TheAdvocate's Full Review: Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liber...
In the Acknowledgements section of Moral Politics, George Lakoff recounts a conversation that lead him to write this book. He’d asked a friend to think of one question you could ask a person to illuminate what his or her political leanings might be. The question his friend settled on was, “If your baby cries at night, do you pick him up?”
The shallow implication is, of course, that liberals, conforming to his “nurturant parent” metaphor would compassionately pick up the baby, while conservatives, following a “strict father” metaphor would leave the baby to cry, rather than risk spoiling the child. But how many exceptions might there be to this rule? A staggering number, I suspect. Being both a conservative and a parent who picked up my crying baby in the night, it was my left-leaning moderate husband who eventually insisted we let our son cry it out. Subsequently, I credit my left-leaning moderate husband with the fact that our son consistently slept through the night by the early age of one month.
Lakoff is a cognitive linguist at Berkeley whose interest lies in discovering the moral metaphors we use to define ourselves politically. His conclusion is that we employ mostly parental metaphors, based on our deep-seated “nation-as-family” concept. He’s a self-confessed liberal who claims to be open-minded, but his bias is evident throughout the book, as in these excerpts from his two parental-metaphor models:
Conservative “strict father” model: “A traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting the family, as well as the authority to set overall family policy… The mother has day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. Children must respect and obey their parents, partly for their own safety…”
Liberal “nurturant parent” model: “A family of preferably two parents, but perhaps only one. If two, the parents share household responsibilities. The primal experience behind this model is one of being cared for and cared about… living as happily as possible, and deriving meaning from mutual interaction and care… The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents, not out of the fear of punishment.”
Notice that liberals don’t adopt nurturant “mother” or “father” models (which would be unbalanced and perhaps even unfair), but conservatives (who are typically unfair, as the implication goes) do, adopting an age-old patriarchal hegemony. Other implications are that conservatives disapprove of female equality and are physically abusive.
A year before publishing this book, Lakoff published an essay entitled “Metaphor, Morality, and Politics,” in which he claimed to be open minded enough to realize that conservatives aren’t merely political pawns of the rich. “The common liberal idea that conservatives are just selfish or tools of the rich,” he wrote, “does not explain conservative opposition to abortion, feminism, homosexuality, and gun control.” Yet, describing the conservative lexicon on page 30 of Moral Politics, he contradicts himself, “To make sense of this, one must know why rich people [to conservatives] are ‘the best people’…”
Certainly most people, liberals and conservatives alike, view being rich as more desirable than being poor. But the conservative in me has never considered rich people better in any way. I admire people who are self-actualizing (many subsequently earn money from exactly this attribute), who live well (not richly, but in an organized, harmonious and usually simple manner), and who are kind to others. Consider people like Ted Turner, Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr., or Alec Baldwin. They’re copiously wealthy liberals who don’t live simply, are only narrowly self-actualizing (and are often self-destructive), and who have been publicly unkind to others.
Perhaps my biggest criticism of Lakoff’s argument is that the “strict father” model fails to explain why conservatives (like myself) push for governmental decentralization – a blatant contradiction of the centralized authority of his father-figure metaphor. The conservative ideal of decentralization seems to be an outgrowth of our distrust, earlier last century, of centralized Soviet communism, as well as a general distaste for governmental bloat. But these days decentralization, a sort of small-is-beautiful/E.F.Schumacher outlook is also defended by thinkers like Virginia Postrel, Jane Jacobs and Michael Rothschild as adhering to the tenets of complexity and self-organizing systems. Because we prefer decentralization, conservatives often criticize federal concentration of power, advocating instead that state and local governments have more power over state and local issues.
Many liberals assume that such federal criticism reflects a conservative hatred for government in general, as evidenced by the title of Lakoff’s sixteenth chapter: “How Can You Love Your Country and Hate Your Government?” Lakoff answers his own question by deferring to the psychological dysfunction of conservatives: “Let us think about this question in terms of the model presented above. The Nation As Family metaphor turns this question about the nation into a question about the family: How can someone love their family, love the idea of the family, love their ancestors, but resent and hate their father?” At this point, Moral Politics descends into predictable Leftist psychobabble.
Finding conservatism a morally inferior mindset, Lakoff seems to consider it politically "moral" to falsely psychoanalyze conservatives, attributing false motivations to their beliefs and false behaviors to their methods. His political metaphors, while not new, are certainly thought-provoking, but his obvious bias leaves me unable to recommend this book as any sort of contribution to cognitive or political science.
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