George Lakoff and Everything

George Lakoff writes about pretty much everything because he writes about the fundamentally metaphorical nature of human thought. I’ve read two of his books and when I was in the local university library today I noticed three of his other books:

1. Moral politics : how liberals and conservatives think

2. Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought

3. Where mathematics comes from : how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being

These books, from the brief skimmings I gave them today are very interesting. But his book on politics seems confusing. I jumped to the end and read the last chapters prior to my physics class today because I know about Lakoff’s tendency to rehash old material at the beginnings of books. Anyhow, what he does is he shows the difference between conservatives and liberals by highlighting what he considers to be the controlling metaphor for their politics.

1. Liberals have a nurturing parent concept of government.
2. Conservatives have a strict father concept of government.

I don’t mean to do a review or anything like that. I just mean to point out how this seems to poison the well against conservatives. For instance, in chapter 22, Lakoff notes that there are ten assumptions that guide the “Strict Father Model” that he sees in conservative discourse and action. Here they are:

1. There is a universal, absolute, strict set of rules specifying what is right and what is wrong for all times, all cultures, and all stages of human development.
2. Each such rule has a fixed, clear, unequivocal, directly interpretable meaning which does not vary.
3. Each moral rule must be literal, and hence must make use of only literal concepts.
4. Each human being has access to the fixed, clear, unequivocal meaning of moral rules.
5. Each rule is general, in that it applies not just to specific people or actions but to whole categories of people and actions.
6. The categories mentioned in each rule must have fixed definitions of precise boundaries, set for all time and the same in all cultures.
7. All human beings must be able to understand such rules in order to have the free will to follow them or not.
8. These rules must be able to be communicated perfectly, from the legitimate authority responsible for enforcement to the person under the obligation to follow them. There must be no variation in  meaning between what is said and what is understood.
9. People do things they don’t want to do in order to get rewards and avoid punishments. This is just human nature and is part of what it means to be “rational.”
10. But, for this to be true, people must be able to understand precisely what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. There must be no meaning variation concerning what rewards and punishments are.

The problem with this list is that I’m quite conservative in outlook and almost none of these apply to how I think or have come to my conclusions and while those assumptions do match many conservatives that I know, they also match many people who don’t care about politics and they certainly match the assumptions of a giant stack of books I own about feminist theory (written by people who are not conservative at all).

If you ask many of my friends, you would find that I was quite ambivalent about politics and have only recently become interested in it as I’ve studied the history of western civilization in greater depth and spent time learning what it means to excel at both rhetoric and dialectic (because I teach both to high school students). Most of my conclusions aren’t so much default as steps along the way. Even then, as a disciple of Jesus I find being nurturing to others to be centrally important unless you’re trying to protect the weak or vulnerable from the strong.

The list and perhaps the entire book should probably be understood as Lakoff’s attempt to “reframe” the issues related to politics in such a way that not only his particular value set, but the entire constellation of specific positions he holds are seen as radical attempts to nurture people who have been damaged by conservative thinking. Lackoff has written a manifesto wherein he explains how and why to reframe things using rhetorical questions and redefinitions of issues based upon shared values (this is a good rhetorical tool and can indeed be used to find true things as well). His book antedates the manifesto, but the strategy is present.

My guess is that many conservatives, particularly Christians, do not buy into most things on that list. Libertarians often don’t care about any ethics except being left alone. Christians belief that whole chunks of Scripture were inspired precisely to be fulfilled in Jesus and become obsolete as literal moral or national guidance (Hebrews 8:13). Roman Catholic Christians do believe in absolute truth, but they subscribe to Aristotelian virtue ethics as a part of their theological system, so their conclusions allow for pragmatic based ethics because the absolutes are based upon the nature of things and the commands of God are provisional in their system, not absolute.

Anyhow, it was surreal to read his material couched in a sort of pseudoscientific language as he characterized conservatism as so frightening that he has become more liberal than ever (p 336).

Anyhow, despite my conservative leanings, I’m quite somewhere between Anabaptist and disinterested in the “culture war” because I find that many people I talk to on either side refuse to use reason. I know I should care about politics because they largely determine the future, but the most interesting things about the book aren’t so much political as they are deja vu-ish.

1. In my younger years, before I understood things like categorizing people and treating them accordingly (I had no guile or malfeasance then…the world has hurt me so I’m more bitter and vicious than I used to be sadly), I found my college professors to sometimes treat me strangely when topics of dispute would come up in class discussion and I would state my view. But they did treat me like Lakoff recommends. I simply didn’t know the game and would try to cite facts or articulate arguments thinking we were having a discussion. They would “change the frame” and I wouldn’t know how to keep it. I still remember a psychology professor being pretty sure that the view of Christian character in marriage I articulated from the New Testament wasn’t actually in there precisely because it sounded appealing.
2. When I read Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God, many of his arguments seemed familiar. It’s because they were Lakoffian. Campbell does credit Lakoff’s ideas in a footnote on page 990. So that explains that.

Anyhow, moral of the story: This guy will probably help me understand the world better despite my disagreeing with him about everything related to math, philosophy, and politics. I suspect he figured that since those fields use words and he’s an expert in linguistics, that he could redefine all of the things that use words. We’ll see.