 This week there was a letter to the editor of our local community paper entitled Disgusted With Today's Young People.
The author, apparently a man in his sixties who owns a small business
in the nearby town where he has lived all his life, lamented that this
town was not what it used to be. When he grew up people treated each
other with respect, and showed respect for people's property. They were
obedient and appreciated and deferred to authority. Now, he said, the
children stand around idly on street corners, at night they run around
drinking and smashing beer bottles on the street, vandalize cars and
spray-painting graffiti on the walls of stores. He and his daughter, he
went on, now drive down the streets of their "once lovely" town "angry,
revolted and disgusted" at the "moral decay" of "young people" that has
"ruined" their town.
I could almost picture dozens of readers nodding nostalgically in
agreement, but my reaction was "What planet are you living on?" The
town he describes is awash in failed, boarded-up businesses, eyesore
strip-malls, horrendously-snarled traffic (it's a major thoroughfare
for commuters, and the town has failed for 20 years to develop an
alternative route to the one 'main drag'), and sprawling, ugly, shoddy,
identical houses on postage-stamp size lots. I avoid it like the plague
because it's been horribly mismanaged, and the quality local shops have
moved to more tourist-friendly areas as the big box stores have started
moving in. But all this guy can see in this ugly sprawl is a handful of
"disgusting young people". How could he have such a warped view of
reality? I concluded it must be the result of some direct personal
experience. I wanted to understand. I started by reviewing George
Lakoff's theories about where our worldviews and prejudices come from.
A brief aside: I've noticed that Lakoff's varied theories of
human behaviour and cognitive science seem to be converging. He is beginning
to look like the successor to Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher whose
ideas underlie David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. In a recent interview
in Edge Magazine, Lakoff says:
When
Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we
realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent
with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and
Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is
unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science
perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with
results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new about
the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the
internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth... We
are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out
bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world
thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.
Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the
neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of
abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our
sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can
perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made
possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied
interactions in the world.
Abram quotes Merleau-Ponty saying something similar:
Synaesthetic [involving all the senses together] perception is the rule
[among all life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because
scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so
that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel,
in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the
physicist sees it, what we are to see, hear and feel.
I think this is important, revolutionary thinking, and I'm going to ponder on it and write about it further.
But back to the letter to the editor. Lakoff is best known, at least in the blogosphere, for his explanation
that the dramatic differences between the politics, philosophies, and
entire worldviews of liberals and conservatives are due to the
different metaphors they use to describe and understand the world: The
conservative uses the metaphor of Moral Strength (The world is divided
into good and evil; To "stand up to" evil one must be morally strong
through self-discipline and self-denial; Someone who is morally weak
cannot stand up to evil and so will eventually commit evil; Therefore,
moral weakness, lack of self-control and self-indulgence are forms of
immorality) and the Strict Father metaphor (It is the father's job to
support his family and protect it from evils -- both external and
internal; He insists on his moral authority, and commands obedience.)
The liberal uses the metaphor of Moral Empathy (We must understand what
others feel and why; We must look after each other; Social ties to
others are vital; Happiness should be maximized as long as it does not
hurt others; Fairness is paramount) and the Nurturing Parent metaphor
(protecting and helping yet empowering our children and those less
fortunate to care for themselves, being cared for and cared about,
having one's desires for loving interactions met, living as happily as
possible, and deriving meaning from one's community and from caring for
and about others).
So Lakoff is saying, on the one hand, that the way we think is
intimately connected with, and limited by, our bodies: Perception lies
behind all Conception, which is why we think mainly in 'physical'
metaphors. And on the other hand, he's saying that liberals and
conservatives have fundamentally different, almost opposite, worldviews
because they use opposing metaphors to understand and explain the
world. We all have more or less the same bodies, the same 'perceptual
equipment', so that must mean that liberals and conservatives have had
radically different life experiences
with that equipment. Conservatives, believers in a world of danger and
weakness, must have experienced first hand, through their senses and
bodies, violence, the threat of violence, abuse, neglect, repression,
deprivation, uncertainty, morally atrocity, and/or moral 'failure'. We
learn from what we see and what we are shown, not what we're told,
which would explain why children of conservatives who live very
comfortable lives tend to be more liberal, why children who are abused
tend to be both conservative and abusive, and why liberals, as they get
older and experience more violence, tend to get more conservative. It
would also explain why liberalism peaked in the late 1960s, a time of
unprecedented comfort and peace (so that, unlike the Iraq War, most saw
the Vietnam War for what it was -- ideological aggression -- not for
what the conservative government portrayed it as -- protection). By
contrast, conservatism has peaked in depression, wartime and post-war
times, when there is more physical evidence of violence, deprivation,
danger and the other factors that promote a conservative worldview.
