Archive for the ‘George Lakoff’ Category
Interview with Wereldwijd 297 magazine
(May 2019 interview, covering Anxiety Culture, New Age, bullshit jobs, Brexit, alt-political categories, right-left anti-establishment convergence, Lakoff’s semantic framing, Mueller report & Russian interference.)
Elif: I first spoke to you in the early noughties, after Channel 4 (UK national TV broadcaster) had a show which featured your zine, Anxiety Culture. One of the things I remember is the “Messages from the adverts”, where you said the two underlying messages were “You are not good enough” and “There is something wrong with you”. Do you think that’s even more the case with social media now? It seems to be creating anxiety and mental health problems for young people.
Brian: Yeah, you’re not interesting or clever or experienced enough. And even if you think you are, you’re not getting enough recognition and appreciation. So you’re constantly trying to fix a perceived lack. It’s endless, and designed to be addictive by social media platforms, with their dopamine hits. I’m assuming young people aren’t taught intellectual or emotional self-defences against it in school.
Elif: Not as far as I’m aware. The usual academic studies still take priority.
Brian: Ironically, I think some of the New Agey type of self-help books contain the best solutions, from a behavioural perspective. The kind of books that most people I know sneer at, mostly with good reason. You just have to suspend disbelief when reading them, not take them too literally and ignore the obvious crud. Then pick out the good ideas. For example, the artificial (at first) practice of feeling grateful regardless. So you become the source of recognition and appreciation for others, regardless – instead of trying to grasp those things from others. Obviously if you’re the source, for others, of what you thought you lacked from others, the sense of lack is sweetly nullified. The problem is that the New Agey books might frame the basic idea with the kind of sappy language that most people probably reject (“all the love you need is already within you”, etc).
Elif: What I also liked about Anxiety Culture was the undermining of the Puritan work ethic, particularly the simple graphic détournement of business clipart, for example the ‘Crap Job Watch UK’ stickers. Have you by any chance read David Graeber’s new book, Bullshit Jobs? It’s based on some of the same ideas you were writing about back then.
Brian: No, but I read his earlier essay about bullshit jobs [Strike magazine, 2013], which expanded on the notion of pointless jobs to great effect. I think he was one of the people behind Occupy Wall Street? Ironically, I remember the guy who ran the biggest radical left website, ZNet, writing an article for the Guardian in which he says the main focus of the Occupy movement should be “full employment”!
Elif: What do you think of Occupy’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent”?
Brian: Well, it refers to wealth concentration, but it makes no sense if you’re talking about the distribution of political opinion. There’s no uniformity of political view uniting the 99%. It was more like 50/50 on the support of Trump, Brexit, etc. Those fine margins behind victory are important – easily exploited. I think this is where pundits like Glenn Greenwald get it so wrong. Greenwald’s view is that Trump/MAGA, Brexit, “yellow vests” movements, etc, are popular expressions of the economically hurting masses against establishment elites. It’s a nice, simple frame, like the 99% vs the 1%. But reality makes a mockery of it.
Elif: What do you mean?
Brian: Take the idea that Brexit was a popular mass revolt against elites. In fact, the Brexit campaign was funded by elites and planned by elites. It was promoted by rightwing media with billionaire proprietors. The promoters of Brexit didn’t see it as a 99% vs 1% issue. Through their voter research they realised it’s 51%/49% against what they want. So they find ways to swing things in their favour at those fine margins. The voter support for Brexit wasn’t primarily – or even disproportionately – from the economically struggling, the “left behind”. According to the detailed voter survey statistics I looked at, there’s more of a basis to think that support for Brexit was primarily – or at least disproportionately – from people who already held “conservative” viewpoints on trigger issues such as immigration.
To support the notion that Brexit was essentially an anti-elite movement, Greenwald wrote that “media elites in the U.K. were vehemently united against Brexit”. But that’s completely wrong. In fact, over 65% of UK national newspapers (by circulation) campaigned in favour of Brexit. The Daily Mail, Sun, Express, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph were all for Brexit. The BBC is supposed to be neutral but gave endless airtime to Nigel Farage and UKIP. Not to mention that UK tabloids have been pumping out scaremongering anti-immigrant and anti-EU headlines on an almost daily basis for decades.
Glenn also recently wrote that “rightwing nationalism is on the rise all over the democratic world because impoverished masses see no viable alternative”. That seems a strange notion to me. Logically, it’s like saying the poor see Fascism as more viable than NO Fascism. Not just in isolated cases, but as a sweeping generalisation. [Note: I explain this point in the comments section below – B.]
Elif: What does Noam Chomsky say?
Brian: Chomsky says “if you have any moral understanding, you want to keep the greater evil out”. That was in a recent interview. He immediately added that he “didn’t like Clinton at all, but her positions are much better than Trump’s on every issue I can think of”.
E: You moved on from the subject matter of Anxiety Culture to focus on semantic framing with your News Frames blog and Kindle book, but your output seems to have slowed, with only one new post last year, and none since. Have you changed direction again? What have you been up to?
