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  • Added May 20th, 2017
  • Filed under 'All Sorts'
  • Viewed 1348 times

How will we vote?

By Rod Mitchell in All Sorts

compares the different political stances to either the strict father or the nuturing family

HOW WILL WE VOTE?
Election campaigning is beginning here in New Zealand. So I have begun wondering how we make our assessment and what prompts us to vote in one way rather than another. Traditionally, we live with a left and the right frames working in our politics, but it is interesting to reflect a little more deeply on what constitutes the 'right' voting a particular way and the 'left' voting in a strikingly different way. So when I came across George Lakoff's wonderful little book entitled 'Don't think of an elephant'-know your values and frame the debate-; I was stimulated to wonder whether his analysis of the Republican and Democratic voting rationale in America could have application here.
Here in a brief outline is George Lakoff's ideas. George is a linguistic metaphor communication specialist. He remembers from his teaching days a student linking the metaphor for a nation as a family. We have 'founding fathers'. 'The Daughters' of the American Revolution. We send our 'sons and daughters' to war. The family is a natural metaphor because we usually understand large social groups, like nations, by using smaller groups like families.
Given the existence of the metaphor linking the nation to the family, he asked the next question: if there are two different understandings of the nation, Republican and Democratic so do they come from two different understandings of the family?
So when George put in the two different views of the nation, he found two very different models of the family emerged: a strict father family and a nurturant parent family.
The Strict Father model begins with a set of assumptions:
"The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There are absolute rights and absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good."
What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can
protect the family in the dangerous world, support the family in the difficult world, and teaches children right from wrong.
The nurturant parent family also begins with a set of assumptions: "Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. The assumption is that children are born good and can be made better. The world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parent's job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others.
What does nurturance mean? It means two things: empathy and responsibility. If you have a child, you have to know what every cry means. You have to know when the child is hungry when he or she needs their diaper change when he or she is having nightmares. And you have a responsibility - you have to take care of this child. Since you cannot take care of someone else if you are not taking care of yourself, you have to take care of yourself enough to be able to take care of the child.
All this is not easy. Anyone who has ever raised a child knows that this is hard. You have to be strong. You have to work hard at it. You have to be very, competent. You have to know a lot. Also, all sorts of other values immediately follow from empathy and responsibility. Think about it.
First, if you empathise with your child, you will provide protection. This comes into politics in many ways. What do you protect your child from? Crime and drugs, certainly you also protect your child from cars
without seat belts, from smoking, from poisonous additives in food. So progressive politics focus on environmental protection, work protection, consumer protection, and protection from disease. These are the things that progressives want the government to protect their citizens from. But there is also terrorist attack, which liberals and progressives have not been very good at talking about regarding protection. Protection is part of the progressive moral system, but it is not being elaborated on enough. And on September 11th, progressives did not have a whole lot to say. That was unfortunate because nurturant parents and progressives do care about protection. Protection is important. It is part of our moral system.
Second, if you empathise with your child, you want your child to be fulfilled in life, to be a happy person. And if you are unhappy, unfulfilled person yourself, you're not going to want other people to be happier than you are. The Dalai Lama teaches us that. Therefore it is your moral responsibility to be a happy, fulfilled person. Your moral responsibility. Further, it is your moral responsibility to teach your child to be a happy, fulfilled person who wants others to be happy and fulfilled. That is part of what nurturing family life is about. It is a common precondition for caring about others.
There are still many other nurturant values like:- freedom; opportunity and prosperity; fairness; open two-way communication; honest communication; community building and service to the community; cooperation; trust."
So does this analysis ring any bells for us here in New Zealand and if it does could it help us as we listen to program promises from our politicians over the next few months.
Rod Mitchell