I haven't seen anything from George Lakoff in quite a while. I have great respect for his writings both in a political context and in a much broader philosophical/scientific context. I just ran across a recent paper by him directed at democrats and found some interesting ideas about systems science in it: Obama Returns To His Moral Vision: Democrats Read Carefully! The title is rather interesting since it was written a few months before the recent debacle. He has written another article since and the tone has changed significantly:Why Democracy Is Public: The American Dream Beats the Nightmare. I don't hope to compare my work to that of Lakoff yet we do overlap to a significant extent. You will find me using his ideas regularly as I write. Many here probably still do not know Lakoff so a brief review is in order before we get to the systems ideas. Read on below to get the whole picture.
If we have to pigeon hole Lakoff he is a cognitive linguist. In that field he has been a student of how we deal with ideas and the role the unconscious mind in the way we form our ideas about things. His applications to politics are the subject of a number of book which you will find if you go to the links above. Beyond politics he has contributed much to our understanding of the difference between the philosophy that is behind most modern neo-liberal thought and what he sees as a genuine philosophy based on humun thinking and how it works. Thus he is, in my mind, on of the revolutionary thinkers in modern science along with Robert Rosen who has created the brand of complexity theory I have been practicing and developing further.
To be all too brief, what Lakoff has seen, and now has documented with lots of evidence, is a totally different view of how the human mind operates than 18th century enlightenment followers subscribe to. I couple this with the failure of Cartesian reductionism in science after the ideas of Rosen.
Lakoff calls it the embodied mind. He explains this in a very interesting book along with Johnson in: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999) His many works on the use of metaphor in our thought process all relate to the ideas set out there. In a nutshell, he rejects the notion of mind apart from the human brain in any abstract "objective" manner. Rosen gives another side of the same argument and also dismisses the "myth of objectivity".
This leads, in Lakoff's case, to the idea of political "framing" of ideas. Again books exist to explain this so don't expect it all to be condensed here. In brief, he identifies the practice so well studied and developed by the right wing in this country: the framing of ideas. Once the frame is established, the use of buzz words and triggers of varioius sorts has the listener tuned in to ideas he has had before and great effort is required to break through these responses to get your own thoughts across. generally there is no time and they win. We have seen this in operation too many times to dismiss the idea. Triggers like "tax relief, tax and spend, big government, baby killers, and many many more abound. Why did the "tea Party" choose its name? The two words trigger volumes of ideas without another word being said.
The place where my interests and his really coincide is in the use of causality in explaining why things happen. He distinguishes two kind of cause: direct, or simple, and complex cause. Right wing (and often reductionist scientific thinking) focus on direct cause:
AGENT---------------------------->RESULT
Complex cause is again the subject of books, but this time by Rosen and his students. The most revolutionary ideas coming out of those works have to do with networks and closed loops of causality-the essence of what we call "complexity".
We are now ready to contemplate systems for real world systems are complex in the above sense. Here's what Lakoff says about systems in the new article:
With his April 13, 2011 speech, the President is back with the basic, straightforward idea of right and wrong that he correctly attributes to the founding of the country — as UCLA historian Lynn Hunt has observed in her important book Inventing Human Rights.................................President Obama, in the same speech, laid the groundwork for another crucial national discussion: systems thinking, which has shown up in public discourse mainly in the form of “systemic risk” of the sort that led to the global economic meltdown. The president brought up systems thinking implicitly, at the center of his budget proposal. He observed repeatedly that budget deficits and “spending” do not occur in isolation. The choice of what to cut and what to keep is a matter of factors external to the budget per se. Long-term prosperity, economic recovery, and job creation, he argued, depend up maintaining “investments” — investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, long-distance rail), education, scientific research, renewable energy, and so on. The maintenance of American values, he argued, is outside of the budget in itself, but is at the heart of the argument about what to cut. The fact is that the rich have gotten rich because of the government — direct corporate subsidies, access to publicly-owned resources, access to government research, favorable trade agreements, roads and other means of transportation, education that provides educated workers, tax loopholes, and innumerable government resources are taken advantage of by the rich, but paid for by all of us. What is called a ”tax break” for the rich is actually a redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class—whose incomes have gone down—to those who have considerably more money than they need, money they have made because of tax investments by the rest of America.
It should be clear to anyone who understands the different between thinking based on direct causes rather than these complex systemic relationships can understand why the impasse is there. The two wold views don't mesh. It will not be cured by the kind of arguments we have put forth because they assume the other side sees the links and relaationships. They don't!
In his words:
To see this, you have to look outside of the federal budget to the economic system at large, in which you can see what budget cuts will be balanced by increased in costs to others. A cut here in the budget is balanced by an increase outside the federal budget for real human beings.
What is a “system?”
Systems have the following properties:
Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable; they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the earth is a major indicator.
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Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the money supply. In the global environment, the global icecaps are an uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat, which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more, and on and on.
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Non-local and network effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US, and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via such non-local effects.
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Nonlinear effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt for the whole country over a decade.
When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of “systemic causation.” “Systemic risks” are the risks created when there is systemic causation. Systemic causation contrasts with direct causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something, or shoots someone.
Given the effectiveness of right wing framing and this fundamental difference in world views, the impasse is a given as well. No amount of "talk" or "negotiating" can remedy the fundamental problem. It will take very hard work and study on our part to get this across to the American people. Let's get to it!