B: I’ve been sidetracked by mundane issues, the most notable being that I collapsed with a cardiac arrest while out walking. I was then confined to hospital for a month waiting for open heart surgery. I’ve fully recovered now, though.
E: My god! Were you aware of a problem beforehand?
B: No, it was totally unexpected. No warnings, no symptoms. I’m basically slim, fit and healthy. It wasn’t a heart attack – my heart just stopped because of a problem with the aortic valve. It needed four shocks to bring me back, apparently.
E: Were you with someone at the time who could get help?
B: No, I was on my own, walking along the north Wales coast. Luckily, one of the first people to pass by was an off-duty policewoman who knew exactly what to do. I was quickly airlifted to hospital. But it was a close thing.
E: Did you have any “light at the end of the tunnel” experiences?
B: Ha! Not that I remember. Although when I finally came around in hospital after the cardiac arrest, it was a strange state of mind – alert and present, but non-personal and completely unconcerned. After the later heart surgery it was more like I would have expected coming out of anaesthesia. By the way, Britain’s National Health Service – the NHS – seems world-class to me. It’s one state institution that should never be taken for granted by anti-establishment types, left or right. Fuck Nigel Farage. Anyway, shall we continue to the next topic…
E: Ok. A few years ago, the Independent newspaper published your article about political categories such as “alt-left”. What’s striking from this is how these categories – mere labels – cause such confusion in the first place, before one even gets started on the debate. How do you see the framing of political categories – left, right, centrist, liberal?
B: “Right” and “left” apparently originated as references to political groups on different sides of a room – eg aristocrats seated on the right, commoners on the left. The problem arises when you imagine that this right-left convention implies a linear scale with two ends, a centre, and degrees of distance from the centre. This linear metaphor doesn’t work for political views, because, as Lakoff says, “there’s no ideology of the center”. A so-called “centrist” is just someone who has “leftwing” views on some issues and “rightwing” views on others.
E: What about liberals?
B: I remember, in the 1990s, rightwing US radio talk-show hosts whipping up hatred of “liberals”, generally, and of the Clintons, specifically. Now you see the same hatred of “liberals”, and of Hillary Clinton, from some influential sections of the “left”. And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say “hatred”.
This apparent anti-liberal convergence of “hard right” and “radical left” on some issues has led to the notion of a “horseshoe” effect, in which the right-left linear scale bends in the shape of a horseshoe, bringing the extreme ends close together. But I think that’s a rubbish metaphor, like “centrist”.
E: How would you explain the convergence using Lakoff’s political framing theory?
B: The anti-liberal framing comes from a “conservative” moral stance. The clue’s in the “tough” language of disgust with “soft” “weak” “compromised” liberals. Even when this comes from “radical leftists”, it sounds like tough “strict father” framing. The anti-liberal “convergence” looks as if it stems from this moral revulsion against what’s seen as morally weak – fence-sitting or corrupted, compromised “liberals”, middle-of-the-road “spineless” equivocating “centrists”.
This moral revulsion against liberals tends to arise on different issues for “left” and “right”. So, in that sense, it’s not really shared – it’s not a real convergence. The “left” might see liberals as morally weak and compromised for succumbing to corporate, pro-war interests, etc. The “right” might see them as weak for phony political correctness or “not standing up for America’s interests”, or whatever.
E: Why is disgust at weakness specifically a conservative frame?
B: Strength is a primary value in the conservative moral hierarchy. It’s more important than, say, empathy or tolerance. The reverse is the case with progressive liberal morality. You could never pass yourself off as progressive with slogans like “might is right” or “full-spectrum dominance”! In the UK, the Conservatives constantly repeated the phrase “tough on crime” and always accused the left of being “soft” on crime. And it worked, because people would then see the issue in terms of strength versus weakness, which favoured the conservative positions of tougher prison sentences, “zero tolerance”, etc. John Major, the former Conservative Prime Minister, advocated “more condemnation, less understanding” – with “understanding” framed as weakness in the context of crime prevention.
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists”. Why not? “Because compromising with evil is a position of weakness”. But it worked in Northern Ireland and South Africa. Any stance perceived as morally weak and compromised goes against the conservative moral hierarchy in which moral strength and moral purity are primary. The progressive liberal morality has an entirely different emphasis, in which negotiation and compromise can be framed in terms of positive moral qualities, social responsibility and empathy – it’s less about strength and weakness, per se.
[Note: Re-reading this, it occurs to me that readers will think, “If conservatives are so big on moral strength and purity, why do they put up with Trump, who is the embodiment of corruption and moral turpitude?”. I think the answer is probably that Trump frames everything he does in terms of winning and strength, and without shame. And this sort of overrides the perception of corruption for many – but not all – conservatives. It’s for a similar reason that many conservatives tolerate ruthless big business. I’ve written about this elsewhere – eg here and here. – B]
E: Where does the framing of “the establishment” fit into this?
