George Lakoff and the Motive for Metaphor

CMD executive director, John Stauber(left)and George Lakoff.
(Photo by Randall Wallace)

The U.S. Democratic Party has not exactly thrived in recent years, as John Stauber and I observed in our most recent book, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America Into a One-Party State. Republicans now control every branch of the federal government and a majority of state governments as well. Opinion polls show strong public dissatisfaction with both the Bush administration and Congress, but conservatives retain firm control of all of the levers of power. Currently in the U.S. House of Representatives there are 232 Republicans, 202 Democrats and 1 Independent, and in the Senate, Republicans hold 55 out of 100 seats. Democrats will face an uphill struggle if they hope to win back a majority in even one of those houses in 2006.

It's quite a comedown for a party that enjoyed comfortable majorities through most of the latter half of the twentieth century. Adversity, however, sometimes breeds new thinking, and George Lakoff, an affable professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, has emerged as an influential advisor to Democrats looking for ways to reinvent themselves. He heads a think tank, the Rockridge Institute, which works to "reframe public debate . . . by applying the discipline of cognitive linguistics to reveal the underlying frames and assumptions that structure American political discourse." Former Democratic presidential candidate and current party chairman Howard Dean called Lakoff "one of the most influential thinkers of the progressive movement" and was so impressed with Lakoff that he ordered members of his staff to read his 1996 book, Moral Politics. Dean also wrote the introduction to Lakoff's more recent book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2004).

The big revelation from Lakoff for many Democrats seems to be his insistence that they need to get serious about the language choices they make when talking about issues. For me, that's not much of a revelation. What I find most interesting about Lakoff isn't the fact that he's interested in framing, but the way he thinks about framing.

Lakoff's scholarly career began under the mentorship of MIT linguistics professor (and leftist activist) Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he broke away from Chomsky. Their differences became so sharp within the linguistic community that they are sometimes described as the "linguistics wars."

"I had helped work out a lot of the early details of Chomsky's theory of grammar," Lakoff said in a recent interview. "Noam claimed then -- and still does, so far as I can tell -- that syntax is independent of meaning, context, background knowledge, memory, cognitive processing, communicative intent, and every aspect of the body." Language and thought, in other words, were considered an abstract process that just happened to be occurring in human beings with physical bodies; the same rational processes could be expected to occur even if we were disembodied rational beings, like computers. The mind's cognitive functions could therefore be studied independently of the brain and body that happened to house it.

Lakoff, however, became convinced that human language and thought are inseparable from our bodies. The mind, he says, "is embodied, not in the trivial sense of being implementable in a brain, but in the crucial sense that conceptual structure and the mechanisms of reason arise ultimately and are shaped by from the sensory-motor system of the brain and body." In order to make sense of the world, we rely constantly on metaphors derived from that sensory-motor system. Even highly abstract systems of thought, such as philosophy and mathematics, rely on body-based metaphors. These ideas became the basis for Lakoff's books including Metaphors We Live By (1980); Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (2000).

How do metaphors figure in all of this? Here are some metaphors that Lakoff discusses in Metaphors We Live By:

• "Time is money." This metaphor is reflected not just in the phrase itself but in the language we use to talk about time: we "waste" time, "spend" time, live on "borrowed" time, "save," "budget," "share" or "invest" it. The metaphor of time as money gives us a way of thinking about time that highlights certain things it has in common with money, such as the fact that it is a valuable, limited resource.

• "Happy is up." This metaphor is never stated in exactly those words, but we can see it at work in the language we use to talk about our moods: "He lifted my spirits," "I'm feeling low," etc. Lakoff points to "happy is up" as an example of an "orientational" metaphor whose meaning is derived from the "sensory-motor system of the brain and body." Happiness corresponds to the physical experience of standing or walking upright, while depression corresponds to the physical experience of lying down when we are tired or depressed.

• "Argument is war." This metaphor finds expression in phrases such as "defended a position" or "winning the argument" and in the way we say that arguments can be "reinforced," "attacked," "shot down," "on target," or even that someone can "occupy the high ground" in a debate. Of course, arguments are not really wars, just as time is not really money, but the metaphor helps us think coherently about arguments based on some of the things that they have in common with war: conflict, disagreement, hostility, strategies for winning, and so forth.

