Endless “austerity” framing

April 29, 2013 – Over the past few days, I’ve been pondering the “austerity” frame, which currently seems to dominate political and economic debate. How to describe it as succinctly as possible? The best I can come up with is this:

In conservative ideology, “austerity” isn’t a temporary economic measure, it’s a permanent moral imperative.

It’s like the “war on drugs”. No matter how overwhelming the evidence of failure, it will still be pursued as policy, because the alternative is routinely framed as immoral (see below for examples). The Wikipedia entry on economic austerity won’t tell you anything about this moral dimension, and most economics pundits will tell you little. Analysis of front-page newspaper stories and political speech can, however, tell us much…

Every day we’re presented with a false moral dichotomy: Austerity vs X. What is X? It’s both the disease whose cure is austerity, and the only available alternative to austerity. And it’s framed as being essentially immoral. X is “government waste” on “dependency culture”, “something-for-nothing culture”, “living beyond one’s means”, “spiralling welfare spending”, “benefit cheats”, “benefit tourists”, etc. Recipients of state “handouts” are placed on the moral spectrum somewhere between idle fecklessness and fraud/theft.

This is the moral-metaphorical framing which has usurped the facts and figures. It doesn’t matter to the frame that the real costs of both welfare fraud and legitimate unemployment benefits (etc) are relatively low. As George Lakoff, puts it, “frames trump facts”. Another way of putting it is that evidence-based reason is unlikely to prevail while moral outrage against X is triggered by headlines every few days.

The austerity frame combines with the economy-as-household metaphor, which Paul Krugman has described as follows:

The bad metaphor – which you’ve surely heard many times – equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt.

The result of this combination is that we think of austerity in terms of household activity (working, spending, borrowing, etc). This has two damaging consequences. First, it gives a false idea of how national economies work (as Krugman explains). Second (and most relevant here), it makes us think of economic-failure’s causes and solutions in terms of household behaviour. The problem with this is that household metaphors don’t fit the actions of banks which led to the financial collapse, or the steps which still need to be taken against the banks.

When economy-as-household metaphors are used repeatedly with the austerity frame, it becomes difficult to discuss the role of the banks – especially when communication is limited to soundbites. Opposition politicians tend to opt instead for the path of least resistance: “tough on welfare”. Or they repeat the “getting people back to work” line. Unfortunately, even the latter reinforces moral “austerity”. Why? Because worklessness is presented as the problem – particularly the behaviour of individuals and households with regard to “finding work”. The logic is as follows:

1. Poverty/joblessness is viewed as moral failure of the individual.
2. “Austerity” is the moral discipline that will punish these failures.
3. Austerity means people can’t be “dependent” on benefits – they must alter
   their behaviour and “get back to work”.

The real giveaway about “austerity” is that not everyone is subjected to it. Those most deserving of austerity’s pain and punishment (eg banks and bankers) have escaped it. The financial institutions that are more dependent on state handouts than all “benefit scroungers” put together exist in a different compartment of media/political debate. After all, they are wealth-creators, job-creators – they are respectable, they wear suits, they make tons of money, and they reward political parties with it in various ways. This means they have the right kind of discipline. They don’t need the moral discipline of austerity. That’s reserved for the dirty scrounging peasants who are viewed as too feckless and idle to get a job.

The bottom line is that most conservative ideologues don’t really want austerity to end any more than they want the “WAR ON SCROUNGERS” headlines to end. Both are an integral part of the same conservative frame (or “ideology”). It isn’t new – the recent Philpott “vile product of welfare UK” case is preceded by countless others. In 1976, Ronald Reagan referred to a “Welfare Queen” who had supposedly received $150,000 in government handouts and was driving a “Welfare Cadillac”. The media could never find this person – it appeared to be a made-up stereotype.

Lakoff explains in technical terms why such stereotypes are readily adopted by our brains (“Prototype Theory”, “salient exemplars”, etc), but it boils down to existing “deep frames” which have been repeatedly reinforced:

Of course, what made this [stereotype]  possible were strict father framings. First, there was the conservative logic that morality requires discipline, discipline in the market leads to prosperity, and lack of honest prosperity means laziness, lack of discipline, and therefore immorality. The Welfare Queen myth fit the frame – and would not have worked if it had not. (Lakoff, The Political Mind, Chapter 9)

A Daily Mail front page you won’t see…

April 8, 2013 – JK Rowling should perhaps be given a Nobel Prize for getting a generation of kids to read books. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s generated endless amounts of tax revenue. How was this phenomenon nurtured? By a little time and space on the dole.

You’d be surprised how many successful people developed their craft on the dole. In a way, most successful corporations also require a long period on the dole. Do you think Boeing and Microsoft would have achieved commercial success without decades of state-funded research and development in aerospace and computing?

Any true wealth-generating activity requires periods of “social nurturing” which aren’t profitable. They’re not self-funding in the short term; they are dependent. (We realise this for children – we call it “education”. The money spent on it is regarded as social investment).

“Investment” (in human beings) was also one of the ideas – along with “safety net” – behind “social security”. The welfare state was created in the forties, in a post-war economy which was nowhere near as wealthy as now (imagine: computer technology didn’t exist).

But, for decades, the rightwing press, “free market” think-tanks, politicians and pundits (not just of the right) have wanted you to think differently about social security. They want you to think of “welfare” as an unnecessary nuisance which costs more than everything else combined.

To that end, a simple set of claims, accompanied by a certain type of framing, is relentlessly pushed into our brains by newspaper front pages and TV and internet screens. It has two main components:

1. Vastly exaggerate the real cost of “welfare” and falsely portray it as “spiralling out of control” (how this is done is explained here and here). Misleadingly include things like pensions in the total cost when you’re talking about unemployment. (This partly explains why people believe unemployment accounts for 41% of the “welfare” bill, when it accounts for only 3% of the total).
2. Appeal to the worst aspects of social psychology by repeatedly associating a stereotype (the “benefits scrounger/cheat”) with the concept of “welfare”. One doesn’t have to be a prison psychologist to understand how anger and frustration are channeled towards those perceived as lower in the pecking order: “the scum”. (According to a recent poll, people believe the welfare fraud rate is 27%, whereas the government estimates it as 0.7%).

It’s a potently malign cocktail. When imbibed repeatedly, there’s little defense against its effects. Even those who depend on benefits come to view benefits recipients in a harshly negative light (see Fern Brady’s article for examples). Those politicians who aren’t naturally aligned with rightwing ideology go on the defensive – they talk about “being tough” and “full employment“. It just reinforces the anti-welfare framing.

The strangely puritanical – and deeply irrational – obsession with “jobs”, ”hard-working families”, etc, at a time in history when greater leisure for all is more than a utopian promise (due to the maturation of labour-saving technology, etc) seems an integral part of the conservative framing – which is perhaps why many on the “left” find it difficult to provide counter-narratives.

But that would require another article. For now I’ll leave you with a short video explaining Basic Income – a fast-spreading idea which is highly relevant to the above. (Guardian columnist George Monbiot recently championed Basic Income as a “big idea” to unite the left).

Poverty framing – discussion with JRF’s Chris Goulden

Dec 6, 2012 – Every news story requires a frame, and stories about poverty tend to reflect the politicians’ hackneyed narrative about “getting people back to work” – even though in-work poverty is rising, and even though “joblessness” seems low on the list of factors contributing to the big financial meltdown.

Over the years, I’ve found research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) useful in countering dubious claims (eg from press/pundits) about UK poverty.

How does a group such as JRF address issues which are as much about moral framing as they’re about statistics? Chris Goulden (head of JRF’s poverty team) kindly agreed to discuss poverty framing with me by email…
………………………………….

•News Frames:  You tweeted that “Work IS the best route out of poverty – half the time”, with a link to a JRF piece of the same title. I replied: “More precisely, ‘having an adequate income’ is the best route out of poverty”.

My intention was to contrast two different poverty “frames” – one focusing on the individual’s “responsibility” (direct causation); the other on social distribution of income (systemic causation). These tend to correlate, respectively, with conservative and progressive moral frames (according to George Lakoff et al).

