<![CDATA[Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that Liberal linguist George Lakoff hurts the Democratic Party:
The field of linguistics has exported a number of big ideas to the world. They include the evolution of languages as an inspiration to Darwin for the evolution of species; the analysis of contrasting sounds as an inspiration for structuralism in literary theory and anthropology; the Whorfian hypothesis that language shapes thought; and Chomsky’s theory of deep structure and universal grammar. Even by these standards, George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House. …
There is much to admire in Lakoff’s work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or references (just a generic reading list), and cites no studies from political science or economics, and barely mentions linguistics. Its use of cognitive neuroscience goes way beyond any consensus within that field, and its analysis of political ideologies is skewed by the author’s own politics and limited by his disregard of centuries of prior thinking on the subject. And Lakoff’s cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons fails on both intellectual and tactical grounds.
I tend to agree, despite having been a deeply impressed student of Lakoff’s work since he published his Philosophy In The Flesh, which I continue to believe is an essential work for understanding how we think and perceive the world. It may be the most important theoretical work of the late 20th century.
But, like previous theorists who have provided penetrating and useful analyses of their times and people—Rousseau and Marx come immediately to mind—Lakoff has committed the error of translating his critique into a proscription for society with, I think, fairly disastrous results. Once the analyst becomes a revolutionary, even the most thoroughgoing intellectual analysis can become, as Pinker writes, cartoonish.
Whose Freedom?, Lakoff’s new book and the successor to Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate–The Essential Guide for Progressives, turns the debate between liberal and conservative into a one-dimensional argument predicated on simplistic assumptions about the motivations of convervatives. Geoffrey Nunberg’s much more rewarding Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volv-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercin, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show provides another damning account of Lakoff’s recent influence on Democratic pols, who have turned to Lakoffian framing of issues as the new solution to all problems liberal. Nunberg simply critiques, making the same important points about the value of the words freedom and liberty without proscribing what they should mean or how they should be communicated.
There is much more to the challenge of winning elections than framing, you have to have real policy positions that offer a stark alternative to wide-ranging conservative message, which has reduced political discourse to a battle between different kinds of people—evil, stupid, conceited liberals vs. godly, practical and humble conservatives. Simply reframing the discussion while sustaining the largely exhausted liberal program. Progress has made liberalism appear reactionary, beyond conservatism’s quest to preserve “values,” it appears because of continued reliance on Roosevelt-era rhetoric that liberals want to roll-back history and return to power, rather than provide new policies for our times.
Part of that appearance is framing-related, but Lakoff has begun to impose his interpretations of metaphors on the Democratic party. The brilliance of Lakoff’s philosophical and linguistic work, as compared to the recent political jeremiads, was that it demanded you examine every idea as a novel emanation of ancient experience. It was useful because it forced one to question everything. As an ideological tool, it drains the life from rhetoric because of the expectation everyone will see the same thing, that the mind and political discourse can somehow be cracked. Because we are all different and the times constantly change, there can be no proscribed meaning.
There is much to admire in Lakoff’s work, as Pinker says, but he’s not the liberal Messiah who will save liberalism, which is how his ideas are being treated by many.
Think and act, don’t just follow, or you’ll never win an election to get your chance to change anything. Leave the marching largely in lock-step to the other guys.
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