Metaphors, in other words, aren't just clever word games that poets use when they want to compare their lovers to flowers or summer days. According to Lakoff, "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." Metaphorical thinking occurs whenever we use some formula of "A is B" to understand "A." Often our use of metaphors is so ingrained that we don't even notice we are using them. For example, we might say that someone is "crazy about his girlfriend" or "nuts about her" without noticing that they are using the metaphor "love is madness." If someone "devours" a book, has "half-baked ideas" or makes "warmed-over arguments," we probably don't notice that we're using the metaphor "ideas are food."

And metaphors are used for political gain. During the first war in the Persian Gulf, Lakoff wrote an essay titled "Metaphor and War" in which he stated:

"Metaphors can kill. The discourse over whether to go to war in the gulf was a panorama of metaphor. Secretary of State Baker saw Saddam Hussein as "sitting on our economic lifeline." President Bush portrayed him as having a
"stranglehold" on our economy. General Schwarzkopf characterized the occupation of Kuwait as a "rape" that was ongoing. The President said that the US was in the gulf to "protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the innocent," and that we had to "push Saddam Hussein back." Saddam Hussein was painted as a Hitler. It is vital, literally vital, to understand just what role metaphorical thought played in bringing us in this war."

One of the most influential metaphors about war, as Lakoff pointed out, is the statement by German military theorist Karl Von Clausewitz that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." But other metaphors are at work as well, such as "war is a violent crime"; "war is a competitive game"; and "war is medicine" (which therefore uses "surgical strikes" to "clean out" enemy positions).

A Family Affair

In Moral Politics, Lakoff attempts to explains why liberals and conservatives in the United States think differently about issues ranging from military spending to abortion to government welfare programs. (Many of the themes from Moral Politics are repeated in Don't Think of an Elephant, which was written as a practical guidebook for progressives.) The differences in thinking, he concludes, are based on different metaphors about the family that govern liberal and conservative thinking. Both liberals and conservatives use the "family" as a metaphor when thinking about the government, in the following ways:

• The nation is a family.

• The government is a parent.

• The citizens are the children.

According to Lakoff, "we all have a metaphor for the nation as a family. We have Founding Fathers. The Daughters of the American Revolution. We 'send our sons' to war. This is a natural metaphor because we usually understand large social groups, like nations, in terms of small ones, like families or communities."

There is a difference, however, between conservative and liberal family values. Conservatives think in terms of a "strict father" morality, whereas liberals use a "nurturant parent" morality. Here's how Lakoff describes strict father morality:

"It is assumed that the world is, and always will be, a dangerous and difficult place. It is a competitive world and there will always be winners and losers. Children are naturally bad since they want to do what feels good, not what is moral, so they have to be made good by being taught discipline. There is tangible evil in the world and to stand up to evil, one must be morally strong, or 'disciplined.'

The father's job is to protect and support the family. Children are to respect and obey him. The father's moral duty is to teach his children right from wrong, with punishment that is typically physical and can be painful when they do wrong. It is assumed that parental discipline in childhood is required to develop the internal discipline that adults will need in order to be moral and to succeed. Morality and success are linked through discipline. This focus on discipline is seen as a form of love -- 'tough love.' . . .

Strict Father Morality demonstrates a natural Moral Order: Those who are moral should be in power. The Moral Order legitimizes traditional power relations as being natural, determining a hierarchy of Moral Authority: God above Man; Man above Nature; Adults above Children; Western Culture above Non-western Culture; America above other nations. . . .

When translated into politics, the government metaphorically becomes the Strict Father. The citizens are children of two kinds: the mature, successfully disciplined, and self-reliant ones (read: wealthy businesses and individuals), whom the government should not meddle with; and the whining, undisciplined, dependent ones who must never be coddled. Just as in the family, the government must be an instrument of Moral Authority, upholding and extending policies that express Moral Strength."

