Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
I don't buy into a whole lot of that George Lakoff "it's all frames" communication but in broad strokes I think he's ultimately correct that human reason sort of works like this, that we have a really incredibly small amount of stories/frames that we understand intuitively ("old people are senile, young pretty people are dumb, white guy in a suit is serious") and so we take all the events we see in the world and fit them into that frame. Rather than the post-Enlightenment pretense we like to imagine, that we take the facts of the world and assemble them into explanations. That's not what happens, instead we take a few simple stories and narrative-arc things we have in our brains and shape what we see into those, and so when a bunch of right-wing troglodytes see AOC, it won't matter a single bit what she actually says or does, she's in their "pretty young naive brown person" frame which means she's dumb and naive but in desperate need of clever white guys to beard stroke and educate her, which they sort of think is some perverse fantasy, that it's clever and aggrandizing for them, like what women want is to be talked down to by a superior white guy, whatever.
I think this is exactly right. Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" is a profound and important book, but a lot of his later applied work doesn't reach its level. Humans were smart enough to invent agriculture and thousands of years later alphabets/pictographs and number systems (mainly for proto-contracts), but we haven't gotten a scintilla smarter since then.
We're sophisticated apes run by emotions and use a not broad range of frames to build most mental domains. Our progress is as much from empathy as anything else. Hell, every society and every merchant and prince had a need for medicine, but it took 2500 years from the early Greeks to get anything very useful.
And our frames mutually interact and support one another, such that individual or even sustained contrary observations do not overturn "core" beliefs, as they can be explained away. (Duhem-Quine Thesis). I used to resist the Kuhnian notion that old scientists had to die for science to really change, but it's that way because their views are elaborate enough that they need a full gestalt shift to appreciate new scientific theories. The same holds for politics, with the addendum that most people in a generational cohort don't even pay attention to new facts that could falsify or update their views. They vote based on tribe and folk wisdom.
(A correlary is that a baffoon like Trump functions like a "critical experiment" that both undermines the old order/frame and jars many casual political paticipants into awareness of the weakness of the subterranean policy project of, eg, republicans, hastening the demise of their coalition as people are forced, often by sheer revulsion, to pay attention to what was previously mainly background noise. It's often good to win in politics, but if you win so much that people actually lose their healthcare, you've sown the seeds of your own demise.)
This is why I'm so big on demographics, because I think the GOP framework, undergirded by strong religion and anti-communism (secondarily "pro-business"), is literally dying as a majority-ish political super-frame and the US is "catching up" with Europe (where religion has had a weaker influence on popular political thought over the last 70 years).
Edit: but damn if they aren't trying to leave behind a self-destruct button in the form of a radical Supreme Court as they exit the scene. However, even if there are 6 conservative justices by 2020, the court cannot move too firmly against the popular will for long )
Last edited by simplicitus; 11-20-2018 at 09:32 AM.