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Summary: Correction to Kirkus Review
Review: "Those liberals!" "Those conservatives!" How many opportunities for community-building have been hijacked by political debates? And yet, itÕs fascinating how rarely the assumptions underlying political differences come to the surface. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff has built this political book around a reinforcing process: Attitudes about child-raising lead to attitudes about government, which lead to attitudes about child-raising again. Conservatives see morality as a matter of strength and discipline (Lakoff calls it "strict father morality"). Liberals see it as a matter of empathy and protection (Lakoff calls it "nurturant parent morality"). Both groups believe that the other groupÕs attitudes lead to danger, and both believe that a government should be to its people as a parent is to their children. Both groups, in the end, know a piece of truth about the world that the other groups lack. (Lakoff makes this clear although he, himself, falls on the side of the nurturant parents, and argues for liberalism on those grounds.) If you are trying to pull together (or simply to understand) a community full of both "strict fathers" and "nurturant parents," especially in the United States, then you need this book... Ð
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Summary: Brilliant, and well-written too
Review: After reading this fascinating book I'll never look at politics in the same way again. Lakoff's theory of moral politics pulls together apparent inconsistencies and irrationalities in both liberal and conservative thinking in a way that makes everything fit. Brilliant!
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Summary: A Template of American Political Thought
Review: As a psychologist, Lakoff has an interesting approach to why Americans hold the political views that they do, and since politics is a human exercize, I guess it makes sense.Matching left and right-wing thought with opposing views of family organization, Lakoff explains the seeming contradictions in political positions by liberals and conservatives alike. Overall, it's a very useful book. I would have liked to see him explain what conditions make one a conservative or liberal in the first place, perhaps geographical or economic backgrounds, but otherwise I learned a great deal from "Moral Politics."
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Summary: The Pasteboard Mask of Metaphor
Review: In MORAL POLITICS, cognitive linguist George Lakoff explores the metaphorical language behind politics, "deconstructing" the emotionally powerful, and unconscious "common sense" discourse of family ties and their inappropriate but ubiquitous application to politics. It is quite a remarkable performance, often thought provoking, insightful and even revelatory. Once he gets through a too long disquisition on the science of cognitive linguistics (which, despite the trappings of scientific method has much in common with literary criticism) and gets down to cases, his sharp, often cutting insights into what he calls the tendentious, self-righteous, self-legitimizing discourse of the Right, crackles with acute observation. His introductory example of the distorting power of metaphor discusses an editorial in the Washington Post. This editorial, written when Washington, D.C. was suffering budget problems, likened the city to a "poor mother" who overcharges on her credit card because she is too softhearted to deny her child the things she thinks the child requires. Lakoff points out that instead of employing logical argument about budgets and economics, the "argument" in this column proceeds from metaphor, comparing the city to an undeserving, prolifigate welfare mother, which most readers will recognize as a stock character in conservative dramaturgy. Thus, the columnist is able to reduce the problem to a stock situation with the appropriate stock conservative remedy: "just say no." Lakoff countering in the liberal vein, points out that the city's budget deficits were incurred for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the flow of suburban workers in and out of the city each day, commuters who do not pay city taxes but still require and demand city services. Further, he suggests that the seat of state power might be considered especially deserving of the largesse of Congress by virtue of the fact that it is our nation's capital, the city of the people, and of important symbolic value. Using these arguments, he suggests Congress could be characterized by liberals as a "deadbeat dad," as a way to counter the conservative metaphorical system, fighting metaphorical fire with metaphorical fire. His analysis of moral accounting and moral credit is at the heart of both the conservative and liberal metaphorical systems. The difference between the models is a difference in emphasis and within each system a difference of focus, Lakoff suggests. Liberals, when they open the books to examine moral debits and moral credit accruing to various people, groups, and classes, factor larger social forces into the balance. They call into the accounting notions of fairness and equality of opportunity as factors that have a decided effect on the chances of each citizen or group to prosper. When conservatives do their Moral Accounting, no social factors -- poverty, race, gender -- are allowed to muddy the calculation. In the atomistic conservative accounting system, every individual is already equal: equal to succeed by dint of hard work, self-reliance, and self-denial or to fail because of laziness, dependency and irresponsibility. The conservative ideology, which Lakoff describes as Calvinistic, then expands the individual moral accounting to society at large claiming that wealth is a signal of moral superiority on earth, and a sign of one's election to life everlasting in Heaven. Lakoff offers two metaphorical models to explain the difference between conservatives and liberals, both of which are based on conceptions of the family. He notes that conservatives wield their metaphorical model -- The Strict Father -- much more effectively than liberals because they have studied its innerworkings more rigorously. Also, he notes it is more rhetorically effectively because unlike the liberal model -- The Nurturant Parent model -- The Strict Father model offers a complete explanation and justification for those who are either powerful already, or for those who wish to support and emulate the powerful. The Strict Father program of top-down ideologically reinforced hierarchy -- a disciplinary program where punishment is more important than reward -- is a program which believers are told flows out of the natural moral order established of God. Not surpassingly, the Strict Father model supports and reinforces the Free Market model, offering its Chain of Bein moral ethos as a natural legitimization of the "discipline" of the "competitive" market. The Nurturant Parent model, on the other hand, supports mutual respect, mutual aid and tolerance, and according to Lakoff is ineffectively articulated by liberals and mischaracterized by conservatives as communistic, socialistic, destructive of individual initiative. The problem with both metaphorical systems Lakoff realizes is the primacy of place given the parent, whether Strict or Nurturant. Both imply hierarchy, one an Old Testament hierarchy where the Father is firmly ensconced as the ultimate arbiter and disciplinarian, the other where the Nurturant parent, modeled after the Son of the New Testament, which offers forgiveness and compassion. Democracy, on the other hand, is a political system that is intended to promote lateral relationships and mutuality of governance. Lakoff's depiction of liberalism as the Nurturant parent, though descriptive of the current ethos of the Democratic Party, tends to legitimate hierarchy -- a kinder, gentler hierarchy, but a hierarchy nonetheless. The anarchist Emma Goldman, raised by a strict father who beat and terrorized her, yet whose bold and dashing character she admired in spite of the abuse -- an embodied version of the conservative ethos -- saw all kinds of power as self-reinforcing and self-legitimating. While the therapeutic state is probably more humane than the patriarchic model offered by conservatives, it must ask itself for whose benefit it exists, and whose well being it really promotes. It is a party that is, in its past incarnation as the Party of Hope, is in Lakoff's formulation and to its credit, more willing to entertain the question than the Party of History. While Lakoff does us a service by encouraging us to see behind the pasteboard mask, an older Democrat, Melville, a Young American Democrat, encouraged a far riskier and dangerous project: to burst through the mask into a new and unpredictable moral space.
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Summary: An original and thought-provoking treatment.
Review: In this book George Lakoff applies insights from contemporary cognitive science and the study of metaphor in an effort to explain why conservatives and liberals think as they do, why their positions on certain issues seem inconsistent with their positions on other issues, and why debates between the two always seem to generate more heat than light. According to Lakoff, liberalism and conservatism presuppose incompatible worldviews proceeding from conflicting moral premises about the family and childrearing--transferred to the political realm via a metaphor which leads advocates of each to see the nation as akin to a family and its government as akin to a parent. The conservative worldview proceeds from a Strict Father conception of the family, one with the father at the head of the household, the mother subservient in a hierarchy, and the children expected to obey authority without question. The liberal worldview presupposes a Nurturing Parent model which sees parents as equals and their role as nurturers instead of taskmasters. Competing moral beliefs dictate the language of each. Thus the role in conservative writings of terms like independence, personal responsibility, self-reliance, tough love, strength, discipline, and so on; and the role in liberal writings of other terms: compassion, social responsibility, care, helping, sensitivity, social forces, and so on. This further explains conservative and liberal demons, why conservatives despise feminists and homosexuals whose very existence seems to subvert their conception of a morally correct family structure; and why liberals despise Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh as persons who confound their view of nurturer as a proper function of government in a humane society. Lakoff reaches some provocative conclusions as he applies