Category: Personal

What Type of Progressive Are You?

Quoting from the George Lakoff book “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” excerpted at ThinkingPeace:

Now let me talk a bit about how progressives understand their morality and what their moral system is. It too comes out of a family model, what I call the nurturant parent model. The strict father worldview is so named because according to its own beliefs, the father is the head of the family. The nurturant parent worldview is gender neutral.

Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. The assumption is that children are born good and can be made better. The world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parents’ job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others.

What does nurturance mean? It means two things: empathy and responsibility. If you have a child, you have to know what every cry means. You have to know when the child is hungry, when he needs a diaper change, when he is having nightmares. And you have a responsibility — you have to take care of this child. Since you cannot take care of someone else if you are not taking care of yourself, you have to take care of yourself enough to be able to take care of the child. All this is not easy. Anyone who has ever raised a child knows that this is hard. You have to be strong. You have to work hard at it. You have to be very competent. You have to know a lot. In addition, all sorts of other values immediately follow from empathy and responsibility. Think about it.

First, if you empathize with your child, you will provide protection. This comes into politics in many ways. What do you protect your child from? Crime and drugs, certainly. You also protect your child from cars without seat belts, from smoking, from poisonous additives in food. So progressive politics focuses on environmental protection, worker protection, consumer protection, and protection from disease. These are the things that progressives want the government to protect their citizens from. But there are also terrorist attacks, which liberals and progressives have not been very good at talking about in terms of protection. Protection is part of the progressive moral system, but it has not been elaborated on enough. And on September 11, progressives did not have a whole lot to say. That was unfortunate, because nurturant parents and progressives do care about protection. Protection is important. It is part of our moral system.

Second, if you empathize with your child, you want your child to be fulfilled in life, to be a happy person. And if you are an unhappy, unfulfilled person yourself, you are not going to want other people to be happier than you are. The Dalai Lama teaches us that. Therefore it is your moral responsibility to be a happy, fulfilled person. Your moral responsibility. Further, it is your moral responsibility to teach your child to be a happy, fulfilled person who wants others to be happy and fulfilled. That is part of what nurturing family life is about. It is a common precondition for caring about others.

There are still other nurturant values.

  • If you want your child to be fulfilled in life, the child has to be free enough to do that. Therefore freedom is a value.
  • You do not have very much freedom if there is no opportunity or prosperity. Therefore opportunity and prosperity are progressive values.
  • If you really care about your child, you want your child to be treated fairly by you and by others. Therefore fairness is a value.
  • If you are connecting with your child and you empathize with that child, you have to have open, two-way communication. Honest communication. That becomes a value.
  • You live in a community, and that the community will affect how your child grows up. Therefore community-building, service to the community, and cooperation in a community become values.
  • To have cooperation, you must have trust, and to have trust you must have honesty and open two-way communication. Trust, honesty, and open communication are fundamental progressive values — in a community as in a family. These are the nurturant values — and they are the progressive values. As progressives, you all have them. You know you have them. You recognize them.

Every progressive political program is based on one or more of these values. That is what it means to be a progressive. There are several types of progressives. How many types? I am asking as a cognitive scientist, not as a sociologist or a political scientist. From the point of view of a cognitive scientist, who looks at modes of thought, there are six basic types of progressives, each with a distinct mode of thought. They share all the progressive values, but are distinguished by some differences:

  1. Socioeconomic progressives think that everything is a matter of money and class and that all solutions are ultimately economic and social class solutions.
  2. Identity politics progressives say it is time for their oppressed group to get its share now.
  3. Environmentalists think in terms of sustainability of the earth, the sacredness of the earth and the protection of native peoples.
  4. Civil liberties progressives want to maintain freedoms against threats to freedom.
  5. Spiritual progressives have a nurturant form of religion or spirituality, their spiritual experience has to do with their connection to other people and the world, and their spiritual practice has to do with service to other people and to their community. Spiritual progressives span the full range from Catholics and Protestants to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Goddess worshippers, and pagan members of Wicca.
  6. Anti-authoritarians say there are all sorts of illegitimate forms of authority out there and we have to fight them, whether they are big corporations or anyone else.

