The Human Mind
Strict Father morality is not just out of touch with the realities of raising children. It has a problem that goes even deeper. It is out of touch with the realities of the human mind.
To see why, we need to look first at ten deep and necessary assumptions made by Strict Father morality, and then look at what the human mind would have to be like if those ten assumptions could hold. Here are those assumptions:
There is a universal, absolute, strict set of rules specifying what is right and what is wrong for all times, all cultures, and all stages of human development.
If this were not true, there would not be strict moral boundaries, there would be no single straight and narrow path for us all to follow, and there would be no absolute moral standards. This is why conservatives cannot tolerate multiculturalism, which denies this claim, maintaining instead that different cultures may have different rules and standards. Conservatives assume that denying absolute rules and standards is to say that there are no rules and no moral standards at all. The only possibilities they see are moral absolutism or chaos. We will see below that such a dichotomy is false.
Each such rule has a fixed, clear, unequivocal, directly interpretable meaning which does not vary.
If rules have any significant variability of meaning, then moral boundaries and standards are not strict and the “same” rule could legitimately mean different things to different people. If people don’t understand “the” rules in the same way, then there is no such thing as “the” rules. There are only different understandings. If the rule is not directly interpretable, then what counts as a moral standard is subject to interpretation, which means it cannot be absolute.
Each moral rule must be literal, and hence must make use of only literal concepts.
If a moral rule is metaphorical, then it is not directly interpretable. In order to know how to follow it, one would have to supply a metaphorical interpretation. But since different metaphorical interpretations are possible, the rule would not be fixed and absolute.
Each human being has access to the fixed, clear, unequivocal meaning of moral rules.
If someone cannot understand exactly what the rule is intended to mean, then punishment for disobedience cannot have the effect of getting the person to follow the rule.
Each rule is general, in that it applies not just to specific people or actions but to whole categories of people and actions.
Rules cannot define general moral standards if they are just about specific individual people and actions. They must be about categories of people and categories of actions.
The categories mentioned in each rule must have fixed definitions and precise boundaries, set for all time and the same in all cultures.
If the definitions of the categories were not absolutely fixed, then the meanings of the rules could vary from person to person, culture to culture, or time to time, and they would no longer be absolute. If the boundaries of the categories were not precise, then the moral standards would not be clear and people would not be able to know exactly what was right and what was wrong.
This is a major point. Moral absolutism requires conceptual absolutism. If variability of meaning of any sort is inherent in concepts, then the rules using those concepts are subject to the same variability of meaning. And if that happens, then the whole idea of absolute, universal moral rules becomes impossible.
All human beings must be able to understand such rules in order to have the free will to follow them or not.
You can’t make a free choice to do or not to do something if you don’t know what that thing is.
These rules must be able to be communicated perfectly, from the legitimate authority responsible for enforcement to the person under the obligation to follow them. There must be no variation in meaning between what is said and what is understood.
People can’t obey your orders if they have a different idea than you do of what those orders are.
People do things they don’t want to do in order to get rewards and avoid punishments. This is just human nature and is part of what it means to be “rational.”
The whole idea of rewarding or punishing people for following or not following rules depends on this being true. If it is not true, then punishing people for breaking rules and offering rewards for following them will have no effect. Without such an effect, authority breaks down.
But, for this to be true, people must be able to understand precisely what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. There must be no meaning variation concerning what rewards and punishments are.
Here we return to the invariability of meaning. It makes no sense to impose punishments if the meaning of the punishment is not itself clear. If the idea of what the punishment is can vary substantially, then what you think of as a punishment might be understood by someone else as being neutral or even as a reward. Remember Brer Rabbit and the briar patch.
These are minimal conditions on the way human beings must function in order for Strict Father morality to be viable. If these conditions are not all met, then that moral system becomes incoherent. For example, suppose that people do not operate generally by reward and punishment. Then the threat of punishment will not be a deterrent, nor the promise of reward an incentive. Without reward and punishment guiding human action, Strict Father morality cannot get off the ground. In short, Strict Father morality requires perfect, precise, literal communication, together with a form of behaviorism.
