Monday, July 30, 2012

Chairman Lakoff’s Cognitive Casuistry

George Lakoff is an impossibility. A hapless totalitarian clown of such extreme dimensions, a rational mind has to assume the possibility he isn’t real. He writes whole pages at a time in which every sentence is factually wrong in a glaringly obvious way, but it doesn’t matter because his conclusions would be absurd even if his facts came from something resembling reality. He must be joking, but he isn’t. And, best part, the Democratic Party is following his advice. Closely. The liberal establishment has found its dead end, and it teaches at Berkeley.
Excreting his latest pamphlet-depth book in partnership with one of his graduate students, Elisabeth Wehling, the alleged linguist applies a cartoon of cognitive science to show progressives how to rise to gentle power past the vicious and uncaring political right. It’s hard to see Wehling’s contribution, because Lakoff has been down precisely this very road before: progressives are animated by a “nurturant” morality, a family model in which parents are equal and the family cooperates (but parents, who serve in this metaphorical model as government officials, “have the last word because they are ultimately responsible”). Conservatives, on the other hand, organize their relationship with the world around the metaphor of the “strict father.” They don’t nurture or discuss; they dictate and punish, and twirl their waxed mustachios beneath the canopy of their silken top-hats.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chairman-lakoffs-cognitive-casuistry/

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