George Lakoff

GEORGE LAKOFF
TCG National Conference, June 18, 2005
George Lakoff
TCG National Conference 2005

INTRODUCTION

BEN CAMERON, Executive Director, Theatre Communications Group:

Beyond just the issue of advocacy specifically and influencing votes, beyond getting audiences in, however, these are perhaps the biggest manifestations of larger, deeper, more penetrating philosophical work: a repositioning and re-articulation of our larger value and purpose, why we matter in the first place.

To introduce our plenary speaker to lead us into this discussion, it’s my deepest pleasure to give you one of the country’s great playwrights, one of the country’s great actresses, and one of TCG’s and my own great friends, Ellen McLaughlin. [applause]

ELLEN MCLAUGHLIN, Actor and Playwright; TCG Board Member:

I still can’t believe we got George Lakoff to come speak to us. He has always been in demand, but ever since his latest book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, came out, he’s been receiving literally dozens of calls every day, requesting his appearance. People flat-out beg him. I know we did.

Another person would just bask in all the attention, but for George, fame seems to be completely beside the point. He’s just waiting for all this to blow over so he can get back to work. He’s tired. But he may have to wait a long time. He seems to have become indispensable. That’s problem with being uniquely capable of articulating and elucidating the most troubling dilemmas of our time.

You will have seen in our program that George has been a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California–Berkeley since 1972, as well as holding a number of other prestigious posts, notably as a senior fellow at the Rockridge institute. He has written a large number of influential books, including Metaphors We Live By, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things [laughter] and the tremendously important Moral Politics of 1996.

But the thing in his dossier that will leap out for this audience is that he has worked as a dramaturg. My husband Rinde Eckert’s 1985 one-man opera, Slow Fire, which he wrote with Paul Dresher, involves a weekend in the life of Bob, a regular American guy whose line of work eludes us for the bulk of the piece. When Monday morning rolls around at the end of the piece, we see him dress for the day’s work, which turns out to be as a hired killer. The revelation needed to be surprising and yet, in retrospect, inevitable. The question of how to find the necessary theatrical metaphor rose in rehearsal one day when George was in the room. George spoke up to say, “How about making the three-piece suit he puts on out of camouflage material?” It was such an elegant, witty and marvelously theatrical solution to the problem that it was immediately adopted and the piece achieved one of its more memorable visual metaphors.

This seems to be characteristic of the way that George thinks: He is arresting, innovative and utterly original. He’s the guy you want in the room when the thorniest dilemmas need solving. This is one audience that doesn’t need to be told about the power of metaphor. We devote our lives to it. We also don’t need to be convinced that language matters. But how language makes its impact, how its power can be co-opted, its meaning distorted, its nuance and intricacy blunted—these are matters which virtually no one is better able to address than the man we are fortunate enough to hear from today. It is with gratitude and admiration that I give you George Lakoff. [applause]

GEORGE LAKOFF:

In dangerous times, theatre is needed more than ever. And you are needed more than ever.

I want to talk a bit about what the nature of these dangerous times is, and I want to first talk generally, but then get into the issues before you directly, not the just the issues before the entire country.

Let me ask some questions to begin with. Why would conservatives want to cut Sesame Street? Why Sesame Street? Why are you guys not getting support of a real sort from the progressive community? You know, why aren’t you getting real support from the educational community? How does fear work? What do you do in an atmosphere of fear? What is the antidote to fear? These are questions I want to get to.

But let me begin by talking a little bit about what I study. I’m a linguist, a cognitive scientist. I study the mind, I study how language works, I study metaphorical thought—that’s my business. Let me give you an example of one of the things that I study: I study the framing of ordinary language. Framing is not a big deep thing. Take something like a bottle. You understand what it is, you have a mental image of a bottle, you know what it is. Namely, it is a container, it’s made of certain materials, glass, plastic, things of that sort, certain size, holds typically liquids but possibly other things, something you can drink out of or pour out of, you hold bottles in certain ways—and that’s what you know. That’s what a bottle is. That’s the frame for a bottle. It’s been set to a frame.

Let’s take a more interesting case. Why is it that when we started talking about stem cell research, Frank Luntz wrote a memo. Frank Luntz is the conservative language man. And the memo said, “Don’t talk about stem cell research; talk about embryonic stem cell research.” Why? And notice this has spread. The New York Times says embryonic stem cell research. The Democrats say embryonic stem cell research. The bill in California says embryonic stem cell research. What is the mental image of an embryo? Think about it, it’s a little baby. Tom DeLay says stem cell research allows people to tear babies apart. Dismember embryos. How does it really work in stem cell research? Stem cell research is carried out on blastocysts. What’s a blastocyst look like? It’s a hollow sphere, just a few days old. It has in it a small number of stem cells. No hair cells, arm cells, blood cells, heart cells, brain cells, nothing else but undifferentiated stem cells. And if you called it blastocyst stem cell research, who would care? But that’s what it really is.

Language matters, framing matters. And framing can distort the truth. It’s very very important, that framing can distort the truth simply by carrying mental imagery. And you know about mental imagery, that’s what you deal with every day.