Thus, Strict Father morality requires that four conditions on the human mind and human behavior must be met:
1. Absolute categorization: Everything is either in or out of a category.
2. Literality: All moral rules must be literal.
3. Perfect communication: The hearer receives exactly the same meaning as the speaker intends to communicate.
4. Folk behaviorism: According to human nature, people normally act effectively to get rewards and avoid punishments.
Cognitive science has shown that all of these are false. The human mind simply does not work this way. And it’s not that these principles are off just a little. They are all massively false. But, before going on to see why they are false, it is important to see why it is important that they are false.
Categorization
Let us begin with categories. First, categories can be fuzzy; they can have shaded borders. What is a rich person? There are clear cases, but no absolute income line clearly demarcates rich from non-rich. There is a gradation. There are no clear boundaries here. One can artificially impose them, of course. But then one could impose them in another way just as well. Consider a moral rule like “The rich should help the poor.” If person A does not help person B, it is not always clear whether the rule is being violated.
Fuzzy categories like “rich” and “poor” regularly appear in moral rules. One can always draw lines in one way or another—below this line is poor, above that line is rich. But where one draws these lines is a matter of interpretation and discretion, just what a strictly absolute morality cannot tolerate.
Second, categories can be radial, as in the case of a mother. Suppose you have lots of mothers of various kinds. A genetic mother (who donated the egg that formed you). A birth mother (who bore you). Your father’s wife at the time of your birth, who raised you. And your father’s second wife, your step-mother. How do you know if you have obeyed the commandment “Respect thy mother”? Which mother? All of them? Even the egg donor you’ve never met? Even the birth mother you haven’t seen since you left the womb? Of course the meaning of mother has changed since the time of the commandment. And that is the point. Meanings change in this way constantly. Most categories are radial. If the concept undergoing change is part of a moral rule, then the rule is not clear and unequivocal. It will require interpretation. But there are always different possibilities for interpretation. And that makes the rule not strict and unequivocal. It means the rule defines not one path but many possible ones.
Third, there are prototype effects. Suppose you have a stereotype of athletes as dumb and you are in charge of admissions to a major university. This is, of course, a false stereotype, just as all stereotypes by their very nature are false. Suppose you feel that this places a moral obligation on you not to admit dumb people into the university. Suppose you do, under alumni pressure, admit athletes. Have you violated your self-imposed moral obligation?
The problem is this: Rules contain categories (e.g., dumb people). People usually have stereotypes for thousands of their categories. It is completely normal (though maybe not nice) for people to reason in terms of stereotypes. Because different people have different stereotypes, they will understand a category differently and reason about it differently. That means that they will understand a moral rule containing that category differently. In short, the fact that people really do reason about categories on the basis of stereotypes violates the condition that the meaning of a rule must be invariant from person to person and occasion to occasion. The mind just doesn’t work that way.
Incidentally, stereotype-based reasoning is only one form of a much more widespread phenomenon called “prototype-based reasoning.” We have seen other examples of prototype-based reasoning in this book. One type is reasoning in terms of ideal cases, as when one thinks about conservatives or liberals in terms of an ideal model of conservatives or liberals. Another type is reasoning on the basis of demons, or anti-ideals. We have seen plenty of cases of demon-based reasoning throughout this book. Another case is called “salient exemplar” reasoning, where one takes a well-known case to stand for a whole category. This is common throughout political and moral discourse.
Fuzzy categories, radial categories, stereotypes, and other forms of prototype-based reasoning all introduce meaning variability. Radial categories are produced, in large measure, because categories do change over time, and their extensions over time are often preserved in radial category structure.
FRAMING
Alternative framing possibilities also provide for forms of everyday variation in meaning. Consider an example from my colleague Charles Fillmore (see References, sec. A3). Suppose you have a friend named Harry who doesn’t like to spend much money. You could conceptualize him and describe him in two very different ways. You could say either “He’s thrifty” or “He’s stingy.” Both sentences indicate that he doesn’t spend much money, but the first frames that fact in terms of the issue of resource preservation (thrift), while the second frames the issue in terms of generosity (stinginess).