You mention that it’s a cliché to say “work is the best route out of poverty”. I regard it also as a strong expression of the ‘conservative’ frame which has dominated thinking about work/poverty for decades (this frame/worldview is evangelised by the “self-made man”, industrialist Mr Bounderby, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, for example).

The figures reported by your JRF piece are very interesting, and I thought they could have been framed in a very different way. Do you (and your JRF colleagues) normally consider framing, or do you regard your material as neutral presentations of findings, etc?
……………………………………….

•Chris Goulden:  Negative attitudes among the public, in politics and in the media towards people experiencing poverty is a key barrier. I agree that a different way of framing poverty is needed if there is to be more support for initiatives to reduce it.

But I don’t think what you call the progressive, distributive, systemic etc. frame necessarily helps. Or at least, simply presenting poverty as an issue beyond the control of individuals experiencing it is not persuasive. I believe there is, and needs to be, a third way (sorry) / synthesis between structural and individualised causes of poverty that is neither solely blaming the individual nor structurally-deterministic. Ruth Lister sets this out well in her book, Poverty (2004).

The role of science, research and evidence is interesting in this context yet also challenging. We and the researchers we work with are not often as explicit as we should be our underlying values and assumptions. This applies as much in natural as in social science. A common and more effective / “truthful” frame for the production of evidence and the discussion of its implications for poverty would be extremely useful.

I’m not sure what precedents there are for reframing issues in this way that could be drawn on however?
……………………………………

•News Frames:  I think the ‘Frame Semantics’ literature does have much to contribute, but first I’d better clarify my terms to avoid misunderstandings.

By “progressive”/”systemic” I don’t mean “beyond the control of individuals”. To me, it seems undeniable that poverty in modern society is a matter of systemic causation. At its simplest: the individual controls some factors but not others (availability of income, costs of housing, etc). So, it seems clear that we should use frames of “systemic causation”. Yet the newspaper headlines have, for decades, presented an extreme form of “direct causation” (eg that the “workshy” are to blame).

I think it’s precisely this latter frame which leads to the “negative attitudes” that you mention. And it’s not just the tabloid newspapers which feed into this. For example, “work is the route out of poverty” is an expression of the same metaphorical frame as blaming the “workshy”.

Lakoff et al have shown how, across many complex issues (from climate to war to welfare), conservative moral frames tend to use the “direct causation” metaphors (eg “Bush toppled Saddam and freed the Iraqis”). So much political debate appears to have followed this kind of direct-cause metaphorical mode, and for so long, that we usually don’t even notice it operating. (I think this is particularly the case with the issue of work/income/poverty).

But the “progressive”/”systemic” alternative isn’t at the other end of a linear scale from the “conservative”/”direct-causation”. They are just two very different modes of thought which we all have “instantiated in the neural system of our brains”. In fact, the notion of a linear political scale (eg left-right) with extremes at the ends, and “moderates” in the middle, is itself a misleading metaphor, according to the cognitive scientists. Or as Lakoff says, there aren’t really any moderates. That’s another debate, of course, but it possibly has a bearing on your point about a “third way”?

•Chris Goulden:  Ok, I think we basically agree then. But by framing it as ‘systemic’ or ‘progressive’ (and I’m not sure those two are synonymous), you are implying it is beyond the control of individuals, in the same way that ‘individualised’, ‘regressive’ or ‘conservative’ imply it is only the individual actor who counts. If all parties could agree it was both structure and agency, then we could focus debate on where the balance lies and implications for policy and practice. At present, there is just division and a debate about what’s different not the commonalities of view.

And then there is the issue of the causative route – you say “the frame leads to the negative attitudes” but, in part at least, the negative attitudes lead to the frame. Which came first?

Regarding the issue of the use of cause as a metaphor, I agree that’s a general problem. The way we all talk is based on thousands of underlying assumptions and theories about the world that are more or less plausible or supported by scientific method or layers of personal experience. I don’t see how this is just a conservative moral frame. What’s the alternative? Socialist chaos theory?

However, the biggest issue remains – leaving aside what would be a better frame for poverty in this country for a moment – how do frames change and how do people who want to instigate those changes best go about it? That’s what I am really struggling with. Simply saying, as we often do in JRF reports, that there are bigger forces at play – the nature of jobs available, the cost of housing – doesn’t make people believe it and change their opinions.

•News Frames:  If you think “systemic” framing implies a denial of individual “control” or “agency” (as factors), then I can see you’d have problems using it on poverty. I just hope you don’t have a “society made me do it” caricature in mind. (By the way, I don’t think “progressive” is synonymous with “systemic” – but the frames tend to correlate).

I’m talking about multiple, complex causation misleadingly reduced, via metaphor, to single, direct causation (eg “hard work leads to prosperity”) – whereas you’re talking in terms of “where the balance lies” between “structure and agency”. Your idea of “balance” appears to make sense (sort of) when you put it in those terms. But if the reality is systemic causation (as it evidently seems to be with UK poverty), then where is the “balance” between appropriate systemic framing and misleading direct-cause framing?

For example, how close are the following statements to your balance point?:

1) “Work IS the best route out of poverty – half the time”. (Title of your recent JRF piece)
2) “We believe that work should be the surest way out of poverty”. (Living Wage Foundation)

You ask why I lay the blame on conservative moral framing in particular. This comes mainly from my reading of Lakoff’s cognitive-linguistic analysis. Here’s a quote from a Lakoff article (2009) which puts this into accessible language:

“Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral—and economic—values is fallacious.

“Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual short-term self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral, and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis.”

I also think Lakoff answers (much better than I could) your question on how to instigate changes in framing. He’s written books specifically on this subject. ‘Don’t think of an Elephant‘ is a good starting point, if you haven’t already read it.

Incidentally, I assume that your chicken-and-egg question (“Which came first?” – the negative attitudes or the frame?) wasn’t serious, as the context was decades of headlines blaming the “workshy”, etc. But if you are serious, I’ll return to it.

•Chris Goulden:  So, maybe my joke about socialist chaos theory was actually closer to the truth than I thought? I think it’s an important point to unpick about whether “systemic” is correlated with progressive or not. I don’t see why they should be. “Systemic” is an objective description of how we think reality works. “Progressive” is a value system.

But this does go to the heart of the methods of social science, and indeed of natural science. I’ve no doubt that reality is systemic and that simple direct causes are uncommon if not non-existent in terms of explaining human behaviour. We, I hope, are taking a systemic approach in our new programme that is aiming to develop an anti-poverty strategy for the UK. It aims to show what it would be like to live in, and what it would take to reach, a UK without high levels of poverty.

I think the statement ‘work is the route out of poverty’ by itself doesn’t imply structural or individual causes. Or even non-systemic ones. We always argue that it’s not just the fault of individuals and that all our opportunities are restricted by structural circumstances. If you tried to maintain a systemic approach to all discussions about policy and practice then I fear you wouldn’t ever be able to say anything. We need heuristics not exact models of reality.

What might a systemic description of poverty and its solutions look like to you and would this frame by itself help to reduce negative attitudes? I think negative public attitudes have complex causes and are not just the direct result of decades of headlines (and there is a strong current going in the other direction). Aren’t you reverting to a ‘morally conservative/direct causation’ frame there?

•News Frames:  On your last point: I think you’ve misread – or misunderstood – my remarks about “negative attitudes” (towards the poor). I wrote: “it’s not just the tabloid newspapers which feed into this”. I referred to a culturally dominant frame (on work/poverty) which has complex historic causes – eg: I mentioned Dickens’s Hard Times, which contains a virtual taxonomy of this metaphorical framing.

The frame manifests as negative attitudes to the poor (among other things) – the frame being the cognitive underpinning of the attitude. Negative attitudes towards the poor are generally inseparable from the frame of poverty as moral failure of the individual. Decades of newspaper headlines (among other things) reinforce this moral framing. I see no single, direct cause here.

I’ve already provided pointers to Professor Lakoff’s work. I think it would yield diminishing returns to revisit (again) the point about “progressive”/”systemic” correlations – at least while you’re unfamiliar with the body of research I’m referencing. However, I’ll briefly address your question on “systemic” approaches to poverty.