Let me talk about other kinds of framing—the most important kind is called deep framing, and this has to do with what is behind the current division in our country. Back in 1992, I watched the Republican National Convention during the summer, out of civic duty [laughter]—I have a lot of civic duty. And I decided I had to see, I just had to see Dan Quayle’s acceptance speech [laughter], because it had been written by William Crystal, a major theorist. I sat in my living room watching Dan Quayle, and I got embarrassed, because I could not understand his acceptance speech. I mean, I got the words, I understood every sentence; I had no idea how the sentences fit together. And the other guys out in the convention hall did, they applauded at the right time and waved their signs. I didn’t get it.

So I said, I’m going to memorize one case. Here it is. Dan Quayle’s argument against the progressive income tax, one-sentence argument: “Why should the best people be punished?” Everybody applauds, they wave their signs, they get it—I don’t. [laughter] Now, for a linguist, this is weird. [laughter] This is my business, you know. I’m sitting there totally embarrassed, I said, I’m going to memorize this one, I’m going to try to figure this one out.

Two years later, I get embarrassed again. I buy a copy, again out of civic duty, of The Contract With America. I go down there, get my copy, I’m reading the 10 promises. And I say—I’ve just published a book, by the way, on categorization, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and I’m supposedly one of the country’s experts on categorization—and for the life of me, I could not figure out the category “conservative.”

I mean, here are some people who are opposed to abortion and in favor of the flat tax. What does the flat tax have to do with abortion? They’re anti government regulation of the environment. What does that have to do with the flat tax? They’re for tort reform. What does that have to do with abortion, or owning guns? Right? Say, these are odd people! Then I say, I have exactly the opposite views on every one of these. What brings my views together? And I had no clue, and I got embarrassed.

When a linguist gets embarrassed, watch out. He does research. [laughter] On you. [laughter] So I went out, I started interviewing liberals, conservatives, etc., and quickly discovered something that was sort of obvious in a way: Everybody thought the other side was irrational. You talk to progressives. They say, how can you possibly be pro-life and for the death penalty? You talk to conservatives, they say, how could you possibly not want to put a murderer to death, and sanction abortion? And in case after case each side sees the other as irrational. This is a key to something that we know—worldview clash. There are two different worldviews here. But what are they?

So one of things I started doing was looking at the question of family values. Why should it be that at a time when there are so many problems in the world, conservatives were pushing family values—and what were these family values? And when I looked at it, I found an answer from one of my students who had noticed that we all have a metaphor that the nation is a family. Nobody says, why fathers? What do fathers have to do with this? No question. We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have Daughters of the American Revolution. I mean, natural. We have a metaphor of the nation as a family. We understand large social groups in terms of small ones; the family is the most obvious one. And if we have two different understandings of the nation, we have two different understandings of the family. And that is what came about.

So I went, I took the understandings of the nation, I worked backwards. Out popped two idealized models of the family: a strict father family and a nurturing parent family. And you know which is which.

Now, it turns out that the strict father family, which I came upon simply by doing linguistics, turned out when I first gave a linguistics talk on it, two of my friends who were conservatives were sitting in the back of the audience. These are linguists from the Christian coalition—they have linguists. [laughter] They have to translate the Bible into lots of languages. [laughter] And they’re good linguists, they’re smart people. They came up to me afterwards, they said, “This strict father family—it’s close. Fix it up here, you got it a little wrong there—but you should know this. Don’t you read Dobson?” I said, “Who?” “James Dobson.” This is 1994. “Never heard of him.” They said, “You must live in Berkeley. He’s on 3,000 radio stations.” “Gee, not KQED.” “He’s a columnist in more newspapers than any other person in America.” “Not in the Times, you know?” “Okay, you haven’t read his classic book, Dare to Discipline?” “I didn’t see it in Cody’s, you know.” “It wouldn’t be there, you know, where do you find it—you’ve got to go to your local Christian bookstore.” I said, “Look, I live in Berkeley.” “Even in Berkeley—take a walk down Telegraph Avenue, go past Cody’s, take a right, you’ll see the Jews for Jesus bookstore.”

So I got out my dark glasses, my trench coat. [laughter] Literally. Brought a little plain brown wrapper. [Laughter] I did. Walked down to the Jews for Jesus bookstore. Walked in, went to the back shelf. There was a shelf of the new Dare to Discipline, the classic. And lots of other child-rearing books. And by the way, Dobson has a $2 million operation called Focus on the Family, which does more child rearing than any other organization in the country by far. They’re in churches and day care centers everywhere. And here is what is taught. In a strict father family, you need a strict father because there’s evil out there in the world and you’ve got to protect the family from evil, and mommy can’t do it. Second, you need a strict father because there’s competition in the world—there will always be competition—there will always be winners, there will always be losers—and you don’t want to be a loser. You need a strict father to be a winner. Third: kids are born bad, they just want to do what they want to do, they want to do whatever feels good, they don’t do what’s right. There’s an absolute right, there’s an absolute wrong, and you need a strict father to teach him right from wrong, and mommy ain’t strict enough.

So how do you teach a kid right from wrong? There’s only one way. Punishment when they do wrong painful enough, it’s got to be painful, so that the kids will have an incentive to discipline themselves internally so they’ll do right and not wrong. And the punishment has to be painful, but Dobson turns out to be one of the more advanced thinkers here. He says there is absolutely no reason to hit a child below the age of 18 months. The other guys say birth. But he’s the advanced one.

