Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't
By George Lakoff
University of Chicago Press
413 pp.; $24.95

George Lakoff is not a political scientist, but he does fancy himself as conducting a scientific study of politics in America. An eminent professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, Lakoff has set out to discover the basic differences between liberals and conservatives. His interests are "empirical" rather than "theoretical," he says, adding that he "did not begin with any philosophical presuppositions about what I would find." (A degree of skepticism may be in order here; see, for example, Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars [1993] for an account of Lakoff's career.) So it is as a scientist that he addresses us: "These results emerged from empirical study using the tools of a cognitive scientist to study political worldviews."

This book, then, presents itself as the outcome of research; its findings claim the status of a discovery, made by Lakoff in the course of his study of "our moral conceptual system, especially our system of metaphors for morality."

So what did Lakoff discover about liberals and conservatives? He learned, he says, that these opposing groups share a metaphorical understanding of the Nation As Family, but while conservatism is based on a "Strict Father" model of the family, liberalism is based on a "Nurturant Parent" model. Seen from this perspective, "liberal" and "conservative" are not, at root, political categories: "They are categories whose central members are defined by family-based moral systems that are projected by the Nation As Family metaphor onto the domain of politics."

Lakoff's argument runs like this:

--Political policies are derived from family-based moralities (conservative = strict father; liberal = nurturant parent).

--Those family-based moralities are largely constructed from unconscious conceptual metaphors.

--Understanding political positions requires understanding how they fit family-based moralities (translating what people seem to be talking about into what they are really talking about).

"It is," summarizes Lakoff, "the common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor of the Nation As Family that produces contemporary conservatism from Strict Father morality and contemporary liberalism from Nurturant Parent morality." If one has any doubt where Lakoff stands, here is a hint: Dobson, bad; Spock, good. If the categories appear rigged to favor the latter, that's because they are.

All this unconscious stuff results in diverse categories of moral action. Conservative categories are:

1. Promoting Strict Father morality in general;
2. Promoting self-discipline, responsibility, and self-reliance;
3. Upholding the morality of reward and punishment;
4. Protecting moral people from external evils;
5. Upholding the moral order.

Liberal categories of moral action are:

1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness;
2. Helping others who cannot help themselves;
3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves;
4. Promoting fulfillment in life;
5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above.

Lakoff wants us to believe that all this accounts for conser-vative and liberal differences on issues such as abortion, the environment, homosexual rights, family values, and various economic issues. He even takes a stab at theology:

The Nurturant Parent interpretation of Christianity has very different consequences than the Strict Father model. . . . In Strict Parent Christianity, God is a moral authority, and the role of human beings is to obey his strict commandments. The way you learn to obey is by being punished for not obeying and by developing the self-discipline to obey through self-denial.

By contrast, "In Nurturant Parent Christianity, God is a nurturer and the proper relationship to God is to accept his nurturance (Grace) and follow Christ's example of how to act nurturantly to others." All this may appear a tad simplistic. But then, mind you, Lakoff isn't a theologian, either.

As the title suggests, Lakoff thinks that liberals have failed to understand conservatism, locating its essence in a desire for less government or branding it as a conspiracy of the ultrarich to protect their power and money. Not so, says Lakoff, who confesses that before discovering the key to unlocking the differences between conservatives and liberals he, "like many other liberals," thought of conservatives as "mean, or insensitive, or selfish, or tools of the rich, or downright fascist." Now, at first glance, it seems that he has seen the light: "I have come to realize that conservatives are, for the most part, ordinary people who see themselves as highly moral idealists defending what they deeply believe is right."

Such confession is no doubt good for the soul of Nurturant Parent liberals, but it reveals more about the general attitude of your average secular, academic elitist than Lakoff may want to admit. (Thought experiment: consider the fate of an outspoken, young conservative scholar applying for a junior faculty position in Lakoff's department before his epiphany.)

But that turns out to be a moot point in any case, for after assuring us that conservatives are really nonduplicitous "ordinary people" and that his judgment of them as crypto-fascists was off the mark, Lakoff immediately adds that he finds conservatism, "now that I think I understand it reasonably well, even more frightening than I did before." You have heard of the Holocaust and the "ghastly tragedies in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, and so many other places"? Well, there you see Strict Father morality at work. (Thought experiment #2: reflect on the fate of our young applicant now that Lakoff has seen the light.)

Robert Bellah says on the cover of Moral Politics that "Lakoff's stunning book opens up a whole new understanding of public discourse in America. . . . It is a major achievement. Both conservatives and liberals have much to learn from this work." Amitai Etzioni says that this is a "very thoughtful book, honest to a fault." Uh huh. What does it say about political discourse among secular elites that they can insinuate that conservatives are worse than fascists and have that taken as a model of civil and intelligent political thought?

The most disturbing feature of this book is not its self-righteous and self-serving condescension but, in the end, the implicit gnosticism that informs it. The tendency among many right-wingers is to offer conspiracy theories to account for what they think are the self-evidently wrongheaded stances of their political opponents. Secular liberal academics tend not to go in for things like "the international conspiracy of the Illuminati." They prefer to explain the political positions of their opponents by "unconscious conceptual metaphors and the like." How else does one explain the fascistic tendencies of conservatives but by their unconscious, metaphorical adherence to "Strict Father" morality?

One is not surprised then that Lakoff concludes his book by declaring that "public discourse as it currently exists is not very congenial to the discussion of the findings of this study." Joe Sixpack, alas, ain't gonna buy it. There are some forms of quasi-gnostic silliness to which only liberal, secular academics are susceptible.

-Keith J. Pavlischek is director of the Crossroads Program on Faith and Public Policy, a public-policy research and educational ministry of Evangelicals for Social Action.

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.