Now imagine an invocation that says: Spend as little money as possible. This is the message that a balanced budget amendment would send to Congress. There are three ways to interpret this invocation: Either “Be thrifty” or “Be stingy” or both. Liberals argue that the government should be thrifty but not stingy. Conservatives argue, on the basis of Strict Father morality, that thriftiness in government is never stinginess, since cutting off government funding just makes people more self-disciplined and self-reliant and so is good for them.
The point is that such an invocation, which is a very real invocation, has two interpretations depending on framing. Moreover, the meaning of that framing depends on world-view, as we have seen throughout this book. But Strict Father morality demands a view of the human mind in which such framing and worldview differences do not and cannot exist. Moral rules, in order to be moral rules, must be understandable in the same way to everybody. The very existence of different worldviews and different modes of framing shows that this is false. The human mind is such that framing differences and worldview differences really do exist, not just here and there in minor ways, but on a truly massive scale. The prohibition “Don’t murder babies” may or may not apply to taking a morning-after pill, depending on whether a cluster of cells is framed as a “baby” and taking such a pill is framed as “murder.”
Variability in meaning due to framing and worldview differences and to the properties of categories (fuzziness, radial structure, prototypes) creates such a huge meaning variability in normal, everyday human reasoning that the conditions needed for the Strict Father model to be coherent are just not met.
Rewards and Punishments
Such variability also occurs in the understandings of rewards and punishments. Anytime you specify a reward or a punishment, you use human categories that are subject to the same kinds of meaning variability. This means that “rewards” and “punishments” vary in their meaning. Remember the moral of Brer Rabbit: being thrown into the briar patch, which would have been a punishment to others, was a reward to him.
Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and a small army of co-workers have produced, over two decades, an enormous body of research (see References, sec. A5) detailing how people do not operate by folk behaviorism, that is, according to an objective characterization of what ought to be in their best interests—what ought to count as reward and punishment. Their experiments show in case after case that people just do not reason that way even when it matters a lot to them. Often, the source of that failure is due to the fact that people use other forms of reasoning that get in the way of a reward-punishment form of “rationality”—prototype-based reasoning, alternate framings, worldview differences—which affect how categories of people and events are understood and even affect judgments of simple probability.
The fact is that people do not reason all the time, or even primarily, in terms of maximizing clear and unequivocal rewards and punishments. This fact undermines the principle of the Morality of Reward and Punishment, on which Strict Father morality is based. If punishment isn’t always understood as punishment, or if punishment is not usually the basis on which people act, then the whole Strict Father paradigm is undermined. Using punishment to exact obedience to authority and so build self-discipline and self-reliance won’t work. And as we saw in the last chapter, it doesn’t work in the case of childrearing.
Metaphorical Thought
We have seen throughout this book that people conceptualize a great many things in terms of metaphor, morality itself being one of those things. The fact is that conceptual metaphor exists on a large scale and that it plays an enormous role in moral thought. Take the moral principle that punishment for crimes should be fair. This requires the use of the metaphor of Moral Accounting, and it prompts different accounting schemes around the world. In America, we ask how big a fine or how long a time in what kind of jail is to count as a punishment. The metaphor Well-Being Is Wealth prompts us to try to find a common measure in terms of which we can balance the moral books—balance one kind of harm (assault on well-being) in terms of another. The metaphor of Moral Accounting, being a metaphor, always requires further interpretation if we are to function in terms of it. And the fact that there are many kinds of possible interpretation means that the moral injunction that punishment be fair cannot be followed in just one way. It too has a multiplicity of possible interpretations. Such a multiplicity of interpretations for a moral injunction violates the need of Strict Father morality for a moral rule to have one absolute, universal, true-for-all-times-and-circumstances, clear and unequivocal meaning. The very existence of conceptual metaphor makes Strict Father morality unworkable because it violates the possibility for absolute moral standards.
Imperfect Communication
As for perfect communication, it should be obvious that it simply doesn’t work. The failure of perfect communication between liberals and conservatives should show that clearly. The fact of that failure is so prominent in cognitive science and linguistics that it has even become the subject of a best-selling self-help book—Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand. Tannen, a former student in my department and now a distinguished professor at Georgetown University, is just one researcher in a field of thousands studying the nature of human discourse and its difficulties. (See References, A4.)