By contrast, progressives see the world through the frame of nurturant parent morality:

"It is assumed that the world is basically good. And, however dangerous and difficult the world may be at present, it can be made better, and it is your responsibility to help make it better. Correspondingly, children are born good, and parents can make them better, and it is their responsibility to do so. . . .

In the Nurturant Parent family, the highest moral values are Empathy and Responsibility. Effective nurturing requires empathy, which is feeling what someone else feels -- parents have to figure out what all their baby's cries mean in order to take care of him or her. . . . Being responsible to others and oneself requires cooperation. In society, nurturant morality is expressed as social responsibility. This requires cooperation rather than competition, and a recognition of interdependence. . . .

The role of the nation should be to promote cooperation and extend these values to the world. This comes from caring about the well-being of people in our own and in other countries, recognizing that all nations exist interdependently in one global "society," and, therefore, wanting to cooperate with other nations to solve problems like hunger, disease, oppression of women and exploitation of children, and political strife.

Ultimately, the job of a progressive government is to care for and protect the population, especially those who are helpless; to guarantee democracy (the equal sharing of political power); to promote the well-being of all through cooperation; and to ensure fairness for everyone."

These different models of family morality, Lakoff says, explain why certain ideas cluster together as "conservative" while others cluster together as "progressive." He explores how these models explain why conservatives typically oppose legalized abortion but support the war in Iraq, while progressives support legalized abortion but oppose the war.

From a progressive point of view, the views of conservatives on these two issues are contradictory. How can someone claim to be "pro-life" yet support war? And as Lakoff notes, conservatives also hold other beliefs that seem contrary to a pro-life attitude: "The United States has an extremely high infant-mortality rate, largely due to the lack of adequate prenatal care for low-income mothers," he writes. "Yet conservatives are not in favor of government programs providing such prenatal care.
. . . Liberals also find it illogical that right-to-life advocates are mostly in favor of capital punishment." But these views hold together, he says, because they are consistent with other aspects of strict father morality. Conservatives support capital punishment because of their belief in the importance of punishment; they oppose pre-natal care because they see health care as a matter of personal responsibility in which the government should not interfere; and they support the war because of their belief in a moral order that places America above other nations and because "the military itself is structured by Strict Father morality. It has a hierarchical authority structure, which is mostly male and sets strict moral bounds."

Using Lakoff's analysis, political consultant Tom Ball has advised Democrats to "use words that exude weakness" to describe their Republican opponents. "Do not use words that could be construed in the 'Strict Father' model of morality as strong," he writes. "This refers specifically to many of the words that progressives use liberally in describing the opposition: Mean, heartless, insensitive, dictatorial, hateful, angry, evil, stubborn, harsh. . . . If you truly wish to attack conservatives at their deepest level of meaning, then forget the sissy taunts of, 'Oh, you're so mean,' or '. . . so stubborn,' or '. . . so evil!' Instead, label them WEAK." Ball has even developed a helpful list of 175 words appropriate to that purpose: coward, confused, unprincipled, failure, nervous, pathetic, helpless, hopeless scared, paranoid, twit, ineffective, incompetent, awkward, inept, etc.

"Parent" or "mother"?

I think some of Lakoff's analysis is interesting, but I also see some problems with it. In general, I think he does a better job of describing the underpinnings of conservative thought than he does of describing the underpinnings of liberal thought. The concept of a "strict father" is clear and specific, whereas there is something a bit vague about "nurturant parent." It might be more accurate to say that liberal values are based on a "nurturant mother" rather than parent. Liberalism of course espouses equality between the sexes, but the idea of a nurturant "parent" really draws from the way people think specifically about mothers more than it does from the way people think of parents in general. (In fact, the term "nurture" is based on the same Latin root as the word for "nurse" or "suckle," suggesting activity that is not only socially but biologically specific to women.)

This gender distinction is sometimes expressed in the not-so-coded language that conservatives and liberals alike use when talking about their differences. According to conservatives, liberals aren't "nurturant parents," they are "girly-men," "wimps," "pussies." For their part, liberals characterize conservatives as "cowboys" suffering from "too much testosterone." I'm not sure what (if any) practical implications flow from choosing the term "nurturant mother" rather than "nurturant parent," but Lakoff's theory should recognize more clearly that gender shapes both conservative and liberal thought.

