Framing the Message

Enemy not corporate greed; it`s private government

wandering raven — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:37:09 +0000

Frances Moore Lappe and Anthony Lappe have argued in Huffington Post that debate engulfing the US now should not be framed as an attack on corporate greed, but rather an end to private government.

They argue that the movement should focus on “getting money out of democracy so that the 99% can be heard”.

They suggest that every supporter should support `Fair Elections Now`legislation.

Untellable Truths

wandering raven — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 10:05:22 +0000

George Lakoff has written a short op-ed piece in Truthout which in fairly clear language outlines some tactics for changing the ‘frame’ of some key issues in American political life. These techniques are as relevant for Canadian or British political action as well.

It’s worth a read!

Twitter and framing

wandering raven — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:33:35 +0000

I’ve missed the wave with respect to Twitter and some of the new technologies. Sometimes I’m ahead of thee wave, sometimes behind, but rarely do I ride it.

I wonder what Marshal McLuhan would have thought of Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Where would his ideas take us, if applied to the new technologies. If ‘the medium is the message’, how does Twitter affect the message.

While many dismiss twitter as a stream of meaninglessness, I think it provides another opportunity, especially with respect to framing.

Rational discourse and argument is difficult on Twitter, because of the severe limitations of space. There are two responses for this if meaningful discourse is our goal: either distill rational ideas down to their essential core, or abandon rationality completely with respect to twitter, and use metaphors of various types to communicate.

While both offer opportunities, the latter is the purvue of framing, in the sense that George Lakoff uses it. When the goal of twittering is to politically convince, then the theory of framing demands that we attract the reader to maintain an interest, while providing metaphors that cause the reader to associate our message with progressive frames developed and identified elsewhere.

wandering raven — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:18:25 +0000

The Unhelpful Quality of ‘Anti-racism’

The problem of anti racism campaigns or reactions is that the use of the term ‘anti- racism’ creates the frame of race in a person’s mind. That frame is associated with metaphors that a person has absorbed, often which have been carefully constructed by evil political forces, or naively by well meaning but ignorant institutions. An ‘anti racist’ campaign labelled as such actually reinforces racist metaphors.

Countless studies have shown that race is a faulty construct, that the differences among races are much greater than the difference between races. Furthermore skin colour is a faulty indicator of racial background, or culture. Clearly someone can have a completely white cultural background and black skin, and the reverse.

I worked in the city with a young man named Chris, whose father was a dark skinned Nigerian and whose mother white skinned Canadian. Knowing Chris was from a small town in Alberta I asked how he liked living in the city. His face became very pained, and he said “I don’t, because everyone thinks I’m black.” “But Chris”, I thought to myself, looking at his sun darkened complexion, “you are black.” But Chris was right to be pissed, and I was wrong. He grew up in a middle class Albertan family playing hockey, and hunting deer, and going to school in a place where his skin colour had become invisible. He had little commonality with Black American culture, and even less with the culture of his Nigerian ancestors. Suddenly in the city, the people he met thought he should be into ‘black’ culture, because many Canadians with generations of Canadian ancestry as dark skinned people identify with and embrace aspects of Black American culture.

Even American blacks are taken in, putting the support behind a (somewhat) black President who shares their skin colour, but who is genetically half white and has a fairly white cultural background. Race matters in America because people of all skin colours have been told that it matters. In almost any interaction between people in America, no matter how collegial or benign, race based on skin colour matters. At least that’s how it seems from here.

When I was in my twenties I realised I had to confront some negative attitudes I had about black people. In doing so I realised that my uncomfortable feelings and attitudes only related to American blacks, people with southern or urban accents, that I saw only on television or read about. I didn’t have biased (at least that I could detect) towards the dark skinned Canadians or African or Carribbean people around me in my Canadian city. I concluded that my attitudes were mostly the result of racist attitudes that I’d absorbed growing up inundated with American culture. In my opinion even well meaning cultural institutions transmit race oriented biases in America. Even as I developed as a young left wing radical, I’d subtlely absorbed attitudes about people based largely on the colour of their skin.

In America even liberal or radical people often focus on ‘race’, especially the differences in culture between white skinned and dark skinned people, as the defining quality of importance in any political or cultural discussion. In America where nearly every cultural institution associates blackness with poverty, violence and underclass, it is impossible not to absorb that metaphor, and probably impossible to expunge it without serious self examination. But even people who are ideologically opposed to this negative association still see race (a completely meaningless proxy label) as an important defining quality.

