The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

by George Lakoff

  Yes, global warming systemically caused freezes in the American south. Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy—and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud: It was causation, systemic causation! Network causes, feedback loops, multiple causes—all acting probabilistically as part of the global weather system—have been systemically causing weather disasters. Yes, systemically causing untold human harm and billions, if not trillions, of dollars in damage.

  Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies, which are a systemic cause of abortions.

  Systemic causation, because it is less obvious than direct causation, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes. It may be probabilistic, occurring with a significantly high probability. It may require a feedback mechanism. In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.

  Above all, it requires a name: systemic causation.

  The precise details of Hurricane Sandy could not have been predicted in advance, any more than when, or whether, a smoker develops lung cancer, or sex without contraception yields an unwanted pregnancy, or a drunk driver has an accident. But systemic causation is nonetheless causal.

  Semantics matters. Because the word cause is commonly taken to mean direct cause, climate scientists, trying to be precise, have too often shied away from attributing causation of a particular hurricane, drought, or fire to global warming. Lacking a concept—a frame—and language for systemic causation, climate scientists have made the dreadful communicative mistake of retreating to weasel words. Consider this quote from “Perception of Climate Change,” by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

  . . . we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.

  The crucial words here are high degree of confidence, anomalies, consequence, likelihood, absence, and exceedingly small. Scientific weasel words! The power of the bald truth, namely causation, is lost.

  This is no small matter: The fate of the earth is at stake. The science is excellent. The scientists’ ability to communicate is lacking. Without the words, the idea cannot even be expressed. And without an understanding of systemic causation, we cannot understand what is hitting us.

  Global warming is real, and it is here. It is causing—yes, causing—death, destruction, and vast economic loss. And the causal effects are getting greater with time. We cannot merely adapt to it. The costs are incalculable. What we are facing is huge. Each day, the amount of extra energy accumulating via the heating of the earth is the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Each day!

  What Journalists Can Do

  Because systemic causation has mostly gone unframed and unnamed, journalists have previously been at a loss and have been driven to resort to inadequate and misleading metaphors. Charles Petit, writing in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker of January 7, 2014, gives a list of such metaphors. Here are some beauts:

  A weaker polar vortex moving around the Arctic like a slowing spinning top, eventually falling over and blowing open the door to the Arctic freezer . . .

  This big slug of deadly cryosphere air slipped its North Pole moorings, marauded across Canada, and swept through the eastern US . . .

  When the winds weaken, the vortex can begin to wobble like a drunk on his fourth martini . . . in this case, nearly the entire polar vortex has tumbled southward . . .

  Responsible journalists can do better.

  Responsible journalists need to discuss systemic causation. Certainly when discussing global warming and its climate effects, and also when discussing other systemic effects—such as those of fracking, the privatization of education, the decline of unions, and so on.

  Responsible journalists also need to discuss a devastating systemic effect on our economics, recently discovered but not brought into public discourse by the press: the systemic effect of the relationship between productive wealth and reinvestment wealth.

  The version of systemic causation just discussed is designed to fit global warming phenomena. In addition, there are other forms of systemic causation that we will be discussing, for example, in the study of economics. But for our purposes in this book, the most important form of systemic causation concerns the brain itself. The phenomenon of reflexivity is a form of systemic causation. And the relationship between our politics and the concept of personhood is one of the hardest cases of systemic causation to get across to the public, especially to political pundits, policy makers, strategists, pollsters, and other political professionals.

  ★ 5 ★

  Politics and Personhood

  Each of us has a sense of personal identity: your sense of who you are as a person. Central to that personal identity is a moral sense, a sense of what is right and wrong, what justifies our actions. That moral sense, like all that we believe and understand, is physical, built into the neural circuitry of our brains. If that changes, if the circuitry characterizing our moral sense changes, it changes our personhood. That is, it changes the kind of people we are: what we think is right and how we act.

  We have seen that all politics is moral, since political policies are assumed to be right, not wrong or irrelevant. Our political divisions come down to moral divisions, characterized in our brains by very different brain circuitry. We’ve seen that the major moral divisions in our politics derive from two opposed models of the family: a progressive (nurturant parent) morality and a conservative (strict father) morality. That is no accident, since your family life has a profound effect on how you understand yourself as a person.

