George Lakoff is a liberal, goshdarnit!
[Originally Posted on the old Fluid Imagination site]
Though George Lakoff attempts to be ideologically impartial throughout most of Moral Politics, he is a confessed liberal who feels there is scientific research to support his politics. The evidence suggests that:
- The Nurturant Parent model is superior to the Strict Father model as a method of childrearing.
- Strict Father morality requires a view of human thought that is at odds with what we know about the way the mind works.
- Strict Father morality often finds morality in harm, while Nurturant Parent morality does not.
For Lakoff, the argument between choosing whether one should be a liberal or a conservative needs to rest on empirical evidence and not on traditional methods of thinking, that is, not on believing what one was told but rather, on what one has seen. He has argued throughout his book that the conservative model of morality founds its entire system on the idea that authority must be respected without question. Such a morality demands that one believes what one is told by authorities. But for a scientist such as Lakoff, the only authority is empirical evidence. The thoughts of elders are not revered unless they have been shown to be true.
There are two thoughts we might draw from this.
The first is that Lakoff can empathize with the conservative model, that he can fully understand the foundation that the model is built on because he has looked outwards from it and seen the world as an evil and dangerous place where the only way we can ensure our survival is to believe in the authority of those who have survived before us. He is able to empathize in some way because, for him, we need to put ourselves in the hand of empirical evidence in order to survive. This connection between his liberal mind and his conservative model is the bridge that he uses to cross between the two, which gives him the opportunity to see each model from each perspective, to see each model’s weak and strong points.
The second is that Lakoff’s willingness to overturn authority separates him forever from the conservative model. Drawing this second thought shows us that the bridge our first thought created does not, in fact, connect the two models; instead, it is a useless addition to the liberal model, a 5-1/2 minute hallway to nowhere, designed to make liberals think that Lakoff could empathize with conservatives and provide an unbiased communique from inside their model.
We must examine the crack that keeps these two models infinitely apart, and thus keeps Lakoff from providing his readers with an unbiased explanation of how liberals and conservatives think. But before we begin the examination, we must also understand where it is we are standing. In short, we must do as Lakoff has respectfully done: inform the reader of our own bias.
We are liberals who believe in truth. We believe that truth is an experience, a verb, like running. We believe that truth is only what we know it to be, like the way we know we are running when we are running. We know the truth when we feel it. When the feeling has past, we no longer know the truth; we only know what we thought was true. For example, when we first looked at 2 + 2=4 and knew it to be true. We knew it because, well, we just knew it. There can be a whole lot of words that explain why we knew it, but those are only explanations, words that give us a cause and effect explanation of a feeling. They explain what has come and gone, not what is. They will not explain the feeling you are having now, but instead, will explain the feeling you had then, when you first read 2+2=4 and knew it was true. The experience we’re unsuccessfully trying to describe is the sensation of a Eureka! moment, the feeling you get when you just know something is right. For liberals like us, this feeling can be explained later using understandable terms — that is, it is a feeling that can be shared with others — but these explanations might be seen as rationalizations for one’s particular understanding of the truth and not as accurate explanations of the real truth as it was experienced. This definition of truth is inseparable from our critique of George Lakoff.
We’ve hypothesized that Lakoff uses empirical evidence as his authority figure, that he looks to the evidence to support his understanding of the world in the same way that the Strict Father morality requires people to look to their fathers/leaders to understand the world. But we believe that, as someone who believes in science, Lakoff has acquired enough experience with the feeling of the truth to put his faith in it. In other words, we believe that Lakoff knows the truth when he sees it, and only later does he turn to empirical evidence to support it. He might not have the words to point it out right away, but he knows in which direction the truth lies. He uses the language and thought-processes of science to communicate his understanding of the truth, believing, as he must, that the language of science is the most persuasive. Without looking at his record, we’re sure that he has been surprised many times by the evidence, and that he has often refined his theories based on what the evidence has shown, but we’re also sure that he has refined his theories of the truth because he has looked at them in another light and determined they were not true, determined by the fact that he no longer felt that they were.
With this understanding of how Lakoff operates as a scientist committed to the truth, we can go off on a short adventure into an imaginary world. Imagine that a new method for determining the truth is discovered, a new language, perhaps, that demonstrates in clear terms what the truth is in a way that one cannot argue without looking like a complete fool. Imagine that this process does not share one similarity with the empirical method, that, in fact, it reveals, without a shadow, how foolish scientists were to rely on empirical evidence.
If such an incredible thing were to happen, we believe that Lakoff would leave behind his reliance on empirical evidence and move forward into a future of this imaginary, new truth-discovering method. His willingness to cast aside empirical evidence in favor of the truth (as we have defined it) shows that he does not accept authority even in its most basic sense. He is willing to progress beyond what was known to be true already into what is known to be true now.
Because of this foundational acceptance of revolutionary thoughts, Lakoff can never cross that infinite crack in the connection between the conservative and liberal model of morality. For that reason, we have to understand his theories as being nothing more (and nothing less) than George Lakoff’s understanding of the truth.
And as some our conservative friends would respond, “That means it’s just his opinion.“
We would disagree.
We would say, “That is George Lakoff’s understanding of the truth of the situation, and this is a person who has put considerable time and effort into providing an unbiased description of what it is that makes liberals and conservatives fundamentally different from each other. How much time and effort have you put into such a project? Don’t you think it might be worth a listen?”