B: Frank Luntz, the US rightwing’s language guru, used to advise Republicans to “always blame Washington”. Whatever the issue, whatever the complaint, always blame the complacent, compromised DC establishment. This framing was repeated constantly for decades by the right, by Fox News, etc. I think people have heard it so much, without challenge, that it’s become sort of taken-for-granted. It now comes also from commentators on the left. The Twitter accounts of Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald are good examples – it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that most of their tweets tend to put the blame, regardless of the issue, on establishment DC “libs” and “Dems”.
I think it’s a huge boost for Trump & co to have their anti-liberal messaging reinforced by influential figures of the “left”. It’s fairly well-known that Trump publicly praised Wikileaks over a hundred times in the run-up to the election – far more than he praised anyone else. Trump Junior has now taken to “liking” and sharing Glenn Greenwald’s tweets.
E: So the convergence between Trump’s MAGA “right” and “radical left” manifests as anti-liberal, anti-establishment framing. That also sounds like a libertarian position. How do libertarians fit into Lakoff’s scheme of things?
B: Lakoff says that, allowing for variations, a libertarian by most “standard” definitions is a few steps removed from mainline conservatism. The main difference is that the libertarian’s focus on non-interference by government leads to a strong advocacy of civil liberties. So, a libertarian might oppose government restrictions on pornography, drugs, etc – contrary to conservative morality. Otherwise, libertarian positions tend to reflect what Lakoff calls the “strict father” morality of conservatives – ie self-reliance, self-discipline and individualism valued above the “liberal” morality of nurturance, empathy and interdependence. That’s why libertarians seem to hold conservative views on welfare, gun control, taxation, social programs, etc.
E: But the civil liberties advocacy looks more like liberalism.
B: Lakoff argues that it’s a superficial similarity – that libertarians encourage civil liberties advocacy for very different reasons than liberals. It seems more of a mind-your-own-business individualism – which springs from strictness morality according to Lakoff’s thesis. Ask a libertarian and a liberal whether civil liberties should routinely include the right to own and use a gun. You will likely get two different answers reflecting very different moral focuses.
E: And what about non-interventionism in foreign conflicts? That looks like another convergence between libertarians, the alt-right and anti-war leftists.
B: There’s a big difference between anti-war views based on progressive morality (universal empathy, humanitarianism) and so-called “non-interventionist” views based on fairly narrow nationalist cost-benefit considerations. Whenever you see people lauding, say, Tucker Carlson, for his “non-interventionism”, remember that he described Iraqis as “semi-literate primitive monkeys” and said they should “just shut the fuck up and obey” the USA.
E: What do you make of reactions to Mueller’s report, from the perspective of framing?
B: Trump framed the Mueller investigation as a “hoax”. So did Glenn Greenwald, incidentally. Trump also framed it as a sort of coup against him by the “Deep State”. And so did Greenwald! Exactly the same language. Obviously it wasn’t a hoax. And if it was a “Deep State” coup, then I guess we’re still waiting for it to remove Trump. Mueller concluded that Russia’s interference in the US election was “sweeping and systematic” in ways that violated US criminal law. He concluded it was a sophisticated multi-pronged operation to “amplify political and social discord” and to help Trump.
E: But was it successful? Did it really help Trump win?
B: Well, you can’t measure its “success”, as there’s no way to quantify its effects distinct from all the other factors in voting. Trump turned this to his advantage by saying Russian interference had no effect on voting outcomes. But there’s no evidential basis for that assertion.
E: Just as there’s no evidential basis to assert that it tipped the balance in Trump’s favour. So is it all scaremongering over nothing? You mention Glenn Greenwald – who said the Democrats and the liberal media essentially cooked up the scandal to hide their own failures. And he points out that Russia isn’t alone in trying to influence foreign elections – the US does it all the time.
B: I think we should be concerned about the undermining of democracy, whoever is doing it. I don’t see it as necessarily scaremongering – although I’m old enough to remember when the “reds under the bed” stories about British union leaders did look like media scaremongering.
Voter “influence” technologies are evolving, becoming more sophisticated and effective, using new approaches in psychological profiling, cognitive linguistics, military-developed programs, mining vast databases of personal information on political biases, semantic triggers, etc, with constantly improving targeting on social media. And it’s available to the highest bidders, to unscrupulous parties. Why wouldn’t that raise alarms? I’m glad people such as Carole Cadwalladr are investigating it in the UK and elsewhere.
E: Thanks for your time, Brian!
Populist right – the mass appeal of “strict father” framing
George Lakoff’s book, Moral Politics, popularised the idea that ‘rightwing’ politics stem from a particular moral worldview, which Lakoff called “strict father framing”. Lakoff’s work unearthed, as it were, the cognitive root of prototypical “conservative” beliefs on a wide range of issues (from gun control to economics, from sex and abortion to war and the death penalty).
