Reading from from Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame Your Argument: The Essential Guidefor Progressives, by George Lakoff, p. 1

         When I teach the study of framing at Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an exercise. The exercise is: Don’t think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I’ve never found a student who is able to do this. Every word [you use], evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame.

         President Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on TV. He stood before the nation and said, “I am not a crook. And everybody thought about him as a crook.

         This gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want…. (These are the words of George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics. And the following words are mine)

Sermon

         A few weeks ago, one week before the election, I attended a retreat led by a Catholic priest. I’ll call him “Father Brian.” He asked us to call him just Brian. I had been skeptical that our annual UU minister’s retreat was being led by a Jesuit priest, but I’d put on my best tolerant face and wondered what was afoot. Well, just the sight of him bowled me over: he looked so gentle, kind, and humble and with a sparkle in his eye. He told us that it was daunting to speak to a whole roomful of UU ministers. We smiled. He had us! There were 31 of us, 32 with Brian.

         First he led us in a meditation of being with the thoughts and images of things that bothered us in our lives and then in the country and when we opened our eyes, he asked us to hold those thoughts in our minds. And then he asked, “How many of you were meditating upon the upcoming election?” Every hand was raised. He asked us each to state in one or two sentences what troubled us the most. We each expressed ourselves briefly. There was a communal heaviness of heart.

         And then Brian said, “Now, let us hold all of what has been said, all this anxiety about the election and the conditions surrounding it and this time I want you to ask yourself ‘What is really going on?’” When he said ‘What is really going on,’ he made this gesture with his hand. [Dear Reader, I moved my hand up and down like a wave moving forward and I did this every time I said ‘What is really going on?’ just like Brian did.] Again he said, “What is really going on? I mean, what is really going on in the heart and mind of the people. Let us look beneath the words and the actions, beneath the anger and frustration? What is really going on in the spirit of the people? What is really going on in you?” Each time he said ‘What is really going on?” he made this gesture with his hand. Soon we knew that the gesture related to what the motivation was within us and within the country. What was moving in the spirit of the people?

         We reflected upon this for about five minutes in silence. And then we began speaking from a very deep level. Generally, we said that there was a great deal of fear, concern, confusion, and polarization in the nation. We felt that our nation is going backwards and that many gains in human rights, women’s rights, and environmental well being will be lost. It was a very powerful time and a great relief to express what we were feeling and thinking. Then Brian asked us to meditate once more and to ask ourselves what Spirit was saying to us. This time Brian meant the Holy Spirit but he told us to interpret this according to our own spiritual frame of reference.

         The power and the effectiveness of this process stayed with me for many days. It seems to me that no matter what is going on in our lives, for things that are very important and difficult to understand, we owe it to ourselves to ask “What’s really going on? What’s really going on?” so that we can get to the root of it and also hear the “still small voice” of wisdom within us. When the election results were in, this process of discernment of what is really going on, helped me a great deal to handle my own fear, anxiety, and disbelief. This is the spiritual side of what I want to address with you today. But now I ask you to bear with me and move to your intellectual side for I have come across a set of ideas of immense importance to progressive-minded people. And much of this is of a socio-political in nature.

         I do not wish to offend anyone when I speak of such issues from the pulpit. But I do want to remind us that all around this pulpit are carved the ancient prophets of the Bible. I believe that this is an encouragement for the minister of this church never to forget that we Unitarian Universalists are called to be prophets, particularly when injustice is rampant in our society. So here I stand, Ann the Prophet, in the footsteps of the Prophet Amos when he entreated, “Let justice flow down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)

         This morning, I touched upon one of these socio-political ideas in the reading by George Lakoff about the elephant and how our minds use frames of reference, mostly by an unconscious process. George Lakoff wants us to understand some fundamental things about the human mind. The religious right understands these things very well for they have generously funded conservative think tanks that have been informing them for 30 years and now 80 per cent of our media are using this knowledge 24 hours per day, so please let us begin to understand a little of it.

         Two World Views: 1) Strict Father or 2) Nurturing Parent:

         First, don’t think of an elephant! Ah, I see that you immediately thought of an elephant!

         George Lakoff wants us to understand consciously what kind of family philosophy frame we live from. He describes two kinds of family frames. The first is that called the Strict Father world view and the second is the Nurturing Parent world view. The people who subscribe deep within their psyches to the strict father world view think of vastly different values than the people who hold in their psyches the nurturing parent world view. The talk about family values was fundamental to the outcome of the last election. We must understand what was and is really going on. So let us look at the strict father world view first.

