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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.

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