Bullshit, Metaphors, and Political Precision

Given this natural condition of uncertainty in the meaning of words, and their critical role in communication, to say the least, we can certainly expect that as we move away from the sciences towards other areas of human endeavor we have even greater vagueness in trying to express complex ideas. Politics is an easy example. America’s current American president is a babbling bullshitter, to use the explanatory framework of the essay, On Bullshit, and he is easy to characterize as an idiot, like when he conflates Western liberalism with something going on exclusively in modern California.

In this particular case, we have to track down what “liberal” means and meant at various times, then try to suss out how that meaning is working today. At one time, the term was simply expressive of freedom with minimal government interference. Libertarians still carry a version of that meaning forward, but liberalism also came to mean something akin to a political focus on government spending to right perceived economic and social disparities (to achieve “freedom from want and despair,” via FDR). And then it began to be used as a pejorative related to that same focus.

As linguist John McWhorter points out, abstract ideas—and perhaps especially political ones—are so freighted with their pragmatic and historical background that the best we can say is that we are actively working out what a given term means. McWhorter suggests that older terms like “socialist” are impossible to put to work effectively; a newer term like “progressive” is more desirable because it carries less baggage.

An even stronger case is made by George Lakoff where he claims central metaphors that look something like Freudian abstractions govern political perspectives. Lakoff, in Whose Freedom? and elsewhere, uses contextual frames and deep/surface metaphors as explanatory mechanisms for how we think about politics. Conservatives have a deep metaphor of the “strict father” while progressives have the “nurturant parent family.” The surface metaphors and image regimes follow from this in public discourse: voting rights are under threat from outsiders for the contemporary conservative, versus being under threat from excessive and stifling regulation for their progressive counterpart.

These metaphorical systems result in polarized discussions with constant language reframing: “right to life” versus “woman’s rights;” “socialized medicine” versus “medical care as a right;” etc.

Is there any systematic way to go from polemics towards a less freighted and neutral way of handling these linguistic and cognitive processes? An approach similar to crowd-sourcing policies might be one way to move forward. I’ve previously discussed a model for using crowd-sourcing combined with expert curation of political policies. Don’t worry too much over whether any of this is practical or doable; the goal here is just to brainstorm large goals in the hunt for more modest improvements.

Let’s imagine how such a system might play out using voter identification concepts as a basis. An individual or group proposes that voters should have to present identification in order to vote. Their goal, as they state it, is to reduce fraudulent votes. Others point out that many people don’t have identification yet are citizens and should have the right to vote. Experts start to curate the proposal and pull up academic and government studies related to the rates of fraudulent voters. (Hold your opinions on the matter here in suspension for a bit longer. It’s hard, I know.)

Now, the critical requirement that arises in terms of this expert curation is exactly the opposite of the think-tank-opinion-makers-as-experts approach. It is not a moment to apply an ideology. Instead, let’s use a Wikipedia-like model for how the curation moves forward. “Weasel words” are not allowed, for instance, and analysis must subscribe to a “neutral point of view,” which means that expert opinions need to curate each other to insure that where there are disagreements they are properly recorded in a balanced fashion. Good documentation of facts in a transparent manner is another key requirement for such a system.

A model for expert policy curation that tries to balance the metaphorical drivers and frames through multi-party involvement combined with a rules system may seem an alien way to proceed with policy-making given our current, party-driven political system. It does, however, have the property that we get a more grounded basis for collective decision-making than humanity has ever had in its entire history, and one that is respectful of the range of ideas that emerge from our complex societies.

Let’s imagine another scenario using a system like this. The metaphorical concept of the “Green New Deal” is based on an appeal to the “New Deal” and pulls forward concepts of mass government spending, despite there being few concrete proposals associated with the idea. It’s powerfully evocative and is a virtue signal framing concept that empowers political excitement on all sides of the political spectrum. Breaking the idea down through a transparent process of crowd-sourced concrete policy initiatives begins to remove the vagueness, threats and promises that surround the phrase in isolation. A sound bite is powerful politically, but a curated basket of pros-and-cons is politically achievable. The proponent and opponent both get to see the costs, benefits, and unknowns associated with the system, rather than operating as a tribal response to the initial inchoate meme.

Now that’s 21st century thinking.