One obvious example is the frame of poverty as social harm. Responsible society has a moral obligation to protect people from harm. We already have the metaphor of a “safety net” – as well as numerous examples, from other domains, of public funding of public safety. Note how this contrasts with the (‘conservative’) frame of poverty as moral failure of the individual. In extreme cases of the latter, the individual’s poverty isn’t regarded as harm, but as tough medicine, or as an incentive for market discipline, etc – and the notion of a safety net (such as welfare) is regarded as immoral, since it makes people “weak and dependent” (in this moral scheme – for more details, see my ‘Essentials of framing’).

Given that you’re looking for “a different way of framing poverty” – and given that JRF seems to take a broadly “progressive” stance – I’d have thought Lakoff’s work would be of enormous practical benefit to you. If there’s a more substantial body of work on social-political framing out there, I haven’t seen it – and I’ve certainly looked.

But I’ll leave it at that, as overselling these things can be a kiss of death.

•Chris Goulden:  I think it might be helpful to try to sum up where we agree and where we disagree (or are yet to agree)?

Here’s what I think anyway – let me know if you agree with what I think we agree on

1. Systemic understanding and causes are better depictions of reality than direct causes
2. The dominant frame around poverty in the UK is negative and a barrier to progress on effective action to reduce poverty
3. A more positive framing would be helpful but it is very difficult to change this but we should try; and we should watch out for repeating negative framing in JRF’s treatment of poverty and related issues
4. I need to read some Lakoff

Here’s where I don’t think we agree

1. Systemic understanding naturally goes together with a ‘progressive’ approach (I don’t see how that is logically possible)
2. A ‘agency within structure’ framing could be more helpful than a systemic one (although I still don’t quite get that – see point 4 above)
3. Individual actions, behaviours and attitudes still matter – obviously that doesn’t just apply to people experiencing poverty, also employers, politicians, research funders etc. By trying to remove victim blaming, you risk denying agency, free choice etc.
4. Within a systemic frame, direct causes still have a place (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to understand anything (“it’s all too systemic”))

•News Frames:  Only one point stands out, to me, as a real disagreement. This is where you write: “By trying to remove victim blaming, you risk denying agency, free choice etc” (point 3). I certainly disagree with this. I don’t think it follows at all – and the absurd implication is that since we shouldn’t deny poverty victims free choice, we must therefore blame them for their poverty.

Here’s an alternative (“systemic-causation”) frame: Poverty as a result of multiple, complex causes, which may include the actions of the individual experiencing poverty (among other interrelated factors). Simple enough. It avoids “victim blaming” (single, direct cause); it avoids presenting work as “the route” out of poverty (single, direct cause) – but it doesn’t deny individual agency/free-choice.

Note: I offered to give Chris the final word, but he said he was happy to leave that last reply of mine as the final thing. Many thanks to him for taking the time to discuss this issue. I recommend both his regular JRF blog and his Twitter account (a good source of links to poverty studies and news articles, etc). – BD

“Lesser of two evils”

Voting dilemmas & framing

“Choosing the lesser of two evils isn’t a bad thing. The cliché makes it sound bad, but it’s a good thing. You get less evil.”
– Noam Chomsky (attributed)

Every few years, we get a vote. We call it “democracy”, and it’s so important that we’ll even bomb other countries into adopting a pretense of it. So, please indulge me by considering this “framing” dilemma:-

Imagine: For decades, governments (regardless of party) aid the rich, blame the poor, start wars, erode basic freedoms, etc – all the nasty fascistic/unprogressive* stuff. The only real voting “choice” is between different “party presentations”, eg:

• Party 1: “Progressive is good. We’re progressive.” [Second claim is false]
• Party 2: “Unprogressive is good. We’re unprogressive.” [Second claim is true]

Accepting that this is just a fairy tale from my imagination (and nothing to do with reality), who would you vote for? (Assume you’re forced to vote).

Many would probably vote for Party 2 on the basis that at least it’s not lying about progressive ideals (among other things). I encountered something like this during the Bush/Gore US election – some on the left would say: “Let Bush win! At least his fascist tendencies are out in the open”.

To continue with the malign fairy tale, Party 2 wins and promotes the “unprogressive is good” message relentlessly. Fear, intolerance, competition. Everything is framed in that way for decades, until people lose the cognitive ability to conceptualise in progressive frames. The authoritarian/unprogressive becomes “common sense” and “normal”.

The unprogressive policies were always a given with both parties (for “structural” fairy tale reasons – The Evil Corporation™, etc). But the dominant framing wasn’t a given. Only Party 2′s framing has warped people’s minds to the effect that even “working class” people are starting to think in the frames/metaphors previously used only by the wealthy conservative.

(The heroine/hero of the tale ponders the significance – if any – of this to the “lesser of two evils” voting dilemma…)

Luckily it’s only a nightmarish fantasy. In the real world, minds don’t get warped – people think for themselves, with facts and stuff. Of course. Still, it’s disturbing to see cognitive scientists like George Lakoff having similar fantasies. In his nightmare, conservatives have been…

“…instilling their worldview and their deep framing over thirty-five years – changing a lot of brains, and by repetition, making those changes permanent. [...] As a result, progressive messages don’t take root, because the soil was prepared for conservative messages, not progressive ones.”
(Lakoff, The Political Mind, p239)

* I’m not keen on the term “unprogressive”, but I tried using other terms, and they didn’t quite work in this context.

“Radical” memes & “radical” churnalism

“the Left’s been infected, too.”
- David Foster Wallace

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
- attributed to Niels Bohr

Nick Davies did us all a favour by popularising the term “churnalism“. Now, with one word, we can refer to a common, insidious media process without having to resort to vague terms such as “propaganda”. (That term has its uses, of course).

Most talk of churnalism seems to focus on “mainstream” media and corp/gov PR, but there’s also a “radical” churnalism (eg of the left). For example, if a popular dissident figure publishes a piece on a newsworthy issue, it will likely be republished, reposted, reblogged, facebooked, retweeted, mass-emailed, etc, to an audience of hundreds of thousands. And it soon acquires an “authoritative” status (almost as if it’s been peer-reviewed by a panel of Nobel Prize-Winning Saints). This seems to happen almost every day.

Given that most of my readers, like myself, probably regard most of this “radical” content as somehow on the side of “good” (to the extent that it opposes warmongering, power-hungry, profit-obsessed interests, etc) what comes next may be a little hard to take. David Foster Wallace put it eloquently:

As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95% of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties.

Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude… But the Left’s been infected, too. (David Foster Wallace, interview)

You don’t have to look far – in blogs, Twitter, newspaper comment sections, etc – to see what DFW refers to. It looks as if the “ideological and reductive” aspects thrive most in the fast, unreflecting, copy-n-paste, repost, retweet, mass-mailing environment characteristic of churnalism (“radical” or otherwise). But let’s pause here…

Questioning the status quo has always needed time. Changing your thinking requires time away from economic demands of work and “productivity”. Noam Chomsky pointed out that you can’t undermine conventional pieties in a 15-second soundbite – you need more time. But you need more time, also – much more – to arrive at a state in which you are capable of “undermining” (or even just fundamentally questioning) your own thinking.

Why would you want to undermine your thinking? Well, isn’t that exactly what we demand from others who fundamentally disagree with us? Whether they’re “mainstream” journalists, bloggers or drinking buddies with the “wrong” opinion – we want them to see how deeply wrong they’ve got it. (“You’d have to be an idiot to believe that…”, etc).

We expect those who disagree with us to “be reasonable”, “face the facts”. But it doesn’t work that way, even when the “facts” seem clear-cut and verifiable. It usually takes more than grudging admission of factual error to get someone to change their “position”. We don’t think in facts – our thoughts aren’t strung-together facts. Every “fact” requires a frame to make sense of it (or, as Lakoff puts it, “we think and reason using frames and metaphors”). What we’re really demanding of our political, ideological or informal ‘opponents’ is that they change their worldviews, their cognitive framings (ie their “position”), to more closely match ours.

Imagine such a thing being demanded of yourself. Most of us, even if we had the inclination to seriously question our own “positions”, probably wouldn’t have the time to do a good job of it. For a start, you’d have to trace back through all the “authorities” you accepted since childhood, and ask yourself which claims you checked, and which you took on faith – and whether there were any alternatives you overlooked, etc. A huge task. There are too many other things urgently demanding our attention. So, for now, it’s more convenient (and fairly satisfying, “politically”) to just do a bit of reposting, retweeting, reblogging: “RT new Pilger piece on Assange. I haven’t got time to read it properly, but he always says it better than I could”, etc.