In Canada, which is intensely multicultural and has some very ethnically diverse cities, people don’t talk as much about race. In America race is central to every public conversation. Why is that? Why do Americans of hundreds of cultural and ethnic backgrounds and mixtures line up on either side of the black/white race divide? Perhaps it is because of years of insistent propagandising,(See Mil’s paper) and responses by radicals that feed the metaphor and fail to change the frame. (See Lakoff)

Identifying someone’s race is a way to mark them as ‘other’. Skin colour is a convenient proxy for race, and the people who use it don’t really care about all the exceptions.

I think there are loosely three types racists. There are ultra xenophobes who hate anyone different, there are people who are somewhat threatened by other cultural groups in terms of employment, class differences, etc, and there are cynical political extremists who exploit the fears and ignorance of these two groups to build political power. Perhaps there is a fourth type, those of us who have benign feelings toward people with different skin colours or ethno-cultural categories, but who still see race as some sort of meaningful label.

By focussing on anti racism, we give power to the idea of race itself. We conjure up in the minds of the people we encounter with our campaign the idea of race and skin colour as an important factor in interpersonal relations. Once the idea of race, of ‘black’, or ‘white’, or ‘Asian’, is introduced to someone’s mind, it is impossible to avoid all the metaphors that have been implanted in their mind by years of assimilating cultural ideas and values and information. Subtle things for most of us perhaps, like blacks=jazz, Asians=spicy food, whites=political power. More critically, it is impossible to avoid conjuring up the extremist metaphors developed and promoted by racist and fascist parties. People threatened in their jobs, their income, their culture are particularly vulnerable to picking up on these metaphors. Every time we talk about race, even to promote anti racism, we reinforce the idea that race is a meaningful defining characteristic among people.

Our goal should be to transcend the use of racial differences for any purpose whatsoever. It should be to make race, especially based on skin colour, an irrelevant concept. In my opinion a true anti racist would refuse to talk about race. A true anti racist would seek to define people by other means than race. A true anti racism campaign would aggressively develop alternative frames, and alternative metaphors that deny race as an important characteristic, and create new mental frameworks for people to use in thinking about their social interactions with people outside their traditional community.

In my own mind, people can practise any culture they want, and I am often interested in them because of their unique and interesting backgrounds. But I am going to try to avoid even thinking of them in terms of race, especially skin colour, even in the case of dark skinned Americans who self identify with Black American culture.

An example. Working in a Food Bank I worked with a very visible and cohesive group of volunteers that were largely women, Chinese, and Buddhist, who came every Friday and had a very good time, working very hard preparing food for the Food Bank. Some were new Canadians, some born in Canada. They were universally referred to as ‘the Chinese women’. I was unhappy that they were labelled that way because, though they might have Chinese ethnicity, they were also Canadian. So I started calling them the Buddhist women, and it stuck. This label also has its problems, but in the Food Bank context it was an improvement. Getting to know the group better would have destroyed that label as well.

The main characteristic of the BNP is not that it is ‘racist’. It is that it is a fascist political party which is attempting to gain political power by making one group of people hate another group of people to the extent that the former can gain something by taking away something from the other. Those are the terms that we should use, or similar terms. Calling it racist simply draws attention to the issue that they most successfully use to deceive and indoctrinate people.

In other words, if we want to fight racism, we should talk about fascism, and never let the word ‘race’ see the light of day.

Whenever a fascist tries to separate us, we should focus on the qualities that give us solidarity.

References :

1.George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant

2. The paper I read on the origins of American racism Find and reread and fix references here.

How to sell ethical warfare

wandering raven — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:44:16 +0000

Here’s an excellent article, originally appearing in the Guardian on how Israel presents it’s policy of war as ‘ethical’.

A blog using the framing idea

wandering raven — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:06:57 +0000

Here’s a blog post that uses the idea of framing to discuss Israeli Palestinian issues.

Some notes on framing the anti-war debate-Afghanistan (work in progress)

wandering raven — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:19:44 +0000

The war in Afghanistan presents a difficult problem, because the reasons for intervening there have been based on both conservative and progressive values, and the intervention has been promoted using both conservative and progressive frames. Likewise the opposition to the intervention comes from both conservative and progressive camps.

