by José de la Isla Hispanic Link News Service
José de la Isla
HOUSTON – University of California, Berkeley, linguistics professor and progressive guru George Lakoff has an interesting way to explain why we don’t get it about immigration.
Lakoff has completed a new book with a long title, The Poltical Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Mind. In it, he goes a long way in explaining why this nation’s politics became so polarizing and dysfunctional during the past quarter century.
Basically, it has to do with the framework of values that we have in our minds and the words we use to illustrate them.
We met and talked when Lakoff was in this city in late February to address the Progressive Forum. I submitted that the history of the inner-city core was a story about a wave of immigrants who came to live in places that others were abandoning — places that had become slums or nearly so. In Houston, first men, then whole families, moved into parts of the East End and the second and third wards and downtown. This happened despite many failed efforts and maybe hundreds of millions of urban anti-poverty funds to create and maintain a social infrastructure for livable communities.
Urban pioneers, often immigrants, created neighborhoods that were later “discovered” for their urban potential, right before city living became a growing trend. As they settled in, investments, banks and strip centers returned to the neighborhood landscape.
In many parts of the country, a mindset took hold that negated immigrant contributions and instead portrayed people who only use up public services, who depleted education resources, populated emergency rooms and were portrayed not as not law abiding contributors. No matter how many studies showed this was not true, the facts didn’t matter. They still don’t.
Lakoff makes the explanation that about 98 percent of thought is not conscious. That’s why facts, unless they have a frame around them, don’t matter. Frames are the worldview going into the words we use. Our morality and politics come from what our brains are doing below the conscious level.
Everyone has mirror neurons that fire up when you do something or see someone doing something, he explained. That’s why we can have feelings of fear, anger and happiness when we see it in others. It is how we empathize. Also,those neurons fi re up more when we cooperate, he says. And so we are biologically wired for cooperation.
Now here’s the astounding part. Lakoff says that empathy has to be developed and used or it will atrophy.
“So that means the bleeding heart liberal. . .” I started to say.
Lakoff fi nished my sentence, “is the true American. The bleeding heart liberal is what the American is. What it means is that you care about other people and you act responsibly on that care.”
In his book, Lakoff describes how conservative frames — like “it’s your money and the government wants to take it away” and “cut and run” — have become a mindset that can be hard to break. Mostly, these notions run counter to our very nature as empathetic beings. He hypothesizes that before long reserarch will show non-empathtic brains atrophy.
Lakoff helps explain why it is that some conservatives — should we say regressives — don’t get it.
Meanwhile, progressives argue with facts. But that 18th century form of reasoning doesn’t connect, either.
For instance, the public in most reputable national surveys says it wants immigration reform and a path to legalization. In 2006, Latino voters turned out in record numbers with other U.S. Americans across the board to throw out of office 30 Republican members of the House of Representatives and six members of the Senate, all but one of whom supported HB 4437, which proposed to criminalize undocumented immigrants.
Running as unreformed regressives was those Republicans’ first attempt at political suicide.
Unless they don’t watch out, the next Republican attempt could fi nish the job. If Lakoff is right, these folks need to start thinking a lot more empathetically, and not with that part of their anatomy next to their wallets.
[José de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. He is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (Archer Books). E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com]. ©2008