If the child learns discipline—that’s the only way you produce moral beings is by this form of discipline—if the child learns discipline there’s a wonderful secondary effect, because then the child can go out in the world, seek their self-interest and become prosperous. Now, why is it moral to go out in the world and seek your self-interest? And the answer is very clear in Dobson. It has to do with capitalism, with free market capitalism. Adam Smith says if everybody seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand, as a law of nature. This is natural. The way to do good in the world is by seeking your own profit. So the good people are the people who are disciplined enough to go out, seek their own profit, and become prosperous.

What’s bad? When you get in their way. If you get in their way—suppose you’re not trying to seek your own self interest. Suppose you want to help other people. You’re going to get in the way of people who are legitimately seeking their own profit. And there’s a name for you, if you’re a conservative, conservatives have a name, it’s called a “do-gooder.” Any of those people out here know any do-gooders? [laughter] Tom DeLay called George Soros a do-gooder a few weeks ago. Do-gooders like MoveOn and Tom DeLay [sic].

Now. There’s a logic here, the logic is suppose you’re not prosperous. That means you’re not disciplined. If you’re not disciplined, you can’t be moral, so you deserve your poverty.

What does this mean applied to society, to government? It says, social programs are all immoral. Immoral. Why? They give people things they haven’t earned, taking away their incentive to be disciplined and hence their incentive to be moral. Who are the good people? We now answer the Dan Quayle question. The good people are the people who have been disciplined and become prosperous. What is punishment? Taxing them by taking away their incentive to make more money. QED. You can see the Dan Quayle logic. It’s not just Dan Quayle, it’s the conservative logic that Crystal is laying out.

And this is behind all of the conservative ideas about cutting the budget, starving the beast and getting deficits. Why do you want deficits? Because there’s no money for social programs. This is a poor country, no more money, we have nothing in the budget for this. Lots for the war, but nothing in the budget for social programs. And they’re immoral and we should cut them.

There’s another part of this which has to do with what I’ll call the moral order. There’s an idea that some people are better than other people—the people who are disciplined and moral. They should be the wealthy powerful people. And in the world there’s a hierarchy. God above man—there’s a hierarchy of morality paired with power. God above man, adults above children, men above nature, Western culture above non-Western culture, America above other countries. And then men above women, straights above gays, whites above non-whites, Christians above non-Christians. It’s historical. God made the world in this way and it’s right that we should have this power structure historically because it’s moral. That is part of what conservative ideology is about. And that is behind all of what we’re seeing now in this country.

What is the other model that came out? The nurturing parent model? It says you run a family like this: There are two parents and they’re equal. Gender is not a factor here. Second, their job is to nurture their kids and to raise their kids to be nurturers of others. What is nurturance? Two things. Empathy, connection. You have to know what those things mean—and responsibility. You have to take care of yourself. You can’t take care of someone else if you’re not taking care of yourself. And you have to be responsible to others. And you teach your kids empathy and responsibility for themselves and others. It’s the opposite of permissive parenting—the very opposite.

And from this you can see all progressive values following immediately. One, you care about your kids, you empathize with them, you want to protect them. We have worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection—safety nets. Progressive values. You care about your kids, you want them to be treated fairly—fairness is one of our values, as is equality. You care about your kids. You want them to be happy and fulfilled in life. Happiness is a moral value. Why? Because if you’re an unhappy person, you’re not going to want other people to be happier than you are, and you won’t empathize. And this is something the Dalai Lama is very clear about, he has a book called Happiness. Why is the Buddha smiling? Very clear. To be a compassionate person you have to be happy enough so that you want other people to be happy. You can’t be miserable and be a compassionate person, really. Happiness is a moral requirement. Fulfillment in life is a moral requirement and it’s something you want for your kids. But to be fulfilled in life, your kids will have to be free. You can’t be fulfilled without freedom. To be free you have to have opportunity. To have opportunity you need broad prosperity. Those are your values.

You live in a community. What kind? You don’t want a strict father community where a leader tells you what to do or else, you want a nurturing community where leaders care about you, are responsible to the community, where people care about each other and are responsible to each other. That’s what a nurturing community is about. And that community requires cooperation. Cooperation requires trust, trust requires honesty and openness. Those are our values. Period. Straight-out, those are the progressive values.

Those values fly in the face of the strict father model. And those are the values taught on Sesame Street. Sesame Street is nurturance itself. That’s what’s that’s about. That’s why it’s got to be cut. That’s why it is a target. Very clear. They understand this.

Where does theatre fit into all this, where does art fit in? It doesn’t fit very well in a strict father model unless it is supporting that model. The highest value there is supporting the strict father ideals in themselves, defending those ideals, making sure that they’re carried out, building infrastructure for that. Anything that goes against that—for example, investigating the truth regardless of where the chips fall—goes against it. Goes against that ideology and the defense of that ideology. It goes against the moral authority of the strict father. Because if it turns out that the truth shows that he has no moral authority, you know, that blows the whole idea.