Progressive values that are relevant include:

Fairness.

Consistency What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. All people have the right of self determination. Do NATO countries accept the right of other countries to interfere in their affairs? Of course not. Why then do NATO countries demand the right to interfere in other countries? Why do democratic governments have to negotiate with NATO to get them to leave? Where does the intervention stop?

Honesty The reasons given for the allies being in Afghanistan is not the real reasons for being there. This is evidenced by the amount of effort and money being put into military objectives versus development objectives. Furthermore, the refusal to negotiate suggests that NATO is not willing to tolerate a consensual government, in which many of the elements of the government are anti western. Nothing but subservience is adequate. Therefore honest is a good frame to use, because NATO governments have been obviously dishonest about their intentions.

Many progressive values and frames are used to justify the intervention in Afghanistan. Sometimes these are used honestly, in other instances these are used disingenuously be leaders with no intention of honouring the values implied. While the US government, and other NATO governments, pay lip service to progressive values, when they had the opportunity to defend democracy and promote development in Afghanistan after the Najibullah government was overthrown, they were conspicuous by their lack of participation.

Some progressive values used to justify intervention:

Fairness: Why do Afghan women deserve to be treated unfairly and less well than in other countries?

Equality: Why don’t Afghan women have equality with men.

Responsibilty Don’t we have a responsibility to Afghans to help them develop?

Rationalism with respect to Framing.

wandering raven — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:49:45 +0000

Progressives tend to subscribe to the view that all thought is rational and people make their decisons rationally, using facts and logic.

Lakoff p39, Don’t Think Like an Elephant, points out that: (four points, strongly paraphrased in places)

1. Recent research in cognitive science shows that most thought is not conscious, but rather unconscious.

2. People think using metaphors and ‘frames’, in the context of a worldview. Whereas rationalism assumes that thoughts are literal, that thinking proceeds independently of any frames. (It ‘follows’ therefore that rationalism can’t properly explain normal decisionmaking.

3. People have different worldviews. People will not reason the same if they have different world views. (Ed. This implies that different worldviews have implicitly different reasoning process–perhaps it is part of the progressive worldview to emphasize rationality?

4. People reason using the logic of frames and metaphors. Rationalism assumes that reasoning is logical and fits into classical logic, which doesn’t take into account of frames and metaphors. (Ed. I’d need to look into this a little deeper to understand what Lakoff means by this).

Recent studies, (and I love to remember the reference for this, help me someone), suggest that most of us think subconsiously all the time and that the rational, conscious mind is simply a rationalisation exercise which allows us to be part of a social grouping. Rationality, and consciousness, are adaptations to a social way of life. For example, having a consciousness allows us to reframe our behaviour to make it acceptable or understandeable to others. (Ed. Don’t go too far with this without reading the original references).

I think Lakoff would argue that talking rationally to someone who is thinking in a different frame is completely a waste of time and probably counter productive. The first step would be to start from a shared value, then emphasize it, then establish a frame for the current discussion that is based on the common value. (Example?)

Chomsky on the other hand, appears to be a complete rationalist. Perhaps this is why, despite years of producing facts about the functioning of the American state, he has had relatively influence in the US, and is written off by much of the intellectual elites of the US. Chomsky steadfastly refuses to acknowledge anyone else’s frames. Logically what is needed is a cadre of followers to find frames by which Chomsky’s facts and conclusions can be translated into other people’s world views. (But would Chomsky support them, or would he resolutely continue to try to transform people’s worldview through rational discourse)?

(Ed. I’m simply hypothesising above, I may not understand Chomsky deeply enough).

Twelve Traps for Progressives to Avoid

wandering raven — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:09:11 +0000

In his book ‘Communicating our American Values and Vision’, George Lakoff lists twelve traps that progressives must avoid. I’ll list them here and paraphrase them for the British and Canadian contexts. It may take a while for this article to get edited with respect to the Canadian and British contexts.

1. The Issue Trap. Lakoff argues that regardless of disagreements on policies or issues, progressives will always see eye to eye on values. Logically then, we should focus on values. Focussing on values will allow progressives of different stripes to unify, at least on that level.

2. The Poll Trap. Lakoff argues that polls are only accurate to the extent that they frame the right questions. Leaders must lead by focussing on values, framing the issues from the perspective of progressive values.

