Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In The Dust

Liberals don't understand how anti-abortion "right-to-life" activists can favor the death penalty and oppose reducing infant morality through prenatal care programs. They don't understand why budget-cutting conservatives should spare no public expense to build prison after prison to house even non-violent offenders, or why they are willing to spend extra money to take children away from their mothers and put them in orphanages --- in the name of family values. They don't understand why conservatives attack violence in the media while promoting the right to own machine guns. Liberals tend not to understand the logic of conservatism; they don't understand what form of morality makes conservative positions moral or what conservative family values have to do with the rest of conservative politics. The reason at bottom is that liberals do not understand the form of metaphorical thought that unifies and makes sense of the full range of conservative values. To understand what metaphor has to do with conservative politics, we must begin with that part of our metaphor system that is used to conceptualize morality -- a system of roughly two dozen metaphors. To illustrate how the system works, let us begin with one of the most prominent metaphors in the system -- the metaphor by which morality is conceptualized in terms of accounting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keeping the Moral Books We all conceptualize well-being as wealth. We understand an increase in well-being as a "gain" and a decrease of well-being as a "loss" or a "cost." This is combined with a very general metaphor for causal action in which causation is seen as giving an effect to an affected party (as in "The noise gave me a headache"). When two people interact causally with each other, they are commonly conceptualized as engaging in a transaction, each transferring an effect to the other. An effect that helps is conceptualized as a gain; one that harms, as a loss. Thus moral action is conceptualized in terms of financial transaction. Just as literal bookkeeping is vital to economic functioning, so moral bookkeeping is vital to social functioning. And just as it is important that the financial books be balanced, so it is important that the moral books be balanced. Of course, the "source domain" of the metaphor, the domain of financial transaction, itself has a morality: It is moral to pay your debts and immoral not to. When moral action is understood metaphorically in terms of financial transaction, financial morality is carried over to morality in general: There is a moral imperative not only to pay one's financial debts, but also one's moral debts. More: http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 27, 2007]

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