Monkey Morality: Five Criticisms of George Lakoff's Political Metaphors (Part One)
Tue Sep 05, 2006 at 09:11:12 AM PDT
Like 98% of you on Daily Kos, in 2004 I read George Lakoff's
Don't Think of an Elephant and thought it was brilliant. However, the more I thought about Lakoff's model of the liberal worldview (his Nurturant Parent metaphor), the less it "hung together." It wasn't until I came across an article about religious fundamentalism that I began to put my finger on what seemed to be wrong. Serendipitously, I had just finished reading
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, which prompted me to connect Lakoff's metaphors with recent insights from evolutionary psychology. The result of this intermingling of politics and prehistory is, I believe, a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews, and also a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.
Join me on the flip for the first of my five criticisms of Lakoff's Strict Father / Nurturant Parent metaphors and Part One of this five-part diary.
Part One. The Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough. The conservative worldview is actually based on typical behaviors in primate societies (alpha-male behavior).
A while ago I came across an article about religious fundamentalism titled The Fundamentalist Agenda by the Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas. Dr. Loehr takes as his starting point a study called the Fundamentalism Project, a massive study that found remarkable similarities among all the world's many varieties of fundamentalism.
- Fundamentalists believe that their rules apply to all people and to all areas of life.
- Men are in charge.
- Since there is only one correct set of rules, they must be communicated precisely to the next generation.
- Fundamentalists spurn the modern and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed.
- Fundamentalists deny that their own scriptures might have been influenced by culture.
How is this possible, Dr. Loehr asked — how could all fundamentalisms the world over be so fundamentally (cough) the same?
The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors are familiar because we've all seen them so many times. These men are acting the role of "alpha males" who define the boundaries of their group's territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children; there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected; outsiders are expelled or fought.
It is easier to account for this set of behavioral biases as part of the common evolutionary heritage of our species than to argue that it is simply a monumental coincidence that the social and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms [...] are essentially identical.
Now, if you think evolutionary psychology is a bunch of bunk and all human behavior is culturally determined, you won't get much out of the rest of this diary. For my part, though, I found Dr. Loehr's article fascinating and persuasive, not only because I'd read Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, but also because the article's description of primate behavior sounded strangely familiar.
[This family is a] traditional nuclear family with the father having primary responsibility for the well-being of the household. The mother has day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house and details of raising the children. But the father has primary responsibility for setting overall family policy, and the mother's job is to be supportive of the father and to help carry out the father's views on what should be done. Ideally, she respects his views and supports them.
Life is seen as fundamentally difficult and the world as fundamentally dangerous. Evil is conceptualized as a force in the world, and it is the father's job to support his family and protect it from evils — both external and internal. External evils include enemies, hardships, and temptations. Internal evils come in the form of uncontrolled desires and are as threatening as external ones. [...] He insists on his moral authority, commands obedience, and when he doesn't get it, metes out retribution as fairly and justly as he knows how. It is his job to protect and support his family, and he believes that safety comes out of strength.
Source
Anyone who has read Moral Politics or Don't Think of an Elephant will recognize this excerpt as George Lakoff's Strict Father metaphor for the conservative worldview. The similarities between Dr. Loehr's alpha-male society and Lakoff's Strict Father family are striking: one powerful male is in charge, females are subordinate and are relegated to a mainly reproductive role, the male protects the in-group from outsiders and other threats, the male sets norms for behavior and punishes infractions, and obedience to the male is expected and demanded. Although Dr. Loehr was talking mainly about religious-fundamentalist attitudes, he realized that his insights could be extended to conservative attitudes in general:
What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. (emphasis added)
Although Strict Father morality fits pretty well, it doesn't go deep enough in terms of explaining the basis of the conservative worldview. In my opinion, a more apt term for the conservative worldview might be alpha-male morality, or maybe monkey morality.
Thanks for reading, and join me the rest of this week for Parts Two through Five. (Here's the link to Part Two.) Also, thanks to June T. and Steve B. for your helpful comments on this diary.
(Okay, the behavior I called "monkey morality" is more characteristic of the great apes than monkeys. But how can you resist that catchy alliteration? I should also address the comments that I know will appear about the bonobo, the lesser-known species of chimpanzee. Bonobos have a female-dominant social structure, and social rank is less important in bonobo society than in other primate societies. However, even though bonobos are more closely related to us genetically than common chimps are, their social structure seems to be less similar. There have been few (if any) truly matriarchal human societies. Almost all human societies are male-dominant, which puts human social structure closer to that of the common chimpanzee.)
Permalink | 24 comments