The Rampaging Elephant In The Room

(First published on Kiltr Jan 2017)

So, today it begins. A ritualistic ceremony takes place, ushering in the dark days, heralding the end of times etc etc etc...unless of course we learn to tell ourselves a different story.

Understanding how the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world we live in and how they help to ‘reprogram’ aspects of our neurology is grist to the mill for cognitive linguists.

In a seminal text, ‘Metaphors We Live By’ (co-authored with philosopher Mark Johnson in 1980), a founding father of the cognitive linguistics field, George Lakoff, detailed how immediate, concrete experience structures our understanding of abstract complexities via ‘conceptual metaphors’, some of which he deconstructed, like ‘Consciousness Is Up’ and ‘Love Is A Journey’.

Perplexed and bewildered, throughout the 1990s, at liberal inability to understand or make virtually any seemingly logical sense of Conservative ideology, Lakoff’s work became increasingly politicised. He began to draw on his earlier linguistic work with conceptual metaphor to make sense of the widening gaps in understanding. In his 1996 book ‘Moral Politics’, he derived two contrasting ‘family’ based models, the authoritarian or ‘strict father’ paradigm, which delineated the Conservative approach, and the authoritative ‘nurturant parent’ approach, representing the liberal aspect.

Lakoff's 2004 ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate’ built on this work and also drew upon a wider range of cognitive science, gaining him greater recognition. He did, however, fail in his self affirmed mission to fundamentally change how liberals and Conservatives approach politics; hence today, hence Brexit, hence the apparent rise and rise of the right around the globe.

But Lakoff is nothing if not persistent. He has penned a post-US-election post-mortem essay to end all other analyses, ‘A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed and What theMajority Can Do’. It brings fresh analysis and insight to the arguments laid down in his earlier works and applies them to current circumstance, where we are, how we got here and what we do about it. He pushes hard for the opening up of a new realm of possibility, instead of retrenching and/or repeating strategies and tactics which have failed, often repeatedly, before. He intends working the essay up into a new book but was motivated to publish now because the ideas in it really couldn’t wait.

Ignore the gathering stormclouds and the curiosity, the beckoning, the framing of the debate, which may have found you engaging with the ritualistic initiations of today. Instead of lending them any of your energies, follow the link and read Lackoff’s essay, start to make sense at a neurological level of the madness passing before our eyes, there and here. When you're done, maybe order up a book or two, if it's beyond your means and you promise to treat it well, I have a copy of ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ you can borrow.

Remember, decades ago, another pioneering linguist, a cognitive scientist, was criticised for his political activism, mocked because cross-pollinations between the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences, between linguistics, cognitive neurology and political science, simply weren’t understood for being as redolent with fruitful inquiry as they may be now. While time has transpired and events, movements, paradigm shifts in belief and action have come to pass, his work has come to seem more and more like dire prophecy we failed to heed. He should have been listened to then as he still should now.

We could do worse than lend Lackoff our ears, rather than arch an eyebrow at a linguist doing politics, and maybe we can stop thinking about the rampaging elephant in the room, start doing something about it! Meanwhile, Rafiki presents the world with Simba, it's the circle of life!