Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think
by George Lakoff
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Book Summary Information
Author: George LakoffEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-05-01
ISBN: 0226467716
Number of pages: 471
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think
Book Review: Why half of America can't communicate with the other half
Summary: 4 Stars
Here's why "Moral Politics" first interested me personally. As Bush and his neo-cons were telling their lies about WMD in Iraq to propagandize the nation and lead it toward an unnecessary and even detrimental war against a country that neither attacked us nor was a threat to us, I tried an experiment. I was on a list of highschool classmates and had started receiving rightwing email broadcasted by several of them. It seemed that one of them had become neo-con but most had gone over to the religious right (I grew up in eastern Kentucky, part of the Bible Belt). My experiment was to concentrate on three of my former classmates and try to shake their confidence in their illusions via reason. The experiment failed. I tried the same experiment on a close friend, a very Catholic and very intelligent mathematician married to a very Catholic philosopher. Over the years, this friend had used the word 'liberal' disparagingly in our presence several times. Again, the experiment failed. Lakoff's book discusses why my uncontrolled experiments, performed on two entirely different socio-intellectual classes, failed miserably.
"Conservatives have understood very well that their goals are not just political and economic. Conservatives want to change American culture itself. They want to change the idea of what counts as a good person and what the world should be like .... ."
"Moral Politics", pg. 222
In negative reaction to civil rights gains by Blacks and women, and also in reaction to the Vietnam War protests, conservatives over the last forty years have organized themselves extremely well (starting with the creation of 'Christian schools' in the south) and have managed systematically and successfully to define what's important in American politics. According to Lakoff's book, this organization begins in the homes, symbolized by the nurturing methods Dr. Spock vs. the striving for obedience by James Dobson in child rearing.
The battle between liberal and conservative sides is portrayed by Lakoff as belief in 'innocence of young children' (leading to nurturing) vs. belief in 'original sin' (leading to corporal punishment).Lakoff's main point is that rightwing conservatives believe implicity in the notion of a strict patriarchy held in place by threats and punishment. E.g., rightwing ideologues like Dobson teach adherence to a strict patriarchial hierarchy, so that feedback and error correction (certainly necessary for biological survival at the DNA and cellular leval) are completely eliminated. The hierarchy with lack of error correction explains why Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney were able lead the nation into war by lying about 'WMD' in 2003. Lakoff emphassizes that self-righteous people listen only to themselves and judge themselves by their own set of 'moral standards'. This is why Europe was and still is impotent in trying to chllenge the words about (nonexistent!) WMD coming out of Washington.
Lakoff points out that the strict patriarch punishes his kids for disobedience, just as Bush the Partiarch punished Sadam Hussein for disobedience. For neo-conservatives, also discussed in the book, the rest of the world consists of disobedient children who must be taught a lesson by their Father in Washington. As a link, the very popular 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind" was written by an neo-conservative, Alan Bloom. Bloom was a particularly successful with his readership because he hid his ideology so successfully, he never made clear exactly what was his proposed program (I read and reread the book seven times trying to find out). His program, the neo-con program for America and the world, was put into effect by other neo-cons like Wolfowitz, who was Bloom's student. Bloom's connection with the notion of strict patriarchy is illustrated implicitly in his advice from Plato: censor books and music for the young so that they'll grow up to be obedient, not rebellious. Only an obedient child will willingly die for an arbitrary leader in an arbitrary war like the war in Iraq.
Lakoff discusses why the strict patriarchial hierarchy leads easily into free market extremism (eliminate all government programs, deregulate everything, including schools) and helps explain to liberals why, since Reagan, American conservatives have systematically adopted the policy of trying to bankrupt the U.S. government. Lakoff emphasizes the Calvinistic fear (now propagated by conservative Southern Baptist leaders) that financial success on earth signals approval by God, so that the wealthy, not the poor, are the favored ones, the 'elect' who are headed for heavenly reward.
On page 94, 'moral self interest' and Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' are connected, showing why conservatives in the U.S. have opted for free market extremism: deregulation and the abandonment of all government programs (excepting military ones). From the standpoint of the moral absolutism of the strict patriarchy, anything that smacks even slightly of socialism is seen by patriarchial conservatives as 'immoral'. That position is not empirically justified. In my new book "Dynamics of Markets" the myth of 'The Invisible Hand' (stability and equilibrium of free markets) is exploded empirically (financial markets are shown to be unstable and far from equilbrium, there is no 'Invisible Hand' in financial markets).
On page 113 Lakoff answers the question posed by Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine": why is American Society so violent? Lakoff traces the problem back to the peculiarity of the strict patriarchial model adopted by American conservatives, bringing in the element of Calvinism vs error correcting feedback. This explains why Canadians, who are also 'gun nuts', don't kill each other. Canada is a relatively socialistic country, more like the U.S. was BRTF (before Reagan-Thatcher-Friedman). Norwegians and Swiss also have guns at home, but don't kill each other.
Chapter 21, one of most interesting chapters, discusses the ideas of leading advocates of different methods of child rearing. The teachings of the very influential rightwinger James Dobson and other more extreme Fundamentalist Christians are presented. Their message: punish kids into obedience, by beating, if necessary. But consider Scandinavia as a counterexample. Scandinavia is a relatively crime free society, with little murder of Scandinavians by Scandinavians. Women are typically brought up as feminists (anathama to Dobson). In Scandinavia, a parent can go to jail for hitting a child, 'unwed mothers' are treated no differently than are other mothers, and I can tell you from years of personal experience that one can walk anywhere in Oslo at midnight or any other time without fear of attack. The spirit of freedom and democracy seems highest in Scandinavia, where people are active and healthy, and where there is universal health coverage and (because of governmental redistribution of money) no poverty.
The strict patriarchial hierarchy is misidentified (with no empirical evidence whatsover from biology) by conservatives as 'the natural order'. Extremist interpretations of the Bible and Koran are advocated by conservatives of different stripes worldwide, in spite of massive nonuniqueness in the face of infinitely many different possible interpretations. This is, in fact, why strict patriarchy is demanded by Fundamentalists in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: educated and informed people who think for themselves will not obey any self-declared authority, especially not one who claims that he has a direct pipeline to God.
Now for some negative comments about the book. Lakoff repeats his main ideas far too often, maybe with the notion that the reader has to see hear the idea more than once in order to grasp it. I make the same mistake in my own writing, according to my wife, but this repetition makes the book less interesting that it would have been had it been properly edited. Second, there is absolutely is no evidence presented in the text that 'methods of cognitive psychology' (whatever they are) or any empirical method at all were used to arrive at the ideas presented in the text. I want to emphasize that, with any kind of mathematical or nonmathematical modelling, there is a terrible problem of nonuniqueness: empirical data can never pick out a single model, at best only some class of models.
Finally, I'm very grateful to Dr. Angelica Frias for giving me Lakoff's book, which should be read be every liberal in the U.S. and by every social democrat in Europe and beyond.
Summary of Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think
In this classic text, the first full-scale application of cognitive science to politics, George Lakoff analyzes the unconscious and rhetorical worldviews of liberals and conservatives, discovering radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. For this new edition, Lakoff adds a preface and an afterword extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book's original publication, from the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the 2000 presidential election and its aftermath.
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