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A Liberal View of The SOTU

by Christopher Chantrill
January 25, 2004 at 3:00 am

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LIBERALS AREN’T too happy about President Bush’s State of the Union speech last week, and you can’t blame them.  In his review of the war on terror, the president seemed to reprise the old battery commercials of TV tough guy Robert Conrad: “I dare you.”  Liberals would rather not be reminded of the risks of taking on the president over the war on terror.  But liberal cognitive science professor George Lakoff analyzes the president’s speech using a couple of the metaphors he and Mark Johnson developed in their excellent Philosophy in the Flesh. 

The president’s tone, wrote Lakoff, uses the “strict-father” metaphor that “sees the world as a dangerous and difficult place.”  Progressives, of course, conduct politics using a “nurturant-parent” metaphor, where parents with equal responsibility “nurture their children and raise them to be the nurturers of others.”  Even when the president was using “nurturant-parent” language it was to lure the American people down a slippery slope on Social Security and Medicare reform “drawing more and more people out [of the programs]—forever—and the system collapses.”  In Bush’s reforms, “the ultimate goal of the proposal is not in the proposal itself.”  The ultimate goal is “to eliminate the funding of social programs.”

In their book, Lakoff and Johnson brilliantly propose that all our knowledge and understanding about the world issues from our sensorimotor existence as living beings that move forwards through life with eyes in the front of our head.  All our knowledge, they propose, is built up in metaphor from that basic sensorimotor experience.  We say things like: “I can’t wait till we get to Christmas,” as though life were a journey.  Or we say: “Time just flew by while we were on vacation,” as though time were a river that flowed past us.  Along the way, they deliver a sharp blow in the solar plexus to Noam Chomsky, criticizing his linguistics as a Cartesian system that separates mind and body instead of combining them, as they do, in a sensorimotor theory of embodied mind.

Let us stipulate that conservatism is indeed a “strict-father” political orientation.  But President Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative,” which showed that he wanted the American people to think of him, as least in part, as a “nurturant parent.”  Lakoff may think that Bush’s compassionate programs are stalking horses for the real “strict-father” programs lurking in the bushes, but to Bush’s conservative base, the No Child Left Behind Act is the real thing, and so is his handout of prescription drugs to the nation’s elderly and his proposal to forgive all the illegal immigrants and give them legal status in a policy that probably amounts to amnesty in everything but name.  The nurturant-parent side of George W. Bush is making his conservative base crazy. 

Maybe Lakoff needs a theory better than his binary system, a theory that can really do justice to the nuance and complexity of a governing philosophy that seeks to combine both strict-father and nurturant-parent metaphors.

There is a modern metaphor that understands the Bush philosophy, but it issues from the bloodline of Kant-Schopenhauer-Freud-Wittgenstein rather than the stable of Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Heidegger preferred by progressives like Lakoff.  As developed by American psychologist Clare Graves and his students Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, it uses the metaphor of an eight-turn spiral to differentiate human consciousness into a theory that transcends and includes the sensorimotor-based theory of embodied reason developed by cognitive scientists like Lakoff.  You can get a flavor of their “Spiral Dynamics” here.

A spiral dynamicist would analyze the president’s speech last week something like this.  At the tribal purple level, the president spoke like the leader of the American tribe, invoking the sense of belonging that most of us, excepting of course the Angry Left, feel as patriotic Americans.  At the impulsive red level, he flexed the muscles of American power: “the terrorists… declared war on the United States—and war is what they got.”  At the purposeful blue level, he spoke of a God whose “purposes are just and true.”  At the creative orange level, he spoke of “the courage and daring of a free people.”  At the communitarian green level, he spoke of the “respect for differences of faith and race.”

Of course, a Clare/Beck analysis of the president’s SOTU is pretty crude.  But it is a lot less crude than a binary model that veers suspiciously close to Orwell’s “four legs good, two legs bad,” particularly when you note that Lakoff’s “nurturant parent” is conveniently de-sexed for the comfort, presumably, of his lefty readers.  Isn’t the proper term “nurturing mother?”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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