understanding liberals and conservatives

Understanding Liberals and Conservatives • John E. Benson 69

Outside the Theme

Understanding Liberals andConservatives

By John E. Benson

Abstract: It is helpful to teach students of religion and theology that it’s not just the teachings andpractices of a religion that are important, but the way in which these beliefs and practices are handledthat’s critical, whether in a liberal or a conservative way. Recent work in Cognitive Linguistics has helpedpastors and religion teachers introduce this other dimension of their subject in new ways.

Key Terms: Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor, Image Schemas, George Lakoff, absolutism

Using Boxes

It took me a very long time in my schooling tounderstand what “liberals” and “conservatives” are.I think it was well into my teaching career thatthis really started to become clear. What did itwas something I came to by accident. I discovered“boxes.”

In this article I will explain that and what even-tually came of it. I started using the boxes imageto explain to my religion students why it is thatpeople can practice the same religion in differentways. It worked wonderfully.

Then, as if out of the blue, a book by linguistGeorge Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnsonentitled Metaphors We Live By1 crossed my path.What they said was so exciting that I read twomore of their books.2 I was hooked. I still findit hard to believe, but one of the things theytalked about in their work was something theycalled “Image Schemas;” and one of these was

John Benson is an emeritus professor of Religion at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, MN, and a long time member of the Dialog editorialcouncil. He once served as the managing editor of Dialog and for many years was Chairman of the Dialog editorial council.

the container. They explained why I had been sosuccessful in my classes with the boxes image. Ihad picked a prototypical image of a containerand the container lies at the very foundationof all human thinking. No wonder it was sosuccessful!

It’s now many years later and I look back on awhole career of college religion teaching. I went onto read widely in the field of Cognitive Linguistics(CL) and have used its ideas repeatedly in my work.In this article I want to share some of the thingsI’ve learned about the two terms liberal and con-servative with the help of CL ideas. A standardmethodology for using the new insights of CL hasnot yet been developed in the religion area, buthere will be one way of doing it. George Lakoffhimself has written six books on politics using CLfindings.3 I’ve read them, and have been motivatedby them, but as far as procedure is concerned, I’vegone my own way.

I need to say more here about Cognitive Lin-guistics (CL), but first let me tell you a story. It

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70 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 1 • Spring 2014 • March

illustrates how I used the “boxes” idea in class evenbefore I ran across Lakoff and Johnson.

“ Life—Boxes”

I used to assign my college religion students a sce-nario that they’d read and apply to their own lives.It was an essay on “the boxes” of their lives. Here’sthe story:

We began our lives inside an embryonic boxcalled a womb. When the time was right, we wereexpelled from this box and forced into the outerworld. This world, we found, was not our friend;many dangerous and frightening things were tomeet us out there, and we learned early to comerunning back into our mother’s arms when weneeded sanctuary. Our mother’s lap and embrac-ing arms were also a box of sorts. Next our homewas our crib, then our room (if we had one ofour own), our house, our yard, our neighborhood,and finally, our city, our state, our country, andour planet. As we grew older, we found ourselvesmoving from smaller boxes to ever-larger ones, likeChinese boxes, one within the other. Some boxeswere three-dimensional—like our house, and sometwo dimensional—like the lot on which our housesat. When we were in school, we may have studiedanother culture and learned that our cultures sur-round us as the womb once did. So we can thinkof our human cultures as boxes; and the linguistic,political, social, and religious or spiritual traditionsinto which we were born are also boxes.

Emotionally, we learn very quickly that leavingis both dangerous and essential. Just as we wouldhave died had we stayed in our mother’s womb,so we atrophy and eventually die if we remain toolong inside our various boxes. Psychologists tell usthat there is a mental illness that connects withthe container (box) concept. Some tormented per-sons cannot leave their homes, and the therapist’sjob is to take them by the hand and help themleave. This is called agoraphobia, which is the op-posite of claustrophobia. Claustrophobia is the fearof being confined in small spaces like elevators,airplanes, and small hotel rooms. The psychologi-

cal terms introvert and extrovert also come to mindhere. Introverts are more concerned with security,less with freedom, while extroverts are more con-cerned with losing their freedom. In terms of ourboxes image, this would mean that introverts enjoybeing inside boxes while extroverts appreciate beingoutside them.

