review the political mind

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826586.300-review-the-political-mind-by-george-lakoff.html?full=true

Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff

28 May 2008 by Owen FlanaganMagazine issue 2658. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic GuideBook informationThe Political Mind: Why you can't understand 21st-century American politics with an18th-century brain by George LakoffPublished by: Viking PenguinPrice: $25.95ISBN: 9780670019274

IN The Political Mind, George Lakoff, an eminent cognitive linguist at the University of

California, Berkeley, sets out to provide a mind science primer for progressive USpoliticians. His hope is that, come November, they might defeat the conservatives who, ifLakoff is to be believed, already stealthfully deploy the latest wisdom from cognitivescience.

According to Lakoff, the 18th-century Enlightenment painted a portrait of humans asthinkers: rational, logical and attentive to facts. Progressive politicians buy into this, andthus offer facts and logical arguments to sell their policies to the public.

But humans are not rational, at least not fully so. We are affective-epistemic kludges-

Rube Goldberg devices that negotiate reality with all kinds of imperfect, unconscious andemotion-laden tricks for getting by and getting ahead. According to the cognitive sciencecognoscenti, we don't just reason, we reason with passion. We don't think, we combinethought with emotion - let's call it "fthinking". Karl Rove and his cronies, Lakoffbelieves, have long understood this. Francis Bacon said, "Knowledge is power." There isa name for those who use knowledge to gain power. In America they are calledRepublicans.

Politics, says Lakoff, is not about changing minds through arguments and evidence. It isabout configuring and reconfiguring neural pathways. Repetitive, comforting,emotionally attractive and morally appealing narratives, metaphors, mottos and mantrasare most likely to gain neural traction. Politicians who control brains win elections.

Republicans, Lakoff says, understand how "brains and minds work". If voters arefthinkers and not thinkers, you need to appeal to their emotions. One way to do so is tohitch a ride on a narrative that is already neurally well honed. Some narratives - forexample, "rags to riches" - are affective neural superhighways for Americans.


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Apparently, Americans also get that warm fuzzy feeling when they hear a "redemptionnarrative". According to Lakoff, Bush and his handlers understood this. Bush, recall,"had been an alcoholic, had a DUI violation, avoided service in Vietnam, had a shadowexperience in his Air National Guard unit, failed repeatedly in business". Bush's teambrilliantly deployed cog-sci know-how and glommed onto the appealing redemptive

narrative possibilities in this prima facie sorry set of facts - or so Lakoff says. The factthat Rove and company did everything possible to suppress and/or spin these storiesabout alcoholism, cocaine use and business incompetence doesn't bother Lakoff in theslightest.

Democrats, on the other hand, just don't get how people fthink. Really? What about "TheGreat Society", "The Peace Corps" and "Teach for America"- all progressive constructsthat ably employ frames and metaphors?

There are serious issues here, almost all of which Lakoff leaves under-discussed. Mostimportant is the idea that we ought to wonder and worry about how we use language to

frame policy. Should taxation be framed as theft of the fruits of my labour, or asmembership dues to a club I want to be part of? Cognitive science has discovered thatdifferent ways of framing such issues have a big effect on the way people think and vote.

The same goes for the ways we talk about war. Is the war in Iraq a war over oil or is it acostly piece of testeronic juvenilia, the hissy fit of an uncurious moral dullard and his evilsidekick over 9/11 and Daddy's unfinished business in the first Gulf War? Republicansare smart enough not to dwell on these credible ways of describing the war. They knowthey can galvanise people with the repetition of phrases like "the war on terror" and thenget away with whatever they wish.

Was it really a prescient team of advisers with advanced cognitive scientificsophistication who fthought up that metaphor? Lakoff seems to think so. After all,Republicans are the ones who understand "how brains and minds work". They apparentlyknow that the constant repetition of phrases like "war on terror" strengthens neuralconnections. After hearing those words again and again, ordinary people literally getstuck thinking that way. It's noise to neurons.

For Lakoff, the root of all our problems is - as usual - our parents. He believes that weautomatically use a "nation as a family" metaphor, which can be broken down into twocompeting models: the strict father family and the nurturing parents family.Conservatives, he says, idolise "daddy" and believe that "morality is obedience to anauthority- assumed to be a legitimate authority who is inherently good, knows right fromwrong, functions to protect us from evil in the world, and has both the right and duty touse force to command obedience and fight evil". One effect of this is that our leadersdon't have to win public approval because the public, particularly conservatives, fthink ofthe president as father with final say over all matters.

Progressives, apparently, see the world through the nurturing parents model, with its"ethics of care", moved by "a single moral value: empathy, together with responsibility


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and strength to act on the empathy". This ought to make progressives Fthinkers with acapital F, so it is surprising that they allegedly use thinking rather than fthinking to winvotes. Maybe they are not actually motivated by the single moral value of empathy. Oldideas of equal worth and dignity still do much of the work for an empathic politic, apolitic that strives for the common good without all the touchy-feely stuff.

Part of Lakoff's agenda is to help Democrats set up progressive think tanks - actually,fthink tanks - that use the latest scientific research to carry out "cognitive policies" and"framing campaigns". "Conservatives conduct such cognitive policy making every day ofevery year," he writes. "It is explicit, well organized, and well funded. Its aim is tochange brains in a conservative direction. And it has been working." On the other hand,"progressives rarely conduct cognitive policy making". Lakoff's own fthink tank, theRockridge Institute, has closed, according to the latest check of its website.

The moral of the story is that successful politicians know how to use words to get peopleto vote against their own interests and values. Apparently this fact has just been

discovered - by Lakoff. When Plato wrote about sophists who strengthen arguments byappealing to emotion he must have been talking about parking disputes at the agorabecause the relevant discoveries about emotion's role in reasoning and rhetoric, andlanguage's ability to shape thought, wouldn't be made for another 2400 years, atBerkeley.

There is a lesson here, but it is not about politics. It's about the intellectual integrity ofscientists, specifically mind-scientists, who wish to apply what they know across borders.Cognitive scientific ways of speaking help us understand things more deeply only if theyreveal something new, or give thicker and richer texture to an understanding we alreadyhave. Lakoff's premise- that the Enlightenment portrayed us as perfectly rational- isflawed. What about Hume, who famously argued that we are fthinkers (remember"reason is a slave to passion"?), or Adam Smith, Rousseau and Voltaire, all of whomthought profoundly about the role of sentiment? It was Smith, in fact, who firstdistinguished empathy from sympathy.The premise that the Enlightenment saw us as perfectly rational is flawed

Lakoff ends the book with this: "we are far more fascinating creatures than Plato,Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, J. S. Mill, and Rawls for instance- thought wewere". Like most of the linguistic objects in this cacophony, this, as best I can tell, is justnoise from neurons.

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.

Focus on America - Delve into the science and technology questions facing the USA inour special report.

Owen Flanagan is a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, NorthCarolina

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