“Radical” memes

“The meme is the basic unit of cultural transmission, or imitation.”
- Richard Dawkins

There are several different versions of “meme”, but since Dawkins coined the term, I’ll stick with his biological definition. Memes compete with one another to replicate themselves in our minds. A “good” meme is one which spreads easily throughout a population. A good meme doesn’t necessarily imply a “good idea” (eg in the sense of high-quality information) – it’s just good at spreading. As Richard Brodie (author of Virus of the Mind) puts it:

Truth is not one of the strong selectors for memes.
Making sense is a selector… (Richard Brodie)

In other words, people are quick to accept flawed ideas which “make sense” (to them) over accurate-but-challenging ones. Other “strong selectors” for memes (as noted by Brodie, who cites evolutionary reasons) include: Crisis, Danger, Approval, Mission, Authority.

“Radical” discourse isn’t immune from this – one sees the same meme ‘selectors’ here: enemies, heroes, crisis, experts, the battle against nefarious forces, etc. The presence of these elements – more than accuracy, perspicacity, insight, originality, etc – determines the “success” of the “radical” idea/meme, according to memetics.

Continuing with David Foster Wallace:

… political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. (David Foster Wallace, interview)

If the “other side” is seen as corrupt/evil, then this “relentless black-and-whitening” makes sense as being uncompromising. You don’t compromise with evil. In some “radical left” circles I’m familiar with, “radical” has become a measure of the ability to see things “clearly” and starkly in black and white. This seems to precisely mirror (albeit inverted) the “authoritarian” moral logic of what Lakoff calls the “Radical Right”: no room for moral grey, intolerance of “moral contamination”/relativism, and hatred and/or distrust of “liberals” (whatever that term connotes).

What does “radical” mean?

Several different uses for the word ‘radical’ seem widely accepted. It comes from the Latin “radix”, for “root”. Literally “of the root”, but used in the metaphorical sense of “root” as “origin”, “source”, “basis”, “foundation”, etc – and also “primary”, “essential”, “fundamental”.

The term has acquired various political uses/”meanings” – eg via the metaphorical notion of “change from the roots”, as in “affecting the foundations”, fundamentally (rather than superficially) “reformed”, etc. Also, “extreme” – it was once used to describe those belonging to the “extreme section” of the British Liberal party (early 19th C.), etc. Ominously, UK and US governments/authorities increasingly seem to regard “radical” as synonymous with “terrorist”.

Other (better established) synonyms (n. & adj.) for radical include: “avant-garde”, “original”, “iconoclast”, “revolutionary”, “cardinal”, “primal”, etc. Bear those in mind for what follows…

My earliest “intellectual” influences (as a student) were Jung and Surrealism, not Chomsky or Socialist Worker, and this probably explains my perception (or bias) that most of what passes for “radical” in the political realm (via alt-churnalism and meme-spread) looks pretty much the opposite of what’s defined above as “radical” (with the possible exception of “radical” as synonym for “extreme”).

I see little that’s “radical” in copy-n-pasting (or social-media linking, etc) of recycled variations on a “relentlessly black-and-whitened” line whose main function is to identify and denounce the enemy (eg corporate/Western-state) in a tough and uncompromising – but hackneyed – way. (I wouldn’t describe anything I’ve written as “radical”).

With a similar thought in mind, I once tweeted (to nobody in particular):

To me, “radical” is primarily a measure of originality, not of intensity (or frequency) with which you equate “corporate” with “bad”.

That got me an immediate reply (out of the blue) from the radical website, Medialens:

“Nothing to do with originality”? After I pointed out the etymology of “radical” and “original” (root is metaphor for origin/source; originality refers to non-derivative origin/source), Medialens replied again:

Which kind of illustrates what Twitter is good for.

(At the other end of this spectrum, a Guardian piece titled ‘Britain’s 50 new radicals’ seemed to confuse “radical” with “entrepreneur”. See the resulting complaints in the Guardian comments section).

“Radical”: How do you measure information?

“the more probable the message, the less information it gives.
Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems”
- Norbert Wiener, on Cybernetics and Society

With the above, Norbert Wiener simplified Claude Shannon’s equation for quantifying the information contained in a message. In Information Theory, it’s a measure of unpredictability – the information in a message equals the negative of the probabilities that you can predict what comes next. In short, the easier it is to predict, the less information it contains. Dante meets Bosch in a crack lounge.

Thus, as Wiener puts it, great poems contain more information than clichés. Political speech/discourse tends to be among the most predictable & clichéd of all communications – whether it’s hard right, “liberal” or “radical” left. Churnalism of all kinds appears to increase this predictability.

Given a version/definition of “radical” in terms of information, as above (ie unpredictable, non-derivative, original), then what typically passes for “radical” in the political realm looks, to me, like nothing of the sort.

Essentials of framing (merged version)

This is a longish intro to the topic of framing – based on key themes in the work of cognitive scientist George Lakoff. (It merges three shorter pieces into one article).

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups,
parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“It’s because they’re stupid. That’s why
everyone does everything.”
– Homer Simpson

Frames are mental structures which shape our worldviews. They’re largely unconscious, but are revealed by the language we use. For example: “time is money”. This isn’t just a figure of speech – we conceive of time as a commodity, and the frame is activated by common phrases: “don’t waste my time”, “spending time”, “borrowed time”, “running out of time”, “I’ve invested a lot of time in it”, etc.

“Time is money” ↔ anxiety

This metaphorical conception of time isn’t universal – it doesn’t exist in all societies. Some cultures have no conception of “efficient use of time”.

The “time is money” frame has certain negative consequences (stress, insecurity, short-termism, etc) – in addition to the positive things claimed for it by business managers and orthodox economists. In fact, most anxiety seems to result from how we metaphorically conceive of our projected future. More on this later.

“Time is money” is a fairly obvious metaphorical frame. Less obvious is that morality is also routinely framed in terms of money transactions. We say that a person is “discredited” (their moral “credit” is withdrawn) when shown to be untrustworthy. We speak of “profiting” from good (ie moral) experience; we ask if a given course of action is “worth it”. The qualitative realm of morality is transformed into a quantitative one by conceptualising it in terms of accounting. If someone does you harm, you “pay them back”; if you treat me well, I am “in your debt”, etc.

Getting revenge

This type of framing has everyday implications. Suppose you are harmed or disadvantaged by someone’s “immoral” (or inconsiderate) actions. We may not see ourselves as the type of people who seek revenge, but it’s likely we think in terms of “paying someone back”. As a “balancing of the books” this can be seen as a moral good – a legitimate punishment. The morality of retribution is usually associated with conservatism, but it’s generally understood (ie accepted) because of the accounting framing. The fact that you “automatically” think along these lines may cause anxiety and cognitive dissonance if you don’t regard yourself as “that kind of person”.

Framing “work”

There are two common metaphors for work: as obedience and as exchange. In the work-as-obedience frame, there’s an authority (eg the employer) and there’s obedience to the commands of authority (ie work). This obedience is rewarded (pay). In the work-as-exchange frame, work is conceptualised as an object of value which belongs to the worker. This is exchanged for money.

Different consequences apply depending on the type of framing. In the obedience frame, the worker is expected to make personal sacrifices out of “loyalty” to the employer. This may help to explain why workers are giving £29 billion in unpaid overtime to their companies each year.

Why do so many workers tolerate a situation in which income is dependent on obedience? Perhaps it’s because their family upbringing involved the same kind of situation – eg they were expected to perform tasks out of obedience to parents. In other words, the work-as-obedience frame is a familiar part of their neurology, even though it may be disadvantageous in job/business settings.

‘Strict father’ syndrome

Lakoff argues that different types of family upbringing explain many moral and political frames. He makes the case that conservative values are based on a “strict father” upbringing model, and liberal (or “progressive”) values on a “nurturant parent” model. We all seem to have both models in our brains – even the most “liberal” person can understand a John Wayne film (Lakoff uses Arnold Schwarzenegger movies as examples of the ‘strictness’ moral system).

