George Lakoff has an interview: George Lakoff: In Politics, Progressives Need to Frame Their Values that makes some very important points. The inability to understand what he is saying is, to me, a form of denial. Those who fail to understand these scientific points are very much like the anti-science types on the right that are so often criticized.
Cognitive science is relatively new among the science areas that study the mind. The approach is often met with the usual backlash to new progressive ideas. Science has its deniers as well.
Read on below we can explore these new ideas together.
The interview starts out on a very interesting note:
Mark Karlin: Before we get into the new edition of Don’t Think of an Elephant!, THE ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!, I wanted to ask you a bit more about something you said to me in a conversation at your home awhile back. You noted that it’s not surprising that Republicans are more persuasive than Democrats because they are more skilled at selling and marketing. Does this also relate to the prevalence of consumer advertising in the US that convinces people to buy things that they don’t need or want?
George Lakoff: The marketing profession uses knowledge about the mind, the brain, language, imagery, emotions, the framing of experiences and products, personal and social identity, and normal modes of thought that lead to action and that change brains over time. Marketing professors in business schools study results in these areas and teach courses on how to market most effectively. Again, they study normal modes of thought – the way people really reason. It would be strange to call such modes of thought “irrational” since they are the forms of reason that we have evolved to get us through life.
In short, marketers take results from my field – cognitive science – the field that does scientific research on real reason, on how people really think. Marketers know very well that most thought is unconscious – the usual estimate is about 98 percent. They use their knowledge of how unconscious thought works. And they know that consumers are not aware of how knowledge of the science of mind is being used to sell them products that often they don’t need or may actually harm them.
This is an idea that has been used successfully by the corporate world since well before Marshal McLuhan wrote
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man in 1951. It is hard to understand why our political pundits cling to the same worn out myths about political argument.
Let's get it straight:
Can you talk a little about progressives who are surprised that rational arguments don’t win elections?
Cognitive scientists study how people really think – how brains work, how we get ideas out of neurons, how framing and metaphorical thought work, the link between language and thought, and so on.
But other academic fields have not been using these results, especially, political science, public policy, law, economics, in short, the main areas studied by progressives who go into politics. As a result, they teach an inadequate view of reason and “rationality.” They miss the fact that our brains are structured by hundreds of conceptual metaphors and frames early in life, that we can only understand what our brains allow, and that conservatives and progressives have acquired different brain circuitry with the consequence that their normal modes of reason are different.
What progressives call “rational arguments” are not normal modes of real reason. What counts as a “rational argument” is not the same for progressives and conservatives. And even the meaning of concepts and words may be different. Cognitive linguists have learned a lot about how all this works, but few progressives have studied cognitive linguistics. For a thorough review of such differences, take a look at my book Whose Freedom?, which shows how reasoning about freedom can take two utterly different forms for progressives and conservatives.
One has to wonder why this keeps happening. What is it about the progressive person's brain that makes them continue believing a disproven myth much like fundamentalists believe theirs? For many of us who have studied the science carefully this is a big problem. If you step out of the situation and view from a perspective an interplanetary alien might, you might conclude that the conservatives and progressives are more alike than different. This may explain why the system that has them appearing to argue is so well stabilized by the staging of this pseudo-theatrical drama.
Here is the crux of what progressives keep missing and seem so confused about:
You write, “remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest.” I remember writing a commentary on a poor congressional district, let’s say about 98 percent white, in Kentucky. Most of the residents were on food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid – or all of them. However, they have voted in recent elections by landslide majorities to re-elect a congressman who opposes food stamps and supports cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Can you elaborate on how this can occur?
A single moral worldview dominates conservative policies in every domain of life – family, personal identity, sex, religion, sports, education, the market, foreign policy and politics – what I’ve called strict father morality. Your moral worldview is central to how you understand your life.
In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.
If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.
On conservative religion, God is a strict father; in sports, coaches are strict with their athletes; in classrooms, teachers should be strict with students; in business, employers rule over employees; in the market, the market should decide – the market itself is the strict father, deciding that those who have financial discipline deserve their wealth, and others deserve their poverty; and in politics, this moral system itself should rule.
Conservatives can be poor, but they can still be kings in their own castles – strict fathers at home, in their personal identity: in their religion, in their sex lives, in the sports they love. Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth.
How anyone can not see this after these last elections is beyond me. Yet we see diary after diary trying to explain what happened. What happened is exactly what Lakoff said happens in this culture a long time ago.
So the eternal questions will be asked: "So what do we do?"
If you must discuss political differences, just be positive, starting with your values and with how you understand freedom and how it arises from citizens working together to provide public resources for everyone. Use your language, not theirs. Stay respectful.
Those few sentences would discount a large percentage of what I see written here. Just because the opposition does not share your world view does not give you the ability to "rationally" prove them wrong and stupid as well. There can be no debate when the starting premises are so different on both sides. It is not surprising that there is gridlock. It is not surprising that people with a certain world view vote republican.
Just a word on the science buried under all this. Lakoff has studied cognition very carefully. He has a lot of well documented work to back him up. He does not flaunt it when trying to communicate with the public. Rather he distills it into a message that makes sense if you are willing to look at it in its entirety rather than find straw men to shoot at as a form of self defense and denial.
The biggest sign that he is on the right track is that he has warned and analyzed and dealt reasonably with failure after failure on the part of the progressive forces in this country. Like it or not we are not going to change this situation by doing the same thing over and over again.
The money spent on marketing ideas has been a big issue as it should. But it mainly misses the point. That marketing only works when it touches base with people's minds, their world view and their basic identity.
This is a good interview and I suggest you read it carefully before you kick in with your denial frame.