Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (30 page)
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Authors: George Lakoff
Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s chief strategist for the 1980 and 1984 elections, writes in
The Greatest Communicator
about what he discovered when he went to work for Reagan in 1980. Wirthlin, a Berkeley-trained economist, had been educated in the rationalist tradition to think that voters voted on the basis of whether they agreed with a candidate’s positions on the issues. Wirthlin discovered that voters tended not to agree with Reagan’s positions on the issues, yet they liked Reagan. Wirthlin set out to find out why. His answer was that voters were voting on four closely linked criteria:
Personal identification: They identified with Reagan.
Values: Reagan spoke about values rather than programs and they liked his values.
Trust: They trusted Reagan.
Authenticity: They found Reagan authentic; he said what he believed and it showed.
So Wirthlin ran the campaigns on these criteria, and the rest is history—unfortunately for progressives and for the nation. The George W. Bush campaigns were run on the same principles.
It is not that positions on issues don’t matter. They do. But they tend to be symbolic of values, identity, and character, rather than being of primary import in themselves. For example, if you identify yourself essentially as the mother or father in a strict father family, you may well be threatened by gay marriage, which is inconsistent with a strict father morality. For this reason, someone in the Midwest who has never even met anyone gay could have his or her deepest identity threatened by gay marriage. The issue is symbolic, not literal, and symbolism is powerful in politics.
Rationalism is alive and well among progressive candidates and their strategists—especially when it comes to “the center.” In national elections, the voters tend to divide up as follows: strongly conservative Republican: 35–40 percent; strongly progressive Democrat: 35–40 percent; the center: 20–30 percent.
The rationalists see this as a continuum, defined by positions on issues alone. The rationalist idea is to take polls to find out what positions the voters prefer. A problem arises immediately. Conservatives have framed most issues using their language. Rationalists, who don’t accept the existence of conceptual frames, see language as neutral and may take the conservative language as neutral. If presumably rationalist polls ask questions using conservative language, the issues will be framed from a conservative perspective, which will introduce a conservative bias into the polls. If the pollsters are not sensitive to framing, they may not notice such bias, and it will appear to them that the population is moving to the right. The rationalist prescription for a
Democratic candidate: If you want to attract more voters, move to the right.
It would be a tragic move. First, it helps the other side by activating their positions on the issues. Second, it alienates the progressive base, on which you depend. Third, it crosses the moral line between progressive and radical conservative world-views. By asserting conservative moral positions, you are not sticking to your values.
Conservatives know better. They don’t try to get more votes by moving to the left. Why? They understand that the people in the center are biconceptuals, with strict morality governing certain aspects of their lives and nurturant morality governing other aspects. Which governs politics—strict or nurturant morality—can shift. It depends on which version of morality is activated for politics in this election. To activate your version of morality, you use the language of your moral system. That is, you talk to the center using the same language as you use with your base.
Except in two classes of cases. On the national level, conservatives know that, on the issues, they are a minority. They have to activate the strict father model in a majority of biconceptuals. They also have to be sure they don’t turn them off. For example, many biconceptuals are conservative in economic, social, and religious domains, but progressive in the environmental domain. Simply put, they love the land. Hiking and camping with the family, hunting and fishing with friends, perhaps they even want to save God’s creation. So when the Bush administration wants to gut the Clean Air Act and replace it with a bill that allows dirtier air, it knows that it cannot use the name the Dirty Air Act. The result is that they use Orwellian language: the Clear Skies Initiative. No one, not even a staunch conservative, is against “Clear Skies,” though if you know the bill, you know “Clear Skies” means dirtier air. This is lying with language. But it is not moving to the left on policy.
Besides Orwellian language, conservatives also speak to bi-conceptuals
using uncontested versions of contested concepts, as we saw in the case of freedom. In short, they use words like “opportunity,” “security,” and “fairness” in contexts that fit their uncontested senses. The effect is to be compatible with whatever meaning those in the audience have, no matter what their politics.
Because rationalists see reason as conscious and literal, they miss framing and worldview effects. If you don’t believe that there are different, metaphorically defined worldviews, and if you don’t believe there are deep fundamental frames that determine how people reason across issue areas, then what are you to make of the enterprise of reframing? You are going to see it as a form of spin or propaganda, of using words to fool people. This is the worst rationalist mistake of all, because it hides the entire conceptual dimension of politics—all the frames, metaphors, prototypes, and narratives that give political thought and language its moral and emotional depth, complexity, and color.
In short, there are five major rationalist mistakes:
Believing that you can argue effectively against established frames with raw facts—that is, thinking that the truth will set you free
Believing that voters vote on candidates’ positions on the issues, rather than on identity, values, trust, and authenticity—and on the symbolic value of the issues
Believing that candidates should follow the polls, rather than try to change them
Ignoring how biconceptuals work
Believing that reframing is just spin or propaganda, rather than a means of telling deep truths effectively
Does the failure of the rationalist myth mean that we should give up on reason and truth? Not at all. Instead, we should pay attention to cognitive science and get reason right so people can better see the truth about our social, political, and economic realities. What we need is a “higher rationality.”