An adult might lean towards strictness in raising her own children, while demonstrating nurturant values in her professional life, or vice versa. Conservative politicians talk about “family values” all the time – even when there are more important issues (eg war, economy) to be addressed. What do family values have to do with these bigger issues? One suggestion is that by repeatedly talking about family values (to certain audiences – eg working-class Christians, in the US), the radical-right manages to activate the strictness frame for other domains (eg economy, welfare, crime, foreign policy, etc) – where it might not “naturally” (or traditionally) apply.

Frame semantics & fear

“Fear triggers the strict father model; it tends
to make the model active in one’s brain.”
– George Lakoff, ‘Don’t think of an elephant’, p42

In the ‘strict’ frame, the world is regarded as fundamentally dangerous and competitive. Good and bad are seen as absolutes, but children aren’t born good in this worldview – they have to be made good.* This requires that they are obedient to a moral authority. Obedience is taught through punishment, which, according to this belief-system, helps children develop the self-discipline necessary to avoid doing wrong. Self-discipline is also needed for prosperity in a dangerous, competitive world. It follows, in this worldview, that people who prosper financially are self-disciplined and therefore morally good.

This framing complements, in obvious ways, the ideology of “free market” capitalism. For example, in the latter, the successful pursuit of self-interest in a competitive world is seen as a moral good since it benefits all via the “invisible hand” of the market. In both cases do-gooders are viewed as interfering with what is right – their “helpfulness” is seen as something which makes people dependent rather than self-disciplined. It’s also seen as an interference in the market optimisation of the benefits of self-interest.

*Note: In some Christian versions of strict-father framing, children are believed to be born bad – not just “no good”, but “evil”, ie tainted with Original Sin. St Augustine (according to Bertrand Russell) “really believed new-born children to be limbs of Satan”. All the more need for punishment.

Strictness Morality & competition

A ‘reward & punishment’ type morality follows from strictness framing. Punishment of disobedience is seen as a moral good - how else will people develop the self-discipline necessary to prosper in a dangerous, competitive environment? Becoming an adult, in this belief-system’s logic, means achieving sufficient self-discipline to free oneself from “dependence” on others (no easy task in a “tough world”). Success is seen as a just reward for the obedience which leads ultimately to self-discipline. Remaining “dependent” is seen as failure.

[You may want to pause here. Can you see things differently from the strictness scheme? Or do no logical alternatives seem immediately obvious to you?]

Competition is an important premise of Strictness Morality. By competing in a tough world, people demonstrate a self-discipline deserving of reward, ie success. Conversely, it’s seen as immoral to reward those who haven’t earned it through competition. By this logic, competition is seen as morally necessary: without it there’s no motivation to become the right kind of person – ie self-disciplined and obedient to authority. Constraints on competition (eg social “hand-outs”) are therefore seen as immoral.

‘Nurturant’ framing doesn’t give competition the same moral priority. ‘Progressive’ morality tends to view economic competition as creating more losers than winners, with the resulting inequality correlating with social ills such as crime, deprivation and all the things you hope won’t happen to you. The nurturant ideal of abundance for all (eg achieved through technological advance) works against the primacy of competition. Economic competition still has an important place, but as a limited (and fallible) means to achieving abundance, rather than as a moral imperative.

While nurturant morality is troubled by the fear of “not enough to go around for all”, strictness morality is haunted by the fear of personal failure, individual weakness. Even the “successful” seem haunted by this fear.

‘Moral strength’

Central to Strictness Morality is the metaphor of moral strength. “Evil” is framed as a force which must be fought. Weakness implies evil in this worldview, since weakness is unable to resist the force of evil.

People are not born strong, the logic goes; strength is built through learning self-discipline and self-denial – these are primary values in the strictness system, so any sign of weakness is a source of anxiety, and fear itself is perceived as a further weakness (one to be denied at all costs). Note that these views are all metaphorically conceived – instead of a force, evil could (outside the strictness frame) be viewed as an effect, eg of ignorance or greed – in which case strength wouldn’t make quite as much sense as a primary moral value.

It’s usually taken for granted that strength is “good” in concrete, physical ways, but we’re talking about metaphor here. Or, rather, we’re thinking metaphorically (mostly without being aware of the fact) – in a way which affects our hierarchy of values. With “strictness” framing, we’ll give higher priority to strength (discipline, control) than to tolerance (fairness, compassion, etc). This may influence everything from our relationships to our politics and how we evaluate our own mental-emotional states.

That might sound a little dramatic and a bit academic – until we see what’s happening in the real world on Fox News.

‘Authoritarian’ moral framing

We’re constrained by ‘social attitudes’ which put moral values in a different order than our own. Moral conflicts aren’t just about “good” vs “bad” – they’re about conflicting hierarchies of values.

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”
– George W. Bush

“If you can’t be polite to our guests, you have to sit at the kiddies’ table”
– Hannibal Lecter

For example, you mightn’t regard hard work or self-discipline as the main indicators of a person’s worth – but someone with economic power over you (eg your employer) might…….

→ “Laziness is bad”
Under ‘strictness’ morality, self-indulgence (eg idleness) is seen as moral weakness, ie emergent evil. It represents a failure to develop the ‘moral strengths’ of self-control and self-discipline (which are primary values in this worldview). At this point you might want to reflect on how much the Puritan work ethic has affected your life in terms of hours spent in “productive employment” (or “pointless drudgery”).

→ “Time-wasting is very bad”
Laziness also implies wasted time according to this viewpoint. So it’s ‘bad’ in the further sense that “time is money” (see above). Inactivity and idleness are seen as inherently costly, a financial loss. People tend to forget that this is metaphorical – there is no literal “loss” – and the frame excludes notions of benefits (or “gains”) resulting from inaction/indolence.

→ “Welfare is very, very bad”
Regarded (by some) as removing the “incentive” to work, welfare is thus seen as promoting moral weakness (ie laziness, time-wasting, “dependency”, etc). That’s bad enough in itself (from the perspective of Strictness Morality) – but, in addition, welfare is usually funded by taxing those who work. In other words, the “moral strength” of holding a job isn’t being rewarded in full – it’s being taxed to reward the “undeserving weak”.

Thus welfare is seen as doubly immoral in this system of moral metaphors. Of course, others would argue that the “disincentive” to work is provided not by welfare but by work itself – or rather by its long hours, soul-crippling tedium and low pay…

But that’s a different kind of framing.

“Might is right”

In ‘Strict Father’ (ie ‘Authoritarian’) morality, one must fight evil (and never “understand” or tolerate it). This requires strength and toughness and, perhaps, extreme measures. Merciless enforcement of might is often regarded as ‘morally justified’ in this system. Moral “relativism” is viewed as immoral, since it “appeases” the forces of evil by affording them their own “truth”.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists… I think you have to destroy them. It’s the only way to deal with them.” (Dick Cheney, former US Vice President)

There’s another sense in which “might” (or power) is seen as not only justified (eg in fighting evil) but also as implicitly good: Strictness Morality regards a “natural” hierarchy of power as moral, and in this conservative moral system, the following hierarchy is (according to Lakoff’s research) regarded as truly “natural”: “God above humans”; “humans above animals”; “men above women”; “adults above children”, etc.

So, the notion of ‘Moral Authority’ arises from a power hierarchy which is believed to be “natural” (as in: “the natural order of things”). Lakoff comments:

“The consequences of the metaphor of Moral Order are enormous, even outside religion. It legitimates a certain class of existing power relations as being natural and therefore moral, and thus makes social movements like feminism appear unnatural and therefore counter to the moral order.” (George Lakoff, Moral Politics, p82)

In this metaphorical reality-tunnel, the rich have “moral authority” over the poor. The reasoning is as follows: Success in a competitive world comes from the “moral strengths” of self-discipline and self-reliance – in working hard at developing your abilities, etc. Lack of success, in this worldview, implies not enough self-discipline, ie moral weakness. Thus, the “successful” (ie the rich) are seen as higher in the moral order – as disciplined and hard-working enough to “succeed”.

If that seems no more than just a cynical rationalisation for greed and privilege, consider the notion of the Protestant roots of capitalism (nicely summed up here by Encyclopædia Britannica):

Protestant ethic, in sociological theory, the value attached to hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, which, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual’s election, or eternal salvation.

German sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), held that the Protestant ethic was an important factor in the economic success of Protestant groups in the early stages of European capitalism; because worldly success could be interpreted as a sign of eternal salvation, it was vigorously pursued.

As someone whose views tend to fall into the left-libertarian category, I got attracted to this field (Cognitive Linguistics, Frame Semantics) because it provides a way to understand right-authoritarian thinking/morality (which I don’t “condone” any more than I condone drowning puppies en masse). The usual temptation – on the left – is to regard the ‘other side’ as immoral or amoral, lacking in any moral sense, driven only by greed, etc. But that’s close to viewing ‘them’ as subhuman – and before long you’re thinking in authoritarian-style, yourself.

Of course, none of this means that Lying Bastards & crooks are scarce in the political realm…

‘Moral decay’ & other fun metaphors

Media hysteria sometimes calms down a little (eg when the focus is on the decent, respectable people, rather than the bad people**). But it only takes one horrible crime to set it off again. Then we have: “moral decay”, “erosion of values”, “tears in the moral fabric”, a “chipping away” at moral “foundations”, etc. It shouldn’t be surprising that these metaphors for change-as-destruction tend to accompany ‘conservative’ moral viewpoints rather than ‘progressive’ ones.

If True Moral Values™ are regarded as absolute and unchanging (which seems the case with ‘Strict Father’, ie ‘Authoritarian’, moral schemes), then change to the way we think about moral issues must be seen as a threat. And since standards do change in society over time (for numerous reasons, and whether we like it or not), advocates of Strictness Morality see moral decay everywhere, and may believe that “society is going to hell” (or “turning to shit”) – they might even yearn for some Golden Age, a mythical time before things started “degenerating”.

“Moral Purity” & “Moral Health”

Associated with moral ‘decay’ is the metaphor of impurity, ie rot, corruption or filth. This extends further, to the metaphor of morality as health. Thus, immoral ideas are described as “sick“, immoral people are seen to have “diseased minds”, etc. These metaphorical frames have the following consequences in terms of how we think:

1. Even minor immorality is seen as a major threat (since introduction of just a tiny amount of “corrupt” substance can taint the whole supply – think of water reservoir or blood supply. This is applied to the abstract moral realm via conceptual metaphor.)

2. Immorality is regarded as “contagious”. Thus, immoral ideas must be avoided or censored, and immoral people must be isolated or removed, forcibly if necessary. Otherwise they’ll “infect” the morally healthy/strong. Does this way of thinking sound familiar?

In Philosophy in the Flesh, Johnson & Lakoff point out that with “health” as metaphor for moral well-being, immorality is framed as sickness and disease, with important consequences for public debate:

“One crucial consequence of this metaphor is that immorality, as moral disease, is a plague that, if left unchecked, can spread throughout society, infecting everyone. This requires strong measures of moral hygiene, such as quarantine and strict observance of measures to ensure moral purity. Since diseases can spread through contact, it follows that immoral people must be kept away from moral people, lest they become immoral, too. This logic often underlies guilt-by-association arguments, and it often plays a role in the logic behind urban flight, segregated neighborhoods, and strong sentencing guidelines even for nonviolent offenders.”

Enemies everywhere, everything a threat

So, to conclude, there’s a lot to fear from the perspective of ‘Strictness Morality’: the world’s a dangerous place, there’s immorality (and indeed “evil”) all over the place, lurking everywhere, ready to jump out at you. And any weakness that you manifest will be punished. Even the good, decent people are competing ruthlessly with you, judging you for any failure.

“That’s not Charlie the Tuna out there… it’s Jaws.”
— G. Gordon Liddy (US shock-jock)

In a way, this moral framing logically requires that the world is seen as essentially dangerous. Remove this premise and Strictness Morality ‘collapses’, since the precedence given (in this scheme) to moral strength, self-discipline and authority (over compassion, fairness, happiness, etc) would no longer make sense.

Tabloid newspapers appear to have the function of reinforcing the fearful premise with daily scaremongering – presumably because it’s more profitable than less dramatic “news”. But this repeated stimulation of our fears affects our brains at a synaptic level. The fear/alarm framing receives continual reinforcement.

And pretty soon that’s how we start to think…

** ‘Decent, respectable people’: the ones in suits with money and power; the authorities.
‘Bad people’: potentially everyone else; insignificant but awkward types, you & me.

Graphics by NewsFrames

The “Moral Licensing” effect

In a previous post I looked at research on “ego depletion” and “low willpower” (eg exhausted “self-control” type metaphors). This one casts a glance at the “moral licensing” effect…

‘Moral licence’ refers to our increased tendency to act ‘immorally’ if we’ve already displayed our ‘moral’ rectitude. For example, one pioneering study showed that people are more likely to express racial prejudice, sexism, etc, “when their past behavior has established their credentials as nonprejudiced persons.”

Another study found that people give less to charity if they’ve just thought about themselves in terms of positive traits (Sachdeva, Iliev, Medin; 2009). Another showed that folks are more likely to cheat in a maths test if they’ve just recalled a time when they acted morally (Jordan, Mullen & Murnighan; 2011). Yet another found that “people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products”.

The list of research is quite long – it seems a well-established phenomenon. (Several examples are mentioned in this meta-study/review).

‘Self-control’, ‘Willpower’, etc

What does moral licensing have to do with “willpower”? Consider the report of soaring sales of Big Macs after McDonald’s added healthier items to its menu. As Kelly McGonigal (in Maximum Willpower) puts it:

“whenever we have conflicting desires, being good gives us permission to be a little bit bad. Importantly, this is not just a matter of running out of blood sugar or willpower. When psychologists ask people about their licensed indulgences, the indulgers report feeling in control of their choices, not out of control. [...]“

“most people think of all forms of self-control as a moral test. Giving in to dessert, sleeping late, carrying credit card debt – we use them to determine whether we are being good or bad.” (McGonigal, Kelly; Maximum Willpower. Macmillan)

We might think of it as a reasonable balancing of the “good” and “bad” (eg the healthy & unhealthy), but it often doesn’t work out that way. The aura of goodness (eg the thought of eating a salad, a good intention) is apparently enough to ‘license’ us to indulge (or act immorally) – as long as that prior moral goodness is our own (the research consistently shows little or no licensing effect when subjects are simply “primed” with thoughts of moral behaviour unassociated with their own actions).

Thus, moral licensing apparently ‘tricks’ us into acting against our “best interests” while we’re framing things in terms of ‘self-control’. A popular metaphor for this process is ‘self-sabotage’.

‘Highbrow’ vs ‘Lowbrow’ consumer choice

Many of our spending decisions seem tinged with morality. Buying frivolous or luxury items comes with feelings of guilt and “self-indulgence”. According to moral licensing logic, decisions which establish a person’s ethical credentials should provide a licence for indulgence. Some research seems to support this:

“We show that prior choices, which activate and boost the self-concept, are likely to subsequently license more self-indulgent choices. We propose that licensing can operate through an expression of intent to be virtuous, which reduces negative self-attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries.” (Khan & Dhar, 2005:  ‘Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice’)

In a later study (Khan & Dhar, 2007), participants chose a free film rental from a list containing both ‘highbrow’ (eg Schindler’s List) and ‘lowbrow’ (eg Bruce Almighty) films. A separate group had rated the highbrow films as more virtuous. It turned out that participants were more likely to choose a ‘lowbrow’ film if they were aware that the same choice would be repeated in a week’s time (relative to participants who were not aware of the future choice). Here’s how the authors of the study explain this:

“Our account proposed that the optimistic belief in one’s ability to choose a virtuous option in the future reduces the anticipated guilt arising from not exercising self-control and choosing a vice in the present.” (Khan & Dhar, 2007; ‘The Effect of Future Choices on Self-control’)

Whore-addicted Christian evangelists &
Passive-aggressive campaigners

Some occupations have a built-in supply of moral righteousness. So, who can blame the evangelical Christian pastor who ended up robbing banks to fund his addiction to expensive whores (true story). Or the ‘zero tolerance’ cop gone bad? Or the adulterous ‘family values’ politician, etc?