When I first read Moral Politics, it felt like a series of lightbulbs switching on inside my head. This was partly because I’d spent a lot of time modestly satirising ‘rightwing’ media views (eg for my Anxiety Culture zine), and I’d been particularly interested in tabloid newspaper obsessions with “spiralling crime”, “scroungers” and “red tape” obstructions to free-market “competitiveness” and “efficiency”. I didn’t know what united these particular ‘rightwing’ obsessions, but there seemed to be a common mindset behind them. Simply labelling them ‘rightwing’ or ‘conservative’ didn’t tell you what these views had as a common thread.
Lakoff’s cognitive theory seemed incredibly good at explaining and predicting the ways in which these views form – and how they all fit together – on all kinds of unrelated issues. The other side of the theory (nurturant framing), meanwhile, provided insights into my own ‘progressive’ views.
Why the rise of the populist right?
I’ve explained in a previous piece why I tend not to buy the “standard” explanations for the victories of Trump and Brexit. It’s not that mass hardship, inequality and animosity towards “establishment elites” (etc) aren’t big factors. It’s just that they don’t account for the mass appeal specifically of populist right (including hard-right) views. Over 60 million Americans voted for a billionaire who has expressed beliefs ranging from the ominously authoritarian to the violently fascist. This didn’t happen by default.
Before Brexit, in 2015, the Conservatives were voted back into UK government after years of painful economic austerity instituted by… the Conservatives. At the time, the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade documented how the rightwing press had “played a significant role in the Tory victory”. Although never expressed in the following terms, the role they played was to put a nationalist variant of “strict father” framing all over their front pages, regularly, on issues such as immigration, “stolen” jobs/benefits and interfering foreigners (eg EU bureaucrats). Meanwhile, Barack Obama said part of Trump’s success was down to “Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country”.
But beyond documenting mass discontent with the status quo and stating that the ‘rightwing’ media played a role, what else…?
No ‘leftwing’ model to explain ‘rightwing’ mass appeal?
For obvious reasons, most ‘left’/’liberal’ commentators don’t want to talk in terms of the “ignorance” or “stupidity” of the masses. They also don’t want to portray the majority as bigots (or “deplorables”), or patronisingly assert that the gullible public has been “brainwashed”. So what does that leave?
Most of the explanations I’ve read have simply concentrated on blaming “the liberal media”, the greed and aloofness of establishment elites, the failures of the Democratic campaign, the “liberal media”, the unpopularity of Hillary Clinton and the “liberal” media.
Did I mention “the liberal media”? I’m not even sure what that term commonly refers to anymore. Obviously something homogeneous and bad. Trump supporters, the ‘alt-right’, Corbynistas and the ‘radical’ left all seem to agree on the fungible awfulness of “the liberal media”.
But none of this explains the mass appeal of a specifically hard-right alternative (the 60+ million who voted for an Infowars-style bigot presumably counts as “mass appeal”). For that we need something else. Lakoff’s Moral Politics offers the best model that I’ve seen, to date, for understanding this phenomenon – and it has the advantage of being rooted in cognitive science. Even better, it gives us precise keys to understanding political language as well as worldviews. And it doesn’t require any postulating of mass stupidity, immorality or inherent bigotry in order to account for the mass appeal of hardline rightwing views of the type that Trump and his circle espouse.
I think the “strict father” frame thesis provides important clues to what is happening right now – crucial for the ‘progressive’ ‘left’ to understand. If you don’t have time to read Lakoff’s Moral Politics (or his shorter Don’t Think of an Elephant!), here’s my summary of how the “strict father” frame fits together. I’ve kept it non-technical and left out the jargony cognitive linguistics – it just gives an outline, a flavour of the frame itself…
The “strict father” frame
“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
Lakoff makes the case that conservative moral 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).
In the ‘strict father’ moral frame, the world is regarded as fundamentally dangerous and competitive. Good and bad are seen as absolutes, but children aren’t born good – they have to be made good through upbringing. 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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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. To give an example of how different moral hierarchies lead to conflicting political views, consider welfare. From the ‘progressive’ viewpoint, welfare is generally regarded as morally good – the notion of a social ‘safety net’ appeals to a moral hierarchy in which caring and compassion are primary values. Strict conservatism, on the other hand, tends to view welfare not just as an economic drain, but as immoral. You get a sense of this when it’s framed as “rewarding people for sitting around doing nothing”. Here are the steps in ‘strict’ moral logic which lead to the view that welfare is immoral:
1. “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).
2. “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”. 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.
3. “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. (Donald Trump uses typical ‘strict father’ framing on the issue of welfare. He believes that benefits discourage people from working: “People don’t have an incentive,” he said to Sean Hannity during his campaign. “They make more money by sitting there doing nothing than they make if they have a job.”).
“Might is right”
In ‘strict father’ 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”.
‘Erosion of values’ & ‘moral purity’
Media hysteria sometimes calms down a little. But it only takes one horrible crime or indication of ‘Un-American’ behaviour (etc) to set it off again. Then we have: “erosion of values”, “tears in the moral fabric”, a “chipping away” at moral “foundations”, “moral decay”, etc. It shouldn’t be surprising that these metaphors for change-as-destruction tend to accompany ‘conservative’ moral viewpoints rather than ‘progressive’ ones.