  The effect of family life is complex, and peers have an effect as well. One result of that is biconceptualism. Biconceptuals have both kinds of moral circuitry in their brain, mutually inhibiting each other and applying to different issues, person by person. There is no “middle,” no morally based political ideology common to all moderates.

  Regardless of whether you are progressive, conservative, or biconceptual, though, your morality—your sense of what a person should be and do—is deeply connected to the way your brain triggers emotions and determines whether you feel good or bad in certain situations and about certain ideas. It is worth understanding why.

  The Science behind Empathy and Morality

  One of the great discoveries of neuroscience is the mirror neuron system. Simply put, that system operates in our brains and gives us the capacity to connect with others, to know and even feel what they feel, and to connect with the natural world. It is the heart of our capacity for empathy. From emotion research, we know that certain emotions correlate with certain actions in our own bodies—in facial muscles, in posture, and so on. When we feel happy, for instance, our facial muscles are prompted to produce a smile, as opposed to a frown or a baring of the teeth. We also know that the physical cues that broadcast emotion in others will usually trigger in an observer the same brain response that would accompany those physical cues of the same emotion in ourselves. That is why we can usually tell if someone else is happy or sad, or angry or bored—and why a smile is often unconsciously greeted with a smile or a yawn with a yawn.

  All this is thanks to the mirror neuron system, which has circuitry connecting
the brain’s action centers and perception centers. As a consequence, what you see others doing is neurally paired with brain activity that could control your own actions. Muscles are activated by firing neurons, and many of the same neurons are firing whether you are performing an action or whether you are seeing someone else performing the same action. This “mirroring” allows you to see the musculature tied to the emotions of others and sense in your brain what the same musculature would be like in your body, and hence the same emotions, in yourself. In short, it allows you to feel the emotions of others! That is what empathy is about.

  But this effect has further repercussions in the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered a brain overlap, too, between imagining and doing. Many of the same neural regions are activated when we form mental images as when we actually see. The same holds true for whether we imagine moving or are actually moving. That means that we have the capacity to empathize not only with someone present, but also with someone we can imagine, remember, read about, dream about, and so on. That is why we can be deeply moved by a novel or a movie, or even a newspaper story.

  Neuroscientists have also shown that, when someone is in love and they see their loved one in pain, the pain center in their own brain is activated. Emotional pain is real.

  Sounds simple, but there are some twists to the story, some neural complications that affect how we ultimately respond to what we see, hear, and imagine. The prefrontal cortex has regions particularly active during the exercise of judgment. These regions contain neurons that are active when we are performing some particular action and less active when we see someone else performing the same action. It is hypothesized that this gives us the capacity to modulate our empathy—to lessen it or turn it off in certain cases. The mirror neuron system thus connects us emotionally to others, but can in certain cases also distance us emotionally from others.

  The prefrontal cortex is active in another neural system, too—one that I’ll call the well-being/ill-being system. This is the system that releases certain hormones in your brain when you have experiences that make you feel good, and releases others when experiences make you feel bad. In essence, this system regulates whether you have a sense of well-being or ill-being at any given time. It is also the system that presumably is involved in making judgments on the basis of your imagination of what will or won’t bring you well-being.

  The well-being system and the empathy system can interact in complex ways. Some people feel satisfaction both when they are personally satisfied and when those they empathize with feel a sense of well-being.

  Other people do not have the two systems connected in that way. (1) They may have the well-being system overriding the empathy system—with their interests overriding the cares and interests of others. Or (2) they can have a complex interaction in which they maintain their own well-being and balance it with contributing to the well-being of others. Or (3) they may be self-sacrificing, always placing the well-being of others ahead of their own well-being. Or (4) they may be part of an in-group, and may place their well-being and that of in-group members first, without empathizing at all with out-group members. This can vary, depending on what counts as a given person’s in-group.

  Since morality is about well-being, your own and that of others, these four alternatives define different moral attitudes.

  Can the mirror neuron system be affected by inborn factors? Apparently, yes. With certain forms of autism, empathy is lessened or largely absent. In psychopaths, empathy is controlled: Psychopaths can sense what someone else is feeling, not be affected themselves, and then manipulate the other for their own benefit or enjoyment.

  Can the mirror system be affected by how one is raised, by one’s family life and peer relations? Does one’s political morality correlate with one’s capacity for empathy—that is, with the operation of the mirror neuron and well-being systems? That is being investigated, and preliminary results suggest that there is a difference between extreme progressives and extreme conservatives, with extreme conservatives showing less activation in their empathy system.

