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One of George Lakoff's key observations
in his work on contemporary political discourse is that "frames
trump facts" -- when facts are inconsistent with the frames
and metaphors that structure a person's worldview, the facts
will likely be ignored.
Ironically, Lakoff's new book --Whose
Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea
-- demonstrates that problem all too well. His worldview
seems to keep him from the very critical self-reflection that
he counsels for liberal/progressive people.
Lakoff's "frame," simply stated is:
(1) Right-wing Republicans
are the cause of our problems, and
(2) progressives working through
the Democratic Party will deliver the solutions.
So, out the window must go
any facts or analyses that suggest
(1) the problems of an unjust
and unsustainable world may be rooted in fundamental systems,
such as corporate capitalism and the imperialism of powerful
nation-states, no matter who is in power, and
(2) the Democratic Party is
not only not a meaningful vehicle for progressive politics
but, as a subsidiary of that corporate system with its own history
and contemporary practice of empire-building, is part of the
problem.
To deal with those obvious
and difficult challenges to his political proposals, Lakoff fudges
certain facts and ignores others. Whether he does this unconsciously
-- trapped by uncritical acceptance of his own frames and metaphors
-- or is aware of it, we cannot know. But the result is a book
that offers little to citizens who want to deepen their understanding
of our political crisis and start to strategize about a new direction
that can bring this country -- and human society more generally
-- back from the brink of the collapse we face on many fronts.
Whose Freedom? also has a sloppy, slapped-together feel which,
together with its serious intellectual and political problems,
raise serious doubts about Lakoff's fitness to play intellectual
guru to any liberal/progressive movement, a role to which he
has been elevated by many.
Lakoff, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley,
invites this blunt assessment of his book by the way in which
he tries to establish himself as an expert. He asserts that his
analysis deserves such serious consideration because he writes
not only as a political activist but as a linguist and a cognitive
scientist, working "in the service of a higher rationality
that the tools of cognitive science provide" (p. 15).
So, let's hold Lakoff and his book to the standards of a higher
rationality.
First, in a book on freedom by a cognitive scientist, we might
expect some measure of scientific precision in defining the term.
Instead, Lakoff uses "freedom" as a dumping-ground
term for any positive value he wants to endorse and attach to
progressive politics. Near the end of the book he ties freedom
to opportunity in general, economic opportunity, health, social
security, unionization, education, and privacy. "Every progressive
issue is ultimately about freedom," he says (p. 243).
In some superficial way that may be true, but such a laundry
list hardly advances the critical thinking needed to counter
the reactionary right's formulations, which also are rooted in
assertions about the nature of freedom, as Lakoff points out.
The advantage right-wing folks have is that they are comfortable
with intellectual simplemindedness in a complex world, which
makes for rhetoric that can soar but policies which tend to sink.
It's not clear that an equivalent simplemindedness by progressives
will pose a successful challenge. The goal for progressives should
be honest accounts of the complexity that can be communicated
clearly, not equally vapid platitudes that will never have the
same power to propagandize.
What progressives need to shape more successful rhetoric is a
bit of analytical clarity, which is nowhere to be found in the
book. In academic philosophy there is a rich, though often highly
technical, literature on freedom. Mining those insights and translating
them into ordinary language there would be a contribution, but
one Lakoff doesn't attempt. For example, the distinction between
negative freedom (simply stated, the "freedom from"
outside control) and positive freedom (the existence of conditions
and resources that create the "freedom to" pursue one's
interests) that has developed in philosophy is directly applicable
to modern political issues. Lakoff makes no mention of it, or
any other consistent and coherent framework for understanding
the concept of freedom.
The book's analytic shortcoming are exacerbated by the haphazard
writing and non-editing. In some places, Lakoff throws out aphorisms
and slogans without bothering to develop them beyond a single
sentence. Whatever organization he had in mind for the book,
it is not readily apparent. Many readers are willing to wade
through bad writing for good ideas, but the frustration level
grows quickly when no coherent ideas appear as the pages turn.
And then there's the problem of evidence -- those fudged facts.
For example, Lakoff makes the perfectly sensible claim that religion
has no special claim to superiority in moral reasoning, and he
contests conservative Christians' attempts to define their religious
morality as superior. I couldn't agree more. But to support his
argument that this conservative position is the minority view,
he states that "only 12.7 percent of Americans claim to
be evangelical Protestants" (p, 201). Since the book has
no footnotes, it's impossible to know where the figure comes
from, but that's considerably lower than many surveys report.
A 2004 poll for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and
U.S. News and World Report found that white evangelicals
make up 23 percent of the population. A 2002 ABC News/Beliefnet
poll found that of the 83 percent of Americans who identify as
Christian, 37 percent consider themselves to be born-again or
evangelical, which would be about 30 percent of the general population.
Meanwhile, a 2004 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public
Life put the percentage of white evangelical Protestants at 26.3
percent, of which 12.6 percent were categorized as "traditional
evangelical." In that study, black and Latino Protestants
were in separate categories, and there is a category of white
Catholics labeled "traditional." So, it's easy to imagine
that conservative Christians are a considerable segment of the
population.