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? (This framing has taken scaremongering forms in the Brexit and Trump campaigns).
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
There’s a lot to fear from the perspective of ‘strictness morality’: the world’s a dangerous place, there’s immorality and “evil” lurking everywhere – an ever-present threat from the “foreign” and “alien”. And any weakness that you manifest will be punished. Even the good, decent people are competing ruthlessly with you, judging you for any failure.
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.
Rightwing media (tabloid newspapers, Fox News, etc) 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 us at a synaptic level. The fear/alarm framing receives continual reinforcement, triggering the ‘strict father’ worldview, making the model more active, more dominant in our brains.
Update (23/1/2017) – see George Lakoff’s comments on Trump’s inaugural speech. Lakoff says “Trump is a textbook example of Strict Father Morality”, but he also gives some clues on Trump’s weaknesses and how to defeat him (for example, Trump is already a “betrayer of trust” – seen as a big sin in strict father morality).
Facts, frames & “post-truth” politics
Some pointers on how frames fit into the debate about “post-truth”, “post-factual” politics, etc.
Frames vs “facts”
We think and reason using frames and metaphors. The consequence is that arguing simply in terms of facts—how many people have no health insurance, how many degrees Earth has warmed in the last decade, how long it’s been since the last raise in the minimum wage—will likely fall on deaf ears. That’s not to say the facts aren’t important. They are extremely important. But they make sense only given a context. (George Lakoff, Thinking Points; my bold emphasis)
Cognitive science tells us that when facts contradict a person’s worldview (their conceptual “framing” of various issues), the facts will probably be ignored and the frames/worldview kept. Knowing that frames typically trump facts doesn’t devalue facts. The knowledge just makes us more aware of what’s going on.
When a person’s conceptual frames don’t mesh well with evidential “reality”, the evidence that doesn’t fit the frame will likely be ignored, overlooked or dismissed. This way of “thinking” differs fundamentally from the classical view of “reason” as applied empirically (eg in scientific method) – in which factual evidence is allowed to challenge, refute and ultimately transform our beliefs about the world.
The lesson from this is that publicising the facts about any issue may not be sufficient to change people’s minds. And no political viewpoint has a monopoly on “objectivity”. Everyone tends to ignore or dismiss the facts which are inconvenient to their worldviews. And everyone tends to find an abundance of “evidence” or “proof” which supports their worldviews. These processes occur because of the way our brains conceptualise with metaphors and frames – resulting in the creation of our personal reality-tunnels, to which we become “attached” (in a physical sense, neurologically).
What can we do about this? We can attempt to become more aware of the process, and thereby make allowances for it – both in our own thinking, and in “reading” the messages we’re subjected to on a daily basis from the mass media.
“News” as story – not facts
No “newsworthy” event (or non-event) has “meaning” without a conceptual frame. We need frames to make sense of anything. As Lakoff et al point out, we don’t think in terms of neutral “facts” – our thoughts aren’t strung-together facts. We require frames to provide “meaning” to facts. Journalists instinctively know this; much of the “news” is presented as narrative frames – taking the form of a story (often with simplistic attribution of causes, heroes and villains, crisis, drama, etc).
How we tend to frame events will depend on our worldviews, our hierarchies of values, etc. Inevitably this will bring into play the “deep” moral frame structures in our psyches. When we read a newspaper story, however, a frame has already been selected for us in advance. If it’s a common news frame (ie one reinforced through repetition over many years), it may seem entirely normal, appropriate and “true” with respect to the “hard facts” (if any) reported. But at the same time it may induce a “tunneling” – or cognitive blinkering – effect, in which crucial “aspects” of the newsworthy event are excluded from our consciousness.
Example frame: “corporation”
This occurs not just with news “events”, but with political and social institutions and abstractions – and indeed any players, roles, entities, etc, involved in the news story. Consider, for example, the notion of a corporation or big firm. It’s an entity that features often in stories on jobs, in which the frame is perhaps “job creation” or “job loss”, etc. The corporation is the creator of jobs, the “engine of productivity”, etc, within that frame.
Now consider the frame favoured by, say, Noam Chomsky: corporations as unaccountable private tyrannies. Both of these frames (corporations as job-creators and corporations as private tyrannies) might be more or less “supported by the facts” – they’re both “true” in that sense. But, of course, they evoke (or invoke) two very different sets of ideas in our minds regarding the reality or “meaning” of corporations.
The way the “news” is often framed, through repetition, means that one set of “meanings” takes prominence over others. This isn’t “bias” in the usual, narrow sense in which media critics use that term. Neither is it primarily about battles between different sets of opposing “facts”. It’s more fundamental than that, and requires that we understand the new cognitive fields of frame semantics, conceptual metaphor and moral-values systems.
Media metaphors
Political frames are communicated by the seemingly everyday language of newspaper headlines and editorial copy. Metaphors activate (in our brains) the frames to which they belong, and this mostly occurs without us noticing.
