[FYI]: interesting essay on morality

From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 11:46:40 MDT

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    This is from 1995, but I thought it was interesting.

    Metaphor, Morality, and Politics,
    Or,
    Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust

    http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html

    Some (possibly) illustrative snippets:

    <<Liberal politics also centers on a family-based morality, but liberals
    are much less aware than conservatives are of the unconscious mechanisms
    that structures their politics. While conservatives understand that all
    of their policies have a single unified origin, liberals understand
    their own political conceptual universe so badly that they still think
    of it in terms of coalitions of interest groups. Where conservatives
    have organized for an overall, unified onslaught on liberal culture,
    liberals are fragmented into isolated interest groups, based on
    superficial localized issues: labor, the rights of ethnic groups,
    feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, homelessness,
    health care, education, the arts, and so on. This failure to see a
    unified picture of liberal politics has led to a divided consciousness
    and has allowed conservatives to employ a divide-and-conquer strategy.
    None of this need be the case, since there is a worldview that underlies
    liberal thought that is every bit as unified as the conservative worldview.

    [...]

    The resulting picture of the priorities of the Strict Father and
    Nurturant Parent moral systems is as follows:

         * Strict Father Morality (Basic Conservative Morality):
               o The Strength Complex
               o Moral Self-Interest
               o The Nurturance Complex

         * Nurturant Parent Morality (Basic Liberal Morality):
               o The Nurturance Complex
               o Moral Self-Interest
               o The Strength Complex >>

    Enjoy,
            -Mike

    -- 
    


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