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This is part of a transcript from an NPR interview last October. I figured it belongs with the philosophy part of "religion and philosophy", because it looks at some of the possible core reasons for why our philosophies on life tend to point our moral compasses in opposite directions. Anyway, I hope you find this as interesting as I did.
Analysis: Liberals and conservatives
October 12, 2004
NEAL CONAN, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
Sometimes it seems as if liberals and conservatives are talking past each other. Liberals, for example, find it hard to understand how conservatives can support the death penalty and oppose abortion at the same time. Conservatives fail to see how liberals can paint themselves as champions of labor when they support environmental regulations that limit the creation of new jobs. At some point, people on both sides throw up their hands and say, `My position is plain common sense, and you just don't get it.' George Lakoff argues that both of them are right. What divides red state, blue state, 50/50 America, he says, are fundamentally different world views that explain why conservatives tend to agree on a wide variety of seemingly disparate issues like taxes to school vouchers and why liberals take the opposite tack.
So why are you a liberal or a conservative or maybe a maverick? Did you choose one philosophy over the other, or do you decide by issue by issue? What are the underlying principles that make liberals liberals and conservatives conservatives? Why do the two sides have so much trouble understanding each other?
Our number here in Washington if you'd like to join the conversation is (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He explains his theories in a book called "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," first published in 1996, out again in 2002. He joins us now from the studios at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
Good of you to join us on TALK OF THE NATION today.
Professor GEORGE LAKOFF ("Moral Politics"): It's a pleasure to be here.
CONAN: You write that the most important tool to understanding these differences is to understand metaphors and that the most important metaphor is the family.
Prof. LAKOFF: Yes. When you try to understand why it is that all of the different positions hold together; why it is that the same people who favor abortion also favor lower taxes, also favor, you know, the ownership of guns and so on; why do they fit together? And why do people who have exactly the opposite positions, why do they fit together? What explains it is a metaphorical understanding of the nation as a family.
We have our Founding Fathers. We send their sons and daughters to war. We hear these expressions and never think twice about them, but we do understand the nation as a family, but what's interesting is that there are two different kinds of families, what I call a strict father family and a nurturing parent family. And when you understand the differences and that these metaphors of nation as family map those things onto the nation, what you understand is that there are two utterly different understandings of our politics that come out of these family views.
The strict father family begins with a set of assumptions. The world is a dangerous and difficult place. There's competition. There will always be winners and losers. Children are born bad; that is, they want to do just what they want to do, not what is right and that they need to be made good. You need a strict father, according to this view, because you need someone who will protect the family in the dangerous world, support it in the difficult world, win those competitions and teach his children right from wrong. And the assumption is, there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong, and there's only one way to teach kids right from wrong and that is punishment, painful punishment, which can be either physical punishment or withdrawal of affection.
The result of this is the following: The assumption is children will develop discipline through being punished when they do wrong; that is, they'll learn to discipline themselves internally, and that this moral discipline will result in discipline to get them through in the world, to seek their self-interests and become self-reliant and prosperous. And, thus, you have a...
CONAN: And themselves to go on and raise--be stern fathers themselves.
Prof. LAKOFF: Exactly. And not only that; there's a link between morality and prosperity as a result. And so you see the idea that if you're not prosperous, you're not disciplined, and if you're not disciplined, you're probably not moral and so you deserve not to be prosperous. You deserve your poverty.
CONAN: And the others...
Prof. LAKOFF: The result is that you go against social programs. You think all social programs are immoral because they give people things that they don't want--I mean, that they haven't earned, and the result of that, if they haven't earned it, is dependence. The result of that is that people become less and less disciplined, and, therefore, you hurt the people you're trying to help. That's the conservative argument.
Now the liberal way of raising families is the following. They have a nurturing family, and they assume that both parents are necessary and equal and that their job is to nurture their children and raise their children to be nurturers of others. Nurturers of others is very important. In addition, nurturance has two things about it. First, empathy; you have to know what all those cries of the baby mean. You have to be able to connect with your children. And responsibility; you have to be able to take care of yourself if you're going to take care of others and you have to be responsible for others. And you're teaching your children to be empathetic and responsible toward others as well.