Media metaphors structure our experience of “the news” and “public mood”, etc – but not just in the sense of “spin” or “propaganda”. Conceptual metaphor isn’t something that’s extraneous to “straightforward factual thinking”. Rather, it’s central to thought – without such metaphors, we couldn’t reason about complex social issues at all.
Newspaper headlines often use metaphors of direct causation to frame complex social issues. All such metaphors have their own logic, which is transferred from the physical realm of force to the more abstract social realms of institutions, politics, beliefs, etc. The effect is inescapably “reductive”, but not necessarily illegitimate (some metaphors – and their imported logics – are more appropriate than others). Here are some examples of such metaphorical causal expressions:
- Public generosity hit by immigrant wave
- 72% believe Iraq on path to democracy
- Obama’s leadership brought the country out of despair
- Majority fear Vietnam will fall to communism
Each of the causal logics here is different – for example, the notion that one country “falls” to communism, while another takes the right “path” (to democracy). Of “falling to communism”, Lakoff & Johnson remark (Philosophy in the Flesh, p172) that the ‘domino effect’ theory was used to justify going to war with Vietnam: when one country “falls”, the next will, and the next – unless force (military might) is applied to stop the “falling”. The metaphor of taking a “path” has very different political entailments. A nation might not even resemble a democracy, but if it chooses the “right path”, it “deserves” US military and economic “aid”, to help overcome any obstacles put in its “way”. (Incidentally, many rightwing ideologues regard any “move” towards “free market” economics as taking the “path” to democracy).
The discovery of frames requires a reevaluation of rationalism, a 350-year-old theory of mind that arose during the Enlightenment. We say this with great admiration for the rationalist tradition. It is rationalism, after all, that provided the foundation for our democratic system. […] But rationalism also comes with several false theories of mind. […]
If you believed in rationalism, you would believe that the facts will set you free, that you just need to give people hard information, independent of any framing, and they will reason their way to the right conclusion. We know this is false, that if the facts don’t fit the frames people have, they will keep the frames (which are, after all, physically in their brains) and ignore, forget, or explain away the facts. (George Lakoff, Thinking Points; my bold emphasis)
UPDATES – Overweening Generalist, ‘Degrowth’, RAW, ‘ego depletion’
I’ve combined a couple of “Updates” posts into one here (as the menu was getting a bit messy).
April 18, 2016:-
1. A new piece from one of my favourite websites, the Overweening Generalist blog, which comments on (among other things) an article I wrote about Robert Anton Wilson and George Lakoff (the longer version of the piece published at Disinfo.com).
It contains some brilliant observations and comments – give it a read: George Lakoff and Robert Anton Wilson and the Primacy of Metaphors (Overweening Generalist)
2. I’ve just seen a new paper from Ecological Economics journal (April 2016), from Stefan Drews and Miklós Antal, titled Degrowth: A “missile word” that backfires? It discusses the “degrowth” campaign/slogan from the perspective of cognitive framing, and references a piece that I wrote on the subject. Full text (PDF) here.
April 8, 2016:-
1. My Disinfo.com article about Robert Anton Wilson was originally much longer than the one I submitted to Disinfo. I’ve posted the original, longer piece (over 2,000 words) right here, along with a much bigger image.
2. I’ve previously written about “ego depletion”, a seemingly well-supported phenomenon in psychological studies (Daniel Kahnemen cites the work in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow). But as this fascinating new article claims, “An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked”.
Nassim Taleb commented on Twitter, ‘Fortune tellers are about 50% right. With psychology it seems worse. Hypocritical to call this “science”‘. That seems an interesting debate in its own right. Input/feedback welcome, as always…
Rather than leave you hanging on that question of whether psychology should be considered science, I’ll give you a few links with some quality input:
- A discussion on BBC Radio 3 between Rupert Read and Keith Laws, which tackles this question. Starts 35 minutes in, and I found it fascinating (the debate continued on Twitter, and Rupert made some interesting comments on that debate here).
- Since this debate brings up figures such as Popper and Kuhn, why not invite the whole party, to get an idea of what’s going on – Feyerabend, Lakatos and others are here at this Overweening Generalist piece. (It even includes a reference to Robert Anton Wilson, making it more topical with regard to my other update, above. Not bad, considering.)
RAW: new article for Disinfo
22 March 2016 – I’ve written an article for disinfo.com about the resurgence of interest in Robert Anton Wilson’s ideas. As well as looking at a couple of new RAW-related books, it continues the theme I’ve already written (briefly) about – on the harmoniousness between RAW’s mutiple-model neurosemantics and Lakoff’s Frame Semantics.
I shortened it from my original 2,000 words to 1,200 (which is Disinfo’s preferred maximum article length), but I’m pleased with the result, and think you’ll enjoy it. (The accompanying photo is of my Robert Anton Wilson “stash”). Here is the article:
http://disinfo.com/2016/03/raw-resurgence/ (Link is now dead – see below*)
*Web Archive copy of above disinfo.com page here.
