Applying Lakoff

[pegkerr]

This was a comment I made in snippy's journal. I urge you all to read George Lakoff's Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, in order to understand what is going on as people rage over exactly what happened with the aftermath of Katrina.

Have you read Lakoff, by the way? If not, you should. It seems to me that this is a classic example of what he is talking about. He explains that Liberals and Conservatives operate by thinking of the country using two different models of familes. The Liberals operate with the "Nurturant Parent" model (emphazing cooperation, nurturance, "helping," and the Conservatives with the "Authoritarian Father" model (emphasizing hierarchy, chain of command, the strict father overseeing children, correcting them for their own good, because they would run wild without his firm discipline.) Lakoff emphasizes that both worldviews have their own internal, consistent morality.

It seems to me that what is happening is that under the Nurturant Family model, Liberals are furious because the government is not acting as a nurturant parent. It has left its children to starve and die. Under this system, that is the greatest possible sin.

And Conservatives are furious, because the looting in New Orleans is proof that the children have run amuck (as children will do when the parent--the government--are not there to provide firm guidance and order) but the fault lies not with the father at all, who is, but with the badly behaving children. They must be punished for stepping out of line.

Edited to add: I think I also must refer you to this thread between me, snippy and joelrosenberg. I cited a blog entry by Juliette Ochieng here and she replied here. Her reply helps me better understand the conservative thinking here, and what makes conservatives angry: Lakoff explains that the father is there to protect the children: She is exemplifying a strong value of the conservative father model, btw: the father protects the children, rather than hurts them and that is what is so morally offensive about the rampaging in New Orleans. So I mischaracterized the source of conservative ire above. It is not that the children are running amuck that is so offensive. It is that individual fathers are failing to protect their children. Again, one of the greatest moral lapses in this moral system.

Edited to add again: I don't think I quite have my analysis right; am prob. mischaracterizing conservative thought. Don't have time to fix; must clean the house. You must all limp along without me.

Edited to add again: Emotions are running high, but I've managed to get people with disparate viewpoints actually talking here. I would prefer that people not go off in a huff, because I want to get different points of view, and we can't solve these problems if we don't try to find common ground. Surely finding common ground involves helping the people who have been hurt. Nobody on my friends list (I think) wants to kill people in the Gulf States, or is agitating for their ruin or distruction. So please try to keep it civil, people

Comments

[snippy]

Water does fall from the sky, I've heard. It can be collected in a plastic tarp, in fact.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Not when you're being held inside a domed stadium and prevented from leaving.

[snippy]

If I recall correctly, due to breaches in the roof it was raining inside the dome.

Neither you nor I were there; perhaps it was still impossible to collect water. But knowing that it was theoretically possible, it seems unlikely to me that no one even attempted to collect drinking water.

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

The Superdome was not where the biggest problem occurred. It was at the Convention Center, which is not the same place. Actually, though, water did fall from the sky in the superdome. Instead of collecting it, people ran from it. If you live in a hurricane region, as I do, you need to learn to be a survivalist.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Allow me to intrude a note of reality into your palace of self-sufficient fantasy.

When you are huddled into a football stadium with 20,000 other people, listening to a Category 4 hurricane roar overhead, and the wind rips a hole in the dome, you do not think to yourself "Ah! What an opportunity! I must find another refugee who has a tarpaulin and collect rainwater."

Even if you are an unholy combination of Paul Bunyan, Daniel Boone, and Robinson Crusoe, you are far too busy thinking "Dear God, I am going to die," to make plans for the next day. And criticizing people who *were* in that situation for being insufficiently resourceful shows an astonishing lack of both imagination and empathy for a situation you are apparently incapable of comprehending.

I, also, have lived in tornado and hurricane zones. When the worst happened, we sent help to the survivors; we didn't spend our time bitching about how much better we would have coped in the same situation.

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

OOps! My survivalist reference was to being prepared BEFORE the hurricane hit. My point is that there is blame on many levels, not just Bush and the politicos.

I DO know what it is like to huddle in the hurricane winds wondering not only if I would survive, but when the winds would stop. We were not able to get out with Frances because of both wrong information and too many people in wheelchairs to fit into a two seater S-10 pickup. In that situation when you are in a doublewide mobile home surrounded by big trees, many of them jack oaks and pines, you do also wonder about what will be left for the next day if you survive, should you try to tie a bucket out or wait a while and is there any way to capture some of this water to use to clean up without blowing away. I have been there and done that.

I have also lived in tornado country and there is a big difference between hurricanes and tornados. Hurricanes tend to move much more slowly, have higher sustained winds for a longer period of time and dump much more water on the area. It was two days with Frances before the utility company trucks could even start out because of the continuing bands of wind and rain. That is why I think that some of the expectations of the sheltered survivors were also somewhat unreasonable.

I am not criticizing the people's actions during the height of the storm, but after when many just sat and waited for someone else to help them, and I am not talking about those in the Superdome, but in the streets and in the Convention Center which is NOT the Superdome.

My point was that pre-planning was woeful. The Superdome was not even supposed to be a shelter, except a shelter of last resort and there just weren't supplies there. The Red Cross just didn't think that there were any safe shelters in N.O. so set up none. That bothers me somehow.