George Lakoff argues that the coherence of issue positions that can be considered conservative or liberal can be explained through two competing views of the metaphor of the family. Conservatives adopt the 'strict-father' role, emphasizing discipline and authority, while liberals adopt the 'nurturing-parent' role, emphasizing caring and protection. Liberals have been losing ground because we think that we can win people over simply by presenting a rational case for our position, and don't realize that people's emotional, or values responded, based on these unconscious metaphors or frames, are actually more powerful.
Steven Pinker writing in the New Republic criticizes on Lakoff for lack of historical perspective and being too ideological, but his criticism comes off as lacking objectivity. Lakoff rebuts Pinker, argues that Pinker ascribes to Lakoff the opposite of what he actually believes. Leaving aside Lakoff's defense of himself on central academic points (Lakoff never claims that "thinking trades in metaphors directly", etc), I would like this opportunity to further criticize parts of Pinker's article. Pinker writes:
[Lakoff writes] The Democrats were foolish to offer their own version of tax relief, which accepted the Republicans' framing; it was like asking people not to think of an elephant...One can imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff's Orwellian advice to rebrand taxes as "membership fees."...Why should anyone feel the need to defend the very idea of an income tax? Other than the Ayn Randian fringe, has anyone recently proposed abolishing it?
What Pinker (and Geoff Nunberg, below) seem to be missing is that Lakoff's particular suggestion in this case is largely peripheral to his main criticism. Lakoff's "tax relief" example is highly illuminating as an example of how conservatives have shaped everyday dialogue to fit their frame. Rather than refuting the central point of this example, Pinker tries to refute the essentially peripheral suggestion of using "membership fees", and his incredulity at the need to defend the income tax misses the basic point Lakoff is trying to make: it doesn't matter if the income tax is not factually under threat; Republicans will still benefit from a public aversion to taxes under a "tax relief" frame and use that to win elections and advocate artificially lower income taxes. What's more, many more Republicans have advocated abolishing the income tax and replacing it with a (highly regressive) flat tax than Pinker gives credit for. But his going after Lakoff for a relatively trivial aside undermines Pinker's objectivity.
Again Pinker repeats the same mistake later on:
The metaphors in our language imply that the nurturing parent should be a mother, beginning with "nurture" itself, which comes from the same root as "to nurse."...But it would be embarrassing if progressivism seemed to endorse the stereotype that women are more suited to nurturing children than men are, even if that is, by Lakoff's own logic, a "metaphor we live by." So political correctness trumps linguistics, and the counterpart to the strict father is an androgynous "nurturant parent."
Note that whether or not Lakoff uses 'nurturing parent' or 'nurturing mother' is entirely peripheral to his point. What does this have to do with the idea that conservatives and liberals fall into competing metaphorical frames of strict and nurturing? (Ironically, Pinker accuses Lakoff's reply of 'waving the bloody shirt' of gender because Lakoff pointed out that Pinker holds regressive views on women and science, but Pinker is doing the same thing here in his first review.)
Secondly, just because society does not associate fatherhood with being nurturing, it does not mean that Lakoff is obligated to endorse it. If Lakoff can describe the nurturing role just as accurately by using 'nurturing parent,' he is perfectly fine to do so.
Then Pinker goes on to accuse Lakoff of lack of objectivity and proceeds to explain the theory behind the "invisible hand" as evidence that conservatives understand systemic causation. While all well and good as far as it goes (which is not very far), this part of his review delves directly into political debate and has nothing to do with Lakoff's theory about political psychology, so one would think that Pinker would devote no more than one or two paragraphs to this. But instead, Pinker devotes the entire rest of his review to accusations about how Lakoff's political views are poorly grounded and how his conception of positive freedoms are, in Pinker's views, wrong. Nitpicking at minor points and spending such a huge amount of time attacking politics, Pinker actually concedes a major point in Lakoff's favor. He writes, and seems to intimate that he agrees that:
it is conceivable that a discipline-compassion dimension could shed light on our political psychology.
It hardly looks good to concede a central point of the central theory of the writer you're supposed to be critiquing while spending paragraphs flailing on about minor and peripheral points.
Geoffrey Nunberg also writing in the New Republic offers a more balanced and insightful criticism of Lakoff bringing political science, but struggles when he overreaches.
