 "Science
is all metaphor", said Timothy Leary, philosopher and guru of
psychedelics, in an interview in 1980. In the last few years we have
been bombarded with metaphors, analogies, similes and personifications
such as:
- Business is war, and politics is war, or sport.
- A leader is a country or a company ("Russia says...", "The White House responded...", "ExxonMobil believes...")
- A poll or survey represents public opinion ("Americans believe...")
- Conservatives have a 'strict father' morality-driven philosophy, liberals a 'nurturing mother' reason-driven one.
- Business is organic, information has an 'ecology', and
cultures, nations, communities and individual bodies are all analogous
complex adaptive systems.
- The internet, communities and networks, are webs or highways.
- The brain is a computer.
- Weblogs are personal, open filing cabinets, or diaries, or
publications, or 'personal memories', and RSS is their 'delivery
truck'. Collectively, the documents of an organization are its
'corporate memory', enabling 'organizational learning'.
- Our inability to deal with critical but slowly-changing
phenomena like global warming or overpopulation is like the experience
of a frogthat unwittingly boils to death in a pot of very slowly
heating water, and civilization today is like a fast-moving car trying
to brake on a bridge covered in black ice headed for a 'crash'.
- The change needed in human culture and behaviour is a
metamorphosis from today's larval stage to the future butterfly adult
stage.
- The physical separation between the rich and wealthy in our society, and everyone else, is 'corporate apartheid'.
- America under Bush is like a family that has been repeatedly brutalized by a drunk father.
- Outsourcing, infrastructure-aversion, offshoring and cost-cutting has left Western business 'anorexic'.
- People don't vote, or get involved in politics, for the
same reasons they don't exercise: The personal pain of the status quo
does not yet exceed the personal discomfort of making the change.
- We in the West are 'addicted' to wasteful, thoughtless
consumption and to perilous debt, fated to meet every addict's
catastrophic end, and Alan Greenspan is the ultimate 'pusher'; and Bush
is a 'high roller' gambling addict, getting deeper in debt and betting
more and more heavily waiting for the big 'trickle-down' win that will
recoup his colossal losses.
- What business needs is fewer 'prescriptions' and more
'recipes', fewer 'symphony conductors' and more jazz combo-like
collaborative 'improvisation'.
- Ideas and beliefs and behaviours can spread like viruses, 'infect' others and even lead to 'epidemic' change.
For now, let's not quibble over the subtle differences between these
four rhetorical devices. Metaphors, analogies, similes and
personifications are all comparative
devices used to assert substantive equivalence or similarity between
something that is somewhat complex and abstract, and something that is
much simpler or more concrete.
Use of these devices is a very human tendency: They make things easier
to understand. When used properly they can bring clarity the way no
amount of detailed explanation or information can, and do so very
quickly. They can also trigger the imagination, and produce brilliant
creative insight.
But these devices are often also misused and overused: Much of the
subtlety can get lost in the translation, as elements of the comparison
that are not particularly analogous are simply omitted from mention.
Opinion polls do this by limiting respondents' choices and then
claiming the results represent public opinion. And they can be
dangerous, when used to manipulate and deceive, by distorting or
exaggerating comparability. Editorialists, politicians, advertisers and
spin doctors do this all the time, equating dictators with Hitler or
dissenters with terrorists.
In a recent interview
in Edge Magazine that I mentioned a few weeks ago, George Lakoff explained the tendency to use metaphor this way:
When
Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we
realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent
with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and
Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is
unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science
perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with
results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new about
the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the
internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth... We
are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out
bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world
thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.
Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the
neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of
abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our
sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can
perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made
possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied
interactions in the world.
So if business and politics are complicated and abstract, let's make
them simpler and more concrete, more physical, by describing them as
'games' or 'wars'. Games have simple rules and short time limits (wars
once did as well, when what was at stake was more defined and
realizable). Business and politics do not. Games and sports have a
clear winner, so when you're describing what 'winning' is like in
business or politics, you can use a sports analogy ("We wil defeat the
competitors on their home turf" or "Nature always bats last".) Wars no
longer have winners, but they are more serious matters than sports, so
when you're describing something that requires sobriety, you can switch
to a war analogy. Everything
today that its proponent believes requires serious effort or entails
serious risk is described as a 'war'. And if you're a dim-witted,
drug-addled American president, you can even build a whole, simple
artificial world around that analogy, seeing and portraying your whole
existence as a 'crusade', taking orders and advice directly from that
ultimate personification -- the one that is so powerful its name is
spelled with a capital letter. Psychopaths love
analogies and metaphors, and get very good at using them for
manipulative purposes, which is one reason they often succeed so well
in politics and business.
