The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain by George Lakoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was first introduced to George Lakoff through his work in 2nd language acquisition. His thoughts and work in that area was quite impressive, so when I ran across this book I was eager to look into it.
First let me say that this book isn’t really academic. Yes, it is written by an academic, but it’s also meant for general consumption. I didn’t read the reviews below before reading this book, but in skimming them, I am surprised by how people had to mention how academic it was or how technical it is. Honestly, I wish it was more technical.
Also, I had a hard time starting this book because it sounded too much like a liberal griping about conservatives. The way the book eased into framing really annoyed me, because it read too much like loose rhetorical/discourse analysis. I didn’t care about discourse analysis, since I’ve read much more substantial ones… but then surprise: Lakoff made a claim about cognition in terms of discourse.
Suddenly things were not words anymore. He was talking about not only how we think with regular structures, but how invoking those internal structures through language was how people got to emphasize different aspects of cognition.
There are three takeaways for me.
The first is simply that arranging words in ever new ways allows people to process things differently. Providing substantial framing through the use of culturally familiar metaphors isn’t simply window dressing to invoke stolid logical relations… those metaphors also allow the speaker/writer to slip into other arguments by analogy. Lakoff has obviously first worked this out in more academic ways, which would be very interesting to look at… but then, rhetorical analysis has always taken the approach of analysing metaphors and reoccurring tropes as how writing and communication are structured. And the use of rhetoric in this fashion was well documented since early orators from the beginning of human history. Only because of the age of Enlightenment have we instead thought that somehow pure thought was only relational, devoid of excess entanglements… and that understanding supersedes the actual differences in types of expression or kinds of anything… that the categories themselves are more real than the expressions… but really this can’t be true since anything that is the same as anything else is simply the same thing, unable to be distinguished… from itself. By tossing out information or being reductionist, we lose part of the picture. The question of course, is always what context, which part is itself the operant part?
The second takeaway from this book is itself rhetorical, in a way. Lakoff insists that the beyond of language lies solely within the cognitive structures of our neurons… while he seems to imply that such structures are too difficult to decode (neurons fire too quickly, and are too small and numerous to keep track of) He calls quite often, mostly in the latter third of the book, for a New Enlightenment, one that at first, seeks to find the deeper structures of our minds through the use of framing… that we can get at these deeper cognitive structures through intensive rhetorical analysis, much like Chomsky’s deep structure of grammar. I understand this book is not academic, so I am left understandably, a little vague as to how this would exactly work. He dismissing Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG) project as constrained by “Old Enlightenment” thinking… although he highlights UG’s project structure as a model for a new field of study.
Lakoff is serious about merging discourse analysis with cognitive computation. He cites numerous thinkers like Charles Fillmore and the school of the Neural Theory of Language. With this, Lakoff is, in a way, still working within old Enlightenment aesthetics of thought. If language itself is how we process thoughts (which I think him correct), there can be no real deeper structure to thoughts since they pick the expression that is best suited to being what it is. I am not saying that this area of study isn’t worth studying — it is — but people can think in Math symbols, in body movements, in melodies… in other kinds of directly encoded formula instead of just language. Furthermore, tropes and metaphors are specific to groups. The study of such fields will inevitably change them. As memes come and go, so will the study itself always shadow the area of study. To codify those areas of study with academic jargon, which is also inevitable, will inevitably introduce distortion as frames used to discuss those areas themselves formulate the field of study… this is of course, start of a different discussion: the philosophy of science and justificationism, which is beyond the point of this review.
The third takeaway, which I find very invigorating is that poetry and philosophy, through this field, will be seen again as socially valid. Both of these areas have been somewhat repressed by our current capitalist frame, as neither directly contributes to producing or retaining wealth. Yet the deeper reasons for such repression may very well be that such fields of semiotic slippage are also fields which revolutionize and alter perception ever so slightly… loss of these areas of the language arts amounts to a loss of our ability to step out of much of our framing. People can’t rebel against what they can’t see. And people can’t effectively rebel if they do not realize a way out. I don’t mean to suggest that bands of poets or bands of philosophers rove downtown office buildings across first world nations to “blow people’s minds”. And even if they could, there isn’t any reason to do that. After all, people who do want to see alternatives will eventually find them. It’s just that there’s a reason why much of these two areas is difficult to comprehend. The transformative power of both poetry and philosophy have been well documented throughout history even if today they are often dismissed as being irrelevant by “serious professionals”. Lakoff dismisses classical philosophers as “Old Enlightenment” and perhaps they should be dismissed in that way, but the Cliff Note’s version is only our socially accepted “conclusion” of what amounts to lifetime upon lifetime of work by society’s best and brightest. As one who reads Enlightenment thinkers, I must say that their writing does often leave one to see how they turn around objects, create auxilitary objects and speculate the pure relations between collected bundles in an attempt to make sense of the world… In effect, you can learn from their learning… You can make better sense of the world through watching others attempt the same thing. The lesson here isn’t always the content itself, but how the content is formulated… while not itself a matter of “Framing” very much a matter of the creation of context and structure, roots of framing.
Lakoff’s book can be read as a call to action against stolid ways of thinking, against conventionally tried methods of making sense. How much sense do things make now? We race our cars around polluting the planet, we spend our health and our youth to make wealth, only to spend that wealth to try to regain youth. We make tons of waste every year, from products that historically wouldn’t be looked on as trash. And we bury this stuff in our own backyards. Yes it’s true that Lakoff prizes being a progressive against being a conservative. But even those progressive frames are the products of the very systems that compel us to behave the way we do. I understand, one step at a time. But all the same…
Perhaps it’s time for us to return to such areas, in an attempt to find our own freedom, so we won’t simply be money spending-money making machines.
All in all, you can tell that Lakoff is just getting warmed up. He very obviously intended progressives and progressive strategists to take into account cognition in politics, not as a call to step out of thinking in old familiar frames. Instead, let’s use the ones we have to push forward progress. After all, Lakoff did after all help find the now defunct liberal thinktank Rockridge institute. Even at the end of this book, you can tell that he will write another.
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