Think about another case. Suppose you’re in the middle of Kansas—you heard about Kansas yesterday. Suppose you’re in the middle of Kansas, and you’re in a small town where no one has seen anyone who’s gay. Why should anyone in that town care if two people who are in San Francisco and are lesbians want to get married? Why do they care? They do. They do for a reason. If their identity is defined by a strict father model, which cannot have gay parents in the model, it doesn’t fit, gay parents can’t be in there, has to be gender differentiation. If that’s defined by that, gay marriage threatens their very identity. And that’s what conservatives understand.

Take the issue of abortion. Why is abortion such a big issue? Think about a strict father family: Who would need an abortion? Not the father. The mother might. Can she decide on her own? Not tell her husband? Hell no. He is in charge of the family. He is the authority. He has to make the decision, not her. What about a daughter? She’s done wrong. She should be punished. And he should make the decision. Parental notification required by the strict father model. The issue has to do with identity: The very idea that a woman can control her own reproductive life flies in the face of the strict father model. And that is why this issue is so powerful among people who in fact see the world in that way and identify in that way.

This is what we’re dealing with and what we’re up against. The Republicans understand that it is that view of the world which is a metaphorical view, a symbolic view, which unifies conservative thought, that gives rise to those particular issues and makes the powerful and divides us.

What kind of world do they want for us? A world in which some people are better than others. For example, do they worry about the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? No, that’s good because the good people are getting what they’ve earned and the poor people deserve their poverty because they’re not disciplined enough.

Think of it in literal terms. Let’s put the metaphors aside and say, what does this say about society? Think about the mode of reason used by conservatives. We’ve been studying this at the Rockridge Institute. What kinds of reasoning are used in various arguments? We noticed this with Social Security. I was looking at Social Security arguments and I found something strange. There was a set of Social Security arguments that had no facts. I said, well, that’s funny. Here’s a major issue. How can you argue this momentous issue with no facts? I mean, it’s a cognitive curiosity—that’s what I study. [laughter]

So we analyzed this, and it turned out that the arguments are all in terms of what I’ll call fundamental frames. Ideas that conservatives have been putting out there for so long that for much of the country they’ve come to seem like common sense. There is the “bloated big government” frame. You know, the government is in the way, it doesn’t function, should be eliminated, starve the beast, etc. There’s the wonders of the unfettered free market. It’s the free market, unregulated, that is the engine of our society. There’s individual initiative that made the country great: You can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You can manage your money better than the government can. QED: private accounts. You don’t need any facts, right? Straight out.

And it’s not just Social Security. These same arguments are used over and over again. Let me give you some other fundamental frames the conservatives use. One: We need a common sense approach. That means no experts. [laughter] We need a balanced approach. That means we need to do cost-benefit analysis done by corporations. Straight out, you say, balanced approach, that sounds good. That’s what that means. And they have a set of these frames that have been used over and over again till they become part of people’s brains. And then they seem like common sense and you can’t argue with them.

What do we have? Gaps. There’s a term for this in cognitive science—it’s called hypocognition. The lack of ideas we need. We suffer from massive hypocognition. We feel certain things. We know in our hearts when certain programs are right, but we don’t have a way to articulate it. So what we did at Rockridge, we sat down, went through lots of arguments on our side, and asked, where are the conceptual gaps? What are the ideas we need to add to fill it in, to make it a complete argument?

We got a long list of things, and then discovered that they all boiled down to one system. And the system can be expressed in one sentence: We believe in the use of the common wealth for the common good so we can all pursue our individual goals. Period. What does that mean, the use of the common wealth for the common good so we can all pursue our individual goals? Suppose you’re a businessman. You want to start a business. You need a bank loan. Who supports the banks? The government, through taxpayers. You want to issue stock, you need the SEC, the government, through taxpayers. You want to guarantee contracts, you need a court system, paid for by taxpayers. Nobody makes it on their own. You want to ship something—you need highways, paid for by taxpayers. Or airplanes, piloted by people trained by the air force. An Internet, paid for by the government, developed through the ARPANET, all paid for by taxpayers. The use of the common wealth for the common good is used by everyone in business. Business could not exist without it, nor could all of our lives exists without education, hospitals, libraries, and all of those things done through that. There’s a reason why governments in this country were called things like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The role of government is to use the common wealth for the common good so we can all be free to pursue personal goals. That’s part of the genius of the founding of this country.

And the other guys say, no. There is no common good besides pursuing your individual goals, period. They are wrong. It is not just ideology: They are factually wrong. And this is a major thing to understand. The common good is crucial and important.

What does this say, what does all of this say, about theatre? What does it say about emotion? Why is it that fear has been so prominent in our political life? And what do you do about it? Fear evokes a strict father model. It’s fear of evil out there in the world that evokes, calls up this model. It supports conservatism.

What do you do about fear? What’s the opposite of fear? Fear has two components: dread and sadness. The opposite of those are hope and joy. You fight fear with hope and joy. And that’s what the arts are about. And that’s what this country is about. This is a country about liberty and the pursuit of happiness-joy—and it’s about hope, the pursuit, the future. This has always been about hope. That’s what America is, it’s a land of hope. Those guys are going against what this country is most essentially about and what is most powerful and wonderful about human beings—we have hope and joy. And we need to fight it with hope and joy. We can’t go around moping and being afraid of these guys. We have to have music, we have to have laughter, we have to have drama, which goes through the full range of emotions. You guys are needed as never before. And I mean that, very deeply. We need you as never before.

What about truth? We have an assault on truth right now, an assault on science, an assault on the universities. What is being assaulted? The idea that their ideology might not be true, that there might be facts that contradict it, and they want to suppress all those facts. They want a university system where conservatives are teaching their ideology rather than people seeking truth. They want a media system governed by ideology, not truth. They want to get rid of science, they want to denigrate science, because science might give them results that contradict what they believe.

Let’s take the Terri Schiavo case. A very interesting example. Did you see the pictures of the brain that just came out? When you were watching TV during the Terri Schiavo account, how many neuroscientists did you see? I think one showed up on NPR for a couple of minutes, I think it was 30 seconds or 10 seconds or something. What you saw was programmed by a booking agency in Virginia that books conservatives on TV stations around the country. They had 15 full-time bookers during the Schiavo case working all day, 24-7, to book conservatives on TV. No neuroscientists. They happened to put a little picture on Larry King of Schiavo’s brain, you know, the old MRI. I looked at that as a cognitive scientist. I had, like, seven seconds to look at this thing. And you could see that there was no cortex. Nothing. What does that mean? Means she can’t see, she can’t hear, she can’t think, she can’t feel pain, no personality. She can’t remember seeing, imagine seeing, dream of seeing or hearing or moving. Nothing. And no neuroscientist was ever called, with all of those hours of coverage, to go on any of those shows and say that. Nothing.

We have got to get out there telling the truth. And we have to find a way to frame it, and this is a very important thing. Let me ask you a question. Why is it, of all the types of liberals and conservatives there are—we have socioeconomic liberals, we have identity politics liberals, we have ecological liberals, environmental liberals. We have civil libertarians, we have spiritual liberals, we have anti-authoritarian liberals. Why are there no aesthetic liberals? That’s an interesting question.

The history is important. If you go to the history of progressive thought, it begins with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment says, we are all rational beings. We have universal rationality, universal reason. What does that mean, why is it important? Because we no longer have to take the authority of the king, or the authority of the Church—we can govern ourselves. Very important. Moreover it says, it’s irrational to be against your material interests. So a rational government should favor the material interests of all the people, who are all rational, equally. Very important idea. In addition, facts matter, because they have rational consequences for material interest. Therefore we should support science. Very important idea, part of progressive thought.

Unfortunately, the theory about universal reason didn’t quite work. People actually think in terms of frames and metaphors, not in terms of logic. But people who think that rationalism is still viable have false consequences. One is that if you just tell people the truth, they’ll reason to the right conclusion. Not true. Any cognitive scientist will tell you why: People think in terms of frames and metaphors and they are instantiated in your brain. They’re physically part of the synapses of your brain. You can’t think without your brain—it’s just a fact, sorry. [laughter] Not even Terri Schiavo. Can’t think without your brain. Even George Bush, can’t think without...Rove has got to be there. [laughter]

Now. What that means is if the frames don’t fit the facts, the frames stay in your brain and the facts are ignored. You can’t just tell people the truth. You can’t just deny them. If you negate a frame, you reinforce the frame. Hence the title Don’t Think of an Elephant. That’s what I tell my students when I teach about framing. I say, okay, everybody. Whatever you do now, don’t think of an elephant. Can you do it? How many, raise your hands. A couple of wise guys always do.

The point is the word elephant evokes the elephant frame, even if you negate it. You can’t just take their frames and argue against them and say hey, you’re dumb, you don’t know the facts. Won’t matter. You just reinforce the frame if you negate it. And the facts won’t carry it if they contradict the frame. You have to reframe the facts in a way that fits a moral worldview, a worldview you understand so the facts can be understood. The facts must be framed to be understood. That doesn’t mean facts aren’t important—they are for all the traditional reasons. But it’s false that you get pure rationality.

There’s another consequence of the view of rationalism. The consequence is all thought is literal. There’s no metaphor, there’s no framing. What does that mean about framing? It means if somebody comes out and says framing is important, they’re only talking about spin. I’m not talking about spin. I’m talking about how we can understand what we really believe, what we really think, what our moral position is, and how we can express it effectively.

And theatre is important. The other guys know about narrative, and let me just say a few things about that—that’s your business. One of the first things I studied when I got into linguistics was the structure of plots and narrative. And there’s a standard structure of narrative, of certain kinds of narrative, especially folklore and folktales, but all sorts of other narrative in the Western world. And it goes like this. There’s a standard structure, it says: There’s some villain, does something bad to some victim who is harmed. There’s some crime. There’s a hero, who may be the victim—it could be a self-defense story—or not. And the hero has to go through lots and lots of trials and difficulties until finally he defeats the villain. And they may have helpers, or magic swords and weapons and so on, whatever, till they defeat the villain. And when the crime has occurred, there’s an imbalance. A moral imbalance that must be balanced by the end. Moral balance must be achieved and then the hero’s rewarded. You know this story, it’s repeated all the time, constantly.

