The Body Politic

Whole Earth, Fall, 1999 by George Lakoff

NO ALTERNATIVE TO THE NATION AS FAMILY?

If one is disturbed by the Nation as Family metaphor, whether in conservative or in liberal discourse, one might ask whether there are alternative, non-family-based metaphors for politics, or even whether it is possible to have a metaphor-free conception of government.

Governments have armies and judicial systems, and so governments have in part been modeled metaphorically as armies or as judicial systems. Thus, the American government has a top-to-bottom chain of command, as in an army.

In recent years, the American government is conceptualized as a Government as Business metaphor which is to be run efficiently and not lose money. But, what kind of business should it be? The present wisdom has been one specializing in customer service. Taxes, from this perspective, are seen as payments for services rendered to the public, and the impersonality of a factory-like bureaucracy is to be replaced by a more personal form of service.

The government is seen from this perspective as just selling its services to the public for tax money. According to this view, there is no morality in government, just services for sale. It then becomes a practical, not a moral, question as to whether a particular government agency works better than private enterprise. Government as a service industry becomes subject to cost-benefit analysis. Under this model, if the private sector can do a better job, then it should.

Let us take as examples two very different cases. First, Michael Barzelay's example of the Minnesota state motor pool [from Breaking Through Bureaucracy, University of California Press, 1992.] is a perfect example of the government-as-service-industry concept. The job of the pool is to provide cars to state officials for the performance of state functions. There is no issue of morality here, just one of efficient operation. If the state motor pool cannot provide better and cheaper service than Hertz and Avis, then it should go out of business. So far, so good.

But compare this with the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has not just a practical mission but a moral mission--safeguarding the environment, which includes choosing a moral view of the environment. There is no neutral view of the environment; there are only moral views. The EPA's job is not merely to carry out morally neutral functions like measuring air pollution. Its regulations, its forms of testing, its research projects, and its sanctions all come out of a moral vision. Parts of its job could be farmed out to the private sector, but its overall job could not, because the market does not incorporate inherent values, such as the inherent value of nature that emerges from the Nurturant Parent model. It is at points like this that family-based morality enters crucially into government. The same is true of the moral missions of the arts and humanities endowments.

The point of these examples is that the policy debates are not matters of rational discussion on the basis of literal and objective categories. The categories that shape the debate are moral categories; those categories are defined in terms of different family-based conceptions of morality, which give priority to different metaphors for morality. The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue, college loans or the EPA. The debate is about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right metaphor of the family. The role of morality and the family is inescapable.