“The premise that the Enlightenment saw us as perfectly rational is flawed”Owen Flanagan Review
28 May 2008
From New Scientist Print Edition
IN The Political Mind, George Lakoff, an eminent cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, sets out to provide a mind science primer for progressive US politicians. His hope is that, come November, they might defeat the conservatives who, if Lakoff is to be believed, already stealthfully deploy the latest wisdom from cognitive science.
According to Lakoff, the 18th-century Enlightenment painted a portrait of humans as thinkers: rational, logical and attentive to facts. Progressive politicians buy into this, and thus offer facts and logical arguments to sell their policies to the public.
But humans are not rational, at least not fully so. We are affective-epistemic kludges- Rube Goldberg devices that negotiate reality with all kinds of imperfect, unconscious and emotion-laden tricks for getting by and getting ahead. According to the cognitive science cognoscenti, we don't just reason, we reason with passion. We don't think, we combine thought with emotion - let's call it "fthinking". Karl Rove and his cronies, Lakoff believes, have long understood this. Francis Bacon said, "Knowledge is power." There is a name for those who use knowledge to gain power. In America they are called Republicans.
Politics, says Lakoff, is not about changing minds through arguments and evidence. It is about configuring and reconfiguring neural pathways. Repetitive, comforting, emotionally attractive and morally appealing narratives, metaphors, mottos and mantras are most likely to gain neural traction. Politicians who control brains win elections.
Republicans, Lakoff says, understand how "brains and minds work". If voters are fthinkers and not thinkers, you need to appeal to their emotions. One way to do so is to hitch a ride on a narrative that is already neurally well honed. Some narratives - for example, "rags to riches" - are affective neural superhighways for Americans.
Apparently, Americans also get that warm fuzzy feeling when they hear a "redemption narrative". According to Lakoff, Bush and his handlers understood this. Bush, recall, "had been an alcoholic, had a DUI violation, avoided service in Vietnam, had a shadow experience in his Air National Guard unit, failed repeatedly in business". Bush's team brilliantly deployed cog-sci know-how and glommed onto the appealing redemptive narrative possibilities in this prima facie sorry set of facts - or so Lakoff says. The fact that Rove and company did everything possible to suppress and/or spin these stories about alcoholism, cocaine use and business incompetence doesn't bother Lakoff in the slightest.
Democrats, on the other hand, just don't get how people fthink. Really? What about "The Great Society", "The Peace Corps" and "Teach for America"- all progressive constructs that ably employ frames and metaphors?
There are serious issues here, almost all of which Lakoff leaves under-discussed. Most important is the idea that we ought to wonder and worry about how we use language to frame policy. Should taxation be framed as theft of the fruits of my labour, or as membership dues to a club I want to be part of? Cognitive science has discovered that different ways of framing such issues have a big effect on the way people think and vote.
The same goes for the ways we talk about war. Is the war in Iraq a war over oil or is it a costly piece of testeronic juvenilia, the hissy fit of an uncurious moral dullard and his evil sidekick over 9/11 and Daddy's unfinished business in the first Gulf War? Republicans are smart enough not to dwell on these credible ways of describing the war. They know they can galvanise people with the repetition of phrases like "the war on terror" and then get away with whatever they wish.
Was it really a prescient team of advisers with advanced cognitive scientific sophistication who fthought up that metaphor? Lakoff seems to think so. After all, Republicans are the ones who understand "how brains and minds work". They apparently know that the constant repetition of phrases like "war on terror" strengthens neural connections. After hearing those words again and again, ordinary people literally get stuck thinking that way. It's noise to neurons.
For Lakoff, the root of all our problems is - as usual - our parents. He believes that we automatically use a "nation as a family" metaphor, which can be broken down into two competing models: the strict father family and the nurturing parents family. Conservatives, he says, idolise "daddy" and believe that "morality is obedience to an authority- assumed to be a legitimate authority who is inherently good, knows right from wrong, functions to protect us from evil in the world, and has both the right and duty to use force to command obedience and fight evil". One effect of this is that our leaders don't have to win public approval because the public, particularly conservatives, fthink of the president as father with final say over all matters.
Progressives, apparently, see the world through the nurturing parents model, with its "ethics of care", moved by "a single moral value: empathy, together with responsibility and strength to act on the empathy". This ought to make progressives Fthinkers with a capital F, so it is surprising that they allegedly use thinking rather than fthinking to win votes. Maybe they are not actually motivated by the single moral value of empathy. Old ideas of equal worth and dignity still do much of the work for an empathic politic, a politic that strives for the common good without all the touchy-feely stuff.
Part of Lakoff's agenda is to help Democrats set up progressive think tanks - actually, fthink tanks - that use the latest scientific research to carry out "cognitive policies" and "framing campaigns". "Conservatives conduct such cognitive policy making every day of every year," he writes. "It is explicit, well organized, and well funded. Its aim is to change brains in a conservative direction. And it has been working." On the other hand, "progressives rarely conduct cognitive policy making". Lakoff's own fthink tank, the Rockridge Institute, has closed, according to the latest check of its website.
The moral of the story is that successful politicians know how to use words to get people to vote against their own interests and values. Apparently this fact has just been discovered - by Lakoff. When Plato wrote about sophists who strengthen arguments by appealing to emotion he must have been talking about parking disputes at the agora because the relevant discoveries about emotion's role in reasoning and rhetoric, and language's ability to shape thought, wouldn't be made for another 2400 years, at Berkeley.
There is a lesson here, but it is not about politics. It's about the intellectual integrity of scientists, specifically mind-scientists, who wish to apply what they know across borders. Cognitive scientific ways of speaking help us understand things more deeply only if they reveal something new, or give thicker and richer texture to an understanding we already have. Lakoff's premise- that the Enlightenment portrayed us as perfectly rational- is flawed. What about Hume, who famously argued that we are fthinkers (remember "reason is a slave to passion"?), or Adam Smith, Rousseau and Voltaire, all of whom thought profoundly about the role of sentiment? It was Smith, in fact, who first distinguished empathy from sympathy.
Lakoff ends the book with this: "we are far more fascinating creatures than Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, J. S. Mill, and Rawls for instance- thought we were". Like most of the linguistic objects in this cacophony, this, as best I can tell, is just noise from neurons.
The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.
Focus on America - Delve into the science and technology questions facing the USA in our special report.
Owen Flanagan is a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina
