Home
Archive
Columnists
Video
Blogs
Discuss
About
Search
Donate
Advertise
100 words for 100 days: submit your 100 word essay and get published on AlterNet
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
  • AlterNetYour turn

Support AlterNet
Do you value the information you're getting from AlterNet? Please show your support with a tax-deductible donation.


Feedback
Tell us how we're doing.

Advertisement
Advertisement

The 'Language of Values' in Politics

By George Lakoff, AlterNet. Posted July 21, 2005.


Renowned cognitive scientist George Lakoff expounds on how moral and spiritual beliefs affect political beliefs and actions.
George Lakoff
George Lakoff
Listen

Download
Advertisement

As part of Tikkun’s Spiritual Activism Conference in Berkeley yesterday, UC Berkeley psychology professor George Lakoff spoke to the nearly 1,200 attendees about moral politics, spiritual beliefs, and some of the fundamental differences between right-wing and left-wing politics.

“Lots of people are partial progressives, and those are people that we can talk to,” Lakoff told the conference. He continued:

“The way to talk to them is to find out what they share with you, that is, what the nurturing parts of their lives are. What’s particularly interesting is communities. In the red states -- I lived in the midwest for 4 1/2 years -- one of the most striking things to me was Midwestern communities. They were nurturing communities. They were communities where they had leaders who cared about members of those communities, where people cared about each other, where there were projections of the nurturant family on the communities. And that’s always a place to start conversations, if you want to talk about values.”

Lakoff went on to talk about progressive Christianity versus conservative Christianity, and how that too is informing not only today’s politics, but also many of our past struggles, including the anti-slavery movement, women’s suffrage and the fight for civil rights.

Digg!

George Lakoff is the author of Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate' (Chelsea Green). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »

Advertisement
Advertisement

 

Comments Turn comments off sitewide Give us feedback »
Comments closed.
The comments for this story have been closed. Thank you to everyone who participated.
View:
Depends on which side of the tracks you come from.
Posted by: Sojourner on Jul 21, 2005 5:33 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Finding something in common is the essence of 'pragmatism,' because that offers the possibility of finding something else that works for all.

I grew up in the Midwest, but I haven't been back there in a long time, and I have no desire to go back. It's a great place, if you happen to be white and come from the right side of the railroad tracks, are not poor.

I've been away so long now that it makes me nervous to go back to places where everyone looks just like me. Lakoff cannot be talking about Milwaukee, ranked in the 'Black Commentator' as the worst place to be black or Indiana, happy to send its youth to Iraq as canon fodder.

However, that is where I learned to hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Rather, a good American should deny reality by being positive, at all costs.

Even 'Catcher in the Rye' saw the phoneys for what they are. If cognitive psychology promotes snake oil, give me Freud instead, with his respect for Greek tragedy. Life is too short to try to live out someone else's sales pitch.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Lakoff needs to say which midwest state...
Posted by: NonnyO on Jul 22, 2005 5:42 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
If Lakoff lived west of WI or IL, he was living in an eastern state, NOT a midwest state!!! Anything south or east of that area is a southern state. I am in the north center of this nation in the bluest of blue states, and it IS the "midwest" and Lakoff's "values" that discuss religion and politics together are so far off base here that it's an alien concept. In the stoic area I live and where I grew up, religion was never discussed anyway, and most certainly it's never, ever discussed in connection with politics!

WHY are people talking about religion and politics as though they are connected?!?!? They are NOT connected!!! The Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment to give us freedom OF and freedom FROM religion!!! Religious dialogue belongs in houses of worship, NOT in the realm of politics or on television on political infotainment shows or infotainment news on MSM!!!

Discussing religion and politics together makes us all fall into the neoCon trap of judgemental attitudes that say Dems don't have any "values" and that puts Dems in the position of defense, and no one listen to any progressive ideas if they're listening to defensive answers to judgemental questions or progressive answers to judgemental statements. They've already made up their minds and they will not listen anyway. We saw that happen in the "debates" of '04, in particular, and while King Georgie Boy has/had the verbal skills of a cretin with a low IQ, he still won the day because he could repeat his mantras of "terra and fear" - scare tactics to make sheeples who can't think or analyze for themselves vote for him - and against their own best interests. (And, of course, there was the questionable results from e-voting machines in OH and FL.... 2000 was not an election; he was Selected by the Supreme Court. He was not "re"-elected in '04 because he wasn't elected in 2000.)

Lakoff needs to get over the neoCon trap he's fallen into of discussing religion and politics together. It's a fatal trap guaranteed to make Dems lose elections and keep neoCons ignorant and unreceptive to ideas that can't be put on a bumper sticker.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

So we're back to "Extremism in the name of liberty is right"?
Posted by: Sojourner on Jul 22, 2005 1:49 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Endless national debt? Pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation? Building bigger and bigger bombs? A richer and richer plutocracy? Greater medical spending for one of the poorest health care systems in the developed world? Growing poverty? Greater destruction of the ecosphere? Wipe out more non-human species? More air, water, land pollution and desertification? Etc., etc., etc.

That's the Republican party platform since Barry Goldwater.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

I am at this conference
Posted by: nvcarissa on Jul 22, 2005 10:12 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The idea here is not to force any version of religion on the US. What many of us are appalled at is the religious right's hijacking of the "values" conversation. And we mean to step into the space that they have claimed as their sole domain and to push back.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Link to info on the conference
Posted by: nvcarissa on Jul 22, 2005 10:16 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Spiritual Activism Conferences in Berkeley, Ca. July 20-23, 2005

Conference Goals:
Begin the process of creating the strategy and program for The Nework of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), which will:

1. Challenge the misuse of God and religion by the Religious Right

2. Challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism of the advanced industrial societies (first and foremost in the U.S. and Canada), and replace it with a NEW BOTTOM LINE (so that institutions are judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological consciousness, and to the extent that they maximize our capacities to respond to the universe with awe and wonder)

3. Build an alliance between secular, religious and "spiritual but not religious" progressives--in part by challenging the anti-religious biases in parts of the liberal culture (while acknowledging the legitimacy of anger against those parts of the religious world that have embodied authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic practices and attitudes).

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

OH, PULLEEEZZZ!!!
Posted by: thinkingsooner on Jul 23, 2005 12:04 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Where is the conference on surviving Peak Oil? What's going to happen to all the Americans who are totally medication dependent.....when do they start stockpiling? The common ground we will all find is survival, baby!

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

I too was wondering which midwestern states
Posted by: maxpayne on Jul 27, 2005 5:50 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Though I'll tell you that without Cooke County, IL would have gone to Bush in a landslide in both 2000 and 2004 like he did Indiana and Missouri. And Wisconsin was so close both times. WI or IL is as good as MO and IA and even the Dakotas and Montana if you look closely at the actual makeup of each state's results. Lakoff's book makes it clear that following the polls and letting the rightwing media and the GOP pick the battleground states is a terrible mistake for Democrats to make.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]