*UPDATE (Aug 2019): Disinfo.com seems to have closed down, so the original link above is now dead. There’s a longer version of the article here.
Tabloid stereotypes – typifying classes by worst-cases
Sept 19, 2014 –Today’s Daily Express headline is a particularly nasty example of an irresponsible tabloid practice. Most people would probably (and rightly) think of it as demonisation of a class of people – by constant publication of nightmare cases whose attributes are in no way typical of the class (“migrants”, “benefit claimants”, etc) assigned by the newspaper.
Apologists for the Express might argue that the headline is factually correct (assuming the details have been reported correctly). But the point is how “facts” and “news” about sensational single cases can be framed in a way that distorts probability judgments, warps logic and incites hatred/fear regarding the class of people referred to.
Prototype Theory: distorting our judgments
Prototype Theory, in cognitive science, looks at the internal structure of categories/classes, and how single class members can stand for the class itself. It offers a useful explanation of what’s going on here (ie how the Express is fucking with our heads, precisely).
Our minds create various kinds of prototype for a given category/class. For example, a typical case, an ideal case and a nightmare case. We tend to use the “typical case” prototype in our inferences about what we consider “normal” (eg statistically, probabilistically) for a category, or class, of people.
Problems arise with something called a “salient exemplar” (a well-known case that stands out for us, for various reasons – including sensationalist media coverage. The tabloids are full of them). The salient exemplar tends to distort our probability judgments about a given class of people if it’s conflated with, or affects our perceptions of, the “typical case”. This can happen quickly, and without much conscious awareness – eg as a result of the repeated media coverage (of the salient exemplar), we have “reflex” associations and responses to the “migrant” frame.
The Express (and it’s not just the Express) knows it would get into trouble with a “KILLER BLACK”, “KILLER GAY” or “KILLER JEW” headline. But it knows it can get away with “KILLER MIGRANT”, just as it knows that it can get away with portraying the class of “welfare recipients” in terms of the “vile” “cheat” salient exemplar. The examples are endless – see my Curious repeating headlines in the Daily Express for a selection).
It isn’t new, of course. Lakoff (in The Political Mind) discusses the uproar that started in 1976, when Ronald Reagan referred to a “Welfare Queen” who had supposedly received $150,000 in government handouts and was driving a “Welfare Cadillac”. As it turned out, nobody could find this person – it appeared to be a made-up stereotype. As Lakoff puts it, “Reagan made the invented Welfare Queen into a salient exemplar, and used the example in discourse as if it were the typical case.” (The Political Mind, p160)
Misleading Vividness fallacy
I mentioned, above, how sensationalist tabloid framing warps logic regarding classes of people. There’s a fallacy in logic known as “Misleading Vividness“, eg the belief that the occurrence of a particularly vivid event (eg a terrorist bombing) makes such events more likely, despite statistical evidence indicating otherwise. Misleading Vividness has strong psychological effects because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic. There’s a lot of material already available on cognitive heuristics (as a result of the popularity of the work of Daniel Kahneman and others). I think it would be a fruitful area of research to combine this field with that studied by Lakoff et al, particularly with emphasis on media coverage and its effects. In the words of Nassim Taleb (quoted by New Scientist some time ago), media coverage is “destroying our probabilistic mapping of the world”.
Framing vs “Orwellian language”
April 24, 2014 – Orwell’s fiction ‘memes’ – Newspeak, doublethink, Big Brother, etc – still sound resonant to me, but his famous essay, Politics and the English Language, seems outdated (and wrong) in important respects. Of course, you can’t blame Orwell for not knowing what cognitive science and neuroscience would discover after his death – most living people still have no idea how those fields have changed our understanding of language and the mind over the last 35 years.
Orwell’s essay is premised on a view of reason that comes from the Enlightenment. It’s a widespread view that’s “reflexively” still promoted not just by the “liberal-left” media and commentariat, but also by the Chomskyan “radical left”. And, as George Lakoff and others have been at pains to point out, it’s a view of reason which now seems totally wrong – given what the cognitive/neuroscience findings tell us.
I’ll return to Orwell in a moment, but, first: Why does the Enlightenment view of reason seem wrong? Well, it’s an 18th-Century outlook which takes reason to be conscious, universal, logical, literal (ie fits the world directly), unemotional, disembodied and interest-based (Enlightenment rationalism assumes that everyone is rational and that rationality serves self-interest). It follows from this viewpoint that you only need to tell people the facts in clear language, and they’ll reason to the right, true conclusions. As Lakoff puts it, “The cognitive and brain sciences have shown this is false… it’s false in every single detail.”
From the discoveries promoted by the cog/neuro-scientists, we find that reason is mostly unconscious (around 98% unconscious, apparently). We don’t know our own system of concepts. Much of what we regard as conceptual inference (or “logic”) arises, unconsciously, from basic metaphors whose source is the sensory and motor activities of our nervous systems. Also, rationality requires emotion, which itself can be unconscious. We always think using frames, and every word is understood in relation to a cognitive frame. The neural basis of reasoning is not literal or logical computation; it entails frames, metaphors, narratives and images.
