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

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

There, I think I couldn't disagree more strongly -- respectfully, but strongly. Just to pick up on one thing... as a father, I think I have an obligation to protect my kids -- that's part of what I signed up for, and it seems to me to be a deal that's good for society, for them, and I would hope, for me. (And I think that protecting them involves a whole lot of things, including trying hard to teach them to be able to take care of themselves.)

But I don't think that that absolves their mother of a similar responsibility and, while I don't normally speak for her on political matters, I doubt she disagrees.

Now, I'll be happy to look around for the liberals who say that fathers shouldn't take care of their kids, but I won't find any, I think; I think it's a matter of both emphasis and prediction.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You're missing the point of the analogy. Think of it more as "Authoritarian Parent" than "Authoritarian Father" for this purpose.

The book explains it better than the post, of course. But there's a much shorter essay on the web somewhere that does most of what the book does -- the book is a mostly unnecessary spinning out of the essay.

B

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

No, actually, I'm simply disagreeing with the thrust of the analogy. I don't think that nurturing and providing structure and authority are conflicting; I think they're orthogonal, and that's, as I've suggested, why I find Lakoff -- and if you're talking about the same essay I've read, I've, well, read it -- so unconvincing, although I can see how his take would provide comfort both to people who think that maintaining structure and authority are necessarily authoritarian-bad, as well as to those who think that nurturing is just a code word for creating permanent unnecessary dependence.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Agreed. They're not conflicting; they're orthogonal. I don't believe Lakoff says anything different. Most people move back and forth between different mental models all the time.

B

That, I think, is where Lakoff disagrees with you...

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

... and why, among other things, he's formed the Rockridge Institute specifically to promote what he sees as a the creation and implementation of a necessary a "progressive"/nuturing metaphorical framing structure to supplant/compete with/counter what he sees as a "conservative"/authoritarian one that, in Lakoff's view, is the result of billions (with a b) of dollars that conservatives have spent on framing. (My own take, fwiw, is that he's got an advanced case of Chomsky's Disease -- a success or failure of a political view in the real world is merely evidence that his theories were correct in the first place. Hyperdeterministic, eh?)

See http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml .

I think that he's both misreading history and misunderstanding liberals, including both liberal donors, who -- in my reading of his quotes here, and elsewhere -- come across as well-meaning but softheaded (apparently, in his view, liberal donors don't understand what "seed money" might be -- something that I think would be a surprise to, among others, George Soros and EMILY'S list), as well as conservatives (who, in his view, focus on maintaining the status quo, something that the conservative folks I know involved in various things they consider to be [or, in Lakoffese, have "framed"] as "revolutions" would disagree with -- and very specifically those who view most of academia and the mainstream media as a successful liberal framing enterprise).

Reminds me of Freud, as much as Chomsky, really. From my POV, all hyperdeterminists sound much the same.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

I don't think that pegkerr was literally talking about fathers and mothers (at least, that's not what I was agreeing with). It's about the idea of the Authoritarian parental model against the idea of the Nuturing parental model.

This isn't about saying whether or not fathers should protect their children (perhaps it would be clarifying to refrain from using the traditional word 'father' after 'authoritarian', though the authoritarian model is rather hopelessly bound together with patriarchy in many people's minds), but about two different types of techniques that are not limited to gender. Not every father is authoritarian and not every mother is nuturing, certainly.

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

I think she's talking about both fathers and mothers, and about societal models, as Lakoff does. I think that his model (not for how society works, but how society is thought ought to work, by people of different political persuasions) is, to be ungenerous, very badly flawed.

That said, it does lead to some interesting descriptions and suggestions for what he calls "framing" of political issues. (I'd call it "spinning madly," myself, but I've observed in my own political work that the opposition is often very good at framing/spinning, and find my own side remarkably weak at it, all too often.)