Boxes also play a part in our life careers. We havea box that is home to us, but we are always leavingthat haven of security, risking exposure daily in theouter world. Then at night, we return home tosleep in safety. Joseph Campbell sees this structurerunning through all the literature of the world.He wrote a book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,on the adventures of the hero, which also can beunderstood as a leaving and a returning. The herobegins his life inside a home base. From there heor she receives a call of some kind, a call to leavehome and venture into the outside world whereevil demons and fierce monsters await. As heleaves, the hero receives some weapons to aid himin the outside world, and in the outside worldhe finds help coming from strangers on occasion.There is always help, but this does not make theexperience outside, in alien territory, any easier.On the outside, the hero undergoes challenges,confusion, painful attacks, and confinement, buthe somehow gains a boon (prize, blessing) to bringback to his people. The last stage of the story findsthe hero returning home with his prize to thejubilation of his hometown friends. (He also findssome opposition to his coming: not everyone backhome is happy for the new outside influence ofboth the boon and the hero who brought it.) Here


is a common story, a prototypical narrative founduniversally in all cultures. The boxes concept iscentral to it. The hero story is our life story, anda good part of it involves leaving our home boxesand returning to them.

Deep psychological and spiritual meanings areattached to this desire to get inside protective boxes.You could say that the garments we wear constituteboxes of a sort, boxes we climb inside in order tofeel secure. Animals may have fur, scales, and otherbody coverings, but none feel the need to donadditional coverings.

I found that students did wonderfully on this as-signment, taking these ideas and figuring out someof the boxes of their lives. There was somethingabout the boxes image that was intuitive and easyfor them. They immediately were able to use it tothink about their lives and to some extent theiremotions. I remember one of my students one day,a woman, stopped me after class and said, “Dr.Benson, I’d like to tell you about something thathappened to me. I thought a lot about boxes in mylife and concluded that my boyfriend and his fam-ily were small-box and I was large-box, so I endedour relationship. I’d always thought there was some-thing wrong but couldn’t figure it out until now.”

Cognitive Linguistics

The boxes idea was the container Image Schemadiscovered by Cognitive Linguistics. Let me saysomething about this new approach to linguisticsbecause it’s quite revolutionary.

Back in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky revolution-ized the field of linguistics by postulating a “lan-guage module” in the brain that enables humans tothink linguistically. Studies of syntax showed thatchildren know the rules of language much betterthan they would have if they just learned it by im-itating what they heard from others. Two things arenoteworthy here. First, Chomsky’s work helped putan end to the rule of behaviorist psychology, wherewe pay no attention at all to anything inside thehead; and second, this Chomskian language mod-ule was assumed to have no relation to the body.

At a certain point in a child’s development, thismodule gets triggered into activity and they’re onthe way to developing adult language ability.

Several of Chomsky’s students, one being GeorgeLakoff, wondered about the dis-embodied natureof the language in this language module.4 In the1970s they began to explore the possibility that lan-guage might actually be tied to the structure of thebrain, and the brain to the body. To make a long(and very interesting!) story short, a whole new ap-proach to linguistics was born out of this new ap-proach. What philosopher Mark Johnson and otherlinguists began to see was that our bodily experi-ence of the world provides the foundation of lan-guage, and more, there is a whole additional layerof thinking in the brain that precedes language.

What happened, then, was that linguisticsbranched out and made new alliances with var-ious other scholarly fields: psychology, sociologyand anthropology; the neurosciences; political sci-ence; the humanities, and even mathematics. Allthese fields were fascinated by the prospect thatbasic bodily structures in the brain grounded theirfields.5 One needs only to compare this new bodyand brain-based view of language to the Chom-skian dis-embodied view and you have the essenceof what may be a significant turn in the studyof the humanities. Here’s how Lakoff puts it: Wewill need to embrace a deep rationality that cantake account of, and advantage of, a mind thatis largely unconscious, embodied, emotional, em-phatic, metaphorical, and only partly universal.6

Frames and Metaphors

The part of CL I use in exploring the liberal-conservative concepts is two-fold: frames andmetaphors. Frames are neural structures in the brainthat cluster various things together in bunches, sowhen you think of just one element in that cluster,everything else in that frame gets dragged along andis available for use. For example the word “shop-ping” includes a whole host of elements: a store,a trip to a store, money to pay for what I buy,products I purchase, and so on. Many of the frames


we use in our everyday thinking are exceedinglyrich, yet we handle them with amazing ease.

