You are invited to attend:
George Lakoff: Activism, Elections and Beyond
George Lakoff
April 18, 2015
Doors: 7pm, Event 7:30
Bloor United Church—300 Bloor St W, Toronto
Q & A with Trish Hennessy, founding director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' (CCPA) Ontario office.
Presented by
rabble.ca and
Canadian Dimension magazine.
Globally we are witnessing a time dominated by trends of growing inequality:
Runaway wealth to the wealthy
Runaway climate warming
Runaway privatization of public resources
Around the world, and in Canada, progressives are fighting to maintain
long fought for wins, and struggling to communicate progressive values
in a political sphere largely dominated by successful conservative
messages.
Why are conservatives so successful in communicating their messages?
What do progressives need to do to communicate their values to large
populations?
It's a big year for Canadian politics and the stakes have never been higher electorally.
Lets make a new stand for the most important election in Canada's recent
history and beyond, by Framing Progressive values to win.
Join George Lakoff for a unique opportunity to learn about the next
winnable political frames—whether you are concerned about climate
change, income inequality and privatization—or on how to in the next
federal election the leading expert on political framing.
Interested
in a more in depth opportunity to hear from George Lakoff? Lakoff is
in Toronto to provide a unique training at the Centre for Social
Innovation, during the day on April 18. Limited to only 100
participants, a few spots are still available. See details here:
http://inspiringtowin.rabble.ca/program
ABOUT GEORGE LAKOFF
George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist, best known for his thesis that lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
Lakoff
has publicly expressed both ideas about the conceptual structures that
he views as central to understanding the political process, and some of
his particular political views. He almost always discusses the latter in
terms of the former.
Moral Politics (1996,
revisited in 2002) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual
metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American
"liberals" and "conservatives." The
book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff
makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third
of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the
liberal vision.
Lakoff
argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and
conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different
strength to two different central metaphors about the relationship of
the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through
metaphors of the
family. Conservatives would subscribe more strongly and more often to a model that he calls the "
strict father model"
and has a family structured around a strong, dominant "father"
(government), and assumes that the "children" (citizens) need to be
disciplined to be made into responsible "adults" (morality,
self-financing). Once the "children" are "adults", though, the "father"
should not interfere with their lives: the government should stay out of
the business of those in society who have proved their responsibility.
In contrast, Lakoff argues that liberals place more support in a model
of the family, which he calls the "
nurturant parent model,"
based on "nurturant values", where both "mothers" and "fathers" work to
keep the essentially good "children" away from "corrupting influences"
(pollution, social injustice, poverty, etc.). Lakoff says that most
people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and
that political speech works primarily by invoking these metaphors and
urging the subscription of one over the other.
Lakoff
further argues that one of the reasons liberals have had difficulty
since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding
metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed
in a way to promote the strict father metaphor. Lakoff insists that
liberals must cease using terms like
partial birth abortion and
tax relief because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions.
Tax relief for example, implies explicitly that
taxes are
an affliction, something someone would want "relief" from. To use the
terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to
unconsciously support it. Liberals must support linguistic
think tanks in
the same way that conservatives do if they are going to succeed in
appealing to those in the country who share their metaphors.
Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a
progressive think tank, the
Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in
Moral Politics.
Among his activities with the Institute, which concentrates in part on
helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political
metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written
accounts of his message from
Moral Politics. In 2008, Lakoff joined
Fenton Communications, the nation's largest
public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.
One of his political works,
Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives," was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by former
Democratic presidential candidate
Howard Dean. An updated version was published in 2015.
or contact inspire@rabble.ca
