Lakoff for sexuality educators: the power and magic of "framing".(George Lakoff, "Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate")

Like a lot of other sexuality educators in recent months, I've been reading and synthesizing a new book by Dr. George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Lakoff is a cognitive scientist, a neurolinguist to be more exact, who specializes in a fascinating field known as "Semantic Framing."

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As Lakoff explains, we can't see or hear frames. They are part of our "cognitive unconscious"--structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access. These structures determine the way we reason and what counts as "common sense" to us. Frames relate directly to language, because all words are defined relative to certain cognitive frames. Whenever we hear a certain word, therefore, its unique frame is activated in our mind.

Lakoff asserts that the strategic success of the Far Right, in its quest for absolute political power in the United States, can be explained in large measure by its masterful manipulation of semantic frames. He explains that through the work of thousands of think tank intellectuals, language professionals, writers, agents, and media specialists--funded by billions of dollars in donations and grants over the last thirty years--conservatives have worked a "revolution of thought and language." They have successfully managed to brand liberals, long thought of as populists in our country, as "effete, elitist, unpatriotic spendthrifts" and a threat to American culture and values. At the same time they have successfully re-branded conservatives, whose policies favor the economic elite, as the "real" populists.

For many of us in the sexuality field, Lakoff is salve for a burn that won't heal. He really gets it--the why and the how of the relentless attacks by the Far Right on our field, and on many of us personally, over the past three and a half decades. (1) We sexuality professionals, Lakoff infers, like other progressives, have been targeted because we are perceived as threatening to the Far Right's "strict father mentality"--an essentially patriarchal world view shared by the political and religious right wing in this country--and to its decades-long mission to impose this mentality on the rest of the nation.

To the Far Right, Lakoff explains, government should exist as a vehicle for preserving and serving their values (e.g., self reliance; strict discipline; the accumulation of unbridled wealth and power; obedience; punishment as a means of controlling behavior; the literal word of the Bible; premarital chastity); their self interest (tight control over schools, particularly in the area of values or "character" education; public financing of sectarian schools; deregulation of big business; concentrated governmental power and one-way, top down communication from government officials; control over sex and reproduction); and their world view (welfare and entitlement programs are immoral, because they sap self reliance; power should belong to the wealthy, because they have earned it; the environment belongs to human beings who may use it as they see fit as a means of increasing their prosperity; gays and lesbians threaten the established order of the patriarchy and must receive no "special" rights; "Christian" values should provide the core values of government; the U.S. has the moral authority to act as it wishes in the larger world; God trumps science).

THEY CONTROL THE LANGUAGE

The remarkable success of the Far Right in winning the debate in this country over major social, moral, economic, religious, and even scientific issues of our times is due, Lakoff contends, to its uncanny ability to control the language of the debate. "It has long been a right wing strategy," he writes, "to repeat over and over phrases that evoke their frames and define issues their way. Such repetition makes their language normal, everyday language and their frames normal, everyday ways to think about issues." (2)