From these two values, empathy and responsibility, a great deal follows, namely all of the progressive principles. So, for example, if you empathize with your child, you'll want to protect your child, and, therefore, you have political principles of protection, like worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection. If you care about your child, you want your child to be fulfilled in life, and so fulfillment becomes an important value, and there's no fulfillment without freedom. You have to be free to fulfill yourself, and that's why liberty and pursuit of happiness go together.
Similarly, a child can't be fulfilled if he's treated unfairly. So fairness is a value. There's no freedom without opportunity and no opportunity without prosperity. So opportunity and prosperity become values, and you don't live alone. As Hillary Clinton says, `It takes a village.' You live in a community. So community-building and community maintenance and service to that community become values, and you can't have that without cooperation. So cooperation is a major value together with what is required for cooperation: trust. No trust without honesty and open communication. So cooperation, trust, honesty and open communication are progressive values. All of these values are the progressive moral system. That is why progressives believe what they believe, and they often run up against conservatives.
CONAN: Now the heart of this is the idea of this unconscious metaphor. Now you point out, not unconscious in the Freudian sense but unconscious in the sense that we just don't think about it.
Prof. LAKOFF: Right. Most of our thought, as cognitive science shows, is unconscious, I mean, almost all of it, and certainly the concepts that we use, the ideas we use and so on are almost all unconscious. They're things we just don't even notice or think about until someone points them out to us. And so our job as cognitive scientists is to figure out how people can actually think and how that works. One of the most important things that we've discovered is that people first think metaphorically, and second, they think in terms of what are called conceptual frames; that is, small little bundles of ideas that are coherent and about one thing.
For example, if you take the notion of tax relief, which came into our parlance through George Bush when he took office, take the word relief. Relief is the fine relative to what is called a conceptional frame. For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction and an afflicted party who's harmed by it, a reliever who takes the affliction away, who's a hero, and if anybody tries to stop them, they're a bad guy. You add tax to that, and you get taxation is an affliction, which is a conservative idea that goes along with the idea that people who are disciplined should pursue their self-interests, become prosperous. Their money is their reward, and taxation is something that takes that reward away, an affliction.
Analysis: Liberals and conservatives
October 12, 2004
NEAL CONAN, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
Sometimes it seems as if liberals and conservatives are talking past each other. Liberals, for example, find it hard to understand how conservatives can support the death penalty and oppose abortion at the same time. Conservatives fail to see how liberals can paint themselves as champions of labor when they support environmental regulations that limit the creation of new jobs. At some point, people on both sides throw up their hands and say, `My position is plain common sense, and you just don't get it.' George Lakoff argues that both of them are right. What divides red state, blue state, 50/50 America, he says, are fundamentally different world views that explain why conservatives tend to agree on a wide variety of seemingly disparate issues like taxes to school vouchers and why liberals take the opposite tack.
So why are you a liberal or a conservative or maybe a maverick? Did you choose one philosophy over the other, or do you decide by issue by issue? What are the underlying principles that make liberals liberals and conservatives conservatives? Why do the two sides have so much trouble understanding each other?
Our number here in Washington if you'd like to join the conversation is (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He explains his theories in a book called "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," first published in 1996, out again in 2002. He joins us now from the studios at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
Good of you to join us on TALK OF THE NATION today.
Professor GEORGE LAKOFF ("Moral Politics"): It's a pleasure to be here.
CONAN: You write that the most important tool to understanding these differences is to understand metaphors and that the most important metaphor is the family.
Prof. LAKOFF: Yes. When you try to understand why it is that all of the different positions hold together; why it is that the same people who favor abortion also favor lower taxes, also favor, you know, the ownership of guns and so on; why do they fit together? And why do people who have exactly the opposite positions, why do they fit together? What explains it is a metaphorical understanding of the nation as a family.
We have our Founding Fathers. We send their sons and daughters to war. We hear these expressions and never think twice about them, but we do understand the nation as a family, but what's interesting is that there are two different kinds of families, what I call a strict father family and a nurturing parent family. And when you understand the differences and that these metaphors of nation as family map those things onto the nation, what you understand is that there are two utterly different understandings of our politics that come out of these family views.
