Monkey Morality: Five Criticisms of George Lakoff's Political Metaphors (Part Five)

In this series of five diaries, I've been critiquing George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent metaphor for the liberal worldview and using recent insights from evolutionary psychology to try to create a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews and a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

In Part One, I argued that the Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough and that the conservative worldview is actually based on behaviors that are typical of primate societies, namely alpha-male behavior. Part Two concluded with a question: If evolution rewards the pursuit of self-interest, does the Strict Father model fit better with evolutionary theory than the Nurturant Parent model does? Part Three showed that natural selection can lead to cooperation as well as competition. Part Four proposed that competition and cooperation might make more sense as underlying conservative and liberal values, respectively, than strength and nurturance.

Join me on the flip for the big finish (Part Five).

Part Five. A liberal worldview based on the metaphor of a Cooperative Community makes more sense than one based on the metaphor of a Nurturant Parent.

In Part Four, I suggested that the complementary evolutionary strategies of competition and cooperation might be the foundation for the complementary political views that are conservatism and liberalism. There have been any number of other dichotomies suggested as the basis for these views: the Constrained Vision vs. the Unconstrained Vision, the Inherited Obligation Family vs. the Negotiated Commitment Family, the Strict Father vs. the Nurturant Parent, etc. I haven't seen any in-depth discussion of competition and cooperation so I hope someone will want to take on that project.

Over the course of this series, the reader comments brought up another possible angle. Several commenters (particularly alsaur) responded to the discussion of alpha-male behavior in primates by pointing out that there is a long stretch of human evolution in which we lived as hunter-gatherers in what seem to be fairly egalitarian, cooperative societies. It's possible that the liberal and conservative worldviews are expressions of two phases of our evolutionary history, with conservatives seeing the world more as our primate ancestors did and liberals seeing the world more as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did. It's likely that our primate ancestors lived in an extended Strict Father (alpha male) family. It's likely that hunter-gatherers lived in a cooperative community. We probably evolved different behaviors and mental models for negotiating each social environment. Again, I think it's a worthwhile area for further inquiry.

But back to the task at hand. In Part Four I suggested that the idea of the Cooperative Community made more sense as a basis for the liberal worldview than the Nurturant Parent model does. In Moral Politics, Lakoff presents the following moral metaphors as the foundation of the Nurturant Parent model:

• Morality as Empathy
• Morality as Nurturance
• Morality as Self-Nurturance
• Morality as the Nurturance of Social Ties
• Morality as Self-Development
• Morality as Happiness
• Morality as Fair Distribution

Lots of nurturance, a little empathy, a little self-development. For me, the problem with this model is that most of it doesn't hit on the things that liberals actually concern ourselves about. Who really sees morality as empathy or self-development or the nurturance of social ties? Maybe nurturance in the general sense of helping each other, but not in the sense of raising a child. The moral metaphors in the Strict Father model, on the other hand, read like a list of conservative obsessions: strength, authority, moral order, discipline, purity. Conservatives see the world in terms of these values. I never got the same sense about most of Lakoff's supposedly liberal values.

So here's where I throw out my Better Idea: the model of the Cooperative Community, complete with a Lakoff-style breakdown of its constituent moral metaphors. In the Cooperative Community, morality is:

• Morality is Working Together (we all share the same goals)
• Morality is Making Alliances (we're stronger when we band together)
• Morality is Fair Play (everyone plays by the same rules and no one gets to take advantage of the group)
• Morality is Sharing (it's wrong to have more than you need when others don't have enough)
• Morality is Assistance (we take care of everyone)
• Morality is Inclusiveness (there's room for everyone)
• Morality is Tolerance (we all have to live together)

In my opinion, these moral metaphors fit the liberal worldview better than those in the Nurturant Parent model do. I just don't see liberals talking about nurturance, self-development, or empathy very much; even though we all read Don't Think of an Elephant, those moral metaphors have never caught on. On the other hand, liberals concern ourselves a great deal with values like sharing, inclusiveness, tolerance, working together, and helping others. And what really gets us riled up is people who won't cooperate, won't play fair, take more than their share, won't help those in need, divide the world into "us" and "them", and are racists or bigots.

In addition, the Cooperative Community model has the advantage that the liberal values of equality and democracy are built right in. The interactions in the Cooperative Community model are interactions between equals, not between parents and children. And from a political standpoint, the model aligns with frames that already come naturally to Democrats. We've all heard Democratic candidates say they're "Working for You" or "Helping Our Community". But you'll never hear a Democrat try to get elected by saying they'll nurture you or empathize with you.

Finally, I'd like to point out that Lakoff addressed the concept of cooperation in the conclusion of Moral Politics:

Strict Father morality is not just unhealthy for children. It is unhealthy for any society. It sets up good vs. evil, us vs. them dichotomies and recommends aggressive punitive action against "them." [...] Strict Father morality thereby breeds a divisive culture of exclusion and blame. It appeals to the worst of human instincts, leading people to stereotype, demonize, and punish the Other — just for being the Other. [...]

Insofar as Nurturant Parent morality can encourage cooperation and provide the incentive, the training, and the environment in which the largest number of citizens can work together productively and cooperatively, it seems by far the better choice.

Source: Moral Politics, "Basic Humanity"

I would submit that, insofar as Cooperative Community morality can encourage cooperation and provide the incentive, the training, and the environment in which the largest number of citizens can work together productively and cooperatively, it is an even better choice than Nurturant Parent morality.

(Thanks to everyone who read and commented and SusanG for rescuing this diary series on Wednesday. And thanks to George Lakoff for Moral Politics, a truly brilliant, original, and compelling book.)

Additional Reading (from the comments)

Lakoff/Ault Synthesis: Fixing Lakoff's Family Models
Bonobo Society
A Natural History of Peace

Update [2006-9-18 16:53:28 by lucidity]: Paul Waldman, author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), suggests "We're all in it together" as the "big idea" that underlies progressive positions, values, and identity. Progressives and liberals certainly seem to be gravitating toward community as our underlying metaphor. (Waldman's whole book is terrific, btw.)