Digital Johnny, Real Johnny

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

It ocurred to me that if I'm going to attempt to do some metaphorical content analysis, that I should first give a little overview of cognitive metaphor theory. Then it ocurred to me that I'm really lazy and that doesn't sound like a fun entry to make. So, in the interest of reducing the amount of time I have to spend going over basics so you don't say at some future date, "What the heck is she talking about," I'm going to reuse/recycle this lovely thingy I wrote on metaphor and (Bush's) propaganda tactics for some Mass Comm. class hella days ago (a little over 2 years ago). Of course, you'll still wonder what the hell I'm going on about sometimes, but this may help a little. I could have just included the cog.sci. overview, but I think the tax metaphor discussion is kinda interesting too, especially since a lot of these same metaphors (since they are major conservative morality metaphors) are being used currently by the Bush "regime". The links in the biblio still work, too. So without further ado, I present my recycling of laziness:

Conceptual Metaphor as Propaganda

With the emergence of mass media and mass audiences “at the end of the 19th century”, “one major concern that emerged… was the future of the democratic process in the face of new possibilities of manipulation of public opinion through increasingly skillful propaganda techniques (2, 104).” This concern centered around the negative consequences of “a greatly expanded franchise [and] its corollary of the need to base authority on the support of public opinion,” namely, “the cold-blooded manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians (2, 104).” Since then, mass media has become more advanced, able to reach both immense mainstream and niche audiences at nearly every turn with a staggering variety of channels and publications. It seems hardly possible that the propaganda of political forces could manipulate the opinions of such a large and fragmented public so as to endanger the democratic process. However, the propaganda of professional politicians has come to dictate media messages about countless issues, enabling political propaganda to both reach the public and have a significant impact on public opinion. A fresh and formidable case of this is President George W. Bush’s use of White House Press Releases in his campaign for tax cuts, and specifically, the elimination of the estate tax, or the “death tax,” as he and other conservatives call it.

President Bush’s campaign to repeal the “death tax” is clearly propagandistic in that it is a perfect example of Jowett and O’Donnell’s conception of propaganda in Propaganda and Persuasion (1999), “a deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist [the president] (2, 6).” The manifest goal of the campaign is to pass the president’s plan to eliminate the “death tax” through Congress as soon as possible, and thus grant him his first major legislative victory as president in the name of the American people. However, the latent self-interested goal of the campaign can be inferred through a look at the effects of elimination of the “death tax.” Only around two-percent of all decedents each year file taxable estate tax returns but they currently pay out nearly $30 billion per year in estate taxes (4), suggesting that only the richest Americans, most of which are likely to be conservatives like President Bush, are subject to the tax and that their heirs will directly benefit from its elimination.

Two of all propaganda’s short-term goals toward the ultimate self-interested goal of the propagandist are the shaping of perceptions and the manipulations of cognitions, which are “usually attempted through language… (2, 6)” The achievement of these goals requires a special technique to ensure that the “recipients do not perceive the themes of the messages to be imposed on them from an outside authority to which they are required or committed to defer (2, 33).” Jowett and O’Donnell cite metaphor as a special technique for “maximizing propaganda effectiveness,” whereby “the use of specific words… has a direct bearing on how certain events are structured in the minds of the public (2, 325).” Lakoff and Johnson say of metaphor “that most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured; that is, most concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts (2, 325).” However, this explanation of conceptual metaphor provided by Jowett and O’Donnell only scratches the surface of how and why the “selected use of metaphors (2, 325),” shapes perceptions and manipulates cognitions, and fails to examine the implications and political significance of metaphor use in propaganda.

In their book Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought (1999), Lakoff and Johnson describe fully how all people conceptualize and reason about subjective experiences, and “make subjective judgments about… abstract things [such] as importance… and morality (3, 45),” in terms of sensormotor experiences, such as grasping or seeing. Conceptual metaphor, in thought and language, is a pervasive “cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations, …which allows conventional imagery from sensormotor domains [of experience] to be used for domains of subjective experience (3, 45).” The development of conceptual metaphors is natural, automatic and unconscious since young children consistently fail to differentiate sensormotor and subjective experiences. These experiences are then separated “during the period of differentiation… [but] cross-domain associations persist… ” due to the fact that they are “realized… in permanent neural connections… [and] these connections form the anatomical basis for source-to-target activations that constitute metaphorical entailments (3, 46).” That is, the sensormotor experience is the source of the concept which is then mapped onto the target, subjective experience. These initial mappings form primary metaphors that may combine through conceptual blending to form complex metaphors, or “universal (or widespread) conventional conceptual metaphors (3, 46).”

Lakoff and Johnson repeatedly stress, “we naturally think using hundreds of primary metaphors (3, 47),” that “without such metaphors, abstract thought is virtually impossible (3, 59).” However, they also insist that “the most important thing to understand about conceptual metaphors is that they are used to reason with… (3, 65)” That is to say, we reason about abstract concepts using our knowledge of sensormotor experiences. Lakoff and Johnson go on to say that, “…a metaphor may play some significant role in structuring one’s experience… there are certain metaphorical entailments based on the logic of the source domain (3, 72).” In other words, once one is thinking in terms of a conceptual metaphor, he or she is locked into the specific entailments of the source domain, and anything outside that logic is not even a meaningful thought, it is nonsensical. Therefore, when metaphor is viewed as a technique of propaganda and the public thinks about an issue in terms of the metaphors of the propagandist, then the propagandist has to be right. The only way around it is to think of other metaphors that violate the logic of the propagandist’s metaphors.