All six types are examples of nurturant parent morality. The problem is that many of the people who have one of these modes of thought do not recognize that theirs is just one special case of something more general, and do not see the unity in all the types of progressives. They often think that theirs is the only way to be a true progressive. That is sad. It keeps people who share progressive values from coming together. We have to get past that harmful idea. The other side did.

Lakoff’s claim is that different forms of conservatism are united by a common metaphorical projection from the family to society: they project a “Strict Father” model of the family onto society (the Strict Father Model being exemplified, in the parental advice of Dr. James Dobson).

Conversely, different forms of progressive are united by a common metaphorical projection from the family to society: they project a “Nurturant Parent” model of the family onto society. (Lakoff gives no particular examples of advice for this kind of parent, but there are many, and I’m starting to get to know them — Alfie Kohn and Inbal Kashtan are two authors who have written this kind of advice.)

That doesn’t mean that progressives and conservatives necessarily come from those respective kinds of families, or organize their own families along those lines, though it may happen that way. It’s an idealized metaphor that guides thinking.

Anyway, I found the “Six Types of Progressives” listing interesting. I’m not sure I precisely fit into any of them, which isn’t that unusual I guess cause they’re caricatures, idealized models themselves, created to illustrate extremes.

Myself, I guess I’m anti-authoritarian, but I don’t think that means I should “fight” authority, because I don’t think “fighting” accomplishes anything. I guess I’m a spiritual progressive, because I believe in a nurturant-parent model of God. I’m highly pro-civil liberties, leading me to side with libertarians on some issues. I’m in favor of anybody who’s been denied a share being granted it. I’m pro-environment, though I’m fairly ignorant about environmental causes. As for socioeconomics, I’d say that “everything is a matter of money and class” only secondarily — first of all, things are a matter of social structure and worldview, and class and economics flow naturally from there.

Maybe somebody should make a Quizilla quiz that tells you what type of progressive you are, like the ones that tell you what Buffy character you are, or whatever.

Almost everyone I know is “progressive” in at least one of Lakoff’s senses, but Lakoff is correct in that many of the people who hold progressive values do not see themselves as part of a larger progressive movement — partly because progressives in America have been focused on politics and policy issues to such a degree over the last several decades that they are far, far behind conservatives in the art of articulating a vision.

Epiphany: Status Report

A little more than a month ago I blogged about a little epiphany I’d had about my relationship to work.

This week I started to see some profound effects from it.

It would be a long story to give all the details, but to speak in general terms, there were some things about the systems that I work with that have always confused and bothered me. They just seemed “wrong” — but I didn’t know enough about the toolkits they were built with to say for sure they were wrong, or how to fix them.

Late last week I started getting strong feelings about fixing them. I actually lay awake one night thinking about the correct way to initialize new windows in the cross-platform GUI toolkit. Monday night I started working on a little demo app which re-did the things that our systems do (that I didn’t like) in a much cleaner, simpler, more elegant fashion. It was easier than I thought it would be, and I learned a lot in the process.

With this demo I showed my boss that there was a better way. I am very lucky to have a boss who cares more about getting things done and done right than getting them done his way. When he saw what I had done, he started to open up to some reworking of the infrastructure (something he had previously absolutely ruled out because of looming deadlines). Later that day he was working on some problems that involved the stuff that had always bothered me about the system, and I got his permission to make some small changes that night. Well, the small changes turned into big ones and soon I had gutted the app’s plumbing completely and reworked it in the clean, elegant manner I had used in my demo app. Because the app had been designed with some really nice abstraction in key places (kudos here to my boss), the switchover was easier than I would have ever thought possible. Using my new systems the application ran faster and smoother than it every had before, and all the annoying crashes just disappeared.

