CONTEXT: Dissident Politics advocates a pragmatic brand of politics that is focused on applying less biased versions of facts and logic in service to a competition of ideas-based vision of political morals and the public interest. The point was to see if it was possible to develop a plausible science-based ideology that is more rational and conscious reason-driven than existing ideologies. Conceptions of dominant American ideologies, e.g., liberalism, conservatism, socialism and capitalism, are based primarily on unconscious, reflexive and intuitive-emotional-moral perceptions of reality and thinking that distorts fact and logic. The pragmatic ideology concept arose mostly from personal observations of American politics and study of the biology of politics, mainly cognitive and social science research on politics and human cognition. Although the pragmatic ideology was internally consistent and logically defensible, cognitive and social science kept pointing to an astonishing weakness of objective fact and logic as (i) persuasive, and (ii) as a rational core for any political ideology. That disconnect prompted more study of the modern cognitive and social science of politics. The Political Mind was part of that effort.
BOOK REVIEW: Cognitive linguist George Lakoff wrote The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide To Your Brain And It’s Politics, which published in 2008 and 2009 (Penguin Books, New York, NY). Lakoff’s central hypothesis argues that reliance on “Old Enlightenment” (OE) visions of conscious reason (fact- and logic-based) is detrimental in defense of democratic values.
Lakoff argues that OE incorrectly assumes that reason is, among other things, conscious, universal (same for everyone), logical (consistent), unemotional, self-interested and literal or disembodied where mind logic fits world logic. Instead, reason is unconscious and emotion-dependent, inconsistent, embodied and not universal. He argues that unconscious thought itself is reflexive (automatic and not consciously uncontrolled), while conscious thought is reflective (consciously uncontrolled).
Lakoff’s argument that disembodiment of reason seems to cast doubt on pure logic as a persuasive source of moral authority if one assumes that people’s cognitive biology cannot be overcome.
Lakoff is a staunch liberal. He sees the rise of conservative messaging and political influence as a direct and profound threat to American democratic values and the moral mission of government, which is protecting and empowering the public. According to Lakoff, “the radical conservative political and economic agenda is putting public resources and government functions into private hands, while eliminating the capacity of government to protect and empower the public. . . . The Old Enlightenment reason approach not only fails, it wastes effort, time and money.” In other words, facts alone are ineffective.
He goes on to explain: “Politics is about moral values. . . . . Most of what we understand in public discourse is not in the words themselves, but in the unconscious understanding that we bring to the words. . . . . our systems of concepts are used to make sense of what is said overtly. . . . . The very use of the left-to-right scale metaphor serves to empower conservatives and marginalize progressives. . . . The left-to-right scale metaphor is not harmless. It is politically manipulated to the disadvantage of American democratic ideals.”
There is no ambiguity about Lakoff’s politics. He explains at length the power of framing issues in progressive and conservative frames to influence progressive and conservative modes of thinking. His core argument is that when a progressive accepts a conservative frame of an issue, the progressive is at a disadvantage, or maybe even concedes the issue to the conservative point of view. Framing examples that Lakoff cites include viewing illegal immigration as a matter for conservatives of dealing with “illegal immigrants”, while it ought to be progressively framed as a matter of illegal employers and/or consumers. Similarly, health care isn’t a conservative matter of health care “insurance”, but instead it’s a progressive matter of government’s central moral role in protecting and empowering its citizens.[1]
Based on the science, Lakoff argues that American politics amounts to a competition for minds based on messaging to or leveraging two fundamentally different progressive and conservative moral modes of thinking. Those thought modes are based, among other things, on different sets of moral beliefs and personal social identity. The core progressive moral value is empathy and what flows logically from it. As applied to government, Lakoff argues that empathy underpins democratic values of protection and empowerment of citizens. His vision of the conservative view is that fact and logic play a far less important role than is the case for progressives. That implies, for whatever reasons, relatively more reliance on fact- and logic-based conscious reason leads to better politics and outcomes than less reliance.
Where progressives fail is in their failure to abandon OE conceptions of reason fact and logic and to embrace a New Enlightenment (NE) conception of reason that accounts for the cognitive biology of political and moral thought. Lakoff’s vision of NE holds that it is rational (conscious), embodied, emotional, empathetic, metaphorical and only partly universal. NE reason (1) incorporates emotion that’s structured by frames, metaphors, images and symbols, and (2) requires a new philosophy of morality and politics because the brain isn’t neutral or a general purpose computer. Human cognition is severely limited to what it can make sense of. Much of what is perceived is filtered through frames, metaphors and symbols to simplify the cognitive load of making a complex world fit into a specific personal understanding of the world. In short, everyone’s reality is different, in significant part because their morals are different.
Questions: Is Lakoff’s argument persuasive that “there are no moderates” and the only modes of political thinking that exist are either progressive or conservative for any given issue?* If that’s true, how can one account for the pragmatic, not progressive and not conservative mind set reflected by superforecasters that cognitive scientists have detected among a few otherwise normal people (maybe 0.1% to 0.01% of the adult human population)? Is B&B barking up the wrong tree by downplaying emotion and relying on the OE vision of reason, fact and logic, e.g., the evidence is that objective fact and logic are not effective persuaders? Should fact- and logic-based conscious reason in politics lead to better outcomes in the long run? If so, why, and if not, why not?
* Lakoff argues that people are rarely or never all progressive or conservative in thinking about all issues. For some issues progressive thinking dominates, while conservative thinking dominates for other issues.
Footnote:
1. Lakoff observes that about one-third of private health care cost is for profit and administration; Medicare spends 3% on administration and none on “profiteering”. He cites a short taped conversation between President Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman regarding a new trend among health care insurers. The gist of the conversation:
Ehrlichman: Incentives favor less medical care; the less care they give, the more money they make.
Nixon: Fine.
E: The incentives run the right way.
N: (admiringly) Not bad.
Lakoff argues that here, Nixon was identifying with the conservative morals of individual responsibility (be prosperous) and making money any legal way, i.e., raising barriers to health care to increase profit. From that moral point of view, it was a great idea. The progressive moral of empathy and protection for consumers wasn’t part of the thinking. Lakoff argued that’s not a matter of callousness by Nixon, but instead it’s a matter of differing morals shaping unconscious thinking and beliefs.
B&B orig: 5/26/17
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