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Inside the Statolatrist mind

In New Scientist magazine, Owen Flanagan reviews the book The Political Mind by George Lakoff. Flanagan provides a surprising and refreshing non-Statolatrist perspective on science and politics in this review, but that might be typical in New Scientist—it certainly isn’t in primary scientific journals. Flanagan is especially skeptical of this totalitarian State-lover Lakoff. You’re better off reading the whole review, but I’ll quote it at length anyway:

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 US politicians. His hope is that, come November, they might defeat the conservatives who, if Lakoff is to be believed, already stealthfully deploy the latest wisdom from cognitive science.

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

But humans are not rational, at least not fully so. …We don’t think, we combine thought with emotion—let’s call it “fthinking”. Karl Rove and his cronies, Lakoff believes, have long understood this. Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.” There is a name for those who use knowledge to gain power. In America they are called Republicans.

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

Republicans, Lakoff says, understand how “brains and minds work.”
[...]
Democrats, on the other hand, just don’t get how people fthink. Really? What about “The Great Society”, “The Peace Corps” and “Teach for America”—all progressive constructs that ably employ frames and metaphors? …

There are serious issues here, almost all of which Lakoff leaves under-discussed. Most important 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 as membership dues to a club I want to be part of?
[...]
Part of Lakoff’s agenda is to help Democrats set up progressive think tanks—actually, fthink tanks— use the latest scientific research to carry out “cognitive policies” and “framing campaigns”. “Conservatives conduct such cognitive policy making every day of every year,” he writes. “It is explicit, well organized, and well funded. Its aim is to change brains in a conservative direction. And it has been working.”

The moral of the story is that successful politicians know how to use words to get people to vote against their own interests and values. Apparently this fact has just been discovered—by Lakoff. When Plato wrote about sophists who strengthen arguments by appealing to emotion he must have been talking about parking disputes at the agora because the relevant discoveries about emotion’s role in reasoning and rhetoric, and language’s ability to shape thought, wouldn’t be made for another 2400 years, at Berkeley.

My main reason for blagging about this is to express my sincere fear that authoritarian moral busybodies like George Lakoff will succeed in their goal of using cognitive science, linguistic tricks, and emotional conditioning to secure long-term political power in the United States and enact all the policies they really support. (We are probably already on that road.) These are the type of people who, I think, whether they know it or not, would be perfectly fine with a 1984-like society, as long as they and their cronies are the ones in charge of it, because all their goals are good and if you don’t agree, you must be forced into submission.