One of the principal results in this discipline is that different people have different principles of indirect speech. Some people are understaters, who say less when they mean more, stop short of the punchline, and let the hearer draw his own conclusion. Others are overstaters, who exaggerate and never miss a punchline or stop short of a conclusion. Different people even have very different views of what constitutes polite conversation. For some people politeness means being indirect, asking a question rather than making a direct request, for example. For others politeness means directness, saying exactly what you mean, no more, no less. And once one gets into the details, the differences in conversational strategies get far more complex than this. Add to this all the meaning variation introduced by framing, worldview differences, metaphor, radial categories, fuzzy categories, and prototype-based reasoning, and you can see why communication is so very far from perfect.
Thus we can see that none of Strict Father morality’s requirements for what the human mind must be are actually met by real human minds functioning in real discourses. Strict Father morality is simply out of touch with real minds. Moral absolutism is not true because conceptual absolutism is not true. And moral training by enforcing obedience cannot work because people are not just simple reward-punishment machines.
Relativism
Does the failure of moral absolutism mean total moral relativism? Not at all, no more than the failure of conceptual absolutism means total conceptual relativism. As we saw in our study of the metaphors for morality, those metaphors are not arbitrary or random. They are strongly constrained by what morality is fundamentally about: promoting human well-being. The basic forms of well-being—health, strength, wealth, and so on—constrain the possibilities for metaphors for morality. Even basic forms of parenting-experience—Strict Father and Nurturant Parent—seem to provide a limited range of versions of the overall forms of moral systems. Research in cognitive science on the embodiment of mind shows that, despite enormous possibilities for variation, the variations are not unlimited and not random. They are constrained by various aspects of our biology and our experience functioning in the physical and social world. For an in-depth discussion of why conceptual variation and change does not lead to to anything like total relativism, see References, A2, Lakoff 1987, chap. 18.
Nurturant Parenting and a Nurturant Society
Finally we must take up one more question. Why does the existence of conceptual variation, imperfect communication, and the failure of folk behaviorism not lead to the same problems for Nurturant Parent morality? To see why, return for a moment to childrearing. In the Nurturant Parent model, constant communication, interaction, and discussion are crucial. As Berry Brazelton observes over and over in Touch-points, one must always tell a child why you are doing what you are doing, ask her opinion, ask how she feels, respect her feelings, take her suggestions, while sticking to what you think needs to be done unless your child makes a better suggestion. This process requires constant communication and negotiation of meaning. It assumes that meanings will be different and that communication will be imperfect. It assumes that if you keep communicating, note communication failures, attribute respect and goodwill to both parties, and continue to communicate, you will get to the point where the differences in communication and the variations in meaning won’t occur all that much, or matter all that much. What keeps the process of communication going is secure attachment, affection and affectionate behavior, mutual respect, empathy, commitment, clarity of expectations, and trust. That does not apply just to childrearing. It can apply to human interactions in general. That is what overcomes meaning-variations and imperfect communication.
What takes the place of the strict rules of the Strict Father model is clarity of expectations and empathy. What takes the place of reward and punishment is interdependence, communication, and a true desire to remain affectionately connected to those you live with.
FACING DIFFICULTIES
But what happens when the people in your community either want to dominate you or feel no affectionate connections to you or to anyone else? The only answer to date has been to do everything you can to build a nurturant community and extend it more and more to others over time. That is difficult and takes a long time and a lot of commitment and a lot of communication. But the nurturance model in general is difficult to follow and just does take a long time and a lot of commitment and a lot of communication. As with childrearing, there are no easy alternatives. But the Strict Father model is no alternative at all.
Again, as with creating a nurturant family life, it would be unreasonable to expect that creating a nurturant society should be easy or quick. One must be patient and ready to deal with frustration. And one must bear in mind the morality of happiness and self-nurturance. In the midst of frustration, you must find a way to be basically happy and to take care of yourself. If you don’t, you will become less nurturant.
Women have known throughout history that nurturance is a way of life. Many men have instinctively learned it from their mothers and their nurturant fathers. But the challenge in contemporary America is to create a nurturant society when a significant portion of that society has been raised either by authoritarian or neglectful parents.
America is between moral worlds and there is only one way to turn.