3. The ‘Laundry List’ Trap. Lakoff argues that people vote according to values, authenticity, trust, connection and identity. Not based on policies presented at election time or otherwise. Progressives must create an identification and connection with voters, based on values. Politicians supporting policies that are not based on core values will lack authenticity and won’t be trusted.

4. The Rationalism Trap. Lakoff notes that voters do not behave rationally in their own self interest. Rather they vote according to their values. Trust and connection are important. Facts don’t matter if they contradict these.

5. The No-Framing Necessary Trap. Lakoff argues that “Truths need to be framed in order to be seen as truths. Facts need contexts.”

6. The Policies are Values Trap. This one seems self evident. Universal medicare, for example, is not a value. It is a program or a policy based on values of fairness, compassion.

7. The Centrist Trap. Lakoff argues that there are no ‘centrists’, in the sense of someone who has median values. Rather people thought of as centrists are people who sometimes focus on values thought of as progressive, and sometimes focus on those thought of as conservative. In Canada, for example, many Green Party members say they reject left or right as a label. This is because they focus have some values normally thought of as conservative, and on others normally thought of as progressive.

8. The ‘Misunderestimating’ Trap. This trap is perhaps more applicable in the US than elsewhere, where progressives often approach policy making from a rationalist point of view and are frustrated by conservatives who ignore the facts, and every reasonable argument, and respond with emotion (often vitriol). This Lakoff argues is because American conservative populism is cultural, not based on rational analysis.

It might be applicable in the UK with respect to the BNP, however, where every rational argument against the BNP goes nowhere against an entrenched connection the BNP has with a certain kind of identification with a ‘beleagured Britain’. (Ed. expand this)

9. The ‘Reactive’ Trap. Reacting to the policies and proposals of others lets them define the debate. Reacting to their ‘frames’, lets them frame the debate. Furthermore, but reacting to the frame, one strengthens the frame, and diminishes alternative frames. Progressives must change the frames, not reinforce them.

10. The ‘Spin’ Trap. This one seems somewhat obvious too. Superficialty and cleverness doesn’t work. It lacks authenticity and reduces trust. Spin should be replaced by ‘deep framing’, based on a focus on core values.

11. The Policy Speak Trap. Again, this seems self evident. Simple language framing ideas in the context of common concerns and core values is what works.

12. The Blame Game Trap. Blaming the media for our failure to communicate our programs isn’t useful. We are only in control of how we communicate. Lakoff asserts that if we are consistent in promoting our values and asserting our frames, then eventually the media (which is essentially lazy-ed) may adopt our frames. (Ed. I’m not sure Noam Chomsky, for example, would accept this last bit, but would probably accept the first bit).

Do the British Recognise Lakoff’s Family Metaphor?

wandering raven — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:19:21 +0000

George Lakoff, in his Moral Politics volume, demonstrates the difference between conservatives and progressives using the metaphor of the family. Conservatives and liberals, like almost everyone, share common basic values. The difference is in how they choose to emphasize them in their lives. Conservatives emphasize the ‘strong father model’, while liberals emphasize the ‘nurturing family’ model.

Let me say that I’m an outsider when discussing British values. I’m pretty sure that the British would recognise these models, if only from their familiarity with American culture. But I’m pretty sure that they would not accept them as their own.

First of all, the family is much less central to way that Brits see their society. The family is much less central than the community. Look at television. There have been loads of family based sitcoms from the US, for example. For the Brits, the main focus is a community, like the football club, the ‘mates’, the regimental unit. Even the TV sitcoms reflect this, with community being the focus–Coronation Street, East Enders.

For Brits, the family is not an icon of strengh, particularly the male dominated family. Families tend to be thought of as dysfunctional, and private. Males, rather than strong, tend to be dysfunctional, irrelevant, or absent. (Faulty Towers, Keeping up Appearances, XXX)

Values that figure very highly for conservatives in Britain are toughness, perseverence, privacy, ‘stiff upper lip’, loyalty, keeping face).

For progressives I would say that ‘fairness’ ranks highly, as does ‘responsibility’.

Of course all Brits tend to share these values, but emphasize them differently. I haven’t identified a metaphor that works as well for Brits as the family does for all Americans, or for very conservative Canadians. (I’m not sure what metaphor works for progressive or liberal Canadians (or ‘progressive conservatives’ for that matter, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t ‘the family’.