The strict father family begins with a set of assumptions. The world is a dangerous and difficult place. There's competition. There will always be winners and losers. Children are born bad; that is, they want to do just what they want to do, not what is right and that they need to be made good. You need a strict father, according to this view, because you need someone who will protect the family in the dangerous world, support it in the difficult world, win those competitions and teach his children right from wrong. And the assumption is, there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong, and there's only one way to teach kids right from wrong and that is punishment, painful punishment, which can be either physical punishment or withdrawal of affection.
The result of this is the following: The assumption is children will develop discipline through being punished when they do wrong; that is, they'll learn to discipline themselves internally, and that this moral discipline will result in discipline to get them through in the world, to seek their self-interests and become self-reliant and prosperous. And, thus, you have a...
CONAN: And themselves to go on and raise--be stern fathers themselves.
Prof. LAKOFF: Exactly. And not only that; there's a link between morality and prosperity as a result. And so you see the idea that if you're not prosperous, you're not disciplined, and if you're not disciplined, you're probably not moral and so you deserve not to be prosperous. You deserve your poverty.
CONAN: And the others...
Prof. LAKOFF: The result is that you go against social programs. You think all social programs are immoral because they give people things that they don't want--I mean, that they haven't earned, and the result of that, if they haven't earned it, is dependence. The result of that is that people become less and less disciplined, and, therefore, you hurt the people you're trying to help. That's the conservative argument.
Now the liberal way of raising families is the following. They have a nurturing family, and they assume that both parents are necessary and equal and that their job is to nurture their children and raise their children to be nurturers of others. Nurturers of others is very important. In addition, nurturance has two things about it. First, empathy; you have to know what all those cries of the baby mean. You have to be able to connect with your children. And responsibility; you have to be able to take care of yourself if you're going to take care of others and you have to be responsible for others. And you're teaching your children to be empathetic and responsible toward others as well.
From these two values, empathy and responsibility, a great deal follows, namely all of the progressive principles. So, for example, if you empathize with your child, you'll want to protect your child, and, therefore, you have political principles of protection, like worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection. If you care about your child, you want your child to be fulfilled in life, and so fulfillment becomes an important value, and there's no fulfillment without freedom. You have to be free to fulfill yourself, and that's why liberty and pursuit of happiness go together.
Similarly, a child can't be fulfilled if he's treated unfairly. So fairness is a value. There's no freedom without opportunity and no opportunity without prosperity. So opportunity and prosperity become values, and you don't live alone. As Hillary Clinton says, `It takes a village.' You live in a community. So community-building and community maintenance and service to that community become values, and you can't have that without cooperation. So cooperation is a major value together with what is required for cooperation: trust. No trust without honesty and open communication. So cooperation, trust, honesty and open communication are progressive values. All of these values are the progressive moral system. That is why progressives believe what they believe, and they often run up against conservatives.
CONAN: Now the heart of this is the idea of this unconscious metaphor. Now you point out, not unconscious in the Freudian sense but unconscious in the sense that we just don't think about it.
Prof. LAKOFF: Right. Most of our thought, as cognitive science shows, is unconscious, I mean, almost all of it, and certainly the concepts that we use, the ideas we use and so on are almost all unconscious. They're things we just don't even notice or think about until someone points them out to us. And so our job as cognitive scientists is to figure out how people can actually think and how that works. One of the most important things that we've discovered is that people first think metaphorically, and second, they think in terms of what are called conceptual frames; that is, small little bundles of ideas that are coherent and about one thing.
For example, if you take the notion of tax relief, which came into our parlance through George Bush when he took office, take the word relief. Relief is the fine relative to what is called a conceptional frame. For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction and an afflicted party who's harmed by it, a reliever who takes the affliction away, who's a hero, and if anybody tries to stop them, they're a bad guy. You add tax to that, and you get taxation is an affliction, which is a conservative idea that goes along with the idea that people who are disciplined should pursue their self-interests, become prosperous. Their money is their reward, and taxation is something that takes that reward away, an affliction.
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