So, of course: we have different worldviews – not universal reason. It seems obvious, but needs repeating: We don’t all think the same – only a part of our conceptual systems can be considered universal. So-called “conservatives” and “progressives” don’t see the world in the same way; they have different forms of reason on moral issues. But they both see themselves as right, in a moral sense (with perhaps a few “amoral” exceptions).
Many on the left apparently find this difficult to comprehend. Given the Enlightenment premise of universal reason, they think everyone should be able to reason to the conclusion that conservative (or “Capitalist”) positions are immoral. All that’s needed, they believe, is to tell people the unadorned facts, the “truth”. And if people won’t reason to the correct moral conclusions after being presented with the facts, that must imply they are either immoral or “brainwashed”, hopelessly confused or “pathological”.
Few people have exclusively “conservative” or exclusively “progressive” views on everything. We all seem to have both modes of moral reasoning in our brains. (The words “conservative” and “progressive” may seem somewhat arbitrary, inadequate categories, but the distinct “moral” cognitive systems which they point to seem far from arbitrary – see Lakoff’s Moral Politics). You can think “progressively” in one subject area and “conservatively” in others, and vice-versa. And you might not be aware that you’re switching back and forth. It’s called “mutual inhibition” – where two structures in the brain neurally inhibit each other. If one is active, it will deactivate the other, and vice-versa. To give a crude example, constant activation of “conservative” framing on, say, the issue of welfare (eg the “benefit cheats” frame) will tend to inhibit the more “progressive” mode of thought in that whole subject area.
It’s a fairly common experience for me to chat with someone who seems rational, decent, friendly, etc; and then they suddenly come out with what I regard as a “shocking” rightwing view – something straight out of, say, UKIP – a view which they obviously believe in sincerely. This shouldn’t be surprising given the statistical popularity of the Daily Mail, Express, UKIP, etc, but it always conveys to me – in a ‘visceral’ way – the inadequacy of certain left/liberal assumptions about how reasonable, “ordinary” (as opposed to “elite”) people are “supposed” to think.
Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’
To return to Orwell and his essay – he writes that certain misuses of language promote a nefarious status quo in politics. For example, he argues that “pretentious diction” is used to “dignify the sordid process of international politics”. He says that “meaningless words” such as “democracy” and “patriotic” are often used in a consciously dishonest way with “intent to deceive”. The business of political writing is one of “swindles and perversions”; it is the “debasement of language”. For Orwell, it is “broadly true that political writing is bad writing”, and political language “has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”.
Much of this still seems valid (nearly 70 years after Orwell wrote it) – and some of the examples of official gibberish that Orwell cites are as amusing as what you might see in today’s political/bureaucratic gobbledygook. But it’s the cure that Orwell proposes which embodies the Enlightenment fallacy (and which Lakoff, for example, has described as “naive and dangerous”):
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them… Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning… (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language)
Orwell then provides a list of simple rules to help in removing the “humbug and vagueness” from political language (such as: “Never use a long word where a short one will do”). He states that “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language”, and that, “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of [political] orthodoxy”.
What are the fallacies here? Well, most obvious is the notion that political propaganda can be resisted with language which simply fits the right words to true meanings, without concealing or dressing anything up. Anyone who has studied effective political propaganda will tell you that it already does precisely that. The most convincing, persuasive propaganda, rhetoric or political speech seems to be that which strikes the reader or listener as plain-speaking “truth”. In many ways, the right seems to have mastered this art.
The fallacy comes from the Enlightenment notion that because people are rational, you only need to tell them the “plain facts” for them to reason to the truth. We know, however, that facts are interpreted according to frames. Every fact, and every word, is understood in relation to a frame. To borrow an example from my previous article, you can state that “corporations are job creators”, and you can state that “corporations are unaccountable private tyrannies”. Two different frames, neither of which consists of “debasement” of language or factual deception. Rather, it’s a question of activating different worldviews.
Orwell’s notion of letting “the meaning choose the word” seems to imply that our “meanings” exist independently of the semantic grids and cognitive-conceptual systems in our brains. Again, this comes from the Enlightenment fallacy – that there’s a disembodied reason or “meaning” which is literal (or “truth”), and which we can fit the right words to, in order to convey literal truth. It seems more accurate to say that we need conceptual frames to make sense of anything – or, as the cognitive scientists tell us, we require frames, prototypes, metaphors, narratives and emotions to provide “meaning”.
A lot of political/media rhetoric does seem to conform to Orwell’s diagnosis, and its language can probably be clarified by his rules and recommendations. But it’s not this “vague”, “pretentious”, “deceptive” type of rhetoric or propaganda that worries me most. What worries me is the rightwing message-machine’s success (if we believe the polls/surveys) in communicating “plain truths” to millions by framing issues in ways which resonate with people’s fears and insecurities – and which tend to activate the more “intolerant”, or “strict-authoritarian” aspects of cognition, en masse.