The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (6 page)

In addition, if you look at where Democrats get much of their money in the individual states, it is significantly from the lawyers who win tort cases. Many tort lawyers are important Democratic donors. Tort “reform”—as conservatives call it—cuts off this source of money. All of a sudden three-quarters of the money going to the Texas Democratic Party is not there. In addition, companies who poison the environment want to be able to cap possible awards. That way they can calculate in advance the cost of paying victims and build it into the cost of doing business. Irresponsible corporations win big from tort reform. The Republican Party wins big from tort reform. And these real purposes are hidden. The issue appears to be eliminating “frivolous lawsuits”—people getting thirty million dollars for having hot coffee spilled on them.

However, what the conservatives are really trying to achieve is not in the proposal. What they are trying to achieve follows from enacting the proposal. They don’t care primarily about the lawsuits themselves. They care about getting rid of environmental, consumer, and worker protections in general. And they care about defunding the Democratic Party. That is what a strategic initiative is.

There have been a couple of strategic initiatives on the left—environmental impact reports and the Endangered Species Act—but it has been forty years since they were enacted.

Unlike the right, the left does not think strategically. We think issue by issue. We generally do not try to figure out what minimal change we can enact that will have effects across many issues. There are very few exceptions.

There are also strategic initiatives of another kind—what I call slippery slope initiatives: Take the first step and you’re on your way off the cliff. Conservatives are very good at slippery slope initiatives. Take “partial-birth abortion.” There are almost no such cases. Why do conservatives care so much? Because it is a first step down a slippery slope to ending all abortion. It puts out there a frame of abortion as a horrendous procedure, when most operations ending pregnancy are nothing like this.

Why an education bill about school testing? Once the testing frame applies not just to students but also to schools, then schools can, metaphorically, fail—and be punished for failing by having their allowance cut. Less funding in turn makes it harder for the schools to improve, which leads to a cycle of failure and ultimately elimination for many public schools. What replaces the public school system is a voucher system to support private schools. The wealthy would have good schools—paid for in part by what used to be tax payments for public schools. The poor would not have the money for good schools. We would wind up with a two-tier school system, a good one for the “deserving rich” and a bad one for the “undeserving poor.”

The conservatives don’t have to win on issue after issue after issue. There are many things a progressive can do about it. Here are eleven.

First, notice what conservatives have done right and where progressives have missed the boat.
It is more than just control of the media, though that is far from trivial. What they have done right is to successfully frame the issues from their perspective. Acknowledge their successes and our failures.

Second, remember “Don’t think of an elephant.”
If you keep their language and their framing and just argue against it, you lose because you are reinforcing their frame.

Third, the truth alone will not set you free.
Just speaking truth to power doesn’t work. You need to frame the truths effectively from your perspective.

Fourth, you need to speak from your moral perspective at all times.
Progressive policies follow from progressive values. Get clear on your values and use the language of values. Drop the language of policy wonks.

Fifth, understand where conservatives are coming from.
Get their strict father morality and its consequences clear. Know what you are arguing against. Be able to explain why they believe what they believe. Try to predict what they will say.

Sixth, think strategically, across issue areas.
Think in terms of large moral goals, not in terms of programs for their own sake.

Seventh, think about the consequences of proposals.
Form progressive slippery slope initiatives.

Eighth, remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest.

Ninth, unite! And cooperate!
Here’s how: Remember the six modes of progressive thought: (1) socioeconomic, (2) identity politics, (3) environmentalist, (4) civil libertarian, (5) spiritual, and (6) antiauthoritarian. Notice which of these modes of thought you use most often—where you fall on the spectrum and where the people you talk to fall on the spectrum. Then rise above your own mode of thought and start thinking and talking from shared progressive values.

Tenth, be proactive, not reactive.
Play offense, not defense. Practice reframing, every day, on every issue. Don’t just say what you believe. Use your frames, not their frames. Use them because they fit the values you believe in.

Eleventh, speak to the progressive base in order to activate the nurturant model of biconceptual voters.
Don’t move to the right. Rightward movement hurts in two ways. It alienates the progressive base and it helps conservatives by activating their model in biconceptual voters.

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Part II
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Framing 102: Framing the Unframed

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Framing the Unframed

T
here are two common mistakes people make when thinking about framing.

The first mistake is believing that framing is a matter of coming up with clever slogans, like “death tax” or “partial-birth abortion,” that resonate with a significant segment of the population. Those slogans only work when there has been a long—often decades-long—campaign of framing issues like taxation and abortion conceptually, so that the brains of many people are prepared to accept those phrases. I was once asked if I could reframe—that is, provide a winning slogan for—a global warming bill “by next Tuesday.” I laughed. Effective reframing is the changing of millions of brains to be prepared to recognize a reality. That preparation hadn’t been done.

The second mistake is believing that, if only we could present the facts about a certain reality in some effective way, then people would “wake up“ to that reality, change their personal opinion, and start acting politically to change society. “Why can’t people wake up?” is the complaint—as if people are “asleep” and just have to be aroused to see and comprehend the world around them. But the reality is that certain ideas have to be ingrained in us—developed over time consistently and precisely enough to create an accurate frame for our understanding.

