Awhile back (yeah yeah I know I'm forever revisiting dead conversatons) there was an interesting discussion on linguistics here, here and here that in part revolved around the Sapir_Whorf hypothesis on language and culture, which in a nutshell is that language shapes culture not the other way around, (see here for a critique of Sapir-Whorf.).

What brings me back to this topic today however is the Tom Paine article Left Out By Right Rhetoric, an interview with George Lakoff a professor of linguistics at Berkeley and the author of the books Moral Ethics and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.

Lakoff gets interesting when he starts talking about the framing of language. We tend to view language as neutral, that if you just putn out the facts they will speak for themselves. But language is anything but neutral as it is always framed (consciously or sub-consciuosly) in the context of the source's worldview. The point that Lakoff makes is that conservatives have learned to exploit this opposition. Conservatives have learned to use the framing of language as a weapon to alter the audience's world view. Liberals have not.

Now, this is how Fox News works. They will say, "We are fair and balanced. We will have a liberal and a conservative." But we have a conservative host! What the host does is, the host frames the questions, so that the liberal, even if he denies them, still supports the frame. For example, "Are you against the president's proposal for tax relief? What? You are against tax relief?"

Think about the framing of "tax relief." Relief says that taxation is an affliction, a burden that anybody who takes the affliction away is a hero and good, and anybody who is against it, wants people to suffer, right? You are against alleviating suffering?

You see how this works, and it works throughout. The conservative think tanks have worked for 40 years now, developing not just language, but modes of thought that the language fit. And they have learned it very well, and the folks at Fox News have learned it very well.

Liberals have no idea that language is not neutral, it is framed -- they walk into these things all the time. So, liberals have the idea that if you just tell people the facts, people will be rational, and reach the right conclusion. The facts will set you free. They won't! The facts unframed -- if not framed properly in the appropriate moral way, won't set you free! People won't reach the appropriate conclusions. It is very important that the facts be understood in some moral framework. The conservatives have understood that, and they frame everything they have in a moral framework....

But all liberals have a morality; it is a nurturing morality, and they haven't learned to talk in terms of that morality, and they haven't learned to frame their policies in terms of that morality....

In a manner of speaking this does support a weak interpretation of Sapir-Whorf, in say the same way that a society resembling Orwell's 1984 would. Language and its framework being used deliberately (as opposed to an evolutionary development as in S-W) to shape the culture's world view. This works because we think of language as being neutral when it is not. It is by using this moral framing of language that conservatives have managed to make people believe that liberal is a dirty word, that there is something unamerican, immoral about holding liberal ideals.

Until liberals learn to start using the media in the same fashion that conservatives do there is little hope that their message will reach its intended audience in the fashion intended. Instead the conservatives will frame it in their own context and by doing so destroy it.

There is more intersting stuff in the interview, specifically the difference between the strict paternal conservative father vision of family and society and that of the liberal nurturing viewp. The interview is broken into two parts with part II to appear in a later issue (probably later this week).