Incidentally, self-discipline and self-control top the hierarchy of moral importance in the conservative “strict father”, or “authoritarian”, moral framing system. I wrote about this here. I won’t draw any inferences about this with regard to moral licensing. I just mention it in passing…

On the other hand, I think of the unpleasant ‘passive-aggressive’ behaviour of certain altruistic, compassionate campaigning groups who wear their altruistic compassion like a badge. Again, no inferences drawn, and mentioning no names. I’m probably just imagining it.

Moral Licence vs Cognitive Dissonance

All of this brings up a tricky question: When does previous ‘moral’ behaviour license, and when does it constrain people to act consistently with those past ‘good’ actions? Cognitive dissonance theory would seem to predict the opposite of moral licensing – ie that people feel uncomfortable acting in a way that’s inconsistent with how they already view themselves.

Merritt, Effron & Monin (2010) suggest that it depends on whether the previous ‘moral’ behaviour is framed as “commitment” (eg to a task we identify with) or “progress” (on a task we’re obligated to do) – with the former being less likely to result in moral licensing. They cite the classic 1975 study (Miller, Brickman and Bolen) which found that children who were told repeatedly that they were “tidy” littered less than a group who were told that they should be tidy. They comment: “It appears that the labeling made children feel committed to neatness rather than licensed to litter”.

A different way of putting it is provided by Kelly McGonigal:

“Moral licensing turns out to be, at its core, an identity crisis. We only reward ourselves for good behaviour if we believe that who we really are is the self that wants to be bad. From this point of view, every act of self-control is a punishment, and only self-indulgence is a reward. Moving beyond moral licensing requires knowing that who we are is the self that wants the best for us – and the self that wants to live in line with our core values. When this happens, we will no longer view the impulsive, lazy or easily tempted self as the “real” us. We will no longer act like someone who must be bribed, tricked or forced to pursue our goals, and then rewarded for making any effort at all.” (McGonigal, Kelly; Maximum Willpower. Macmillan)

Did you get that? “Identity crisis”, “Who we really are”, “the self that wants to be bad” vs “the self that wants the best for us”? If it’s not confusing enough already, let me quote gratuitously from Lakoff & Johnson on the ‘structure of the subject-self metaphor system’:

‘Our metaphoric conceptions of inner life have a hierarchical structure. At the highest level, there is a general Subject-Self metaphor, which conceptualizes a person as bifurcated [forked, in two parts]. The exact nature of this bifurcation is specified more precisely one level down, where there are five specific instances of the metaphor.’ (Philosophy in the Flesh, by Lakoff & Johnson).

Okay, that’s enough of that for now. But you get an idea of where this is headed…

Meanwhile, here’s Paul Calf reflecting on self-control:

Framing for “radicals”

A view I often encounter is that Lakoff’s Frame Semantics is not politically “radical” enough. Take this review of Lakoff’s book, Whose Freedom? (from CounterPunch), which argues that Lakoff ignores “any facts or analyses that suggest the problems of an unjust and unsustainable world may be rooted in fundamental systems, such as corporate capitalism and the imperialism of powerful nation-states”.

CounterPunch’s reviewer, Robert Jensen, seems (to me) hostile towards Lakoff throughout, and I see indications that he hasn’t read Lakoff’s book very thoroughly (for example, he claims incorrectly that Lakoff “makes no mention” of the distinction “between negative freedom [...] and positive freedom”).

But, putting that aside, what is Jensen’s main problem with Lakoff’s approach? Jensen first makes some good points about the US Democratic party, but Lakoff’s book is not really about the Democrats (except for the illustrative examples cited). Jensen then returns to the same criticism that he started his review with:

Though this critique may seem harsh, it is a friendly one. I agree with many of the policy prescriptions that Lakoff labels as “progressive,” though I would want to push his analysis to the left and move past the predictable and uninspiring liberal ideology. I would highlight the more fundamental issues around illegitimate systems and structures of power, primarily the corporation in capitalism and the nation-state in the imperial era. (Outside the Frame, Robert Jensen)

So: “structures of power”, “corporate capitalism”, “imperialism”, the “nation-state” – these are the “fundamental” issues/systems for Jensen (and for many others who use the same terminology). Jensen writes that Lakoff’s approach is “shallow” for (allegedly) not addressing these fundamentals.

It would be easy to dismiss Jensen’s Counterpunch review as a mixture of ignorance and animosity towards Lakoff, but Jensen is a journalism professor for chrissakes, and he expresses a viewpoint which I’ve encountered with many other “radical leftist” folk who use a similar lexicon of political “fundamentals” (and with whom I probably share a lot of common ground).

So, what’s going on here?

Well, firstly, it’s worth pointing out that these “fundamentals” (“structures of power”, “corporate capitalism”, “imperialism”, “nation-state”) are abstract nouns. They seem useful abstractions to me, but they refer to unimaginably huge aggregations of unimaginably complex, countless human “realities”.

I’m often not sure what’s going on in my own head second by second – so don’t expect me to know what “imperialism” refers to – beyond some crude model in my brain, some metaphorical framing. (But don’t worry – whatever it is, I’m opposed to it). We tend to reify these terms.

(Note for “true radicals”: Please don’t misunderstand me here. In drawing attention to the cognitive “dangers” of such high-level abstract nouns/labels, I’m not “playing down” the very real, massive-scale bloodshed and human suffering that those who use these terms are themselves trying to draw attention to.)

And that’s where Lakoff’s work comes in. For a start, we gain a better understanding of our own internal mapping of this stuff. We become more adept at distinguishing the “map” from the “territory”. We see how our views (and those of people who oppose us), on a range of diverse topics (eg economics, international conflict, various social issues, etc), fit together from an internal “moral logic”. One example Lakoff provides to illustrate this is the question: Why, in the US, do conservative positions on, say, abortion correlate with support for capital punishment or opposition to social programmes for reducing child mortality – ie publicly-funded prenatal and postnatal care programmes for impoverished mothers? (America apparently has the highest rate of infant mortality in the industrialised world). There’s no obvious, commonsense explanation – and no other field of research has seriously attempted to provide answers (especially not empirically-based ones).

Frame Semantics, metaphorical framing, the cognitive-linguistic mapping of “political” views (whatever you want to call it) gives us rich insights into how our “moral” and “political” concepts form and function at the “deeper” levels of what the researchers call the “cognitive unconscious“. To me, there’s a beautiful irony in Robert Jensen’s evaluation of this approach as “shallow”.

Lakoff’s book in fact deals with types of framing directly relevant to Jensen’s “fundamental” issues (“structures of power”, “corporate capitalism”, “imperialism”, etc). Take the section on ‘Economic Freedom’ in which Lakoff writes at length on frames which form the ‘Economic Liberty Myth’ – ie the metaphorical rationale “behind” what Jensen calls the “structures of power” and “corporate capitalism”.

For example, this myth unites the following ideas in a complex moral frame:

• “Free markets are natural and moral”
• “Competition naturally maximises efficiency”
• “Private industry is more efficient than government”
• “Regulation reduces market efficiency”
• “Everybody with sufficient discipline can succeed”
• “Market discipline is natural; regulation is unnatural”

Lakoff shows how these moral-economic frames tend to accompany other ‘conservative’ positions on seemingly unrelated matters (eg foreign policy, war, “domestic” issues such as welfare, etc) in a systemic way. Unlike the rhetoric-heavy “radical” churnalism which is so often found on the pages of CounterPunch, it’s based to a large extent on empirical work, eg research in conceptual metaphor – a truly “radical” field (in the sense of new, original, groundbreaking and “getting to the roots” of things).

Perhaps if Lakoff hadn’t done this pioneering work – perhaps if he’d just stuck to repeating reified terms (“structures of power”, “Power-elites”, “corporate capitalism”, “imperialism”, etc), and citing evidence proving that these abstract nouns refer to the major destructive “forces” on the planet (not difficult to do, really) – then perhaps smart, deeply radical guys like Robert Jensen would welcome him with open arms: One Of Us.