Here's where Lakoff and I disagree: He says that conservatives are
winning the PR war for political hearts and minds because their
metaphors are better understood and easier to appreciate than
liberals', and that therefore liberals need to better articulate their
worldview and belief systems. I think the reason why there are still
such an astonishing number of conservatives in the world is simply
because the world is filled with violence, abuse, neglect, repression,
uncertainty, threats of violence and danger. The fact that the media
are obsessed with showing us these things adds to the general anxiety,
as does the amazing rate of change in all fields of human endeavour,
but these are not first hand things: Most of the world lives with, or has lived with, personal physical or psychological terror of one kind or another for much of their lives, and that has to affect their worldview.
What is particularly surprising to me is that the conservatives who are
trying to make the world 'safe from terrorism' don't realize that terrorism is, in most forms, an innately (if extreme) conservative act.
Bush can bluster about terrorists "hating freedom" and "being evil" but
the truth is that most terrorists are not anarchists who blow things up
for a lark out of self-indulgence, but rather devout, conservative
fanatics who are acting out of moral outrage against what they see as
evil, and who kill others as acts of retribution that they see as
profoundly moral. Very much as the American neocons saw their
hysterical and immensely-costly destruction of two Arab nations as
profoundly moral acts of retribution for 9/11. In this sense,
conservatism is self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and what we
have seen in the last three years is different sects of aggrieved
conservatives attacking each other with increasing savagery and calling
each other 'evil', while we liberals sit on the sidelines saying 'huh?'
But my view of all this is, of course, a liberal one. Both the American
neocons and the Arab fundamentalists would be outraged by the above
paragraph, because their bodies and their personal experiences have
taught them to know who is
moral and who is evil, and to them, liberals just don't get it and are
therefore morally weak and 'evil' as well. If you're not on the side of
America/Allah/God/Whoever, you're on the side of terrorism/our
enemy/Satan/evil. If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
Just as the conservatives will never convince me (even if I now, at my
late age, were to become a personal victim of violence) that I'm
immoral and encouraging the 'enemy' because I don't support pre-emptive
wars, anti-abortion laws, capital punishment, the right to bear arms,
the war on crime, the war on drugs, three strikes laws, an eye for an
eye, drowning government in a bathtub, confrontation above consensus,
untrammeled 'free' trade, blind patriotism, reckless deregulation, tax
cuts for the rich and holy, 'family values', gay-bashing, repression of
civil liberties in times of 'war', feminist-bashing, increased military
spending, and the right to beat one's children -- so will I never
convince conservatives of the opposite. They see me as naive and weak,
or worse. I see them as psychologically damaged to the point they can
no longer see clearly.
And that, ultimately, was my conclusion about the "angry, disgusted"
gentleman who wrote to our community paper. Some personal experience
has caused him to become so bitter, so blind, that he can't see the
trashy Wal-Mart and the strip malls of discount 'dollar stores' and the
boarded-up shops and the shoddy, pathetic homes and the loud,
polluting, interminable traffic congestion and the staggering ugliness
and numbing mediocrity of the town he's lived in all his life, but he can
see a small group of young people, one of whom perhaps spray-painted
something on his whitewashed wall and then, seeing the owner coming,
sneered or laughed at him and fled. And with that one personal incident,
all the real problems of the world and their real root causes and the
desperately-needed solutions vanished and all that was left was a Moral
Vacuum and the personal rage and anger and feeling of helplessness and
victimization, and the fight between Good and Evil.
I could be a pessimist and confess that the conservatives are bound to
win, because as the world gets more crowded and hence more violent,
dangerous and filled with catastrophe this will breed more
conservatives (and because conservatives are now breeding, on average,
much larger families than liberals). But as a liberal, I can't be too
pessimistic. As a liberal I believe that all humans are born and remain
inherently 'good', or at least start out undamaged. We are all born liberals. We have to be trained to be conservatives.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