This story is elaborated with themes, and Robert Reich has a book where he goes through the traditional American themes that elaborate this story. And he points out there are four of them: two about heroes, two about villains, one each about groups and individuals. And here are the cases. Who are the villains? The theme is “rot at the top”—there’s some corrupt person or people at the top. Thomas Frank told you yesterday that’s liberals, that’s you. Rot at the top. The liberal intelligentsia, the liberal elite, the liberal press, the Hollywood liberals, etc., that’s you, right at the top, and me, and the universities. “The mob at the gates.” That’s all the gays going to seduce their kids in Kansas. The mob at the gates. They’re worried about this. So every protest is flashed all over the red states—here’s the mob at the gates. There they are, these weird people coming after you and your kids.

Secondly, who are the heroes? Horatio Alger, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, is one hero. And the beneficent community, the people of faith. And in this story, when applied politically, who is the hero? The voter. What they do, they say: You people of faith, out there, you who are trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps or who have done it successfully—you’re the hero, and we’ve got to stop this rot at the top and this mob at the gates who are going to overcome the country. These elitists. That’s their story. It’s out there every day.

What’s the progressive story? Not there. And you have to tell it. It has to be told: metaphorically, in drama, in all kinds of ways, day after day after day and that’s part of what we’re about. There is a story to be told here. Why is it that it’s progressives who are in favor of the arts and conservatives who are against it? Look at it—in the strict father model, aesthetics does not play a role, it’s not part of fulfillment in life. In our model, it is part of fulfillment in life, part of seeking for truth and honesty and openness, part of happiness and joy, it’s part of who we are. There’s a reason why the country is divided in this way and there’s a reason why conservatives are trying to kill off the arts and theatre.

And then you ask, why are liberals not defending you? Because of the rationalist materialist tradition. Because do they defend education in the arts? No. They only defend education in math, science, something that will get you a job. It’s all about jobs and money, it’s a socioeconomic paradigm we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment.

You look at all the other kinds of liberals there are. Environmental liberals, the identity politics liberals. They come from other parts, where freedom, freedom from the Church, freedom from kings and so on, that’s a history we have—there’s nothing in that history about aesthetics and about the arts and the pursuit of truth through art. It’s sad. And we need to expand progressive thought because this is where the arts naturally fit. We need aesthetic progressives. And we need an aesthetic progressive movement, because aesthetics is not just about beauty. It’s about truth, it’s about emotion, it’s about connection with the world and it’s about all the things we need now more than ever.

Thank you. [applause]

ELLEN MCLAUGHLIN:

We have time for some questions. What I’d ask you to do is come down the side of the theatre. There are mikes on either side, and if you’re in the balcony there’s what we like to call a roving mike, and I’ll look for you. Thanks, we’ll start with you, ma’am.

Q: Simple question.

GEORGE LAKOFF:

I like simple questions.

Q: Why are the conservatives so well organized and we’re not?

GEORGE LAKOFF:

Okay. [laughter] Very good point. There’s a historical answer and an explanation for the historical answer.

The historical answer is in 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo just before he went onto the Supreme Court, nominated by Nixon, wrote a memo to the National Chamber of Commerce where he said at the height of the Vietnam War, “We conservative businessmen are in trouble. Our best and brightest students no longer want to become conservative businessmen. This is a disaster, we’ve got to do something about this. Here’s what we have to do—here’s the plan. We have to get wealthy conservatives to pool their money together and do the following list of things. One: establish conservative professorships in major universities,” like the Olin Professorships all over the country. “Establish institutes at major universities and support them,” like the Hoover Institution at Stanford or the Olin Institute at Harvard. “But you can’t trust the universities. We have to have our own institutions. We need to establish research institutions, think-tanks, where we hire the best conservative scholars we can and support them well—get them research assistants, get them the best research facilities—and not just that, we have to develop talent, bring talent along.” Hence we have the Federalist society, which pays people’s tuition through law school if they become conservatives and get them jobs in prestigious firms and so on. And, he says, “We need to make sure these scholars can publish their works. We need to start journals, we need to start magazines, we need to buy up media, buy up TV stations and radio stations so these messages can get out there and develop language.” He laid out the plan. Two months later he’s on the Supreme Court. The plan is taken by William Simon, Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, he goes to Olin, he goes to Coors—Coors sets up the Heritage Foundation—and one after the other this whole structure is built. It’s $3 billion over 35 years. $3 billion. We had to do research to find out that it was there. Not that they hid it, it was just not publicized very widely. And it’s there. And it’s organized—they have regular meetings—Grover Norquist, every Wednesday morning, 9–12, has a meeting of 80–200 invited conservative leaders over the full spectrum of conservative opinion—there are conservatives who hate each other and disagree—and over the whole range from the lowest grassroots organization up to the White House—they all come together. What do they do? One, they socialize. They find out about each other’s families, play golf, etc. Two: They have a show and tell. Everyone who wants to gets three minutes to say what his organization is doing and what their problems are and what news is going on. Three: They have debates. If there’s an issue where there’s contestation he gets the best debaters, has them debate, everyone asks the toughest questions, and then they see if there’s a consensus, and if there’s a consensus, everybody follows it. By 5:00 that evening there’s language that is sent out and everybody is saying the same thing. And they have bookers in Virginia that book people all over the country saying the same thing.

That’s why. That’s how it has happened. That’s what you’re up against.