this conceptual machinery to various issues: abortion, gun-control, capital punishment, affirmative action and the culture wars, and so on. He explains why conservatives oppose abortion but favor capital punishment even though each (on their terms) takes a human life, and why they oppose government spending on welfare but support it for the military. His argument would also account for why liberals favor government intervention to help the poor and minorities but see it as having no right to interfere with a woman's right to choose. He suggests explanations for the many variants on conservative and liberal themes, some of the former focusing on the religion and others mostly ignoring it, with some of the latter focusing on, e.g., women's issues and others focusing elsewhere. (Libertarians, according to Lakoff, are much closer to mainstream conservatives than they think; their moral focus is on keeping government small, but within a Strict Father conception of society.) Lakoff even finds contrasting Strict Father versus Nurturing Parent views of God, leading to interpretations of Christianity other than those of conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition. He observes that Jesus himself did not ignore the poor and destitute. In the end it is wrong and simplistic, however, to dismiss conservatives merely as heartless, self-interested apologists for the rich, and it is equally wrong to dismiss liberals as whining promoters of bureaucracy and large, intrusive government. Examining the dispute between the two in light of the findings of behavioral science on childrearing and of cognitive science on how the mind operates, Lakoff concludes that current scientific research favors the Nurturing Parent model. Thus he is a committed and unapologetic liberal. He does not, however, claim to have the final word on the subject. His book issues an implicit challenge to conservatives to back up their views on the family and by extension, on society, by producing quality research of their own. Right now, he contends, advocates of Strict Father morality are allowing Christian fundamentalists to set their agenda for the family and for communities. (Libertarians, I had noticed before encountering this book, have little to say about family systems at all.) I confess to being one of those people who has, until recently at least, operated from a Strict Father perspective of the (more or less) libertarian variety. As such, Lakoff has given me a great deal to think about, and I will never again look at conservatism, liberalism or libertarianism in the same way. Lakoff is thoughtful, intellectually honest about where he stands, and never becomes shrill or strident. When he states an opinion he always has a reason. He even has an explanation for why liberal politics has retreated somewhat in the 1990s, at least at the state and local levels. This is implied in the book's subtitle. Conservatives, Lakoff believes, have greater intuitive insight into the moral structure of their position and how to use it to maximum effect in communities than do liberals. Thus conservatives' highly successful appeals to "family values" which have won them so many state and local elections. Lakoff urges that we create a "metalanguage" for the discussion of political issues which takes into account how conservatives and liberals operate from different moral premises, but sees today's political discourse as so impoverished that he is pessimistic about this happening, at least right now. I offer only these reservations. The psychologist Abraham Maslow observed that "if your only tool is a hammar, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." Reductive approaches which use vast, expansive categories as their primary means of explanation are always vulnerable to this sort of danger. Lakoff's tools are cognitive science and his Strict Father / Nurturing Parent dichotomy. This does not really permit him to ask, on their own terms, questions like, Do conservatives (or libertarians) have, at some level, a fundamentally better grasp of economics than liberals? Do they have a better grasp of the conditions under which societies develop, flourish, and then prosper well enough to nurture all their members? After all, the natural order in which the human race invariably finds itself does not nurture us in ways which do not strain the metaphor. We have to nurture ourselves and each other, and even when this is necessary, the indifference of the universe suggests limits to the nurturing model. Finally, can any policies which achieve their goals through coercion succeed? Policies Lakoff would describe as rooted in the Nurturing Parent model have hardly abjured an authoritarianism more easily associated with Strict Father morality, after all, when their advocates could not achieve what they wanted through voluntary means. This might be all the more reason, however, why this model cannot be easily dispensed with. Be all this as it may, Lakoff has definitely added something interesting and important to the conservative-liberal debate. Liberals will find a new and original source of support for their views in this book. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, will find many of Lakoff's observations acutely uncomfortable. In this writer's view, the latter owe it to themselves to swallow their discomfort, read what Lakoff has to say, and then take up his implicit challenge!