Besides frames we need to understand Lin-guistic Expressions, Conceptual Metaphors, and ImageSchemas. Linguistic Expressions are based on Concep-tual Metaphors. So when in a moment we examinethe phrase, “He sure had a closed mind!” what moti-vates it is the Conceptual Metaphor: minds are con-tainers (in our case, “boxes”), and this, in turn, ismotivated by the Image Schema, container.7 There’sa basic logical structure here in this container Im-age Schema. All containers encase things, surroundthem, hold them, protect them, imprison them,and so on. Some form of this Image Schema isautomatically called to mind whenever we use thewords “inside,” “outside,” “into,” and “out of.”8 I’malways amazed how many things in our everydaylives work off this containment idea.

In our little lesson on the boxes of our lives, wesaw a number of Conceptual Metaphors used: wombsare boxes, homes are boxes, schools are boxes, cul-tures are boxes, stages in life are boxes, and so on.9

The reason I made this assignment was to get stu-dents thinking about the different ways in which peoplecan practice a religion. Some do it in a “liberal” way,and others a “conservative” way. When you studythe history of religions, you meet again and againsplits and re-alignments, forced conversions and allkinds of personal “conversions.” Fanatics and large-souled saints profusely litter the long years of re-ligious history. Why? I took this CL material andused it to help me look at the concepts “liberal”and “conservative.”

The Role of Emotion

Two questions arose in my mind when I startingthinking “the CL way.” When it comes to liberaland conservative, a mountain of emotion is usu-ally involved. That’s my first question. When youtake a “frames” approach to the study of liberaland conservative, this becomes very evident veryquickly. For example, you take an actual utterance(linguistic expression) and examine it. It’s always partof a frame or frames where emotions are included.I won’t get into this here, except to say that indi-

viduals and groups get very excited about their be-liefs, so much so that they even give their lives forthem! My question: Is this intrinsic to the beliefsand practices themselves, or something different?

Is Religion Self—Relational?

A second question that has always dogged my stepsever since I started working with this containmentidea is this: Is religion self-referential in some way?Does it in its very structure tell us how to takeit, whether in a liberal or a conservative way? InChristianity, for example, one could say that thewhole world is a box outside of which God exists.Does this mean the stories we tell about Him/Heralways will be provisional, “outside” our clear un-derstanding as to their ultimacy and finality? Is thiswhat Paul Tillich once said about doubt being anintegral part of faith?10 I don’t know, but it’s athought.

I won’t be able to really deal with these twoquestions here, but I wanted to describe them any-way. What I want to do in the rest of this arti-cle is show how the frames usually invoked with“liberal” and “conservative” usually involve “boxes,”the containment idea. (One thing I’ve noticed whendoing this exploration, by the way, is that thecommonly used terms, “left” and “right” for liber-als [progressives] and conservatives, respectively, donot generate living frames. They are arbitrary andconventional,11 telling us nothing about how thesedesignations touch real life. The same can be saidfor the “red” and “blue” colors used for charts andmaps12 that show where conservatives and liberalsare located.)

“ Open-minded”and “ Close-minded”

So let’s get started. I once said to my wife, “Hesure had a closed mind!” We’d just argued with aNew York City grocer about a product called “Liq-uid Smoke.” He insisted that there was no suchthing, and we, of course, had purchased it often in


Minneapolis. He wasn’t even going to look it upand order it for us.

This experience used the “shopping” frame, butwe’ll ignore that here. We’ll focus on the framewhere the expression might be used: “open” and“closed.” These terms call to mind a house withdoors and windows that can be opened or shut.The Conceptual Metaphor is: minds are houses withdoors and windows that contain ideas. Thinking insidethe metaphor, our friend the storekeeper kept hiswindows and doors closed in this discussion andwouldn’t allow our ideas to enter his head. Weassumed he’d “open up” and were surprised whenhe didn’t.

I’d say that in this situation our grocer was“conservative.” Conservatives don’t want to con-sider reports of ideas that contradict what theyhave in their minds. Let’s say, a “liberal” in thiscase wouldn’t have done that. He’d have said, “Oh,really. I never heard of that: ‘Liquid Smoke,’ eh.I’ll look it up. Check with me in a couple days.”