How did this happen? Why did progressives and Democrats not do anything all these years? They believed the truth would set them free. They had the rationalist materialist paradigm. You just need to get the truth out there, that’s all you have to do. So that’s one reason.

Second reason is the difference in the moral systems. The highest value in the conservative moral system is protecting and expanding the system itself. And so they build infrastructure. Their foundations give large block grants that say, here’s $5, $10 million. Take it, do what you need to do, develop talent, etc., whatever you need to do, and the money will be here next year. When did you ever hear of a progressive foundation saying that? Progressive foundations, their highest value is helping individuals who need help, so it says, spread the money around, don’t duplicate effort, don’t spend any money on infrastructure, talent development or God forbid an intellectual or an artist. Different view, different moral system. That is why we slept.

Q: Just to follow up with that. Is there anything published on this that would explain the history and tell the history? And if there isn’t, I’m hoping there could be in the future.

And could you go into a little more detail about how they control the media—when you were talking about for instance that they go to Virginia and they get these people who they’re going to put on the media. Can you go into a little more detail on that?

GEORGE LAKOFF:

Okay. There’s a lot on the history, and first, the history of the conservative movement has been written about. I don’t have the bibliography here, but anyone who wants, send me an email: lakoff@berkeley.edu. We’ll send you a list of books.

So the conservative history is well-documented. And the conservative theoretical books, you know, Buckley, God and Man at Yale, Russell Kirk, etc., these are the major figures in the ‘60s, and a lot since then. Also if you go to the Heritage Foundation they’ll give you a list of books too. [laughter] And they’ll give you a very honest history of the conservative movement that’s been going on. They’re very proud of this. And they should be. They did it all legally, out in the open. And they didn’t publicize it, but it wasn’t hidden. Nothing secret. It’s there.

Secondly, they know how to book people. Eighty percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives, largely from the think-tanks. The think-tanks have radio studios and TV studios on the premises going all day. They have bookers who call up and there’s a central booking agency in Virginia, I’ve forgotten its name right now, but they call up the stations, and they say, we have an issue today on so-and-so, the U.N., on Bolton. Here’s our expert in the U.N., if you want to get him on, here he is, we’ll arrange a time. You tell us when, we’ll put him in the studio. And they do that all over the country. They know every station in every city. That’s why it’s there. It’s done. They know the system and they use and it’s funded to use it.

And they train. They give media training and framing training to everybody. And there’s a manual. Frank Luntz is their language guy. He puts out a training manual. It’s 170 pages. It was leaked on the Internet a couple of months ago. The Daily Kos leaked it. If you want to go to dailykos.com, write in “Luntz Memo,” you’ll get the website for the manual, you can download it, and it’s awesome. All the language is there, written out, what to say on each issue, how to lie on each issue—the lies are interwoven with the effective language. It’s right there; it doesn’t say how to lie, you have to know what’s going on in the world to know the lies from the truth. But this is how you argue. Period. 170 pages on every issue, every argument. Here’s how we think about it, here’s how the liberals think about it, here’s how you puncture their arguments, here’s the language they use. It’s done.

We’re now trying to build an infrastructure to counter that function. Our institute is trying to produce a progressive manual to figure out how we need to do better.

Q: I’m concerned—I have a question about the faith nature of this, because it goes beyond reason. I live in a red community, I attend a mainstream Protestant church, a Methodist church. And I go to Sunday school. And the things that I see: The Prayer of Jabez, The Purpose-Driven Life, The Purpose-Driven Church—these are Biblically-based teachings that absolutely underpin the disciplinary family framing that you were describing. Using the Bible, using faith. And these are highly produced DVDs, study guides, 12-week studies for adults. That then take the argument out of the place of reason of truth and put it to one of faith and belief. How do you suggest we begin to battle that? And may I suggest that one of the things with this effort that we must do is create competing joy-based, love-based Sunday school classes. [Applause] Dobson’s just the tip of the iceberg. Prayer of Jabez, Purpose-Driven Life, major best sellers!

GEORGE LAKOFF:

And not just Sunday school classes, but child-rearing classes.

Q: Yes, but it has to be in the faith community as well.

GEORGE LAKOFF:

All right. There’s a chapter of my book—I have a book called Moral Politics that goes through all of this in detail, written back in ’94, came out in ’96. There’s a chapter on religion. What is the difference between conservative and liberal Christianity? It’s a very interesting and simple difference. Is God a strict father or a nurturing parent? Period.

The strict father God says, here are my commandments—you do as I say you go to heaven, you don’t you go to hell—but I’ll give you a second chance with my son. Then you’ve got to follow your pastor—you do what he says, you go to heaven, you don’t, you go to hell. Same story.

The other model says, you have a nurturing God who gives you unconditional love and nurturance. It’s called grace. What is grace? Grace is metaphorical nurturance. You’re filled with grace, you’re fed by grace, you’re made healthy by grace, you’re made a moral being by grace. You can’t earn grace—it has to be given unconditionally—but you must accept it to get it. And you must be close to God to get grace. Metaphorical nurturance.

Q: That’s John Weston, that’s the Methodist tradition. Yet these other things are being taught there.

