Simple Minds, Part 2 - Metaphor
Last post I showed how prototypes are one way in which Audie simplifies the world for us. Metaphor is another of Audie's tricks.
More than anyone else, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson are responsible for revealing how metaphor pervades everyday thinking. For over 2,000 years metaphor was thought of as a fancy rhetorical flourish — a kind of linguistic window-dressing. In their 1980 classic, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson defined metaphor not in linguistic terms but in conceptual terms. And they showed how metaphor pervades “normal,” everyday experience.
Take the following set of statements:
Where is Pat’s life headed?
I’m worried that my new job will be a step backwards.
Her latest hurdle cleared, Kim felt she could finally move forward.
These examples took me about ten seconds to come up with, and we could easily keep going. It’s easy because there is a common metaphor that generates the statements. Lakoff and Johnson call the metaphor Life Is a Journey.
What does it mean to say that metaphor is conceptual rather than linguistic? What Lakoff and Johnson mean is that language is just one of many ways to express something that is happening at the conceptual level. We could, for instance, imagine pictures portraying each of the above statements. When we’re struggling with accomplishing our goals we might have dreams of obstacles blocking our path. And so on.
To get just a bit more technical, Lakoff and Johnson say that metaphor is a set of “conceptual mappings” between two “domains”: a source domain and a target domain. The source domain (in this case forward motion) provides the conceptual structure that we use for reasoning about the target domain (in this case accomplishing things in our lives).
Metaphor is one of Audie’s chief ways of simplifying the world for us. Just as we need prototypes, without metaphor the complexity of the world would overwhelm us.
As human society has become more intricate over the centuries, the need for metaphor has grown. There's just so much more that needs to be simplified for us. Audie does this without us knowing. And, per usual, if Audie is running the show without Connie’s awareness, problems can result.
In the mid-1990s in California, where I was attending graduate school, affirmative action was attracting a lot of legislative skepticism. As a general supporter of affirmative action, I was alarmed at how rhetorically challenging I was finding it to defend affirmative action. I did some research and discovered a gigantic metaphor that Audie had created.
Essentially, to Americans life is one big competition. Sometimes it’s a game, sometimes a sport or a race, but always a competition. From our youngest days we are taught, through games and sports, about “fair play,” “good sportsmanship,” and, above all, “playing by the rules.” It is good and right, even beautiful, to play hard, to sacrifice for our team, and to do our very best to win. It is also good and right to accept defeat with grace, and to understand that, though we desperately wanted to win, we are greater for playing by the rules and accepting the result, whatever it is.
In order for play to be meaningful, it must be fair. And in order for play to be fair, everyone has to play by the same rules. No exceptions. If you make an exception for even one player, a Pandora’s box of horrors awaits. The entire system becomes meaningless. Can you imagine if we let Jamie have four strikes instead of three, just because some committee decided that something about their life to that point had put them at a disadvantage?
At root this last question is how opponents feel about affirmative action. And they feel that way because the structure of the metaphor dictates it. Reasoning about affirmative action strictly in terms of sports inevitably leads to opposition to affirmative action.
In the technical terms of metaphor analysis, we say that the “inferential structure” of the source domain gets mapped onto the target domain. In other words, we reason about the target domain (school admissions, hiring, etc.) in terms of the source domain (sports). The source domain contains certain logical if-then statements, and all of these are used for reasoning in the target domain. In this case, the source domain follows this reasoning pattern:
There is a set of rules.
Each competitor knows the rules equally well, or at least has a responsibility to know the rules well.
The rules apply equally to all competitors.
We can objectively measure skill by numbers: the fastest time, or the most points, wins.
Given (1) – (4), it would be nonsensical and absolutely unfair to change the rules so that, for instance, a person or team could win by scoring fewer points.
When we import this structure into the target domain — let’s call it “public life” — the details change but the reasoning structure doesn’t:
There is a set of laws, or at least codified procedures, for admissions, hiring, etc.
Each citizen/applicant knows the rules equally well, which are spelled out on application forms, in accompanying booklets, or elsewhere.
The rules apply equally to all applicants.
We can objectively measure ability by numbers: grades and test scores.
Given (1) – (4), it would be nonsensical and absolutely unfair to change the rules so that, for instance, a person could win (i.e., be admitted or hired) with lower grades and test scores than the competition.
As a social scientist I was excited by these findings, because they seemed to explain my difficulties in debating affirmative action. As an affirmative action supporter, though, I was discouraged: The source domain logic is so tight, and the mapping is so natural in American culture, that affirmative action is extremely difficult to defend.
And it was now clear to me that it wasn't difficult to defend because of any inherent flaw in the policy, but because the metaphor simplifies the world in a specific way. The metaphor has no room for the complexity of human society, such as: How do people learn "the rules"? What if some people have more access than others to this information? What about all the other factors in preparing people for school and for the workplace? And so on.
The metaphor can't address these issues. The source domain just doesn't have room.
Lest we blame poor Audie again, it helps to remember that we need to simplify in order to survive. Audie is doing the best they can. As always, Connie being aware of Audie’s tricks is what gives us the best chance to consciously create the world we want.