Here is an example. Pensions, even by those who advocate for them, are often framed as benefits—“extras” granted by an employer to the employed. Yet what is a pension, really? A pension is delayed payment for work already done. As a condition for taking a job, a pension is part of your earned salary, withheld and invested by your employer, to be paid later, after retirement. So if an employer says, “we just don’t have the money to pay for your pension,” that means that he has either embezzled, stolen, or misspent your earnings, which by contract he is responsible for paying you. Your employer is a thief.

I’ve had the repeated experience of talking to union leaders and groups of workers, pointing out to them that a pension is delayed payment for work already done. I get universal agreement. Then I ask, “Have you ever said it?” “No.” “Do you believe it?” “Yes.” “Would you start saying it?” That is where it gets difficult. Even for progressives, it is hard to shake the frame constructed over years by pundits on the right that pensions are pay for not working.

Yet the fact that pensions are delayed payments is an obvious truth that would undermine the idea promulgated by pundits on the right that pensions are pay for not working.

So why can people perceive an important truth on a topic crucial to them, a truth that needs to be out in public, and not say it, not make it part of their everyday discourse?

The reason is that just telling someone something usually does not make it a neural circuit that they use every day or even a neural circuit that fits easily into their pre-existing brain circuitry—the neural circuits that define their previous understandings and forms of discourse.

It is difficult to say things that you are not sure the public is ready to hear, to say things that have not been said hundreds of times before.

As noted in chapter 1, this problem has a name—hypocognition—the lack of the overall neural circuitry that makes common sense of the idea and that fits the forms of communication that one normally engages in, the things you are ready to say and that the people you speak to are ready to hear.

Slogans can’t overcome hypocognition. Only sustained public discussion has a chance. And that takes knowledge of the problem and a large-scale serious commitment to work for a change.

Several important issues that confront us right now—from global warming to the wealth gap and beyond—demand this kind of sustained discussion and commitment. I am offering this section of the book in the hope that various readers will take on the various tasks of working to provide frames—that is, automatic, effortless, everyday modes of understanding that we desperately need.

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Reflexivity: The Brain and the World

Y
ou might think that the world exists independently of how we understand it. You would be mistaken.

Our understanding of the world is part of the world—a physical part of the world. Our conceptual framings exist in physical neural circuitry in our brains, largely below the level of conscious awareness, and they define and limit how we understand the world, and so they affect our actions in the world. The world is thus, in many ways, a reflection of how we frame it and act on those frames, creating a world in significant part framed by our actions. Accordingly, the frame-inherent world, structured by our framed actions, reinforces those frames and recreates those frames in others as they are born, grow, and mature in such a world.

This phenomenon is called reflexivity. The world reflects our understandings through our actions, and our understandings reflect the world shaped by the frame-informed actions of ourselves and others.

To function effectively in the world it helps to be aware of reflexivity. It helps to be aware of what frames have shaped and are still shaping reality if you are going to intervene to make the world a better place.

Reflexivity just is. In itself, it is neither a good nor bad thing. It can be either.

Framing 102 is about how reflexivity can be used for the good, at least for the good of most people, most living things, and for the beauty and bounty of the physical world that supports all life.

In all too many cases, new frames—new forms of understanding—are required to comprehend the world so as to take advantage of reflexivity and make it a better place. This is especially true when the issues confronting us, and needing framing, are complex and systemic—like global warming, the wealth gap, and many other issues that have risen to great importance over the last decade.

Let us proceed.

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Systemic Causation

S
tudying cognitive linguistics has its uses.

Every language in the world has in its grammar a way to express direct causation. No language in the world has in its grammar a way to express systemic causation.

What’s the difference between direct and systemic causation?

From infanthood on we experience simple, direct causation. We see direct causation all around us: if we push a toy, it topples over; if our mother turns a knob on the oven, flames emerge. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation.

Any application of force to something or someone that produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word
cause
is unproblematic. We learn direct causation automatically as children because that’s what we experience on a daily basis. Direct causation, and the control over our immediate environment that understanding it allows, is crucial in the life of every child. That’s why it shows up in the grammar of every language.

The same is not true of systemic causation. Systemic causation cannot be experienced directly. It has to be learned, its cases have to be studied, and repeated communication is necessary before it can be widely understood.

That’s right. No language in the world has a way in its grammar to express systemic causation. You drill a lot more oil, burn a lot more gas, put a lot more CO
₂
in the air, the earth’s atmosphere heats up, more moisture evaporates from the oceans yielding bigger storms in certain places and more droughts and fires in other places, and yes, more cold and snow in still other places: systemic causation. The world ecology is a system—like the world economy and the human brain.

As a result, we lack a concept that we desperately need. We need it to understand and communicate, for instance, about the greatest moral issue of our time—global warming. The ecology is a system operating via systemic causation. Without an everyday concept of systemic causation, global warming cannot be properly comprehended. In other words, without the systemic causation frame, the oft-repeated facts about global warming cannot make sense. With only the direct causation frame, the systemic causation facts of global warming are ignored. The old frame stays, and the facts that don’t fit it cannot be comprehended.

