(LE) Lincoln 2.0

I’d like to say a little more about the moral operating systems we discussed yesterday: the ‘Stern Father Model’ and the ‘Nurturing Parent Model’. I propose this family-relations metaphor advisedly, because we actually tend to think about government and our relationship to it in precisely these terms, as though the nation were a sort of extended family. (There are dangers to thinking this way – family finances are really not usefully analogous to federal budgets, for example – but it is often an informative image, and is readily available.)

I also employ the ‘operating system’ metaphor deliberately, because these two contrasting models operate mostly below the level of cognition. Like Windows or Mac OS, they undergird and support programs and apps without the user having to think about them, and subtly but powerfully condition what those apps can do and how they work. (Those of you who have used both systems will be frustratingly aware of the deep differences.) Likewise the Stern Father and Nurturing Parent models represent not so much the values and ideas that we openly subscribe to, as the unspoken, underlying assumptions that determine how we understand and value everything else. Only rarely in ordinary life do we even think about them directly.

One last point for now. Although the two models are largely incompatible, most people actually contain elements of both systems. For example, a person might well be attentive and nurturing in relation to her children, but operate in authoritarian command mode in her corporate-management job, without necessarily even noticing the switch. The two really are irreconcilable, however, so when one is activated the other shuts down. One of the things that follows from this is that it matters very much how a politician speaks to us – which system her words, style, and images activate and reinforce in us. Watch for such choices in Lincoln’s speeches.