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Summary: A few responses to other reviewers
Review: Larry Willmore got depressed reading Lakoff because he thought the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent metaphors that Lakoff sees as operant in American political morality actually infantilize us, or reflect our opinion that we are infantile: "In neither political scheme is there room for adult citizens who are free to make their own choices." That's a pretty simple-minded reading of how metaphors work. We all metaphorize ourselves in a wide variety of ways in our daily lives, as parents, as children, as lovers, as pack-animals, as computers, as angels or demons, etc. Thinking that way doesn't make us those things; it just helps us structure our experience in terms of those things, even if only in passing. The government is too big and too complex an entity for us to understand in its actuality, so we impose metaphors on it. One of those metaphors is parental. Another is fraternal: Big Brother. Yet another is avuncular: Uncle Sam. Does either of these other metaphors mean that there is some "political scheme" organized by it that "traps" us in some sort of familial role? No, of course not. They're just metaphors. Powerful organizers of our experience, but not in the restrictive sense Willmore means. ReptileMind takes issue with Lakoff for seeming to argue that morality is built upon metaphorical thinking, when in fact, he says, "the two may well have arisen together." So? I don't see Lakoff arguing for a strict causal sequence; he's just saying that the family metaphors are useful tools for imposing some sort of cognitive order on the incredibly complex debate in political morality. A few other reviewers call Lakoff reductive too. Michael J. Edelman, for instance: "Lakoff suffers from the common academic conceit of having an overly simplified view of areas other than his own. Ignoring a few thousand years of history and scholarship, his analysis simply relates all beliefs to a rather simple quasi-Freudian metaphor rather than looking at what underlying beliefs may be responsible." So what? Everybody's reductive. That's what academic explanation invariably is, the reduction of a complex field to the relatively understandable terms of a narrow theory. If you don't reduce, you don't explain; you simply reproduce the complexity. Edelman's real complaint, I guess, is that Lakoff reduces too much; that, of course, is a matter of taste. Lakoff's writing for a large audience; what do you want from him, Hegelian reasoning? A five-volume magnum opus? Max Simmons argues that Lakoff proceeds on the assumption not only that "the American electorate actively engaged with political discourse, but that the models employed therein are coherent within themselves, even if superficially contradictory in their ?radial variations.'" This complaint is based on an ignorance of cognitive science. Cognitivists attempt not to display the conscious analytical contents of actual people's minds, but to theorize about the cognitive strategies people use more or less unconsciously. The desired reader-effect is: "Hey, that's right, I do think about politics that way, damn, I never thought of it that way!" The trick in reading a book like this is to read what the author wrote and not beat him up for not writing the book you wished he'd written. Lakoff's got an interesting theory, and he presents it in an attractive way. His main activist aim is to get liberals to rethink how they think and talk about their political goals, so they can be more effective in the rhetorical battle with conservatives. He's good at that. So he's not an anthropologist or a sociologist or a political theorist; so what? I can imagine Al Gore reading this book now and kicking himself, wishing he'd gotten Lakoff's argument under his belt before taking on a mentally and verbally challenged West Texas good old boy that knew his Strict Father political morality to a T. It's possible to argue that Gore lost the election to Bush, despite the apparent idiocy of Bush, because he didn't know what Lakoff says conservatives know: that the American people want a metaphorical appeal to the family.
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Summary: Interesting, useful, and stretched past the data
Review: The other reviews did a good job of describing the premise and some of the strengths and weaknesses of this book. Lakoff has a fascinating if not totally original view of epistemology regarding categories in the mind. He takes Kant and others into the 21st century by trying to use some semblance of scientific method from the cognitive science framework (his "cognitive linguistics") to determine how knowledge is organized in the human mind. Probably his most original contribution was in "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things." This book goes much farther, and takes some risks. Some of them succeed, but some fail miserably. The premise, as other reviews have pointed out, is that political discourse has an underlying moral influence, and morality has an underlying unconscious cognitive structure. So our understanding of how strict parents should be or how nurturing plays a big role in our sense of right and wrong. Lakoff's original idea is that since we reason in terms of metaphorical structures, our political opinions tend to come pre-packaged in clusters driven by the metaphors we use. If we think of government in terms of a strict authority requiring obedience, we reason politically very differently than if we think of government in terms of nurturing our development. Similarly, the very way we think of debts, moral obligations, rights, and freedoms is both driven and constrained by the underlying metaphors we are using to represent ourselves, our relationship to each other, and our system of governance. So far I think Lakoff is right, but there is a serious flaw here also. Throughout this book there seems to be a basic assumption that all moral reasoning is metaphorical. As if our sense of right and wrong is driven solely by the choice of "strict" or "nurturing" parent. This seems to be what allows Lakoff to extend his theory to all sorts of things that seem a bit stretched to me, to over-apply the parenting model to everything he sees in the political arena. The origin of moral sense seems to appear, by modern evolutionary theory, somewhat more in parallel with language than Lakoff appears to be crediting. Primate morality is covered beautifully by primatologist Frans de Waal (such as in "Good Natured" and "Chimpanzee Politics"). If the capacity for empathy, exchange of value, authority, and so on is found as