The Only Good Analogy is a Dead Analogy

[osprey_archer]

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.



He doesn’t go on (the article is describing specific worldviews, not a theory of ideology) but I think this pinpoints the problem with ideology. Ideologues believe that they’re seeing the world as it actually is, not that they’ve created a better analogy for the world than their opponents; they believe that “the world is like X” means that the world is exactly like X on every major point, not that the world shares points of congruence with X but is in many ways dissimilar.

This applies to literature also. Literature is (among many, many other things, which we will ignore) an analogy for the real world. In a good book, the author gets close to what (most people think) the real world is like, but in the end there isn’t some mystical force of connection between the author and God which makes universal themes ring off the page like bells if only you read the text closely enough.

I think a certain segment of the population (high school English teachers, for instance) mistakenly believe that because stories are powerful, because people believe in stories, stories are in some mystical sense true. That the themes of a story have universal applicability. The fact that Cinderella sits around waiting for her prince is a social message to all women, not merely a recounting of events that happened to one unfortunate young woman who really didn’t have any other options.

Because Cinderella is not just an individual in a specific time and a specific place, she’s analogous to all women, everywhere. Why? Because—well, just because. Because her story has such incredible narrative pull.

History is a story about events that really happened. The events themselves are too complex to be explained in their totality, so they’re reduced to manageability through a story. The story is like what really happened, but it’s simplified (sometimes vastly, if it’s the sort of floating amorphous history that most people learn in school), it becomes a parable, and this collection of parables make up the national character.

Nationalism is a grand story without much basis in reality, but enough people believe it that it becomes like truth. (Similar to truth but different in many ways, or so much alike as to be indistinguishable therefrom?)

The Nazis, c.f. Eichmann in Jerusalem (which is fantastic) told themselves a grand narrative, in which they switched the generally accepted definitions of morality and legality to make killing great swathes of people righteous and lawful, and then inflicted it on their country—and told the story so well that almost everyone in Germany went along with it.

But when the story was broken—when the Danish, the Italians, the Bulgarians, stood up to the Nazis—the Nazis in the area lost their will to work. The Nazi narrative imploded on contact with reality—or at least, it imploded on contact with a narrative of the human condition that involved less cognitive dissonance and distress and was therefore, presumably, closer to reality than the Nazi narrative. Because the narrative was more analogous to reality on more points than the Nazi narrative.

So I think the English teachers are wrong. Stories are powerful not because they touch the truth; they’re powerful because they can create the truth. Up to a point, reality is a product of the stories people tell themselves.

But only up to a point, because reality is just too vast and complex to be harnessed by a story. Hence the fact that analogies always break down: stories have limits, and reality is infinite.



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.

Comments

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

I rather enjoy the statistics mantra, "All models are wrong. Some of them are useful."

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I think small children should be positively indoctrinated with that mantra, and if that's not possible then it should be prominently affixed to all statistics everywhere. Then maybe people will stop being so shocked when they run into the fact that statistics aren't straight from the mouth of God to the statistician's ear, and in fact have a margin of error.

I'm having a cynical day so I don't think it would actually work, but it would make me feel better.

Where do you find all these articles? You always have the best articles.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

Red Family, Blue Family and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool things come from Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/), which is a totally awesome blog of awesomesauce. It talks less about SFF writing/publishing and Anglo-Saxon and obscure saints than it used to, but it's still the source of 80% of my weekly brain nutrient.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

:). That is a cool site. It even has a cool entry right at the top today, like a welcome mat!

It amuses me that one of his axes is a spectrum from "True to Beautiful." What a slap in the face to Keats fans.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

Read the comments--they're always awesome comments. When I grow up I want to moderate like Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Making Light has collected a community of amazing, intelligent, talented commentors and contributors, and the trolls are dealt with well.

And yes, several of the commentors have already made that observation.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I feel so derivative now. Clearly I need to make comment reading a reflex.

Most of them seemed to be disagreeing with the axis on the grounds that truth is, in fact, beauty, which I don't agree with. Sometimes the truth is beautiful and sometimes it's appalling and painful--there isn't really a correlation.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

Sometimes appalling and painful truth is also beautiful, so there.

It still doesn't make Truth-Beauty a good metric, though.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends which definition of beauty you're using. The dictionary definitions all suggest that a thing has to be somehow pleasing to be beautiful, but dictionaries never really capture the full flavor of words.

What qualities would make an appalling and painful truth also beautiful, assuming there isn't something intrinsically beautiful about the fact that something is true?

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

I am so behind. I've wanted to reply to this for ages, even though I don't even have a reply!

All that leaps to mind in this conversation is the Crucifixion; it's (at least in my worldview) simultaneously apalling, true, painful, beautiful, and pleasing.

