George Lakoff has an interesting post up on Obama’s communication failure with respect to the Gulf Oil Spill. Lakoff writes:
Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them. Today was a grand opportunity to pull together the threads — BP and the spill, Massey and the mine disaster, Wall Street and the economic disaster, Anthem BlueCross and health care, the Arizona Immigration Law, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — even Afghanistan. The press threw him fastballs straight down the middle, and he hit dribblers every time.
Quite right. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein analyzes the way in which neo-liberals have used periods of crises to push through a series of economic and legislative reforms. There is no reason that crises of this sort can’t be used to do something similar, but for progressive ends. Yet Obama has done nothing of the sort. No doubt this is because Obama himself appears to endorse neo-liberal economic policies, but all the same.
Lakoff goes on to remark that,
The central idea is Empathy. Democracy is based on empathy, on people caring about one another and acting to the very best of their ability on that care, for their families, their communities, their nation, and the world. Government must also care and act on that care. Government’s job is to protect and empower its citizens.
That idea is what draws together all the threads. The bottom line for corporations (whether BP, Massey, Anthem or Goldman Sachs) is money, not empathy. The bottom line for those who hate (whether homophobes, the Arizona Legislature, or al Qaeda) is domination and oppression, not empathy.
Empathy, and acting on it effectively, is the main business of government.
While I completely agree with Lakoff’s thesis that corporations are profit driven entities and that this is something that needs to be trumpeted again and again, I’m more reluctant about his rhetorical strategy of framing issues in terms of entity. Perhaps I’m a cynical bastard, but I just don’t think people are primarily motivated by empathy but rather by interest. Appeals to charity strike me as very weak. Rather, what needs to be trumpeted is that the profit motive pursued by corporations is directly contrary to the interests of working and middle class people.
The BP oil disaster will very likely have a tremendous impact on the economy. This is a no brainer, of course, with respect to the Gulf economy, much of which is dependent on the fishing industry. But it’s difficult to see how the collapse of that economy won’t also impact the American economy as a whole. Moreover, corporations and neo-liberal de-regulation have, since the 70s, caused the stagnation of wages for working and middle class people, increased joblessness, and created a major wealth gap between the top 5% and the rest of us. This is something people need to understand.
Obama has missed a major opportunity to reverse some of these dynamics and to pump up regulation, actually fund regulators so they can do their jobs, and fund green technologies and renewable, eco-friendly resources. This should have been a major opportunity to push significant tax cuts for those who buy hybrid cars, increased regulations energy efficiency in the trucking and shipping industry (the former travels over a trillion miles a year in America alone), and to push for green energy sources. Why has Obama, who is so intelligent and rhetorically gifted, missed these opportunities? My cynical heart tells me that he’s completely aware of this opportunity but isn’t interested in seizing it because he too is owned by the corporations. In the wake of the SCOTUS decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited money advocating for particular politicians, this seems to follow as a matter of course.
May 28, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Fun freudian typo above in which you replace “empathy” with “entity.” The former is an example of the latter as it happens.
While I very much like Lakoff, I also very much agree that politically, he’s a 60’s hippie flowerchild increasingly out of place in the 21st century.
May 28, 2010 at 10:50 pm
It may be a political reality that any politician in power equates crisis with “opportunity” but it nevertheless doesn’t sit right with me. Crisis as ultimately nothing more than opportunity is blatantly unethical and cold, despite the potential “good” consequences that may result.
May 28, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I think you’re conflating opportunity with selfish opportunism. The point is that moments like this are kairotic moments calling for the right and appropriate response. Part of a political leaders job is to link the local with the global and show the broader context of events such as this. Obama has been woefully inadequate in responding to this situation. Moreover, there’s nothing unethical in pointing out how this situation is linked with the current ecological crisis and the unbridled expansion of capitalism. Quite the opposite. In fact, to not make these linkages is unethical.
May 29, 2010 at 8:49 am
The opposition of interest and empathy is an interesting one – I think it is a mistake to see them as being mutually exclusive.
For interest/empathy we can more or less substitute cognition/affect. If we do this we see that these are less terms in opposition and more psychological categories (so, parts of a whole). The point is that, if we divide the psyche up like this, both parts are involved in any event – including political and economic decisions.
