holidays reading George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. The first is a small book that, though published afterwards, is an excellent introduction to the longer Moral Politics book. It is also geared specifically towards those with a liberal bent. In Moral Politics George Lakoff does an excellent job of not injecting his personal biases until the last chapters of the book.
The thrust of Don’t Think of an Elephant! is that conservatives have, for the past 30+ years, been funding think tanks and special interests to frame debates and issues. This allows them to control the terminology, the debate, and the coverage of these issues. Liberals are losing more and more because they do not have the political infrastructure in place to counter the conservatives effectively and are, in fact, using the conservatives own framing which then validates conservatives and their frames. The book then goes into more detail of the differences between the conservative and liberal world views based on their moral perspectives and frames.
And what is a frame? The definition of a frame comes from cognitive science (Mr. Lakoff is a professor of cognitive science at Berkeley) and describes how we perceive the world around us. Frames are, simply put, our point of view or our frame of reference. All people have them.
The title of the book is an example of how other people can force their frames to have an effect on you, regardless of your own. If I say, “Don’t think of an elephant,” the first thing you will probably do is think of an elephant. Your frame for an elephant can be many things like a large animal that likes peanuts, a frightening beast, a victim of ivory hunters, etc. Many of us share the same frames when we think of an elephant, which allows for a common frame of reference. What the conservatives are doing, says Mr. Lakoff, is telling us what frames to think of, and further, they are giving these frames a clear bias in their favor.
One of his favorite examples is the usage by conservatives of tax relief. What are taxes? They are moneys we pay to our governments for things such as getting roads built, certain benefits like Social Security and unemployment wages for hard times, protection through the military from threats abroad and the police/fire departments for threats within, and the judicial system. These are all good things and I don’t think anyone would do away with them entirely, and taxes are needed or else we won’t have these services. However taxes do take away from our private incomes. This is where the modifier relief comes in to play. A relief implies a burden, something we should not put up with or tolerate. Someone who can relieve us of our burdens is often considered a hero. If conservatives are for tax relief they must be heroes.
Both books go into detail of what is a liberal and a conservative and how they are different. The conclusion is a person is a liberal or a conservative based on the frame for their family life, what that family life should be, how we should raise our kids, how the family should deal with others, etc. This is then mapped on to the metaphor of “the nation as a family”. This metaphor isn’t strictly true (the government as the parent doesn’t raise us as the children) but is true in our minds none the less.
Liberals have the family frame of the Nurturant Parent model which emphasizes communication and encouragement. Conservatives have the Strict Father model which emphasizes discipline and authority. This oversimplification does neither model justice, however, because it is not true that nurturant parents lack authority or discipline or that the strict father model is against communication and nurturance. The difference is where the focus of family values lies, and that difference of focus leads to two very different systems.
One of the many conclusions I came to after reading this book is that the idea that our political system is a spectrum with an extreme left and an extreme right where most of us fall somewhere on the line between the two is patently false. We have two different frames for thinking of politics and never the twain shall meet. There are extremes in each system, yes, but they are unique to those individual systems. There are some pragmatists within each system who realize they have to work with the other system to get things done sometimes; we ignorantly call these folks centrists, but in the end they are really liberals or conservatives, not centrists.
Another conclusion, which won’t surprise any of you who know me, is that I find I am firmly a liberal. I would consider myself generally pragmatic and even have some conservative values but I am undeniably in the liberal camp, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
If you, too, are a liberal, I strongly recommend picking up Don’t Think of an Elephant! as an introduction. Then, whether you are a liberal or a conservative (conservatives may want to skip the last few chapters), pick up Moral Politics so you can better understand yourself and your unique political frame.
(Clicking on the images above takes you to Amazon where you can buy the books!).
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