RE: [Futurework] Reframing (was V is for Volcano)

[Karen Watters Cole]

SS wrote: When Jane Fonda says ---> "Because we can't just talk about women being at the table - it's too late for that - we have to think in terms of the shape of the table.  Is it hierarchical or circular (metaphorically speaking)? We have to think about the quality of the men who are with us at the table, the culture that is hovering over the table that governs how things are decided and in whose interests.  This is not just about glass ceilings or politics as usual."    I hear her saying "DOWN WITH BULLIES and the Patriarchal Structures that support them!" and I say "Hear! Hear! Say it Again & Again!"  >>>>>>>>>>>>>   Thanks, Stephen for “getting it” re: Fonda’s points about redefining the structure.   Yes, GDubya had two sisters, one died as a toddler from an illness, and the youngest child in their family is a sister named Dora, I believe. In official biographies and others it has been told that George 2 became very devoted to his mother during the grieving of the loss of the sister, as most boys would under those circumstances. But with a famous father, as Freud might say, “the rest is history”.   It may be a good time to repeat here on FW that linguistics prof. George Lakoff has written about framing the debate in politics, something Fonda was attempting to prescribe in her speech. Lakoff uses the metaphors of strict-father vs nurturing parenting to illustrate how many people identify with political parties and themes like patriarchal systems.  Below this are other links.  Here is the first third of a piece posted by Lakoff this fall:   Framing the Dems How conservatives control political debate and how progressives can take it back By George Lakoff, in The American Prospect, Sept. 01, 2003   On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started appearing in White House communiqués. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external cause. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, thanks to some reliever.   This is an example of what cognitive linguists call a "frame." It is a mental structure that we use in thinking. All words are defined relative to frames. The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero.   The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. It presupposes a conceptual metaphor: Taxes are an affliction, proponents of taxes are the causes of affliction (the villains), the taxpayer is the afflicted (the victim) and the proponents of tax relief are the heroes who deserve the taxpayers' gratitude. Those who oppose tax relief are bad guys who want to keep relief from the victim of the affliction, the taxpayer.   Every time the phrase tax relief is used, and heard or read by millions of people, this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced.   The phrase has become so ubiquitous that I've even found it in speeches and press releases by Democratic officials -- unconsciously reinforcing a view of the economy that is anathema to everything progressives believe. The Republicans understand framing; Democrats don't.   When I teach framing in Cognitive Science 101, I start with an exercise. I give my students a directive: "Don't think of an elephant." It can't be done, of course, and that's the point. In order not to think of an elephant, you have to think of an elephant. The word elephant evokes an image and a frame. If you negate the frame, you still activate the frame. Richard Nixon never took Cognitive Science 101. When he said, "I am not a crook," he made everybody think of him as a crook.   If you have been framed, the only response is to reframe. But you can't do it in a sound bite unless an appropriate progressive language has been built up in advance. Conservatives have worked for decades and spent billions on their think tanks to establish their frames, create the right language, and get the language and the frames they evoke accepted. It has taken them awhile to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an affliction and an unfair punishment -- all of which require "relief." They have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.   Taxes look very different when framed from a progressive point of view. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, taxes are the price of civilization. They are what you pay to live in America -- your dues -- to have democracy, opportunity and access to all the infrastructure that previous taxpayers have built up and made available to you: highways, the Internet, weather reports, parks, the stock market, scientific research, Social Security, rural electrification, communications satellites, and on and on. If you belong to America, you pay a membership fee and you get all that infrastructure plus government services: flood control, air-traffic control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and so on.   Interestingly, the wealthy benefit disproportionately from the American infrastructure. The Securities and Exchange Commission creates honest stock markets. Most of the judicial system is used for corporate law. Drugs developed with National Institutes of Health funding can be patented for private profit. Chemical companies hire scientists trained under National Science Foundation grants. Airlines hire pilots trained by the Air Force. The beef industry grazes its cattle cheaply on public lands. The more wealth you accumulate using what the dues payers have provided, the greater the debt you owe to those who have made your wealth possible. That is the logic of progressive taxation.   No entrepreneur makes it on his own in America. The American infrastructure makes entrepreneurship possible, and others have put it in place. If you've made a bundle, you owe a bundle. The least painful way to repay your debt to the nation is posthumously, through the inheritance tax.   Those who don't pay their dues are turning their backs on our country. American corporations registering abroad to avoid taxes are deserting our nation when their estimated $70 billion in dues and service payments are badly needed, for schools and for rescuing our state and local governments.   Reframing takes awhile, but it won't happen if we don't start. The place to begin is by understanding how progressives and conservatives think. In 1994, I dutifully read the "Contract with America" and found myself unable to comprehend how conservative views formed a coherent set of political positions. What, I asked myself, did opposition to abortion have to do with the flat tax? What did the flat tax have to do with opposition to environmental regulations? What did defense of gun ownership have to do with tort reform? Or tort reform with opposition to affirmative action? And what did all of the above have to do with family values? Moreover, why do conservatives and progressives talk past one another, not with one another?   