[This essay is uncannily applicable in today's political environment, and represents the roots of the problems facing most American's today]
Lakoff opined in 1995 that we may not always know it, but we think in metaphor. A large proportion of our most commonplace thoughts make use of an extensive, but unconscious, system of metaphorical concepts [or memes], that is, concepts from a typically concrete realm of thought that are used to comprehend another, completely different domain. Such concepts are often reflected in everyday language, but their most dramatic effect comes in ordinary reasoning. Because so much of our social and political reasoning makes use of this system of metaphorical concepts, any adequate appreciation of even the most mundane social and political thought requires an understanding of this system. But unless one knows that the system exists, one may miss it altogether and be mystified by its effects.
For Lakoff, one of the most poignant effects of the ignorance of metaphorical thought is the mystification of liberals concerning the recent electoral successes of conservatives. Conservatives regularly chide liberals for not understanding them, and they are right. Liberals don't understand how anti-abortion "right-to-life" activists can favor the death penalty and oppose reducing infant morality through prenatal care programs. They don't understand why budget-cutting conservatives should spare no public expense to build prison after prison to house even non-violent offenders, or why they are willing to spend extra money to take children away from their mothers and put them in orphanages --- in the name of family values. They don't understand why conservatives attack violence in the media while promoting the right to own machine
guns. Liberals tend not to understand the logic of conservatism; they don't understand what form of morality makes conservative positions moral or what conservative family values have to do with the rest of conservative politics. The reason at bottom is that liberals do not understand the form of metaphorical thought that unifies and makes sense of the full range of conservative values.
To understand what metaphor has to do with conservative politics, we must begin with that part of our metaphor system that is used to conceptualize morality -- a system of roughly two dozen metaphors [or memes]. To illustrate how the system works, let us begin with one of the most prominent metaphors in the system - the metaphor by which morality is conceptualized in terms of accounting.
In this essay ...
â–¡ Keeping the Moral Books
â–¡ The Moral Accounting Schemes
â–¡ Experiential Morality
â–¡ Conservativism
â–¡ Conservative Metaphors/or Morality
â–¡ The Strict Father Model
â–¡ The Nation-as-Family Metaphor
â–¡ Liberalism
â–¡ The Nurturant Parent Model
â–¡ Liberal Metaphors for Morality
â–¡ The Nation-as-Family Metaphor
â–¡ Filling in Some Details
â–¡ Moral Pathologies
â–¡ Consequences
â–¡ Coda: Deep and Superficial Metaphor
About the Author
George Lakoff is professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), and, with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980) and More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989).
This essay was first published by the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in its quarterly Social Research (Volume 62, no. 2) in the summer of 1995.
A fuller treatment of the ideas it outlines appears in Lakoff's book, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't, published in 1996 from the University of Chicago Press.
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