Imagine that it is broad daylight and you are attending a large public festival. Now imagine that you suddenly realize that you are walking around in your underwear. Perhaps you are one of the many people who would find it disconcerting to suddenly find that so much of your skin, and most every crevice, curve and imperfection of your body was exposed to public view.
This thought occurred to me while I was at a municipal swimming pool with my children. I was surrounded by hundreds of people who were wearing swimming suits that covered no mo
[1]re skin (and often less) than the underwear that many of these people likely wore. Yet these people strutted about and proudly spread out on their towels and lawn chairs without any apparent concern that they were flagrantly exposing so much of their “private” areas to total strangers.
What is it, then, that convinces people to expose so much of their bodies to strangers in one case but not in the other? It would seem that the context of being at a public swimming area constitutes a “frame.”
George Lakoff wrote of the great power of frames in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Framed the Debate (2004). Here is how Lakoff describes frames:
Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Refraining is social change . . .
Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.
At the municipal swimming pool, I realized the incredible power of framing. Suddenly discovering that 95% one’s flesh is exposed would be a stunning embarrassment in most social situations. For instance, imagine walking around at a grocery store, in one’s workplace or at a religious or civic ceremony in one’s swimming suit. Imagine the embarrassment displayed by many a woman whose underwear has been exposed by a sudden gust of wind. How many men have felt that same paroxysm of embarrassment when they discover that their zipper was not up while they walked about shaking hands at a distinguished gathering? Somehow, embarrassments of these sorts are totally nullified by the municipal swimming pool frame.
[2]Thinking about swimming pools and framing caused me to consider other powerful frames that we use. One of those frames is “war.” As a general rule, it is not socially acceptable to walk around shooting at people we don’t like, lobbing bombs at people we don’t know very well or celebrating when our bombs and bullets rip others’ bodies apart. We are not generally allowed to round up hundreds of people or throw them in prisons based on “guilty until proven innocent.” We are not generally allowed to ignore the deaths of hundreds or thousands of bystanders, characterizing those deaths as “collateral damage.” Outside of “war,” responsible people severely restrict their exercise of violence, making certain that they have conducted sufficient investigation to know that each person they injure or kill “deserves” it.
How powerful, indeed, is this frame of “war”! When we decide to frame intense and widespread violence to be “war,” we are no longer under any obligation to apologize to the people we kill or injure, even to innocent bystanders and even to the parents of young children whose tiny bodies we destroy when we implode homes. When we become violent as part of a “war,” we no longer have a duty to show or feel any empathy toward anyone affected by our violence. Though it is only a word, “war” is a very powerful word. It is so powerful a word because it is capable of shifting us to a frame through which we tolerate conduct that we would normally deplore. It is a frame that causes many of us to give applause and medals to those whose actions we would normally despise.
I am distressed that American televisions and newspapers so readily allowed the Bush administration to characterize its actions in Iraq to be “war” in order to justify the massive violence it is inflicting on so many Iraqi people. Not all uses of violent weapons should be characterized as “war.” The frame of “war” seems especially inappropriate whenever the “enemy” is never identified, geographically or otherwise.
Just imagine how hard it would have been for the President to pull off what he is doing without the use of the frame of “war.” Without that frame, he would have had to explain that he wanted to send hundreds of thousands of people with guns and bombs to kill and destroy the lives of many people who he hadn’t established to be a threat to the United Stated. He would have had to explain that he was planning to shatter the skulls and houses of many people who would be angry that we were in their country, including many people who would not be armed, as well as thousands of totally innocent children. And why would we doing this? Because, according to highly discredited witnesses, some people in Iraq were “bad.”
Without this frame of “war,” the whole rationale for killing 100,000 Iraqis to “save” Iraq would have fallen apart. Without this frame of “war,” the United States would be “occupying” Iraq, not saving Iraq. Without the frame of “war,” the United States would be exercising barely restrained, often randomized violence to cause the deaths of numerous people not proven to be hostile to American interests, for nebulous reasons.
Had our media questioned whether the frame of “war” was appropriate, how many Americans would have been willing to rally around this wretched cause?
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