Emotions? I can imagine a lot of them here.In this case we felt somewhat peeved. It wasn’t aserious matter, but still we felt demeaned and putdown, maybe even a bit unwelcome in his store.That’s likely the case every time the comment ismade that someone has a “closed mind.” It meansthat nothing can get in to this person. He has all heneeds and refuses anything new. There’s an outside-in movement. In the academic world we meet thisall the time. New ideas come repeatedly and wehave to decide whether we’re going to “let themin” or not. In the academic world we make a bigthing of always having an “open mind” toward newideas and practices.

Another example might be Chinese history. The“Middle Kingdom” always has been proud and self-contained culturally, unwilling to admit much ofanything from the outside. By contrast, Japan, onceits doors were opened in the 1850s, borrowed freelyfrom the West and has done so to this day.

Close- and open-minded persons are easy toidentify. I once had a student in an on-line coursewho refused to hand in an assignment that involvedcomparing and contrasting various religions, one ofwhich was his own, Christianity. It takes a certainopenness of mind to compare one’s own religion

with another, and the reason this student refusedto do this is because he held his Christianity to be“in-comparable” to any of the others. Contrastinghe could do, pointing out how and where all theother religions were false, his own being the onlytrue one, but he was unable to put all religions onthe same table and compare them that way.

Our recent fights in the U.S. among Republicanconservatives quickly come to mind as I write this(October, 2013). The extreme conservatives amongthem refuse to accept any new facts or argumentshaving to do with such things as global warming(in part caused by human hands), evolution, theU.S. social safety net, health care changes, and soon.

What about emotions here? They range fromour mild peevishness when our grocer told us therewas no such thing as Liquid Smoke, to irate parentswho home school their children because the publicschools teach evolution. Those of us who feel thesenew ideas are essential for modern life feel sad andare critical of these parents. So when applied tomany different areas of life, the concepts liberaland conservative are very emotion-laden.

Leaving and Entering

Let’s move on now to another liberal-conservativeframe where containment is central and ConceptualMetaphor is present. The frame is leaving and en-tering.

We talk about conservatives being reluctant toenter into new things and leave traditional or oldones. The word, “conservative” says as much; ithas “conserve” in it. Here, too, our boxes image canhelp us explore the words liberal and conservativeas they relate to our response to time and change.Boxes are the things we leave and enter. This isconveyed by the words “into” and “out of.”

Let’s see this in another story I used in religionclass:13

Philip is a college freshman who is homefor Christmas vacation. At the family dinner


table his father asks him how school is go-ing. He says, “Fine.”

Philip’s little sister, who is actually a tenthgrader soon to consider going away to col-lege herself, asks, “What did you end uptaking, anyway?”

“Oh, I have English, Phys Ed, AmericanHistory, and a Philosophy of Religion class.”

“Cool!” she responds. “What does ‘Philoso-phy of Religion’ mean?

Philip responds: “Oh, you study the exis-tence of God, the problem of evil, life afterdeath in various religions, things like that.Actually, that’s my favorite class. The teacheris really great. He really makes you think.

Phil’s father is the next one to speak. Hesays, “The existence of God? Why wouldyou have to talk about that? Of course Godexists! Do you study atheism too?”

“Yes, we just finished that, the atheism part.There we go through various arguments thatatheists put forward. I found that the mostinteresting part of the class.”

Father again: “Actually, I don’t like it thata Christian college like you’re going to putsideas into young heads that could turn themaway from our Lord, Jesus Christ. I’d thinkthe college would want to build up the faith,rather than tear it down.”

Philip is a bit puzzled by this response,but replies “He’s not tearing it down—ourfaith—he’s just trying to have us develop ourown understanding of religion.”

“I don’t think I like that,” father responds.

Phil confesses that that discussion made himunderstand atheists much better, that theyhad pretty good arguments.

Suddenly, Phil’s mother’s mouth begins toquiver and her eyes tear up. She excuses her-self and hurries upstairs to her bedroom. Thefamily can hear her crying up there.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Phil’s fathersays.

“Aw, Jeez, What did I do?” Phil responds.

We talked about this in class. I’d point out thatPhilip has ventured outside the box his parentsare used to living in—and in which he used tolive (maybe still does, to some extent, though hedoesn’t really “feel at home” there any more). Hisfamily culture is a conservative one where certainbasic religious ideas and practices are presumed. Inthis case, Phil’s mother clearly feels that her sonhas abandoned their family box and things are go-ing to change. Both parents are hurt, or at leastshocked, by what has happened to Phil in his reli-gious thinking. They see no reason to change theirfamily culture, but Phil seems excited about newreligious ideas.