The Rest of the World

Moral Politics is also curiously narrow in its focus. The only political ideologies it seriously considers are liberalism and conservatism as those terms are currently understood in the United States. Other countries and other ideologies are virtually ignored, and the history of how political thinking has changed over time is not even considered, even in the United States. This leads to any number of unanswered questions that I'd like to have seen Lakoff consider:

• Is "Strict Father" morality really limited to conservatism? Recently, for example, North Korea held a film festival that featured propaganda films extolling the virtues of its communist leader, Kim Jong Il. The documentaries had titles such as "The Leader Is the Great Father of Our People," "The Fatherly Leader among Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Fighters," "The Fatherly Leader among Officials," and "To Hold the Fatherly Leader in Higher Esteem." This rhetoric isn't particularly unique to Korea. Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung were each portrayed in their day as a "great father of the people," as were dictators on the right such as Adolf Hitler. But in the communist examples, strict father morality went hand-in-hand with cooperative values and support for a welfare state.

• What about ideologies other than liberalism and conservatism? I've mentioned communism and fascism, both of which played a major role in world geopolitics during the twentieth century and still have followers today. Even in the United States, communist and socialist ideas have influenced public policy and have attracted a significant number of followers. In Moral Politics, however, Lakoff's only mention of socialism or communism is in a brief passage where he quotes conservative activist James Dobson, who treats socialism, communism and liberalism as equivalent systems that he equates with permissive parenting.

• What about other uses of the family metaphor? What the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models have in common is that they both begin from the paternalistic assumption that parents are in charge of the political "family." However, there have been important political movements that reject this assumption and actually favor rebellion against parental authority. During the 1960s, for example, the peace movement was dominated by a youth culture whose slogans included, "Don't trust anyone over thirty."

• For that matter, what about George Orwell? It was Orwell, a socialist, who coined the term "Big Brother" in his novel, 1984. Orwell used the term to describe the false paternalism of totalitarianism. "Big Brother" is arguably a symbolic father figure, but if we try to explain him using Lakoff's terminology, he would be a strict father ''posing'' as a nurturant parent. And although Orwell wrote his novel as a critique of totalitarianism by both leftist and rightist governments, in modern times Big Brother has been used primarily as a rhetorical figure by the right to criticize government programs in general. It's hard, therefore, to imagine where he would fit either on the axis of liberal/conservative or of strict/nurturant.

What this all suggests is that the clusters of attitudes that Lakoff attributes to the categories of "conservative" and "liberal" do not flow directly and naturally from the idea of a "strict father" or "nurturant parent" alone. Rather, those ideas have come together as a result of America's specific history and culture, and they find expression in ways that are often arbitrary and paradoxical. Lakoff notes, for example, that there is a paradox in conservative anti-government rhetoric:

"American conservatism has a feature that seems peculiarly American and that often puzzles observers of American politics from other countries. It is the resentment toward government that often borders on, or extends to, hatred. . . ."

How can conservatives love their country, love their system of government, love the founders of their government, but resent and often hate the government itself? This does not happen in most other countries with versions of conservative politics. You won't find it in France or Italy or Spain or Israel or Japan. Why?

Lakoff finds the answer in "a peculiar feature of the American Strict Father model" which holds that "good parents do not meddle or interfere" in the lives of their mature children. "Any parental meddling or interference is strongly resented. . . . Here we have a remarkable form of explanation. A characteristically American part of the Strict Father family model corresponds exactly to a characteristically American aspect of conservative politics." Unfortunately, he offers no citations or other evidence to support his claim that these aspects of the Strict Father model are unique to the United States.

Lakoff adds, "It is not uncommon in this country for strict fathers (or mothers) to go too far and become abusive." The Nation as Family metaphor may therefore project "an abusive Strict Father model" onto conservative political views, in which case "the government, like an abusive father, may be seen as inherently abusive, neglectful, ignorant, dangerous, and potentially out of control." But these attitudes sound to me like the feelings that a lot of liberals these days hold for the current government. So is this resentment part of Strict Father thinking, or part of the Nurturant Parent model?

