August 31, 2007
Fighting terrorism with metaphors
Author George Lakoff, speaking on YouTube
If you poke around this site, you will find that I have plenty of bones to pick with contemporary American conservatism: its prudishness, its failure to see the link between global economics and global politics, its capitulation on the illegal immigration issue, etc.
But whenever I become frustrated with the flaws of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party, I take a peak over the fence. Then I remember why liberalism so repelled me when I was college student twenty years ago. (My Spanish professor of the 1986-7 school repeatedly insisted that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government was “democratic.” Another one of my profs stated that Fidel Castro was a “defender of human rights” in Latin America.)
I recently took one such sojourn to the Left side via YouTube. Author George Lakoff, a linguist and dedicated liberal, spoke to the crowd at Google to support his latest book, Who’s Freedom?
(Here is the link if you would like to watch the entire talk.)
Lakoff began the political portion of his lecture with a fairly innocuous description of the Enlightenment ideas on which the United States is based:
“When this country was founded, it was founded on the ideas of the Enlightenment. And that was, that there was supposed to be a thing called universal rationality. Universal reason…it’s supposed to work like formal logic…It was supposed to be non-emotional and disembodied. This comes from Descartes. ..And it turns out that on that basis there was a political consequence of this: that is what defined human beings was their ability to reason, therefore, they didn’t need to be governed by other people. We didn’t need to have kings and popes and so on, telling us what to do and how to think….We could govern ourselves. ..And since we use reason to carry out our own interests…so the best government was supposed to be one in which everybody was equal…and that was the idea behind this country…That’s why we have a democracy…A terrific idea.”
This introduction is the Trojan Horse of Lakoff’s argument. It disarms his audience for what is coming. The good professor’s ultimate purpose is not to reinforce Enlightenment-era philosophy. His aim, rather, is to debunk the very notion of objective reason:
“One problem with it, however, was the view of the mind: It was completely wrong. Most thought is not conscious. Logic is not the way most people usually think...They think in terms of frames and metaphors, and prototypes and other kinds of mechanisms…As I’ve said, thought is emotional.”
(I bolded the last few words above because they are significant. We will be coming back to them.)
Lakoff then segues into the concept of “metaphorical thought.”
“It turns out that virtually every thought you have uses metaphor of some sort…these metaphors arise unconsciously…”
Lakoff explains the role that common metaphors like “the market is up” play in cognitive development. For example, we think of a goal as a “destination.”
No problem here, but Lakoff next makes a giant leap of logic, in reference to a more recently coined metaphor, the War on Terror:
“You get War on Terror and you’re in metaphorical territory. Terror is not another army. Terror is a state of mind…The War on Terror can’t be a literal war.”
Let’s first examine this assertion at face value: “Terror” in the context of the War on Terror, is most definitely not a state of mind. Terror is a globally affiliated band of fanatics who are determined to forcibly impose a medieval version of Islam wherever they can. And contrary to the above statement, terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah do fairly convincing impersonations of armies. They have murdered innocent civilians on every continent. They are not figments of anyone’s imagination. Nor will they be disarmed or dissuaded by a lecturer at Berkley who defines them as such.
We now need to return to Dr. Lakoff’s statement that “thought is emotional.” Modern liberalism was forged in the counterculture of the 1960s, an environment that was defined by the surrender to the mind to the emotions. The ideas of George Lakoff (b.1941) suggest a strong influence of the irrationality that pervaded American college campuses in those years. (continue...)