I was triumphant. It had worked. I had taken the app and changed the things that I couldn’t stand about it, I’d made it something I liked and cared about — and it was a huge success. My boss paid me the huge compliment that he was thrilled I had gotten to the point that I knew more about these things than he did. Everything was great —

But there was some drama still in the story. Today when I tried to share all the good stuff with him, we discovered that a lot of things that worked great on my platform (Mac) didn’t work right on his platforms (Linux/Windows), even though the tools we were using were theoretically cross-platform. He got really stressed about it, and understandably — from his point of view, it appeared the app had just stopped working. So here I was grinning and saying “It’s better than ever!” as I stood over the smoking ruins of the application he’d carefully put together and handed off to me.

By the end of the day, between the two of us, we’d found fixes for all the cross-platform troubles, so that is water under the bridge. I stayed up late tonight going through and making a ton of trivial changes to get all the bits and pieces of the application in line with the new way I was doing things.

But I’m absolutely elated at what I did to the application. It seems like a total vindication of my insights earlier that I should do the best work I can by my own judgment, instead of worrying about making other people happy. The parts of the application that bothered me most turned out to be the parts that I had the power to change and improve, once I set my mind to it and learned what I needed to learn.

I had felt totally doomed about this project. I had feared that those things which I have now changed were a millstone around its neck, dooming it to working badly at best. Now I can be proud of it. Now I am proud of it. It’s a fine little application, and now that I understand it, I’d cheerfully use these toolkits again for my own personal projects.

This project is going to rock.

This project does rock.

Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life

After reading Michael Nagler’s The Search for a Non-Violent Future and being really excited about the possibilities of non-violent change in the world, the title of Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life of course jumped out at me.

I read a bit of it in the bookstore and decided to buy it. It’s about communication that prevents violence, and communication which is itself non-violent in that it avoids the psychological violence of labeling, blaming, and the like.

Very few of us are in a position where we suffer or inflict physical violence, directly, on a daily basis, but we all deal with conflicts with the people around us and within ourselves, and it’s worth learning how to deal with these things without verbal or psychological violence.

Marshall Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist who’s done a lot of work trying to bring psychology out of the clinical world and into the “real” world, by holding workshops on communication in places where physical violence is a real threat — in prisons, between gangs and police, and in volatile parts of the world like Israel and Rwanda. He’s dedicated to principles of nonviolence and has been trying to work out a communicative style which embodies those principles.

I find a lot of the ideas I’ve come to embrace recently from other sources taken for granted by Dr. Rosenberg: for example, that manipulation by means pleasant or unpleasant is best avoided, or that the only real change for the good comes when “bad” people choose to become “good,” not when “bad” people are defeated by force by “good” people.

Anyway, this book describes a simple form for communicating in a non-violent way, and explores what it takes to put it into practice in both speaking and listening. It involves separating observation from evaluation, taking responsibility for one’s feelings and the needs from which they arise, and learning to make requests which are not demands.

In the week or so since I picked up the book I’ve been putting it into practice talking to my (4-year-old twin) kids, and it seems to help increase the level of sanity, clarity, and understanding in our dealings.

I also drew on some of the book’s suggestions about empathetic communication when I was helping my wife deal with an extremely frustrating situation she was dealing with that caused her a lot of anger — which I was at first at a loss as to how to respond to. Talking to her about it later in the day she said that what I’d said and the way I’d said it had really helped her.

So the advice in the book seems to be passing the practicality test so far. I would recommend it.

Center for Nonviolent Communication Website
Puddle Dancer Press Website

UPDATE: I should note that the one thing that kind of bugs me about NVC is the degree to which it seems to be identified with its creator, Marshall Rosenberg. There’s a degree of what seems like hero-worship or guru-hood about the NVC supporting materials/websites that gives me pause. On the other hand, the actual content of the book doesn’t give me that impression — the book is filled with personal anecdotes but the author doesn’t come across as thinking of himself as anything special. So that didn’t bother me reading the book. If I’d read the web sites before reading the book I might not have bothered because I’d have gotten the impression that [to paraphrase Jan Brady] it’s all about Marshall, Marshall, Marshall!

Epiphany

I realized some stuff about myself, and work, and life today that are personal enough that normally I wouldn’t blog them, but they matter a lot to me and on the off chance that there is someone else who needs to hear them as bad as I needed to realize them, I’ve put them online here.