The question isn't trivial, and in fact is crucial to Lakoff's
claim that follows: "Most Christians are progressive."
It's not clear that the factual claim is accurate, unless one
defines progressive so expansively that it becomes meaningless.
The book's second major problem comes out in this same paragraph,
in which Lakoff argues that "many evangelicals, like Jimmy
Carter, are progressives." Jimmy Carter, a progressive?
Is this the same Jimmy Carter who while president coddled the
Shah of Iran as that brutal dictatorship was collapsing? The
President Carter who ignored the pleas of human-rights advocates
like the late archbishop Oscar Romero, whose request to Carter
that the United States stop funding the brutal Salvadoran military
government and its death squads was ignored?
It's true that Carter has been a stronger advocate for justice
and peace since leaving office, and in those endeavors he deserves
support. But meaningful social change requires that we understand
how institutions shape political decisions as much as, if not
more than, individuals; ignoring the actions of Democrats while
they were in power leads progressives to ineffective strategy
and tactics.
Perhaps Lakoff understands that the unpleasant facts of Democratic
leaders' actions must be obfuscated or ignored if progressive
people are to be persuaded to spend their time and money helping
to put those same folks back in power. Some of the book's most
embarrassing material comes in this arena, concerning Bill Clinton.
In that section on religion, Lakoff asserts that morality "is
ultimately about recognizing and responding to others' needs
-- it is about empathy." Again, I couldn't agree more. That
might lead us to ask questions about the empathy underlying some
of the Clinton policies that Lakoff valorizes. For example, he
gives high marks to the Democrat's Iraq policy, "Clinton's
military containment of Saddam Hussein inside Iraq's no-fly zones,
which indeed succeeded in keeping Saddam Hussein from developing
weapons of mass destruction" (p. 232).
Lakoff conveniently ignores the fact that these no-fly zones
were imposed illegally by the United States and Great Britain
(initially along with France, which eventually pulled out of
the deal), and the routine U.S./U.K. bombing that occurred in
those zones had no legitimacy in international or domestic law.
That is to say, they were crimes against peace. While Republican
crimes demand condemnation, apparently Democratic ones are praiseworthy.
Legal considerations aside, a moral question pops up as well,
which Lakoff also conveniently ignores. Key to Clinton's policy
on Iraq was the continued imposition on Iraq of the harshest
economic embargo in modern history, which virtually the whole
world wanted to lift -- except the United States and its U.K.
ally (which was every bit as much a lapdog to Clinton as to Bush).
While Hussein shares the moral responsibility for the devastation
caused by those sanctions, that Clinton policy is directly responsible
for the deaths -- by conservative estimates -- of hundreds of
thousands of civilians, maybe more than 1 million. Predictably,
the most vulnerable -- children and the elderly, the sick and
the poor -- suffered most from the economic sanctions. Clinton
administration officials made it clear that no matter what Iraq
did to meet the specifications of U.N. resolutions on weapons
-- the condition for ending the embargo -- the sanctions would
remain in place until Hussein was out of power, which effectively
condemned to death those hundreds of thousands.
Remember, according to Lakoff, morality "is about empathy."
Yet when activists tried to build a movement in the late 1990s
to change this cynical and cruel Clinton policy, we found few
Democrats willing to listen. The longstanding U.S. goal of controlling
the politics of the Middle East -- consistent through Republican
and Democratic presidents since World War II -- trumped any empathy
that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright, or other individuals
in that administration might have felt.
I suppose I can empathize, in some sense, with Lakoff: If he
wants to help create the conditions for the return to power of
the Democratic Party, perhaps its sins are best ignored. But
it's difficult to see how this serves the "higher rationality"
that Lakoff invokes at the beginning and end of the book.
Though this critique may seem harsh, it is a friendly one. I
agree with many of the policy prescriptions that Lakoff labels
as "progressive," though I would want to push his analysis
to the left and move past the predictable and uninspiring liberal
ideology. I would highlight the more fundamental issues around
illegitimate systems and structures of power, primarily the corporation
in capitalism and the nation-state in the imperial era. Such
suggestions are typically derided by those in Lakoff's camp as
unrealistic and/or idealistic. Yet no one has ever explained
how a progressive politics that entrenches support for failed
systems is a realistic option for the future. Whatever short-term
strategies we might devise to try to roll-back the advances of
the reactionary right, those tactics have to be informed by honestly
facing the depth of our problems.
If this does seem harsh, that's good -- because it's crucial
that someone with Lakoff's public platform be critiqued sharply
when such weakly argued and thinly supported ideas are tossed
off in this shallow a book. Being rational -- along with being
clear and honest -- are important if we are to create the needed
shift in fundamental thinking necessary to make it possible to
pull this world back from the brink of multiple disasters on
ecological, cultural, political, and economic fronts.
In his concluding call to a higher rationality, Lakoff writes,
"Perhaps the hardest reframing problem is reframing our
own minds" (p. 259). Ironically, it turns out that his book
is evidence for that very claim, which may be the value of Lakoff's
recent work. As he states at the end of Whose Freedom?,
with no apparent sense of that irony: "Transcending the
ideas that we were raised with -- growing to see more -- is the
cognitive work of achieving freedom" (p. 266).
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