The “Home” Box vs. the “College” Box

Phil has wandered “out” of his traditional familybox into another, the new one of his college com-munity. His teacher at the college obviously doesn’tthink there is—or has to be—a challenge to one’sfaith when considering religious ideas dear to oth-ers. The college box here is a culture that encour-ages its students to open their minds to new ideas.But when these two cultures met, there is conflict.I like to think that eventually Phil and his par-ents would reconcile, but initially, at least, there isfriction between them.

Conservatives value tradition over innovation,while liberals value freedom over security. I didn’tdo this in my classes, but it now occurs to me thatI might have listened to Tevya’s “Tradition” song inthe movie, “Fiddler on the Roof.” (The reader canright now listen to this song on YouTube—see thefootnote below.)14 The story is of a young couplethat wants to do things differently than the oldergeneration did. The older generation feels that it’sdangerous to change things that are tried and true.One shouldn’t leave them.

In Tevya’s song, we hear him sing that traditiongives him a sense of security. It’s like a house helives in. In it he knows what he’s to do, how to do


it, who he’s to do it with, and so on. Here’s whereTevya gets his sense of place and his life’s meaning.Security in life is important to have.

As far as Tevya is concerned, security is the mostimportant thing, so we’d call him a “conservative.”The younger generation in this play/movie we’d call“liberals” (or, today, “progressives”). Tevya’s daugh-ter and her boyfriend, though, are willing to sacri-fice security for the freedom. They love each other,so don’t want the match-maker to find a mate forthem. To be forced to marry someone their fatherpicks is for them a prison. They want freedomfrom that prison.

The Conceptual Metaphors here are at least two:traditions are homes (boxes); and life is a movementout of one box into another. The emotions here arereal, on both sides. It’s painful for parents to seetheir children move into another world, one inwhich they themselves don’t feel comfortable. Onthe other hand, from a young person’s point ofview, it feels painfully constricted to remain in theold culture.

Large and Small Boxes: TheQuestion of Pluralism; Toleranceand Intolerance

Let’s think of Phil’s experience another way. Philhas wandered out of his smaller family box into thelarger box of his college community. There he meetsmany different boxes new to him. We see here alarge box inside of which are various smaller ones.Phil’s college teacher obviously doesn’t think thereneeds to be a challenge to one’s faith in consideringreligious ideas dear to others. The college box is apluralistic one where different beliefs are welcome.It’s also is a culture that encourages students toexpand their minds as they think bigger thoughts,maybe entertaining many thoughts on the samething. Phil’s parent’s small box culture isn’t usedto this. There’s a definite uneasiness on their part.Phil’s mother actually breaks down and has to leavethe dinner table. For many this is a very seriousmatter, filled with emotion.

These days it happens less often than a few yearsago, but many families split over religion and allthat goes with it. Children find themselves dis-owned and disinherited by parents who can’t openup to new cultures. Inter-racial marriages also havecaused the splintering of many families.

Making Choices

Those families that find a way to reconcile theirdifferences, how do they do it? I know of a pas-tor and his wife whose daughter a number of yearsago “came out” as a lesbian and united in a specialchurch ceremony with her partner. These parentsrefused to attend the uniting ceremony. But sub-sequently they thought it over. Should they staywith their principles that opposed gay partnerships(now marriages) and lose their daughter? They de-cided that keeping a good relationship with Judywas more important than their moral principle, soto this day their relationship with her has beenexemplary. Here the conservatives changed. Theyopen up to the larger box.

Looking at our own political context, New YorkTimes columnist Thomas Friedman sees a hankeringfor an American monoculture. He sees the recent“Tea Party” Republicans as striving for that, eventhough that is never going to happen. Comparedto most countries in the world today, we in theU.S. live in a very large multi-cultural box thatgets larger and more diverse every year. We arenever going to have a single culture here.

So are we talking like liberals when we talk thisway about the American future? I think we are. It’sthe conservative mono-culturalists who are going tohave to change. They’re the ones who will have tolearn to tolerate working, living and playing withothers.

Inclusive and Exclusive

The terms inclusive and exclusive also are a framein which containment is central. Liberals wouldbe associated with those who are inclusive and


conservatives those who are exclusive. Notice theboxes image here: in-clusion and ex-clusion.