early in evolution as the capacity for metaphor, the two may well have arisen together rather than morality being built upon metaphorical thinking. We also have a line of thought parallel to Lakoff's, with Maynard Smith on game theory in evolution, economist Herb Gintis on the origin of strong reciprocation, and Brian Skyrms ("Evolution of the Social Contract"). They show how political reasoning may also derive from evolutionary trends in relating successfully to each other by "unconsciously" enforcing rules for cooperating, punishing defection, and so on. If we have evolved computational abilities for detecting cheaters, wanting to punish them, nurturing children, and so on, then these things don't simply derive from the metaphors we use. However, the metaphors we use may well help us bridge between these different computational abilties. At some point in each person's development, they begin relying on "strict" or "nurturing" parent models of religion and politics, and at that point, Lakoff's theories of metaphorical computation begin to make sense of things why the same people should both oppose the killing of unborn children and support the killing of convicted criminals, and vice versa. The underlying metaphor used for reasoning does make a difference as Lakoff suggests. It may not however be as fundamental or pervasive to moral reasoning as he seems to assume. Lakoff is understandably worried about the future of liberalism since the conservative worldview is so much more coherent and self-aware of its own moral assumptions. He makes a plea for us to build a more coherent liberal worldview, more self-aware of liberal moral assumptions. It would be a tragedy to lose the "nurturing" aspect of our moral reasoning to conservative thinking just because we have chosen to use strict parenting metaphors. The extremes of fascism and authoritarian "strict parent" government immediately come to mind. Lakoff probably has good reason to be worried about that. Where he doesn't quite convince me, though, is that conservative thinking is wrong because it focuses on the "strict parenting" model. Historically and through political philosophy of our modern age, it seems more likely that what we need is a continuing balance of "strict" and "nurturing" mindsets, setting the goal of taking the best of each, even though our tendency to polarize around clusters or views and priorities constantly makes this a battle. Conservative thinkers have the evolved biology of both strictness and nurturing within them, as do liberal thinkers, and we have the choice of whether to allow particular metaphors to constrain our thinking when we engage in politics. I think the point is more self-awareness, which Lakoff helps us understand, than choosing one model as more correct than the other. So I have to recommend Lakoff's effort here very highly as a beginning for self-awareness of our own moral and political thinking. However, I have to emphasize that it is just a start, and that I don't think it makes sense to assume that our choices are entirely derived from the metaphors we use. We also need to understand our biology and continue investigating about how our reasoning arises from evolutionary, developmental, and social processes.
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Summary: The death of liberalism in America
Review: This is a book that is well worth reading, but one that, for me, is depressing. The book depresses me because I think Lakoff's description of American politics is correct. It took me a while to figure it out, but each of Lakoff's two metaphors --'strict father morality' for American conservatives and 'nurturant parent morality' for American liberals-- describes government as a parent and citizens as its children. Government, in other words, is always paternal in mainstream American politics. Only the _type_ of paternalism differs between conservatives and liberals. In neither political scheme is there room for adult citizens who are free to make their own choices, to make choices that may be unpopular with the majority. This is very sad, but I think it is an accurate description of American politics. Lakoff doesn't feel this way, because he is --by his own admission-- an American liberal and feels that it is proper that government treat its citizens like children. Classic liberals condemned this same style of government that American liberals praise. The classic liberalism of Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill has died in the USA, a nation that owes its birth to a liberal revolution. To understand the depth of this loss, I urge readers of MORAL POLITICS to read also the first of Locke's TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT (1690) as well as Hayek's modern essay "Why I am not a Conservative".
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Summary: Explains nearly everything
Review: Why liberals don't convice, while conservatives do. How liberals are right about more things than conservatives. Metaphors of parenting underlie nearly everything in American politics. The stern father (conservative worldview) has a clearer, stronger position, though far less effective than the inarticulate nurturing parent (liberal worldview). Dunno where my nickname came from; I'm Stewart Brand.
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Summary: Lakoff rediscovers an old metaphor
Review: With the decline of interest in structural linguistics, GeorgeLakoff has, in recent years, shifted his attention to socialtheory. He has constructed a sort of theory of metaphor to explain social phenomena, which puts me in mind of an old quote, that "proof by metaphor is no proof at all". In this book Lakoff has discivered that the metaphor of the family may be extended to all manner of political and social phenomena. In doing so he discovers that while conservatives are wrong, they're not actually evil, just insufficiently progressive. They're motivated by good intentions but stuck in an old model of family interaction. Yes, it's that simple... Lakoff suffers from the common academic conceit of having an overly simplified view of areas other than his own. Ignoring a few thousand yeatrs of history and scholarship, his analysis simply relates all beliefs to a rather simple quasi-Freudian metaphor rather than looking at what underlying beliefs may be responsible. Readers interested in a criticla analysis of the differences underlying political beliefs would be better off reading Thomas Sowell's 1988 "A Conflict of Visions". Readers of a more leftist bent might find Alan Garfinkel's "Forms of Explaination" interesting as well.
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