The answer is that there are distinct conservative and progressive worldviews. The two groups simply see the world in different ways. As a cognitive scientist, I've found in my research that these political worldviews can be understood as opposing models of an ideal family -- a strict father family and a nurturant parent family. These family models come with moral systems, which in turn provide the deep framing of all political issues.   The Strict Father Family In this view, the world is a dangerous and difficult place, there is tangible evil in the world and children have to be made good. To stand up to evil, one must be morally strong -- disciplined.   The father's job is to protect and support the family. His moral duty is to teach his children right from wrong. Physical discipline in childhood will develop the internal discipline adults need to be moral people and to succeed. The child's duty is to obey. Punishment is required to balance the moral books. If you do wrong, there must be a consequence.   The strict father, as moral authority, is responsible for controlling the women of the family, especially in matters of sexuality and reproduction.   Children are to become self-reliant through discipline and the pursuit of self-interest. Pursuit of self-interest is moral: If everybody pursues his own self-interest, the self-interest of all will be maximized.   Without competition, people would not have to develop discipline and so would not become moral beings. Worldly success is an indicator of sufficient moral strength; lack of success suggests lack of sufficient discipline. Those who are not successful should not be coddled; they should be forced to acquire self-discipline.   When this view is translated into politics, the government becomes the strict father whose job for the country is to support (maximize overall wealth) and protect (maximize military and political strength). The citizens are children of two kinds: the mature, disciplined, self-reliant ones who should not be meddled with and the whining, undisciplined, dependent ones who should never be coddled.   This means (among other things) favoring those who control corporate wealth and power (those seen as the best people) over those who are victims (those seen as morally weak). It means removing government regulations, which get in the way of those who are disciplined. Nature is seen as a resource to be exploited. One-way communication translates into government secrecy. The highest moral value is to preserve and extend the domain of strict morality itself, which translates into bringing the values of strict father morality into every aspect of life, both public and private, domestic and foreign.   America is seen as more moral than other nations and hence more deserving of power; it has earned the right to be hegemonic and must never yield its sovereignty, or its overwhelming military and economic power. The role of government, then, is to protect the country and its interests, to promote maximally unimpeded economic activity, and maintain order and discipline.   (End of excerpt: see http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/8/lakoff-g.html or contact me for a 66.5 KB paginated Word document)   Also see http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml, his webpage @ http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~lakoff/ and speaking as a female in context* of the V is for Volcano posting earlier, note that he also wrote Women, fire and other dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind.  His book, Moral Politics, is “an application of cognitive science to the study of the conceptual systems of liberals and conservatives. His most recent book Philosophy in the Flesh (with Mark Johnson), has just been published. It is a re-evaluation of Western Philosophy on the basis of empirical results about the nature of mind, and he is now working with Rafael Nunez on a book tentatively titled Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Creates Mathematics, a study of the conceptual structure of mathematics.” (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> * from Newscan’s Above the Fold: Worth Thinking About: Differences Anthropologist Helen Fisher thinks that women have a different style of thinking than men, which she calls 'Web Thinking':   “Women have begun to enter the paid workforce in record numbers almost everywhere on earth. As these women penetrate, even saturate, the global marketplace in coming decades, I think they will introduce remarkably innovative ideas and practices.   "Women, on average, take a broader perspective than men do -- on any issue. Women think contextually, holistically. They also display more mental flexibility, apply more intuitive and imaginative judgments, and have a greater tendency to plan long term. As they march into the world of paid employment women's broad, contextual, holistic way of seeing will pervade every aspect of twenty-first-century economic and social life.   "Both men and women absorb large amounts of data and weigh a vast array of variables almost simultaneously. Psychologists report, however, that women more regularly think contextually; they take a more 'holistic' view of the issue at hand. That is, they integrate more details of the world around them, details ranging from the nuances of body posture to the position of objects in a room.   "Women's ability to integrate myriad facts is nowhere more evident than in the office. Female executives, business analysts note, tend to approach business issues from a broader perspective than do their male colleagues. Women tend to gather more data that pertain to a topic and connect these details faster. As women make decisions, they weigh more variables, consider more options and outcomes, recall more points of view, and see more ways to proceed. They integrate, generalize, and synthesize. And women, on average, tolerate ambiguity better than men do-probably because they visualize more of the factors involved in any issue.   "In short, women tend to think in webs of interrelated factors, not straight lines. I call this female manner of thought 'web thinking.'"                                               *** See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0449912604/newsscancom/ref=nos im for "The First Sex" by Helen Fisher -- or look for it in your favorite library.   - KWC