Nunberg writes:
Lakoff isn't claiming simply that metaphorical thinking often shapes our political views, after all, but that our political reasoning is dominated by a single metaphorical schema of "the nation as family."...His analysis rests entirely on a kind of rational reconstruction: by systematically working out the entailments of the two pictures of the family, Lakoff says, he can show how each position follows from the basic model...The argument, in short, rests on two assumptions: first, that there is a conceptual coherence to the conservative worldview, and second, that you can uncover it if you can tell a story (or "build a model," as linguists like to put it) where everything fits into place
Nunberg points out that Lakoff gives very little evidence for the idea that there is a coherent conservative worldview and that his particular metaphor better fits the two worldviews better than a number of possible competitors. He points out that Lakoff's single metaphor for exactly two poles becomes simplistic and deterministic once you try to say that it is somehow hardwired into human neurology.
How does this square with the fact that the alignment of political issues, both in relative importance and in the stance of conservativs and progressives- has shifted over the decades, not to mention is radically different across different countries? For example the abortion issue is not huge in Great Britain. Lakoff's theory seems better at explaining turn-of-the-century American politics than human political pscyhology in general.
What he's saying, in the end, is that liberals and conservatives are distinct kinds of people, whose differences are embedded in personal psychology. That's exactly what the right has been saying all along--that the country is divided not along lines of class or power, but by "cultural" differences. And like the right, Lakoff locates the prototypical liberal among upscale urban professionals. True, he never says that explicitly. But he depicts nurturant-parent liberals as people [who hold attitudes] more typical of the Berkeley Hills than of working-class, black, or Latino neighborhoods. In effect, this confirms the stereotypes that conservatives have been successfully hawking for the last 30 years, which have made the phrases "working-class liberal" or "black liberal" nearly inexistent in the American media.
This was a very interesting passage but Nunberg makes his first major stumble in assuming that Lakoff dismisses economic and political differences. As a cognitive linguist, Lakoff's contribution to political science will necessarily be in the realm of cognitive psychology, which is more cultural than materialistic.
Lakoff never claims that because there are significant cognitive differences in the way people think, that all differences are reducible down to cultural differences. And Nunberg's implication that liberals should cede the ground of cultural differences to conservatives doesn't make sense either. Of course, one of Lakoff's major themes is that it is often cultural paradigms rather than material realities or rational discussion that explains political suasion.
Nunberg's least supported claim is probably where he writes that lower to middle class Americans who vote Republican [he points out correctly that they are a distinct minority within their economic strata] do not really accept the strict-father frame:
It may be because they don't have much faith in the power of the Democrats to address their concerns, as Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg have argued, or because they personally don't stand to gain much from existing government programs, as Stephen Rose has suggested. Or it may be because they simply find values issues more compelling or comprehensible than economic ones.
This is a flailing, speculative passage which never really refutes Lakoff, and the last thought actually plays into Lakoff's point: if liberals cannot make economic issues simple or compelling, it will be impossible to get these voters to come over to us on economic issues. Lakoff offers a way of doing so through his framing theory.
From here on out Nunberg makes solid points:
[Lakoff writes:]
Conservative political and intellectual leaders ... represented an economic and political elite, but they were seeking the votes of middle- and lower-class working people. They needed, therefore, to identify conservative ideas as populist and liberal/progressive ideas as elitist--even though the reverse was true. They faced a massive framing problem...[and their solution was the strict-father frame]
Now if you followed that line of argument rigorously, you might conclude that the entire "strict-father" morality business was just a line of patter...Lakoff never addresses the difference between ideas and ideology--between sincere moral tenets and the rationalizations and pretexts that Republicans offer for self-serving policies. In fact he often seems to want to have it both ways, occasionally talking about "conservative morality" as a shell game, but more often presenting it as a deep-seated conviction. The real reason for Republicans' success, he says, is that "they say what they idealistically believe."
In other words, Lakoff seems to give conservatives too much credit by (1) assuming that their ideas represent a coherent whole, (2) assuming that they are genuine, and
(3) obscuring the economic roots of political divisions... In fact the most damning thing you can say about Lakoff is that he too often takes the right at its word.
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