Mike Gurstein forwarded this:
> From: Sid Shniad
> Date: Saturday, January 22, 2011 8:34 PM
>
> http://www.alternet.org/story/149596/
>
> How Can the Richest 1 Percent Be Winning This Brutal Class War Against 99%
> of Us?
>
> By Larry Beinhart
>
> Who are they? The richest 1 percent. And maybe the next 9 percent.
>
> Who are we? All the rest.
>
> [snip]
Not exactly an answer to the question, but here're some thoughts at
least tangentially relevant.
During my elbow-rubbing with academe in the 80s and 90s, I came to
think that the book on metaphor by Lakoff & Johnson was something,
like Snow's "two cultures" or Hardin's "tragedy of the commons", that
one had to have read to be cultured. But I never got around to
getting the book.
So I was tickled to find Lakoff's recent _The Political Mind_ for 2/3
off on remainder. Its subtitle is "Why You Can't Understand
21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain." Well!
I'm keen on both the Enlightenment and the brain so here was a chance
to look into the puzzle of 21st c. American politics in terms of
neuroscience and maybe catch up on the metaphor stuff from the
original guru.
And I was disappointed. It's a demo piece of why I've rejected the
advice of two or three people, based on a page or three that I've
written, that I should write a book. Lakoff is okay, even pretty good
for a page or two running. But overall, his ideas were scattered. I
didn't get much and what I got (see infra) probably isn't quite what
he wanted me to get.
He does pretty good distinguishing and characterizing three groups in
American politics: progressives, neoliberals and conservatives.
Progressive policy derives from a "single moral value: empathy,
together with the responsibility and strength to act on that empathy."
On neoliberals: "What I will call neoliberal thought has the same
moral basis [as progressive thought]....but embraces the Old
Enlightenment view of reason: it is conscious, logical, literal,
universal, unemotional, disembodied, with the function of serving
interests, one's own or those of others."
"Conservative thought...begins with the notion that morality is
obedience to authority -- assumed to be a legitimate authority who is
inherently good, knows right from wrong, functions to protect us from
evil in the world, and has both the right and the duty to use force to
command obedience and fight evil."
That's all pretty good, albeit eminently arguable. But from there on
he pretty much just wanders around. The text is asperged with a
liberal sprinkling of linguistics and censed with some wisps and
tendrils of neuroscience to give it an odor of hard science but the
hard science goes little further than that.
His main point seems to be that the neoliberals are lost in the 16th
century. People aren't rational in the sense quoted above. Mind is
what brains do. Ninety per cent of what brains do happens below the
level of conscious thought. What happens below the level of conscious
thought is reflex, emotion, learned associations and metaphorical
association ("frames" in linguistic jargon). But what brains do is
what mind *is* and mind directs action. Q.E.D.
Well, I though we all knew that. Conscious reason and logic are tools
we use, if we're able, to work around the problems in belief,
perception and action that arise from that 90% that's sub- or
pre-conscious, especially when that pre-conscious part of mind is
subjected to intentional manipulation by others.
Lakoff's challenge seems to be that progressives and especially
neoliberals must take emotion, existing cognitive frames, resonant
metaphor and the like into account when advocating policy, arguing
with conservatives, seeking votes or defending decisions. Because
that's what conservatives do and they're cleaning up, getting people
to fight for policy that's wholly against their own interests by
manipulating that 90% of their brains.
Never once does he mention propaganda, marketing, psychological
manipulation, exploitation or demagoguery. He mentions lies twice. He
doesn't denigrate or condescend to (or even distinguish) that large
cohort for which (one or more of) illiteracy, innumeracy, stupidity,
ignorance, poor education, deeply inculcated ideology, stringent life
circumstances, religion or television overdose makes reason, logic and
more than superficial knowledge of the world difficult if not
impossible.
But so far as I can see, the inference to be made from his meander
through his subject is that if you want to win elections, get
legislation passed and policies implemented, we'uns progressives and
(in his terms) neoliberals have to do what we slag the conservatives
for doing: figure out how to push people's hot buttons and then push
them over and over again. Appeal to emotion, exploit fear, engage
pre-existing frames/metaphors, engender new ones that have emotional
barbs, assume authority and wield authority like a sword.
Jeez, Lakoff never said that. But that's what in infer from what he
did say.
Where do I take this if I try to extrapolate it to American politics?
The president [1] should have gone straight from the inauguration to take
up his role as Barack Grozny -- indicted Bush, Cheney and maybe 40
others for treason and other crimes; ram-rodded single-payer health care
into Congress with every bit of political savagery he could muster;
told the American people that the Republicans want all poor people
to suffer young and die early; closed Guantanamo immediately by
presidential order, as C in C ordered withdrawal from Iraq with
deliberate speed; told the "blue dog" dems to play ball or suffer his
wrath and the repubs fall in and salute elected, instituted authority.
Scare the shit out of them, offer them what they desperately need real
soon, wield authority like a sword.
There's more (and probably better), of course, that a liberal think
tank could gin up if unleashed with Lakoff's principle that 90% of
mind happens below consciousness and we just gotta, like, hit that 90%
with whatever it takes.
Well, if that's what Lakoff was trying to say, I wish he'd just let
his hair down and said it. If it's not, then I don't quite get it.
There's something about integrity that keeps your bred-in-the-bone
progressive from doing that. But what if, in the context of the US's
300 million (or even Canada's 33 million), in the context of mass
culture and the digital age, that's the only thing that works?
[1] George Lakoff's book (Viking, 2008) was written before the 2008 US
election.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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