‘Moral decay’ & other fun metaphors

(Essentials of framing – Part 3)

Media hysteria sometimes calms down a little (eg when the focus is on the decent, respectable people* rather than the bad people*). But it only takes one horrible crime to set it off again. Then we have: “moral decay”, “erosion of values”, “tears in the moral fabric”, a “chipping away” at moral “foundations”, etc. It shouldn’t be surprising that these metaphors for change-as-destruction tend to accompany ‘conservative’ moral viewpoints rather than ‘progressive’ ones.

If True Moral Values™ are regarded as absolute and unchanging (which seems the case with ‘Strict Father’, ie ‘Authoritarian’, moral schemes – see Parts 1 & 2), then change to the way we think about moral issues must be seen as a threat. And since standards do change in society over time (for numerous reasons, and whether we like it or not), advocates of Strictness Morality see moral decay everywhere, and may believe that “society is going to hell” (or “turning to shit”) – they might even yearn for some Golden Age, a mythical time before things started “degenerating”.

“Moral Purity” & “Moral Health”

Associated with moral ‘decay’ is the metaphor of impurity, ie rot, corruption or filth. This extends further, to the metaphor of morality as health. Thus, immoral ideas are described as “sick“, immoral people are seen to have “diseased minds”, etc. These metaphorical frames have the following consequences in terms of how we think:

1. Even minor immorality is seen as a major threat (since introduction of just a tiny amount of “corrupt” substance can taint the whole supply – think of water reservoir or blood supply. This is applied to the abstract moral realm via conceptual metaphor.)

2. Immorality is regarded as “contagious”. Thus, immoral ideas must be avoided or censored, and immoral people must be isolated or removed, forcibly if necessary. Otherwise they’ll “infect” the morally healthy/strong. Does this way of thinking sound familiar?

In Philosophy in the Flesh, Johnson & Lakoff point out that with “health” as metaphor for moral well-being, immorality is framed as sickness and disease, with important consequences for public debate:

“One crucial consequence of this metaphor is that immorality, as moral disease, is a plague that, if left unchecked, can spread throughout society, infecting everyone. This requires strong measures of moral hygiene, such as quarantine and strict observance of measures to ensure moral purity. Since diseases can spread through contact, it follows that immoral people must be kept away from moral people, lest they become immoral, too. This logic often underlies guilt-by-association arguments, and it often plays a role in the logic behind urban flight, segregated neighborhoods, and strong sentencing guidelines even for nonviolent offenders.”

Enemies everywhere, everything a threat

So, to conclude from Parts 1, 2 and the above – there’s a lot to fear from the perspective of ‘Strictness Morality’: the world’s a dangerous place, there’s immorality (and indeed “evil”) all over the place, lurking everywhere, ready to jump out at you. And any weakness that you manifest will be punished. Even the good, decent people are competing ruthlessly with you, judging you for any failure.

“That’s not Charlie the Tuna out there… it’s Jaws.”
— G. Gordon Liddy (US shock-jock)

In a way, this moral framing logically requires that the world is seen as essentially dangerous. Remove this premise and Strictness Morality ‘collapses’, since the precedence given (in this scheme) to moral strength, self-discipline and authority (over compassion, fairness, happiness, etc) would no longer make sense.

Tabloid newspapers appear to have the function of reinforcing the fearful premise with daily scaremongering – presumably because it’s more profitable than less dramatic “news”. But this repeated stimulation of our fears affects our brains at a synaptic level. The fear/alarm framing receives continual reinforcement.

And pretty soon that’s how we start to think…

See also:
Part 1 of this article
Part 2 of this article

* ‘Decent, respectable people’: the ones in suits with money and power; the authorities.
‘Bad people’: potentially everyone else; insignificant but awkward types, you & me.

Essentials of framing – Part 2

‘Strict Father’ (or ‘Authoritarian’) moral framing (which underlies ‘conservative’ ideology – see part 1) affects us in many ways…

We’re constrained by ‘social attitudes’ which put moral values in a different order than our own. Moral conflicts aren’t just about “good” vs “bad” – they’re about conflicting hierarchies of values.

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”
– George W. Bush

“If you can’t be polite to our guests, you have to sit at the kiddies’ table”
– Hannibal Lecter

For example, you mightn’t regard hard work or self-discipline as the main indicators of a person’s worth – but someone with economic power over you (eg your employer) might…….

→ “Laziness is bad”
Under ‘strictness’ morality, self-indulgence (eg idleness) is seen as moral weakness, ie emergent evil. It represents a failure to develop the ‘moral strengths’ of self-control and self-discipline (which are primary values in this worldview). At this point you might want to reflect on how much the Puritan work ethic has affected your life in terms of hours spent in “productive employment” (or “pointless drudgery”).

→ “Time-wasting is very bad”
Laziness also implies wasted time according to this viewpoint. So it’s ‘bad’ in the further sense that “time is money” (see part 1). Inactivity and idleness are seen as inherently costly, a financial loss. People tend to forget that this is metaphorical – there is no literal “loss” – and the frame excludes notions of benefits (or “gains”) resulting from inaction/indolence.

→ “Welfare is very, very bad”
Regarded (by some) as removing the “incentive” to work, welfare is thus seen as promoting moral weakness (ie laziness, time-wasting, “dependency”, etc). That’s bad enough in itself (from the perspective of Strictness Morality) – but, in addition, welfare is usually funded by taxing those who work. In other words, the “moral strength” (see part 1) of holding a job isn’t being rewarded in full – it’s being taxed to reward the “undeserving weak”.

Thus welfare is seen as doubly immoral in this system of moral metaphors. Of course, others would argue that the “disincentive” to work is provided not by welfare but by work itself – or rather by its long hours, soul-crippling tedium and low pay…

But that’s a different kind of framing.

“Might is right”

In ‘Strict Father’ (ie ‘Authoritarian’) morality, one must fight evil (and never “understand” or tolerate it). This requires strength and toughness and, perhaps, extreme measures. Merciless enforcement of might is often regarded as ‘morally justified’ in this system. Moral “relativism” is viewed as immoral, since it “appeases” the forces of evil by affording them their own “truth”.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists… I think you have to destroy them. It’s the only way to deal with them.” (Dick Cheney, former US Vice President)

There’s another sense in which “might” (or power) is seen as not only justified (eg in fighting evil) but also as implicitly good: Strictness Morality regards a “natural” hierarchy of power as moral, and in this conservative moral system, the following hierarchy is (according to Lakoff’s research) regarded as truly “natural”: “God above humans”; “humans above animals”; “men above women”; “adults above children”, etc.

So, the notion of ‘Moral Authority’ arises from a power hierarchy which is believed to be “natural” (as in: “the natural order of things”). Lakoff comments:

“The consequences of the metaphor of Moral Order are enormous, even outside religion. It legitimates a certain class of existing power relations as being natural and therefore moral, and thus makes social movements like feminism appear unnatural and therefore counter to the moral order.” (George Lakoff, Moral Politics, p82)

In this metaphorical reality-tunnel, the rich have “moral authority” over the poor. The reasoning is as follows: Success in a competitive world comes from the “moral strengths” of self-discipline and self-reliance – in working hard at developing your abilities, etc. Lack of success, in this worldview, implies not enough self-discipline, ie moral weakness. Thus, the “successful” (ie the rich) are seen as higher in the moral order – as disciplined and hard-working enough to “succeed”.

If that seems no more than just a cynical rationalisation for greed and privilege, consider the notion of the Protestant roots of capitalism (nicely summed up here by Encyclopædia Britannica):

Protestant ethic, in sociological theory, the value attached to hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, which, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual’s election, or eternal salvation.

German sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), held that the Protestant ethic was an important factor in the economic success of Protestant groups in the early stages of European capitalism; because worldly success could be interpreted as a sign of eternal salvation, it was vigorously pursued.

As someone whose views tend to fall into the left-libertarian category, I got attracted to this field (Cognitive Linguistics, Frame Semantics) because it provides a way to understand right-authoritarian thinking/morality (which I don’t “condone” any more than I condone drowning puppies en masse). The usual temptation – on the left – is to regard the ‘other side’ as immoral or amoral, lacking in any moral sense, driven only by greed, etc. But that’s close to viewing ‘them’ as subhuman – and before long you’re thinking in authoritarian-style, yourself.

Of course, none of this means that Lying Bastards & crooks are scarce in the political realm…

See also:
Part 1 of this article
Part 3 of this article

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