Curious George Visits a Church

(aka, "Mutter in the Cathedral")

...a summer screed...

University of California at Berkeley linguist George Lakoff is currently enjoying fifteen minutes of fame (meaning 200,000 Google hits and a recent New York Times Magazine cover story) on the strength of his willingness to teach progressives how to "reframe" public discourse, so I put James Webb's excellent Born Fighting down long enough to read Lakoff's breakout book on framing. It’s a slim volume that is equal parts progressive manifesto and field guide to the American Right.

Lakoff is earnestly confident of his claim that progressive values are traditional American values, but what his publisher calls the "antidote to the last forty years of conservative strategizing" seems more likely to provoke giggles among interns at Right-leaning think tanks than sleepless nights for their bosses. As a testament to the enduring legacy of snake-oil salesmen on the American frontier, Don't Think Of an Elephant! (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) lives up to its billing.

That’s not to say that the book is wholly without merit. Lakoff's foundational insight, that the mental frameworks or cognitive maps through which we view the world are more important than any facts about that world, has lots to recommend it, even though E.F. Schumacher covered much of the same territory more deftly some thirty years ago in the homage to Maimonides he called A Guide for the Perplexed.

To his credit, Lakoff explains that framing is a commonplace communicative skill that can be used manipulatively (when it becomes "spin") or with intent to deceive (as propaganda). He warns against deceptive framing on both moral and utilitarian grounds. But where Schumacher tackled nothing less than the meaning of life with the dexterity of a professional blackjack dealer shuffling a fresh deck, Lakoff spends 120 pages developing a contrast between "strict father" and "nurturing parent" frames of reference. The discussion becomes an unwitting exercise in high comedy when Lakoff points to the parenting advice of Dr. James Dobson with the same wonder that Jane Goodall once reserved for chimpanzees.

It’s easy to forgive the Berkeleyite for treating the evangelical Christian commentator like an exotic animal (as Lakoff remembers telling a friend, "I don’t think Dobson’s on NPR; I haven’t heard of him"), but one can’t help noticing that Lakoff reveals the limitations of his own expertise whenever he applies his insights to controversies of the day, or, indeed, to anything outside linguistics.

Right off the bat, Lakoff insists that "progressive/liberal morality begins with empathy." Since he also declares fear of evil as the basis for conservative views of the world, it's hard to keep from smiling at his unsubtle conflation of virtue with progressive thought, and hard to sympathize when this conflation leaves parts of his thesis dangling for want of facts on which to stand.

In making a case for empathy and responsibility as progressive virtues, for example, Lakoff suggests re-framing taxes as "investments" in civil society or "dues" owed by citizens to the polity at large rather than burdens from which Americans need relief.

The obvious problem with this re-branding attempt is that while people typically control their own investments, we do not exercise analogous control over how government at all levels spends our money. For every useful section of interstate highway system, there is some fool thing like West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex. Similarly, while dues are legitimate means of funding organizations to which people belong voluntarily, they're not backed by state power, and not subject to arbitrary fluctuation.

With respect to "metaphors of terror" as employed to describe the rationale for American military action in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Lakoff opines in a chapter written in late 2001 that "bombing innocent civilians and harming them by destroying their country's domestic infrastructure will be counterproductive--as well as immoral." That this cri de coeur might be called a pedestrian reformulation of U.S. Air Force doctrine never occurs to him, not least because he’s probably never talked to a public affairs officer, an AWACS pilot, or a forward air controller.

When Lakoff isn't busying himself with unworkable new metaphors or fatally lazy indictments of his opponents, his intellectual palette skews toward highway department shades of orange whose fluorescence makes it harder to discern shades of gray in a multihued world.

The nurturant parent model that Lakoff associates with progressives makes not even a grudging acknowledgment of sexual difference along the lines of "men are from Mars; women are from Venus." This means that only the "less desirable" metaphor in the set Lakoff is talking about can make any gender-based distinctions between male and female conduct. Perhaps those "strict father" conservatives are onto something, after all. But Lakoff seems to regard self-sabotage as a fair price to pay for the privilege of being able to say that "there is nothing in the nurturing family model to rule out same-sex marriage."

Oddly for an author who insists that people should never answer a question framed from an opposing point of view, Lakoff also suggests that progressives should "talk sanctity first" in arguments about the definition of marriage. By then, though, he’s also said that "the ability of ministers, priests, and rabbis to perform marriage ceremonies is granted by governments, not by religions," so we don’t expect his occasional forays into theology to withstand the scrutiny of first-year seminary students.

Lakoff’s summary of the differences between conservative and liberal Christianity would raise even Buddhist eyebrows. He contends that because the "strict father" frame of reference maps onto conservative Christianity, conservatives think God is punitive. If you sin, you’re going to hell. Then the humdinger: "since people tend to sin at one point or another in their lives, how is it possible for them to get to heaven? The answer in conservative Christianity is Christ," Lakoff writes, apparently unaware that Christ exercises identifical claims on liberal Christians, too.

Wittingly or not, Lakoff farms Christ off to conservatives and grace to his fellow progressives. Imagine splitting the two, and never mind where the whole of Christianity gets its name, or whether that Christ fellow might be the source of grace for progressives as well, as Benedict XVI reminded the world just this past week.

Given the tunnel vision in politics, biology, and theology that I’ve already cited, it’s no surprise to find that Lakoff also misunderstands conservative attitudes toward government funding of many social programs. He says we think that social programs are immoral, when in fact the more common criticism from conservatives is that those programs, however moral, are also shortsighted and inefficient. Add that to Lakoff’s plaintive call for a values-based foreign policy, and there’s still no coherent progressive response to something like the Oil-for-Food scandal. Not that it matters. If I understand Lakoff correctly, coherence gathers dust in the toy chest with last year’s harmonica when there’s reframing to be done.

Keenly aware of the number of conservative think tanks and talk radio hosts, Lakoff contends that America’s much-documented culture war was started by conservatives seeking to sustain a "strict father" worldview. Reading his manifesto, you wouldn’t think that Supreme Court decisions banning prayer in public schools and discovering a right to abortion on demand did anything to provoke conservative ire. Moreover, and in spite of the respect Lakoff has for the acumen of People Who Frame Differently, you wouldn’t want your teenage daughter dating a conservative, not least because "conservatives who are ‘pro-life’ are mostly, as we have seen, against prenatal care, postnatal care, and health care for children." We actually saw no such thing, but in Lakoff’s world, it’s only pro-life progressives who recognize that "any woman choosing to end a pregnancy is making a painful decision." The rest of us find opposition to abortion a handy way for strict fathers to control female sexuality, especially as manifested by uppity teenagers having "illicit" sex (the scare quotes are Lakoff’s) and older women who want to delay child-rearing to pursue a career.

One digests this book consoled by the thought that the study of framing is a useful discipline. The overlap between linguistics and politics remains fascinating to Lefties and Righties alike. But notwithstanding the bouquet he got in a foreward by Howard Dean and his status as founder of the Rockridge Institute, Lakoff's analysis never goes deeper than a wading pool.

"Don't Think of an Elephant!" sounds more like "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off" than Curious George probably intended.