Criminal or Mentally Ill?

Yesterday on NPR's Talk of the Nation, cognitive scientist George Lakoff presented his theory of how conservatives and progressives differ, and, more importantly, why.

According to Lakoff it works like this:

1. We Americans view our country through the metaphor of a family - founding fathers, sending our children to war, etc.

2. Conservatives and Progressives have very different ideas of what a family is... the conservatives have a "strict father" model of the family and the progressives have a "nurturing parent" model of the family.

3. Those two models lead to very different conclussions about the nature of life, the universe and everything.

So far, so good. Lakoff's theory explains an awful lot.

But my immediate reaction was "oh, conservatives can't help it... they were abused as children by their strict fathers. Conservatism is a mental illness and we should offer them help."

Then I thought, "Gee, that's a sure a liberal approach to the problem. Any conservative would realize that conservatives are actually immoral criminals and should be locked up." :o)

OK, so Lakoff's point was really that both sides (and we all are partially on each side) have legitimate moral positions derived from our starting assumptions and, if we realize that and keep it in mind, we should be able to deal with each other in a respectful way.

My thought about that is that that in itself is a liberal viewpoint and conservatives won't be interested in respecting that someone else's morality might be legitimate, but we'll see.