Several selves: Good news
For my own parochial interests as a blogger, the timing of Bill Clinton’s surprise visit to North Korea to secure the release of two American journalists couldn’t have been better. Whom should I see last night on CNN, and on The Daily Show, but John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, deriding Clinton for “rewarding bad behavior”: giving Kim Jong-il good publicity for being a dictator. Perfect follow-up to yesterday’s post.
The fact that Daily Show host John Stewart is parodying Tom Bolton is of course a sign that the “make them pay” approach is just one American approach. Many Americans either don’t believe in punishment, or believe it should be used much more selectively, favoring restitution, with the ultimate goal of learning how to be a participating, contributing group member.
One of the deepest thinkers on the subject is my old mentor George Lakoff, whose landmark book Moral Politics transformed how many saw the conservative–liberal divide in the U.S. The gist is that there are two dominant child-rearing-models-cum-moral-systems — Strict Father and Nurturant Parent — that are mapped metaphorically to U.S. politics via something Lakoff calls the Nation-as-Family metaphor. Not surprisingly, Strict Father morality correlates with conservative politics and Nurturant Parent morality correlates with liberal politics.
Lakoff’s model has been criticized for being overly reductive and simplistic. And while I generally agree with those critiques, I do think there’s a lot of validity in the model.The reason I’m addressing it here in this blog is the same reason I wrote the Car Talk post on face: cultures are not monolithic, and we must guard against to temptation to paint in strokes that are too broad.
There’s another reason, though, for thinking these things through a bit more carefully. Not only is each individual in a cultural group unique; each individual is, I believe, in fact several people. Among linguists, it’s the socioloinguists who have led the way on this one, demonstrating through study after study that each of us speaks many “social languages": we use different language with our parents than we do with our peers than we do with our bosses…and so on. American college students, when learning of this, are often resistant to not having one single, consistent “self,” immutable across space and time. But there is much evidence that each of us in fact “many different people.”
To me, that’s fantastic news. It means that we’re not bound to any beliefs we think we might be bound to, and that we have a much richer repertoire of ways of thinking — more arrows in the quiver — than we might have thought we have. That helps anyone in any unfamiliar culture; it will certainly help Westerners in China, and vice versa.
Later I’ll take up some specific ways in which this plays out in Chinese and American culture: ways which show that, despite all the differences, there’s no shortage of common ground to work with.