Freedom isn’t free. It isn’t something that was won for us back in 1776. We can’t take it for granted or just pass it on effortlessly to our children. The progressive freedoms that have defined our country have been expanded over time with great effort and sacrifice, and they are being beaten back and taken from us. Not by foreign enemies. Not by terrorists. But by radical conservatives, who are fellow Americans. It would be easy to say that they are hypocrites, not meaning what they say. Sometimes they are; many of them do lie and use Orwellian language. But on the whole, they do say what they mean. It would be easy to say that the radical conservatives are all evil, or greedy, or cruel, or irrational, or just plain stupid. But they are no more like that than the rest of us. It would be easy to say they are immoral. But they function with a morality of their own—one that we find immoral. It would be easy to say that they are not loyal Americans, not patriotic, not freedom loving. But they consider themselves even more patriotic than we are, and sincerely use “freedom” and “liberty” as their watchwords. It would be easy if we controlled the language of “freedom” and “liberty”—the language of our deepest values. But we don’t. They have commandeered our words and changed their meaning. We must take back the words, restore their meaning, and then do the hard work of taking back our government.
There are two kinds of work that must be done. The first is
political—uniting, organizing, recruiting candidates, training candidates and campaign workers, canvassing, building coalitions, and working though the media. Political work is relatively well understood and just takes money, organization, dedication, and hard work. Winning elections is crucial. But winning more elections—even taking back the House, the Senate, and the presidency, however necessary—is not enough. We must take back the very idea that defines our country—freedom. Unless that is done, the culture wars will continue, they will keep our country divided and make it less likely that elections alone will serve the cause of real freedom.
Beyond the political work is the cognitive work—working on your own mind. This requires changing your brain, thinking in ways you have never thought before, understanding what you have not previously understood, and talking and listening in new ways. The cognitive work is more difficult than the day-to-day political work—partly because the political work is more familiar, and partly because cognitive work just is difficult.
What makes the cognitive work so hard is that it requires a new, higher rationality. We are used to thinking without thinking about it. We now have to become aware of how we and others are thinking and talking. We grew up assuming common sense. We now have to understand that one person’s common sense is another’s oppressive political ideology. We grew up thinking that freedom is freedom is freedom, that the word names a single common idea. We now have to be aware of contested concepts, that “freedom” means something radically different to the radical right—and so do other important words like “opportunity,” “fairness,” “responsibility,” “harm,” “compassion,” and even “God.”
On January 24, 2006,
The New York Times’ Science Times
section ran a story with the headline “A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious.” It was a report of a study by a team led by Drew Westen of Emory University.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.
The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.
The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.
After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in
regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The “cold reasoning” regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.
To cognitive scientists this is hardly a “shocker.” Results of this sort have been known for more than thirty years, though it is wonderful to have MRI confirmation of what we would expect from three decades of research. The Westen team is to be congratulated. We knew that deep-seated frames would trump the facts. The role of cingulate and other brain regions was not known in advance, but it is not a surprise.
What is sad is that the
Science Times
found it “A Shocker” that “Partisan Thought Is Unconscious,” when results about the unconscious nature of thought have been commonplace for three decades. The question is, How long will it take for the news and editorial departments of the
Times
to catch up to the science section?
The problem, of course, lies less with the
Times
and other media than with the universities that train the journalists, pundits, candidates, staffs, pollsters, and strategists. Students of the social sciences and of communications rarely learn about even the most elementary properties of mind and brain. Public political discourse—in government, in the media, in the think tanks, and in the universities—has not incorporated even the most basic facts.
Perhaps the hardest reframing problem is reframing our own minds.
What makes cognitive work so urgent and vital is that it affects free will itself. You can’t will something if you have no idea what it is. Before free will can operate, you must be able to conceptualize what you are willing. Since you can’t conceptualize without concepts, you can’t take back progressive freedom unless you know what progressive freedom is, that we are losing it, and what is replacing it.
This book is about more than freedom in the political and patriotic sense. It is just as much about free will, about how we have begun to lose it and how to regain it. Parallel to the right-wing political machine is a right-wing mind machine. It works via language in at least two ways. First, via words and idioms, like “death tax,” “tax relief,” “judicial activism,” “war against terror,” “liberal elites,” “defending freedom,” “pro-life,” “tax and spend,” “legislate from the bench,” “cut spending,” “up-or-down vote,” “homosexual lifestyle,” “ownership society,” “cut and run,” and so on. Second, via arguments, such as “It’s your money. You earned it. You can spend it better than the government can.”