In the White House Press Releases in which President Bush extols the benefits of his tax cut and the detrimental character of the “death tax,” he uses many conceptual metaphors. When specifically referencing the “death tax” and why it should be eliminated, President Bush’s says, “The death tax is unfair. It is unfair to tax a person’s assets twice (5),” “…eliminating the death tax is a victory for fairness (6),” and also that inheritance taxes are “burdensome” and “weigh heavily on minorities who are only beginning to accumulate wealth (7).” On their face, some of these statements are empirically false. Minorities are not suffering under estate taxes on a wide scale since only the top two-percent of society’s estates are taxable. The bulk of the “assets” that are taxed in this manner were not taxed as income, but were gained through “businesses and investments in securities and real estate (1).” Furthermore, the American Farm Bureau Federation has yet to find one farmer that has lost his farm due to estate taxes (1). However, these statements are also misleading in that the entailments of the central conceptual metaphor used by Bush, WELL-BEING IS WEALTH, so thoroughly shapes the recipient’s view of the situation that its use hides vital truths about the true beneficiaries of the “death tax” repeal.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, a conceptual metaphor prevalent in western society is WELL-BEING IS WEALTH, where one reasons about the abstract concept of well-being in terms of wealth, that is, in economic terms. This metaphor basis for the larger metaphor system of MORAL ACCOUNTING, “by which we understand our moral interactions, obligations and responsibilities (3, 292).” Within the MORAL ACCOUNTING metaphor, “increasing other’s well-being is metaphorically increasing their wealth… [and] gives you a moral credit (3, 292).” Since morality, well-being, and wealth are thus conflated, the logic of the metaphor system entails that it is immoral to decrease someone’s wealth/well-being. “Justice is when the moral books are balanced (3, 292),” and fairness is conceptualized as a kind of standard for balancing them. However, there is no universally agreed upon standard as “fairness is assessed relative to any of a number of models (3, 296).” When a propagandist uses a metaphor to speak about balancing the moral books, to judge whose well-being/wealth has been immorally decreased, he or she is selecting a model of fairness, which effectively eliminates all the other conceptions of fairness from the possibility of entering into the abstraction.

Bush’s reference to certain results of the “death tax” as unfair seems to select, in one instance, the “Equal Distribution of Responsibility conception of fairness (we share the burden equally) (3, 296),” and, in another instance, “Need-Based Fairness (the more you need, the more you have a right to)(3, 296),” conception of fairness. The assertion that it is “unfair” to tax an asset twice entails that each taxpayer need only contribute as much as any other taxpayer, thus it is immoral to tax it twice since one is obligated to make a greater contribution to the system than another. The assertion that the tax is “burdensome” to minorities entails that they are in need of relief from their long-standing economic restriction from the middle class, thus it is immoral to continue to deny them their right to wealth/well-being by subjecting their wealth to this tax. The logic of the MORAL ACCOUNTING metaphor used by Bush entails a line of reasoning about the abstract concept of fairness that rationally leads one to the conclusion that the “death tax” is unfair and immoral, and therefore must be repealed. Yet, Bush’s choice of these conceptions is noticeably in the stead of the actual conception of fairness on which the desire for a repeal is based. This is the “Scalar Distribution (the more you work, the more you get)(3, 296)” conception of fairness, where it is immoral to take money away from those who have more of it the logic of this particular conception of fairness entails that they supposedly worked more/harder for their wealth/well-being. To say that the perception of the public has been shaped or that their cognitions have been manipulated is true in that the conclusions reached are the result of a cognitive process that has been guided by the propagandist’s use of a specific metaphor to describe a public policy issue.

Although it is unlikely that Bush himself is aware of his use of conceptual metaphor, its entailments for his audience, and the subsequent shaping of their perception of the issue, both the metaphor and its effects exist, and have real consequences. It may be due to metaphor’s common place in thought and discourse, that neither the sender nor the receiver is aware of this process, making conceptual metaphor particularly worthy of scrutiny due to its pernicious ability to hide reality. Since politician’s issue self-interested propaganda and the media convey it to create the majority of public policy discourse, propaganda may influence abilities to conceptualize political situations and issues more than is currently recognized. If the logic of the metaphors of government officials limit our ability to think thoughts outside of their domain of logic, it follows that free and independent thoughts, a necessary component of democratic self-government, can only be either precluded or considered extremist and illogical by those operating within the confines of the dominant metaphorical logic. In light of the self-interested nature of professional politicians and the habits of journalism, democracy’s best and only defense against the restrictive nature of widespread conceptual metaphor may be the keen and informed eye of the public when it comes to the language of public policy discourse.

Bibliography
1. Focus on Farms Makes Estate Tax Confusion, New York Times, April 8, 2001. Http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/business/08ESTA.html?searchpv=site07

2. Jowett, G. and O’Donnell, V. Propaganda and Persuasion, Sage Publications, Inc. 1999. Thousand Oaks, California

3. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books. 1999. New York, New York

4. Present Law and Background on Federal Tax Provisions Relating to Retirement Savings Incentives, Health and Long-Term Care, and Estate and Gift Taxes: Scheduled for a Public Hearing Before the House Committee On Ways and Means on June 16, 1999: prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee On Taxation http://www.house.gov/jct/x-29-99.htm#A

5. The White House: Office of the Press Secretary. March 22, 2001: Remarks By the President to the National Newspaper Association 40th Annual Government Affairs: The Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/03/20010322-1.html

6. The White House: Office of the Press Secretary. April 4, 2001: Statement By the President http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/04/20010404-11.html

7. The White House: Office of the Press Secretary. April 5, 2001: Remarks By the President to US Conference of Mayors National Summit on Investment In the New American City, The Rose Garden http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/04/20010405-4.html