I think right away of “gated” communities.They’re designed to keep undesirable people out.Security is the reason most often given for these.Those living in them are wealthy and have much tolose. Let’s imagine a box here. Some on the insidewant to invite in those who are outside. Others onthe inside want to keep out those on the outside.The first are liberals and the second conservatives.

Examples that illustrate these two frames areeasy to come by. I invite new neighbors to dropby for coffee when they can afford a break fromtheir moving in. That’s one that uses an “inclusion”frame. Another example might be a church goingout of its way to invite a new African Americanfamily to join their church.

Racism in the American context supplies us withmany examples of the “exclusion” frame. No blackswere to sit in the front of buses, sit at certainlunch counters, and drink from certain public waterfountains.

In the U.S. we have a large number of immi-grants. This always has been the case. We are anation of immigrants. What happens now, though,is that those of a conservative bent grow increas-ingly protective of what they have, not willing toshare it with newcomers. The “exclusion” frame isused today repeatedly as Congress struggles to passa new comprehensive immigration law.

Absolutism as Refusal toCompromise: “ Better Dead ThanRed”

Many of us found ourselves totally involved in thecurrent TV series, “Homeland,” where an Americansoldier is “turned” into a suicide bomber. Terroriststoday have become a part of our way of life. Indi-viduals associate with fanatical groups bent on de-stroying everyone not exactly like themselves. Theirideology judges all outsiders as wicked and deserv-ing of annihilation, so they are justified in whatthey do. We can see that the boxes image fits

here, but what is the frame? Let’s call it the “abso-lutist” idea. There would seem to be two types, onethe “bargaining” frame, and the other the “martyrframe.” Let’s look at them both.

The “Bargaining Frame”

One new aspect of American politics in recentyears has been the refusal of some very conservativeRepublicans to compromise. For them compromiseis a bad word. Some of their moderate fellow-Republicans have criticized them for this. This iswhat they should be saying:

Always in the past compromise has been theway things in government have gotten done.Two people dicker over the price of a watchin a Near Eastern market. Back and forththey go, the merchant and the shopper. Fi-nally, one or both give in and agree on amiddle price. We know what that is. We’veall done it. But what if one side refuses tobargain? What you “Tea Party” Republicanshave done recently in the U.S. Congress isrefused to govern. If a merchant that won’tbudge on price, she makes no sale. If it’s thebuyer, she gets no watch. In other words, notransaction can take place without some side,or both of them, giving in and revising theirposition.

This is what the clear heads in the RepublicanParty should be preaching to the far right conser-vatives right now.

We might describe the “bargaining” frame as fol-lows: both persons start in separate boxes, but thenboth agree to leave those they were in and enter athird. In politics and religion we’ve coined variouswords and phrases to describe such non-bargainers:fanatics, hard-right ideologues, self-defeating fools,and in the case of these Tea Partiers,” “the suicidecaucus.”

The “Martyr” Frame

This last phrase suggests a second frame for thisabsolutist phenomenon. It’s the “martyr” frame. It


reminds me of a Cold War era phrase that expressesthis powerfully: “Better dead than red.” Duringthe Cold War of the 1950s through the 1980s,some in this country believed we should “just nuke‘em.” That meant, destroy the Soviet Union withour atomic bombs. When these absolutists werereminded that the Soviets would then return anddestroy us, and maybe the whole world, their re-sponse was “Better dead than red.”

In the recent “hostage-taking” (as some calledit) of the country by extreme Republicans who re-fused to raise the U.S. debt limit, some seemed towant to allow the default to happen. Either theywere ignorant of what would happen to the worldeconomic system if that happened, or they didn’tcare—didn’t care that the U.S. would suffer alsoas a result. “Better the default than what we havenow,” is what they seemed to be saying. Luckily,that was not the philosophy that prevailed in theend. The default was avoided.15 For me, this wasa situation where the “martyr” frame was used.

Bodies are Boxes

We’ve seen in this article how Cognitive Linguisticscan help us explore the concepts liberal and con-servative in new ways. It sees them as labels forvarious frames that are structured by the containerImage Schema and the Conceptual Metaphors gen-erated out of it. We’ve noted that, among otherthings, these frames include a good bit of emotion.Liberals and conservatives really care about theirbeliefs and actions.