         Strict Father:

         The strict father world view assumes that “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 is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, the strict father requires obedience …. through punishment, painful punishment [so that] they develop internal discipline to keep themselves from doing wrong, so that in the future they will be obedient and act morally. [This discipline] is what is required for success in the difficult, competitive world….Thus, the strict father links morality with prosperity….This is further linked with [the idea] that views [human] well-being as wealth….When the good [obedient] children are mature, they either have learned discipline and can prosper, or have failed to learn it….This translates politically into no government meddling [including no social services programs].” (Lakoff, pp. 7-8)

         I wonder if any of you can recognize the Calvinist religion in this: the human person is hopelessly depraved and must be kept on a tight reign. A punishing God rewards the hard-working, fear-ridden obedient person with prosperity. The rebel is rewarded with the punishment of poverty. This is the very religion that caused Unitarianism and Universalism to arise in response to the punishing God and depraved human person attitudes two-hundred years ago! And today, I wonder how many of us were damaged by the strict father upbringing! When a president has a strict father world view, he may be inclined to want to cut taxes so that the non-obedient rebel people learn to pull themselves up by their own boot strings and not require any nurturance and care and, therefore, no social services to help them do it. And how might this strict father handle foreign policy. Oh, oh, it had better conform to his way of thinking!

         Nurturing Parent:

         Now let us look at the nurturing parent world view and you might consider which world view is yours. Whereas the strict father is the head of the family, the nurturing parent worldview is gender neutral. (p. 11)

         “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.” (p.12)

         “Nurturing means [empathy and responsibility. Empathy means that you try to understand your child’s viewpoint, listen to him, and anticipate his needs. Empathy means that you will help him to be a happy and fulfilled human being. Responsibility means that you must take care of your child and protect him from harm, including a harmful environment. You will also teach him to cooperate with others and treat them with respect and fairness, trust, and freedom with responsibility. You will also teach him to care for the environment. All of this takes a great deal of work on the parent’s part but you believe it is all worth it. Success for a child is that he is happy, caring, and contributing positively to the world and participating in community building.]” (p. 12-13)

         Which are you?

         Are you the strict father or the nurturing parent. I can assure you that our religious education program operates entirely from the nurturing parent world view that seeks to encourage a nurturing human being and a loving God or a God is Love concept. I assume that you all identify with the nurturing parent world view otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting there or would be in a church that preached hell fire and brimstone!

         When we think and talk about family values we speak out of a frame of reference. This is why we were puzzled and annoyed when the political debate had little to do with our family values.

         In the strict father world view, health, education, and welfare will develop in this way. Forget health care and Medicare; it’s your business. If schools fail, parents will be given vouchers to go to schools of their choice, which will be private and many schools will fail because tests are not a true measure of ability. Welfare and social security will be reduced to a minimum because taxes will be cut and cut and cut.

         The Middle Mixed Majority:

         Now, not all of America falls into two categories, just the religious right and left. There is a large swath of Americans that has a combination of these two world views. These were the great majority who could have voted either way in the November election. If the nurturing parent folks could have articulated their family values and other values as effectively as the religious right, the election might have swung the other way.

         We have work to do in the next four years. That work is embedded in our Seven Principles—it’s all there, all the nurturing parent values. But we must learn to articulate them and frame the issues with reference to them effectively and George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at Berkeley University tells us how to do this. But this is a topic for “What’s Really Going On?” Part II!

         So! What’s really going on? I hope that you will hold these concepts in your mind. This sermon will be on our website by Tuesday or Wednesday and I’ll have it out on the Information Table next week. I hope you’ll buy George Lakoff’s slender book and memorize its concepts, as if it were scripture. Better still, buy six copies, keep one and give the others to thoughtful friends for a holiday gift for I know that what’s really going on now is that you are looking forward to a wonderful holiday season, and so you should for that is what nurturing parents do. (Nurturing parents also take tags for the Needy off the Holiday Hope tree! All the tags were taken!)

         Nurturing parents also have oneness as a foundational concept for the world, so let us sing a typical nurturing parent hymn, #318 We Would Be One.

References

The following book informed and inspired this sermon and is of great importance to us as free-thinkers and liberal religionists:

Lakoff, George. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives, White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.