GEORGE LAKOFF:

You’ve got it exactly. First of all, the sociologists show us there are more progressive Christians in America by far than conservative Christians. They know their theology, they’re organized, they’re out there, putting it out there everywhere, trying to take over all the churches.

There is no liberal theological movement and there is no understanding of the link between theology and politics which I just explained. If you have a nurturing God you’re going to have nurturing politics. And there’s a tradition of separating Church and State, which is seen as separating religion and political activity. But that’s illegitimate for a very important reason. Deeds matter in Christianity, not acts. And what are these deeds? They’re nurturing deeds. And in this culture, that’s always political. They’ve been made political. That has to be brought out.

This is not new. Between 1850 and 1920, everybody in America knew this difference. There was a major split in Christianity in this country, with the strict father church supporting slavery and the nurturing view supporting abolition. The major abolitionists, Theodore Parker and Bushnell, Bushnell’s most famous essay was “Christian Nurture.” About the nurturing God. They preached to audiences of 10,000 in city after city. Everybody knew this. It then came up to women’s suffrage, the same division.

In the 1920s, for some reason I don’t understand, the fundamentalists won. The other guys shut up. They didn’t go away, they just shut up—until Martin Luther King came along. Then there was a burst when he was assassinated; it stopped again.

There needs to be a rebirth of this. Jim Wallace’s book, God’s Politics, is one beginning. We need a lot more. I recommend Wallace’s book highly. Wallace is an evangelical liberal. Evangelical just means spreading the good word—it doesn’t mean what it’s about. He’s an anti-fundamentalist. There’s a difference between fundamentalist evangelicals and evangelicals. Just because someone’s an evangelical—Jimmy Carter was an evangelical. Just a liberal evangelical. It’s very important to understand these differences in religion and to bring liberal religion back, not just in Christianity but in every religion. One thing Karen Armstrong points out in The History of God is that both traditions go back as far as you can trace them in every major religion.

Q: One of my big “a-ha”s listening to you was one of the failures of the rationalist tradition is that we’re working on the “freedom from.” Whereas the creative liberal progressive tradition is the “freedom to.” So I’d like to ask you to tell us a story. One of your most compelling stories of the “freedom to” and the world of the progressives.

GEORGE LAKOFF:

Well, the problem with this is the other guys have their version of “freedom to,” which is freedom to make a lot of money. [laughter] That’s what the free market is supposed to be about. So it’s not just our version of “freedom to.” And we all have stories about “freedom to,” I can tell you about my family, how our family came to America from tsarist Russia—that’s a “freedom to” and a “freedom from,” at once.

But the idea is that freedom has been commandeered by the other side. Freedom should be our value—and they have commandeered our values. They’ve commandeered compassion, freedom, life and opportunity, and given their meaning to them. Freedom for them means freedom in the free market without constraints to make as much money as possible, and if you don’t, too bad. That’s what economic liberty is about. Religious freedom is the freedom of any conservative Christian to put the Ten Commandments up in his courtroom. That is an instance of religious freedom. Freedom for a teacher to conduct prayer in a classroom, that’s considered religious freedom.

The pope, our new pope, has written a lot about freedom. He says, when a woman has an abortion she is surrendering her freedom, giving it up. He says, you are most free when you are following the dictates of the Church. Now, I won’t go into the reasons—there is actually a worldview behind that—and it’s a strict father worldview we can come out of it. But that’s part of what it is. I’m writing a book on freedom and it’ll all be there.

ELLEN MCLAUGHLIN: I’m afraid this’ll have to be the last question.

Q: First of all, thank you. What a glorious, glorious, glorious story you’ve told. [applause]

GEORGE LAKOFF:

By the way, to get applause from an audience of theatre people...

Q: ...It’s not easy, for sure. I’m so interested in this nomenclature of “aesthetic liberal.” It’s a really interesting naming. And as an activist and an artist I’m always so very frustrated by the lack of relationship between progressive activists and artists. And I was recently—I just want to say a quick anecdote—I was recently at the World Social Forum in Brazil, and I went to all these organizing meetings about other forums that have been organized all over the world, and it’s, as you know, a very widespread organization process, decentralized. And all of the organizing committees—I’m talking about 52 countries where there have been smaller regional forums—not one single organizing committee in 52 countries had an artist on the organizing committee. Not one. The most progressive movement. So I guess I need to ask in a certain way, how we can represent ourselves as aesthetic liberals and be invited to the table to actually invent the language of progression, and not just decorate the rallies?

GEORGE LAKOFF:

First, we have a number of things to overcome in the progressive tradition. The first and biggest one is the rationalist materialist version of this that simply says it’s all rationalism, it’s all just material goods that we care about. And if you really think about the rationalist tradition, the version of it that makes sense is a nurturing version of it—one that talks about joy and experience and fulfillment in life and connection to the world and connection to others. That is absolutely crucial. And truth. What happens when you put those together? You get the arts. But because of the rationalist tradition, which is all literal and about material things, and because in many countries that was thought to be carried out by socialism, when socialism missed this whole other dimension of nurturant thought—that is a problem for us.

We have to understand that progressive thought is about nurturant morality. And it’s responsible, it’s not weak—to be a nurturant parent, you’ve got to be strong, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. It’s not easy to be a parent. Anybody ever been a parent and found it easy?

[laughter and applause]