When one looks over the various frames we dis-cussed here, one gets the definite sense that liberalsare the healthier and more attune to the way hu-man life must be lived. The conservative side hassome value to it, of course, but the liberal sideis the stronger and more central. It might be ourown bodies that give us a clue here: Bodies areBoxes. They take in air, food and water continuallyand eliminate them when we’re done with them.Time and change require us to continually leaveone box and enter another. The present is ladenwith the past, as Leibniz once said, but it’s the

present’s “pregnancy with the future” where mostof our emphasis must rest.

We’ve also noted that religion can be practicedeither of these two ways, in a liberal way or in aconservative way. Let’s close with that thought. Ear-lier, I raised the question whether religions them-selves might be self-referential, that is, that they in-struct their believers to take them in a liberal, nota conservative way, tentatively, not as absolutes,16

taken by faith, not by sight. I’d like to make a casefor that.

Endnotes

1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 2003.

2. George Lakoff, Women Fire, and Dangerous Things: What CategoriesReveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987). MarkJohnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination,and Reason. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

3. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); don’t think of an elephant!Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide For Progressives(White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsa Green Publishing, 2004);TalkingPoints: Communicating American Values: A Progressive Handbook (New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006); Whose Freedom? The Battle Over Amer-ica’s Most Important Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Picador,2006); The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and ItsPolitics (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Lakoff with Elisabeth Wehling,The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic(New York: Free Press, 2012).

4. The best short introduction to these revolutionary events is achapter in Lakoff’s book, The Political Mind, Op cit., Chapter 18. Otherbooks on this fascinating history are: Gepffrey J. Hick and John A.Golfsmith, Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Naom Chomsky and the Deep Struc-tures Debate. (London & New York: Routledge, 1995); and Randy AllenHarris, The Language Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

5. Also the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, the hu-manities, and even mathematics.

6. Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 13.

7. We don’t know how many of these there are, but everyoneagrees at least on these: SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, LINK, GROUNDING,AGENCY, BALANCE, UP-DOWN, FRONT-BACK, LEFT-RIGHTand MOMENTUM. In this article we’re not bringing in any of these,though we could. In several actual cognitive situations involving liberaland conservative, several are involved. Notice that all of these come outof common human experience of the world and social situations.

8. What fascinates me most are the image schemas. They are pos-tulated to connect our physical brains with our bodily experiences on theone hand and language on the other. There is a great deal of discussionon the nature of Image Schemas, though a general acceptance of them inCognitive Linguistics. See Beate Lampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning:Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 2005).

9. CL uses different styles of type font for these three differentlinguistic elements. I’ve not been perfectly consistent with these here, butuse them enough to stay somewhat in the CL system.


10. The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper &Row Torchbooks,1957, Perennial Books, 2001).

11. The words are really “left wing” and “right wing,” which goback to the French building that housed the French legislature after theRevolution. It had two wings, the one on the left seating those legislatorswho opposed the monarchy and supported the revolution, and the otherseating those who supported the monarchy and opposed the revolution.

12. Actually, these colors reverse the associations usually connectedwith these colors. The Chinese “yin” and “yang” concepts have it right, Ithink. There red connotes active, male, bright, assertive, dry, intelligent,etc. and Yin connotes passive, female, dull, retreating, stupid, wet, etc.This would suggest that the color red should really be liberal and blueconservative. But that’s no matter now. Those of us sensitive to suchthings have to just get used to reversing these.

13. This story is actually based on a personal experience of mineearly in my teaching career. A local Lutheran pastor asked to

see me about one of his parishioners, a young woman student I hadin Bible class. We met at the college and he complained, with anger I hisvoice, that I had “destroyed the faith” of this young woman. Apparentlymy way of studying the Bible historically was upsetting to her.

14. You can watch this song sung in YouTube, from the film versionof the Broadway play. The URL is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =gRdfX7ut8gw

15. Warren Buffet, in an interview with Charlie Rose in late October(10/22/13, on National Public TV.) likened the seriousness of dickeringwith a debt limit default to the cold war dickering with atomic weapons.Financial default is the atom bomb of the financial world, was Buffet’s Con-ceptual Metaphor here. You don’t dicker with such weapons.

16. One might say that the so-called “Axial Age” religions seem tohave this character. See Robert Bellah’s masterpiece on this. Religion inHuman Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. (Cambridge, Mas-sachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011).

understanding liberals and conservatives

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