Subtitled “Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain”
(Viking, June 2008, 292pp, including 20pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index.)
Note that the paperback edition from 2009 changed the subtitle to “A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics”
This is a fascinating book on two opposite counts. Lakoff is a professor at UC Berkeley, and I became aware of him through newspaper columns and Facebook posts and mentions of him by David Brin. I bought this 2008 book belatedly in 2019 from a 3rd-party dealer, via Amazon, for $10(!), and have now gotten around to reading it.
Briefly, the two opposite counts: his take is about politics, from the perspective of what we’ve learned about the brain [mind] since the 18th century, and his understandings are precisely those gathered from studies of the mind, principally that humans don’t think rationally, as everyone but especially the economists used to think. This is not a new discovery, but what’s new here is how Lakoff applies this to modern politics. On the other hand, his take is innocent of insights from evolution and natural selection, and he never wonders why his two different stances, one 18th-century and one modern, came to be. In fact, he even misunderstands and dismisses natural selection. This is the kind of thing that might undermine an entire book, as read by someone outside the author’s field. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, since he does provide some useful perspectives and terminology.
I’m going to note some key points without walking through and summarizing the entire book.
- His opposite terms are conservative and progressive. (Rather than, say, right v left, conservative v liberal, or any other set of terms.)
- His principle thesis is that the Enlightenment (18th century) notions of reason are obsolete and untrue. Because they had no understanding of how the brain actually works. Which is to say, the mind is not purely rational. [[ This echoes many many other books about how the mind works (Pinker), how humans are not rational (Haidt), and how humans don’t perceive reality, since evolution has primed us only for survival (many). ]]
- He characterizes progressives as being about empathy, protection, and empowerment; while conservationism is about obedience, responsibility, and discipline. I think these characterizations are the most useful takeaways from the book.
These themes run through the entire book. He refers to Antonio R. Damasio’s 1994 book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain several times, as if Damasio was the only one to understand that emotions and reason are not at odds; many other have. (Damasio’s is yet another book I have, in the linked edition, and have browsed through, but not thoroughly read.)
Part way through Lakoff shifts focus to environmental consciousness and the need to save the planet. The empathy of progressives includes their connection to the natural world (which conservatives in some sense deny, thinking that humans are ‘special’). I think Jonathan Haidt’s book, published later than Lakoff’s, explores these themes in more productive detail.
Another implication that I see: conservatives dismiss “woke” because that entails empathy, which they renounce. Conservatives are about strong leaders and obedience to traditional values — which as I suggested recently, are about pre-Enlightenment values, about values that preceded the ideals of American democracy and the Enlightenment values of science and reason.
A couple more comments. Lakoff has read at least one Steven Pinker book, but misunderstands it; he dismisses the idea of natural selection as merely a metaphor, with an anecdote about moths, as if competition for resources is the only driver of evolution. No. Throughout this book, I have the sense that the author is fixated on his idea of two opposites of progressives and conservatives, without ever wondering why these ideas came to exist. Many others do: it’s all about the transition from ancient morality derived from tribal thinking, to the modern world, at least since the agricultural revolution, that has driven humans to live in communities, larger and larger communities, and necessarily required shifts in morality to accommodate them. (Again: it’s those shifts in morality that have enabled a kind of progress that those without that shift could not compete against.)
And I have to critique the book with at times getting bogged down in technical details. Neurons, conceptual metaphors, yadda yadda. He spends a lot of time on ‘frames’ and ‘framing,’ though these are familiar (e.g. in terms like pro-choice and pro-life), and Lakoff’s central message is that conservatives have, for decades, framed things their way. (Because, I would say, their framing better appeals to a primitive mentality.) At the end, what does the author conclude, or advise? Simply being aware of how conservatives have framed things better, and progressives need to do better.
Lakoff mentions the second President Bush as bringing the “unitary executive” doctrine to give him the powers of a dictator. Since this book, and coming of Trump, things have gotten much worse.
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Recalls that I quoted from this book a couple times recently, at the bottom of this post, and throughout this post. And way back in 2017, I quoted his “Conservative Moral Hierarchy” in this post.