The oversimplification and deception that result from misuse of
comparative rhetorical devices are, in my opinion, essential elements
in the 'dumbing down' of all of us, as citizens and consumers,
especially over the past century. We want things to be simple, because
it makes decisions easier and gives us more time to devote to other
things. We want reassurance that what we believe is valid, morally
and/or intellectually, so we can turn our attention as voters and
buyers to issues where we are less sure. But we don't want issues to be oversimplified (even if that makes a decision easier), and we don't want to be lied to (even if that deception is reassuring).
Even the brightest and most critical minds can be seduced by the
comforting and stimulating allure of these devices. Consultants and
employees making presentations to executives (in both public and
private spheres) are encouraged to simplify the alternatives to just
two in order to get broad approval quickly. They build metaphors and
analogies into the presentations that make difficult, complex concepts
appear absurdly simple, and to use the first and second person plural
form of verbs describing the organization to flatter the executives to
see themselves as the personification of the whole company. And, of
course, they use stories with protagonists the executives can relate
to, and antagonists that personify what they loathe, so that the story
metaphorically surfaces and engages their personal struggles as
powerful, self-aggrandized decision-makers. It's revolting to watch,
and epidemic (if you'll forgive the metaphor) in large organizations
and government bodies. But as organizational complexity increases
exponentially with size, and available information is less and less
adequate for competent decisions, and the organization becomes
increasingly unmanageable, it's irresistible. It's also one of the
reasons why large organizations, both public and private, are so
horrifically bloated, top-heavy and inherently inefficient:
Misinformed, underinformed, overconfident executives and
self-proclaimed 'experts' remote from the front lines (sorry, another
metaphor) inevitably make mostly bad decisions.
Models are a form of
analogy, simple representations of (perhaps) infinitely complex and
unknowable realities. As Timothy Leary's quote suggests, that's really
all science is. Scientific models are fascinating, they appeal to our
instinctive search for pattern, and they are occasionally useful. But
scientists, too, get overly enamoured of what are essentially
fabrications, inherently imprecise representations of reality. There is
an insatiable desire to find the ultimate indivisible particle that
completes the model of matter, makes it 'perfect', or the grand
unifying theory of everything. The concept of a universe that is
infinitely complex, undefinable, endless, and infinitely varied is
deeply unsettling and unsatisfying to many scientists, who will go to
almost any length to argue (by analogy, of course) that this could not
be possible.
We have been so seduced by the power of analogy and metaphor to enrich our ability to understand and conceive, that we have promoted conception to a higher plane of credibility and value in our lives than perception,
and our denigration of the latter (and of instinct, that form of
knowledge that is intuitive and not consciously conceived) has led to a
permanent 'detachment' from the sensory, physical world, to our great
impoverishment and peril. As philosopher Merleau-Ponty put it:
Synaesthetic [involving all the senses together] perception is the rule
[among all life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because
scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so
that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel,
in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the
physicist sees it, what we are to see, hear and feel.
Writers of novels and screenplays, likewise, are advised, if they want
to be successful, to 'get real', to physically describe their characters
and environments, to use realistic dialogue, and never just say what a
character is thinking. A good novel transports you metaphorically to
another place (and sometimes another time). And bad novels and
screenplays push the analogy too far, oversimplifying the characters to
grotesque caricatures of good and evil, oversimplifying and distorting
their artificially-constructed reality to emotionally manipulate and
'dumb down' their audience.
So today, the information (both fictional and non-fictional) with we
are bombarded is replete with analogies, metaphors, similes and
personifications, each intended honesty or dishonestly to help us 'make
sense' (yes, this time I'm being ironic, not metaphorical) of that
information.
What are we to do? If these devices are double-edge swords (oops), or
like a car (oops again), powerful and useful if employed cautiously and
competently but very dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced or the
deranged, should we play it safe and minimize use of them, and require
warning labels when they're used? That's pretty impractical, and there
are lots of other techniques available to manipulate people with
language, some of which have no redeeming value whatever.
The only practical answer is to learn (and to teach young people) to
recognize them, and to recognize them for what they are: Useful,
incomplete, imprecise shorthand representations of reality. We could
use some help in this, from teachers, from the media, from novelists
and scientists and politicians and surveyors of public awareness and
opinion. They are (sorry, can't resist) the most potent weapons in the
fearsome and wonderful arsenal of language.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