Alberto Toscano’s recent article ‘Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde‘ (which I read yesterday so it’s fresh in my mind) makes an interesting point: the likes of Tarde (alongside Whitehead, Deleuze, etc.) who have recently been revived because of the central place they give to ’emotion’ in metaphysics (and thus politics) have been hailed as displacing the reductive rationalism of neoliberal economics (and so most sociology and political science, too). But what Toscano points out is that this is only one side of the story – the side of the economists; the other side is that of the marketers – on this side, from Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann through to our PR obsessed present, the place of ‘affect’ has been pivotal (and it has always been associated with anti-democratic sentiments). Deleuze and Guattari weren’t the first to describe capitalism in terms of desire – this had been going on for decades.
On this issue I would highly recommend Adam Curtis’ documentary ‘The Century of the Self (my favourite documentary of all time, in fact) which charts the trajectory of ‘affect’ through Western society from Freud’s psychoanalysis through 60s/70s ‘rebellion’ to Bill Clinton’s PR/market research fueled election campaigns.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that I don’t think we have to choose either interests or empathy – it is in the interaction between interests and empathy that politics is to be found. The point that Ian mentions about Lakoff being a “60′s hippie flowerchild” is quite right and Curtis’ documentary shows precisely the links between this kind of quasi-political subjectivity and the corporate politics of the present. Whether he is “increasingly out of place in the 21st century” is a more complex question, however. Far from being ‘out of place’ as such I would see his statements as standing for much of what passes for the ‘left’ in the U.S. today – that is, a remnant of bygone ‘glories’ that weren’t actually all they were cracked up to be in the first place and still pervade the emotive focus of present discourse. In other words, the centrality of ‘affect’ or ’empathy’ just places all the weight on one side of a, if not arbitrarily then certainly inexactly, partitioned psyche.
The right in the U.S. and elsewhere are under no such illusions – they are more than happy to play on both sides of psychology and be thoroughly instrumental in doing so. (See William E. Connolly’s book ‘Capitalism and Christianity, American Style‘ for an account of how the right is able to organise and cooperate even when it is profoundly divided internally between neocons, neolibs and evangelicals, etc.)
The interesting point, if we go back to Toscano’s article, is that this ‘affective leftism’ so prominent in U.S. politics is also present in ‘leftist’ academia (hence the new popularity of Tarde, etc.)
Now that doesn’t mean that I don’t think Tarde, Whitehead, Spinoza and the others aren’t important but (actually, like Spinoza) we need to rethink the relationship between emotion and rationality rather than just placing all the weight on one side over the other.
In short: neither interest nor empathy rules a priori – the ‘left’ is doomed so long as it dwells on either half; the right doesn’t make this mistake.
May 29, 2010 at 4:51 pm
More about reclaiming the notion of interests.
One’s interests can be construed in myriad ways. People could maximize their interests by maximizing some or all of the following: money, pleasure, things-that-please-Jesus, social utility, cool car stuff. I’ve met people who’ve said they’re motivated by each and all of these things. So the notion of interests is complex.
As an aside, the notion of interests kind of looks like a relation of a particular kind between things. But I digress.
Even if you think interests = money, the series of actions you need to take to maximize your interests is often vague. This is not always the case, but it is often the case. I would say that in this society, the more poor you are, the more unclear and uncertain the path to maximizing your interests, because so many things can intervene in that path. The rich person can make a lot of money in a single day. They can do a whole lot of maximizing just by picking up the phone to a real estate broker or a stock broker. The poor person is usually given instructions to “get an education,” or “play the lottery,” or “get a job.” All of those are viable options that may or may not work out.
The point is that, no matter what motivates you to act, you will be acting against real constraints. I’d say one of the jobs of government (and other social service institutions, too) is to identify those constraints and eliminate them to the greatest extent it feasibly can. On this front I was hoping the Obama administration could do a little more connecting-the-dots than it is.
It’s worth noting that Jimmy Carter did this in his famous “malaise” speech and got creamed in the election. Although the right doesn’t have any Reagan figure waiting in the background to step in. I think it’s the honest truth (and there are conservatives like Andrew Bacevich who think we should revive this rhetoric, too).
May 29, 2010 at 9:35 pm
To clarify: I think Jimmy Carter was telling the “honest truth” in his malaise speech.
June 15, 2010 at 9:37 pm
[…] it has wrought, but in what a missed opportunity this is turning out to be. As I remarked in a previous post on the disaster, this is a prime moment to enact a progressive version of what Naomi Klein calls […]