The Structure of Systemic Causation

Systemic causation has a structure—four possible elements that can exist alone or in combination. Driving a complex, systemic problem, there can be one, two, three, or all four of these elements in play. Here is how they might be explained in conversations about global warming.

A network of direct causes.
(1) Global warming heats the Pacific Ocean. That means that the water molecules in the ocean get more active, move with more energy, evaporate more, and move in the air with more energy. (2) Winds in the high atmosphere over the ocean blow from southwest to northeast, blowing the larger amount of high-energy moisture over the pole. (3) In winter, the moisture turns to snow and comes down over the East Coast as a huge blizzard. Thus, global warming can systemically cause major blizzards.

Feedback loops.
(1) The arctic ice pack reflects light and heat. (2) As the earth’s atmosphere heats up, the arctic ice pack melts and gets smaller. (3) The smaller amount of arctic ice reflects less light and heat, and more heat stays in the atmosphere. (4) The atmosphere gets warmer. (5) The feedback loop: Even more arctic ice melts, even less heat is reflected, even more heat stays, even more ice melts, and on and on.

Multiple causes.
Because of the interaction between the polar vortex and the jet stream, parts of the vortex move south into central North America causing abnormal freezing temperatures as far south as Oklahoma and Georgia.

Probabilistic causation.
Many weather phenomena are probabilistic. What is caused is a probability distribution. Although you can’t predict whether a flipped coin will come down heads or tails, you can predict that over the course of a large number of flips, almost exactly 50 percent will come down heads and another 50 percent tails.

Yes, global warming systemically caused freezes in the American south. Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy—and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud: It was causation, systemic causation! Network causes, feedback loops, multiple causes—all acting probabilistically as part of the global weather system—have been systemically causing weather disasters. Yes, systemically causing untold human harm and billions, if not trillions, of dollars in damage.

Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies, which are a systemic cause of abortions.

Systemic causation, because it is less obvious than direct causation, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes. It may be probabilistic, occurring with a significantly high probability. It may require a feedback mechanism. In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.

Above all, it requires a name:
systemic causation
.

The precise details of Hurricane Sandy could not have been predicted in advance, any more than when, or whether, a smoker develops lung cancer, or sex without contraception yields an unwanted pregnancy, or a drunk driver has an accident. But systemic causation is nonetheless causal.

Semantics matters. Because the word
cause
is commonly taken to mean direct cause, climate scientists, trying to be precise, have too often shied away from attributing causation of a particular hurricane, drought, or fire to global warming. Lacking a concept—a frame—and language for systemic causation, climate scientists have made the dreadful communicative mistake of retreating to weasel words. Consider this quote from “Perception of Climate Change,” by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy, published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
:

. . . we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.

The crucial words here are
high degree of confidence
,
anomalies
,
consequence
,
likelihood
,
absence
, and
exceedingly small
. Scientific weasel words! The power of the bald truth, namely causation, is lost.

This is no small matter: The fate of the earth is at stake. The science is excellent. The scientists’ ability to communicate is lacking. Without the words, the idea cannot even be expressed. And without an understanding of systemic causation, we cannot understand what is hitting us.

Global warming is real, and it is here. It is causing—yes, causing—death, destruction, and vast economic loss. And the causal effects are getting greater with time. We cannot merely adapt to it. The costs are incalculable. What we are facing is huge. Each day, the amount of extra energy accumulating via the heating of the earth is the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Each day!

What Journalists Can Do

Because systemic causation has mostly gone unframed and unnamed, journalists have previously been at a loss and have been driven to resort to inadequate and misleading metaphors. Charles Petit, writing in the
Knight Science Journalism Tracker
of January 7, 2014, gives a list of such metaphors. Here are some beauts:

A weaker polar vortex moving around the Arctic like a slowing spinning top, eventually falling over and blowing open the door to the Arctic freezer . . .

This big slug of deadly cryosphere air slipped its North Pole moorings, marauded across Canada, and swept through the eastern US . . .

When the winds weaken, the vortex can begin to wobble like a drunk on his fourth martini . . . in this case, nearly the entire polar vortex has tumbled southward . . .

Responsible journalists can do better.

Responsible journalists need to discuss systemic causation. Certainly when discussing global warming and its climate effects, and also when discussing other systemic effects—such as those of fracking, the privatization of education, the decline of unions, and so on.

Responsible journalists also need to discuss a devastating systemic effect on our economics, recently discovered but not brought into public discourse by the press: the systemic effect of the relationship between productive wealth and reinvestment wealth.

The version of systemic causation just discussed is designed to fit global warming phenomena. In addition, there are other forms of systemic causation that we will be discussing, for example, in the study of economics. But for our purposes in this book, the most important form of systemic causation concerns the brain itself. The phenomenon of reflexivity is a form of systemic causation. And the relationship between our politics and the concept of personhood is one of the hardest cases of systemic causation to get across to the public, especially to political pundits, policy makers, strategists, pollsters, and other political professionals.