The Only Good Analogy is a Dead Analogy

goldjadeocean linked to Doug Muder’s article about the difference between liberal and conservative viewpoints. It’s a good article for its own sake (it’s about the different mental frameworks through which liberals and conservatives view the world) but what particularly caught my eye was this paragraph:

Lakoff’s general approach, which he developed long before he started writing about politics, is to recognize that the human mind works in metaphors: Life is a struggle; business is a game; time is money - stuff like that. The mind casts every abstract idea in terms of more immediate experiences. Struggles, games, and money, in turn, have their own metaphoric interpretations, and (to make a long story short) it’s turtles all the way down. There’s no ground floor where we think of things as exactly what they are.

And it goes on to posit that ideology is, in essence, a really big analogy for how the world works. The world is too irreducibly complex for anyone to understand it without an analogy to mediate and provide narrative direction.

( In which I discuss ideology, literature, and history, and the fact that I need therapy becomes abundantly clear. )

It’s a failure of writers, I think, to see the world as a hotchpotch of grand narratives. Clearly this is an over-simplification (language itself is an over-simplification) but at least it leads to interesting places.

***

Incidentally, I think the article itself suffers from a breakdown of analogies. Muder’s family analogy warps his discussion of the conservative view of abortion. He completely ignores what I think most conservatives believe is the crux of the issue, which is whether or not abortion is murder. He manages to ignore that issue entirely.