Conspiracy theories

I also have a bone to pick with Lakoff's characterization of what he calls the "cynical liberal response" to conservatism, which he goes so far as to call a "conspiracy theory":

"The cynical liberal response is that the ultrarich are attempting to take over the intellectual life of the country to ensure their domination. One step has been to finance a network of right-wing think tanks. Eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities would eliminate a major source of funding for non-right-wing research. Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would curtail public discourse in a way that would serve thought control. Controlling the purse strings of public universities would be another step in thought control. . . .

There is much to be said for the cynical liberal response. Much of it is true. Yet it has major flaws and is far from the whole story. First, it is a demonization of conservatives. . . . Second, the conspiracy theory attributes too much to competence and to centralized control. . . . Third, the conspiracy theory does not explain why conservative rhetoric can make sense to so many people who did not previously vote conservative. . . . Fourth, the conspiracy theory does not explain the details of conservative political positions. Why should the death penalty be in the interest of the ultrarich? How can the rich get richer on the Three Strikes and You're Out law, which requires heavy government spending on prisons? . . . The conspiracy theory doesn't explain many important conservative policies."

At the end of Moral Politics, however, Lakoff says that progressives are facing a "think tank gap," because conservatives have "spend a huge amount of money -- well over a billion dollars in the 1990s alone -- to support their intellectuals in such think tanks." So is this "a vast, conspiracy theory," as Hillary Clinton once suggested? No, it's not. It is the simply the result of disciplined, committed political organizing by the conservative movement, as John Stauber and I wrote in Banana Republicans. For more than four decades, conservatives have worked to build a network of grassroots organizations and think tanks that formulate and promote conservative ideas, and they are now reaping the fruits of that investment.

Moreover, conservative ideas do largely serve the interests of the wealthy, which is in turn tied to the conservative movement's success in raising the money needed to fund its ideological apparatus. When conservative ideas have clashed with the interests of their funders, in fact, the ideas have often changed to accommodate their funders. In Banana Republicans, we describe how this process affected libertarianism, a political ideology that was often associated with marijuana-smoking hippies in the 1960s but nowadays focuses mostly on corporate-friendly economic issues such as opposing minimum wage laws or environmental regulations. Why the change? Much of it can be explained as a result of the funding that began pouring into libertarian organizations, beginning in the 1970s, from wealthy corporate backers (and major polluters) such as Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries.

For a more recent example, consider the Jack Abramoff scandal involving prominent conservative activists and Native American casinos. The newfound power of the "gaming industry," as it likes to call itself, has been reflected in the changing attitudes toward gambling of conservative politicians, including President Bush. Opposition to gambling has been a longstanding tenet of conservative politics and is certainly the attitude that you would expect from Strict Father moralists. Bush expressed this viewpoint himself when he was governor of Texas and wooed religious conservatives by boasting of his "strong antigambling record" and moving to shut down an Indian-run casino. "Casino gambling is not OK," he declared. "It has ruined the lives of too many adults, and it can do the same thing to our children." As a presidential candidate, by contrast, he has accepted large campaign contributions from casinos and even appeared personally at a Las Vegas casino for a fundraiser for his reelection campaign.

"Bush's retreat from his antigambling rhetoric came as Republican lobbyists and activist groups collected tens of millions of dollars from Indian tribes seeking to preserve their casinos," reported the Boston Globe. "When Bush was a firm opponent of gambling, his position opened the door for GOP lobbyists to court gaming tribes worried about a tough administration policy. After Bush dropped his antigambling rhetoric, lobbyists touted their access, and fund-raising from Indian tribes grew exponentially."

Lakoff is undoubtedly correct that moral metaphors shape our political perceptions, but as the above examples illustrate, it's not a one-way street. Politics and money also play a role in shaping our moral metaphors -- a lesson that public relations specialists and other professional "perception managers" understand only too well.