metaphor

In the first installment of my Art of Persuasion series, I talked about emotional wedges. For the second installment, I’ll like to discuss metaphors and models.

Let’s disagree with George Lakoff that we ought (intentionally or not) to mislead through metaphors, as Steven Pinker points out in his critique of Lakoff’s metaphor-abuse. Or better, consider this doozy from Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought:

One can just imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff's Orwellian advice and renamed "taxes" as "membership fees." (Indeed, Orwell himself singled out revenue enhancement as an egregious euphemism for a tax increase in his famous 1949 essay "Politics and the English Language.") ... To take the most obvious example, taxes and membership fees are not two ways of framing the same thing: if you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will cease to provide you with its services, but if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail.

Okay, so truth-in-metaphor is a better long-term strategy. But let’s agree with George Lakoff (and Mark Johnson) that we “live by” metaphors to some extent and that they are powerful cognitive tools—useful for framing issues and distilling a lot of information.

Recall that among the false metaphors the left uses is that society is like a machine. As I’ve written elsewhere, we need to fight this false metaphor. But first we must learn to identify them as Pinker did above:

Sadly, we're getting a whole lot of precisely the wrong kind of thinking in response to this [financial] crisis. Indeed, most of the bad thinking arises from viewing the economy through the lens of false metaphor -- economy as machine. We've heard pundits accuse the government or banks of being "asleep at the switch." But in a complex system there is no switch. We've heard people ask how to "fix it," "run it," or "regulate it," suggesting if just the right sort of genius controlled the rheostats, we'd get just the right sort of economy.  

When it comes to economics, the Left are, ironically, practitioners of Intelligent Design. (I’ll leave that detour for later.)

It’s not enough to critique false metaphors. We must introduce our own, more truth-conducive metaphors. And we must repeat them ad nauseum. In this case, we should argue that society is an ecosystem. Ecosystems - as any lefty can tell you - are dynamic systems, un-designed and evolved. You can’t plant an ecosystem like a garden, or operate it like a machine, or interfere with it too much—notwithstanding the best arguments of the Krugmans, Galbraiths and Keyneses of the world.

Let me not pass over models, which, as Max Black suggested, are a species of metaphor. Models are able to pick out specifically functional correspondences between the literal (source) domain and the figurative domain—which makes ‘economy as ecosystem’ as much a metaphor as a model.

In any case, this may be too abstract an example. I’d love to hear thoughts on other metaphors the Freedom Movement can embrace.  Because metaphors pack a cognitive punch. See?