  Since all thoughts and feelings are physical, a matter of brain circuitry, it is not surprising that moral sensibilities should be constituted by physical brain structures like those we have just been discussing. These brain structures form the neural basis not only of your own moral sensibilities, but also of your views on what an ideal person ought to be.

  The Ideal Person

  What should an ideal person be like? Conservatives and progressives have largely opposite views, given their different views of morality. Biconceptuals have different views as well, depending on how their moral views are divided up: biconceptuals who are largely conservative will tend to have a conservative view of what people should be like, and biconceptuals who are largely progressive will tend to have a progressive view of what people should be like. Or, biconceptuals that are less extreme may believe that an ideal person is biconceptual in the same way they are, with the same distribution of conservative and progressive views.

  The progressive (nurturant parent) moral system maintains a delicate balance between the empathy and the personal well-being systems. At its core is empathy for others and the responsibility to act on that empathy, but it is modulated by the proviso that you can’t take care of anyone else if you’re not taking care of yourself. That is, it centers on empathy and includes both personal and social responsibility.

  The conservative moral system centers on the well-being system—on personal responsibility alone, on serving your own interests without depending on the empathy of others to take care of you and without having empathy and responsibility for others.

  There are nuances, but this gets at the heart of the difference.

  Empathy versus Sympathy

  Empathy and sympathy both involve the capacity to know what others are feeling. But unlike empathy, sympathy involves distancing, overriding personal emotional feeling. Someone who is sympathetic may well act to relieve the pain of others but not feel the pain themselves. The word “compassion” can be used for either empathy or sympathy, depending on who is using the word. For example, George W. Bush, in first announcing his run for the presidency, called himself a “compassionate” conservative, citing the book by Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion.

  Olasky and Bush’s take on compassion and conservatism point to a central difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives tend to believe that society as a whole has a responsibility to aid those in real material need and that the government should be a major instrument, with support from taxes. Conservatives tend to prefer charity, delivered through nongovernmental organizations, and tend to believe that real help for most people in material need is a refusal of aid, to give them an incentive to help themselves. Hence the conservative motto: It is better to teach someone to fish than to give him a fish to eat. Incidentally, charity for the “deserving” few costs a lot less than taxes to provide resources for the benefit of all.

  This dichotomy leads to two very different ideas of what an ideal person should be like, and how our politics should be arranged to produce a version of the ideal person with the “right” moral system, whether purely conservative, purely progressive, or the right combination of the two.

  Reflexivity and Personhood

  At this point we have to ask The Reflexivity Question for Personhood: Can linguistic framing change the kind of person someone is? The answer seems to be yes, though possibly not in extreme cases. And of course it may depend on age and circumstances. But such changes do appear to have happened over the years—so far as I can tell, mostly with biconceptuals. Extreme conservatives (estimated at about 25 to 30 percent of the US population), it appears, cannot be changed by reframing and setting up an effective communication system that operates full time, not just at elections. Yes, this means that some people cannot be “reached” (an inaccurate progressive metaphor) or “woken up” (another inaccurate progressive metaphor).

  Consider
a moderate progressive who is partly conservative. She hears conservative language and conservative arguments over and over, day after day for years—in the media or with friends or both. The conservative language will activate the conservative moral system, making it a bit stronger every time the language is heard. As the conservative circuitry in her brain becomes stronger (the synapses strengthen), the more likely it is that her views on issues will change from progressive to conservative. The result may be a shift within the brain from a person who is partly conservative to a person who is mostly conservative. I believe that this has actually happened in many cases.

  That is the power of the conservative messaging system: It is reflexivity in action. Over time, someone’s very personhood can change, and with it her ideal of what other people should be. And, of course, who they should vote for.

  The other conservative use of reflexivity depends upon getting those votes. Once in office, conservatives can not only say that government cannot work and has to be minimized and privatized, but by being in the government, they can also stop it from working, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. How? By cutting taxes, by cutting funding, by passing laws, and, in the Supreme Court, by reinterpreting laws.

  In contemporary America, politics and personhood are inseparable—and apparently moving in a conservative direction. To change that direction, progressives need to understand the role of the brain and of communication systems in the process.

  Politics and Personhood at the Founding

  When the United States was founded, politics and personhood had come together, but in the progressive direction.