On the day of Donald Trump’s most recent inauguration, the veteran campaign strategist and “deep frames” scholar George Lakoff published a 17-point rallying call to resist authoritarianism, co-authored with fellow framing expert Gil Duran.
Lakoff is an old friend of our work, which grew from our efforts in the mid-2000s to align his understanding of deep frames with the social psychology of human values. While working for WWF-UK, and soon after the publication of Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, I arranged a video conference between the chief executives of large UK-based environment charities and some academics, including Lakoff.
We were donated a session in several of Hewlett-Packard’s “Halo Rooms”: the chief executives all crowded into a room in HP’s London offices and Lakoff joined at some ungodly hour from the HP offices in Palo Alto, complaining about bad coffee. People appeared life-size on the screens and the rooms were all furnished in the same way, attempting the illusion that we were all sitting around the same table. Today we’d just jump on Zoom.
The meeting helped to propel forward debate about messaging within environmental organisations in the UK: there was something very seductive about the suggestion that, by embracing different language and metaphors, environmental NGOs could change minds. But the exhortation to think carefully about the language we were using was just the most digestible part of the message we heard that day.
Lakoff himself was always clear: messaging alone is not enough. Deep frames are shaped by lived experiences and the real-world impact of policies. Savvy communication must work in concert with meaningful action and institutional change: words alone will not drive transformation.
I have some reservations about Lakoff’s 17-point plan. It doesn’t have much to say about resisting different and interconnected forms of oppression, and I baulk at his insistence that Americans should “maintain a steely focus on what matters”, when what matters is then narrowly defined as “your health, your family, and the survival of our country”. No mention of other people’s health, other people’s family, or the potential impact of a Trump administration on the lives of people across the globe – let alone its impacts on the more-than-human world.
But Lakoff’s urge to Support Artists and the Arts, is important:
“Literature, music, and art,” Lakoff writes, “are crucial to a healthy society and a functioning democracy. Fund them and support them in every way you can. Artists, musicians, and writers will help inspire the changes we need.”
The arts as a force for cultural transformation
Lakoff is right: we need to support and celebrate the arts for its subversive potential. But this potential is, without question, lost as soon as the arts become valued only for their contribution to economic growth.
Here in the UK our seemingly visionless Labour government is throwing its weight behind such nihilism. Earlier this month Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, trumpeted Labour’s commitment to the arts, while apparently guaranteeing its impotence at raising or pursuing radical questions:
“Every government has understood the cultural value of the creative industries. They’ve understood the social value. Very little attention has been paid to the economic potential,” she said.
Wrong, wrong and wrong wrote storyteller Philip Ralph. Previous governments, in common with this one, have failed to understand the inherent cultural and social value of the arts, while paying overwhelming attention to its economic potential.
To take just one example from over a decade ago, Maria Miller (Nandy’s predecessor, serving under David Cameron’s Conservative Government) used a speech at the British Museum to urge arts executives to: “help me reframe the argument: to hammer home the value of culture to our economy.” And leaders within the sector duly obliged. Very soon afterwards Arts Council England published The Contribution of the Arts and Culture to the National Economy: their assessment of the economic return-on-investment that the sector provides.
It’s over a hundred years since the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky argued that because art – viewed in the broadest sense of the word – helps to shape our culture, it is the proper role of artists to anticipate the cultural impact of their work.
In Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky wrote:
“It has been said… that art is the child of its age. Such an art can only create an artistic feeling which is already clearly felt. This art, which has no power for the future, which is only a child of the age and cannot become a mother of the future, is a barren art. She is transitory and to all intent dies the moment the atmosphere alters which nourished her. The other art, that which is capable of educating further, springs equally from contemporary feeling, but is at the same time not only echo and mirror of it, but also has a deep and powerful prophetic strength.”
As Lakoff rightly highlights, a healthy democracy depends on nurturing the creative voices that challenge authoritarianism. Those of us who want to help in the midwifery of a more compassionate and equitable world, would do well to think about how and why we value the arts.