I suppose the basic aspect would be that not all pain is undesirable, and not all beauty is pleasant, but I'm really short of actual examples. I wish I had more!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I often look at your posts and think, "Hey, that's really thinky and interesting," except I don't have a reply, and then its three days later and "what's wrong with Calvinism" is lost in the mists of time.

As for the undesirability of pain--I think most people find physical pain undesirable, but a lot of people find emotional pain attractive. Hence the popularity of tragic romances or Lurleen McDaniel novels, where the main character is always dying of cancer.

I'm not sure how "real" that kind of emotional pain is, though--but that's another side conversation in itself.

Perhaps someone could find something beautiful in their own grief? I'm leery of theories that involve finding beauty in someone else's suffering--elegant assassins and so on--but religious traditions often require that you suffer before you can reach enlightenment.

Honestly, this may all be barking up the wrong tree. It might be easier to discuss the relationship between truth and beauty by discussing the lies that people think are beautiful.

Perhaps we should start a new thread? The comment boxes are getting very small.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

I always love thinky thoughts, so if you have to drop a comment by a week late, I won't mind.

I'm not so good at the truth/beauty debate because I believe strongly that truth is subjective and reality is consensual, and I have a deeply-sown hatred for formal logic. But, um, maybe someone else will have something to say?

(I just view your commentpages in ?format=light)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

If I ever figure out how to use format=light (I got this computer a year ago and I still haven't quite figured it out :/) that sounds like a clever solution to the problem.

I do think that reality is consensual breaks down when you get to a basic enough level--it doesn't matter what you believe, you've got to eat to live--but for things like politics, religion, social relationships, it's essentially true.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

You type ?format=light on the end of a post URL. So this page would be http://osprey-archer.livejournal.com/21289.html?format=light Or, more generally, go to customize journal (http://www.livejournal.com/customize/options.bml) and select yes for "Disable customized comment pages for your journal".

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

It's slightly less pretty, but it is actually legible now.

[exuberantself.livejournal.com]

I remember when this concept was first introduced in Rhetorical Theory. Honestly, between Plato and Bacon, my head nearly exploded--or, more likely, imploded as I've never felt stupider in my life.

It's frighteningly simple in the breakdown though: communication and understanding are both impossible because we lack the most basic tools necessary for either.

Great point of literature being indicative of, but not identical to, life, by the way.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I never read Bacon, but I did read Chuang Tzu, whose whole point (once you wade through his thickets of incomprehensible metaphor, which I suppose might be his indirect way of point out that analogies are evil) is that we can't know anything, and if we could we couldn't communicate it.

Like everything else, this theory breaks down eventually--clearly people manage to communicate some things, no matter how imperfectly--but it still puts Ultimate Truth definitively out of reach.

I found my literature class in high school absolutely exasperating because we had to write all these papers about the themes expounded in the book of the week, as if this ramble through the extruded product of the author's psyche illustrated some deep Truth about the universe, unreachable by any other means.

I think that if some Truth is only available in imaginative literature, that's because it's something we wish was true, not something actually true. My teacher may have thought I was a raging cynic.

[anait.livejournal.com]

Thanks for linking to that article-- I really enjoyed reading it, and it gave some good food for thought. I also like your thought-provoking post. It covers so many things (and so does the article) that I'm having trouble putting my thoughts in order to come up with a response. Um... here I go...

I'm with you on History as parable and Nationalism as self-perpetuating myth, but I'm not sure about the rest.

I was skimming the comments about truth vs. beauty or beauty as truth (and vice versa). I have a fascination with Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' and he argues for a view of aesthetics where beauty is separate thing from morality. He is very much of the beauty is truth and truth is beauty school. Some of his accompanying epigrams for the book: "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved." And, "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

Part of Wilde's charm is that he chooses beautifully witty sentences over honesty, but there is a draw for me in what he says. Where I stand is that truth and beauty can sometimes be congruent, but don't necessarily have to be. Truth can be beautiful, or it can be hard and ugly. Beautiful things can be true, or they can be false. Depending on where you stand, morality can add to beauty, or, if you're Oscar Wilde, be completely irrelevant. For me, there's a draw to beautiful things that can be dark or immoral or untrue, but I'm also glad that beauty and morality and truth (or what I perceive as truth) can meet and be in perfect accord, like in music by Mozart, or paintings by Velasquez. Most things come back to music for me, in the end. Beauty and truth are subjective and personal, I think, if you believe in free will, though there are some things that the majority can agree on (and this is usually a good thing): collective notions of beauty and truth, I guess you could call it, that function for us on a societal, cultural or national level. The ideas that make civilization go round and round.

[anait.livejournal.com]

So I think the English teachers are wrong. Stories are powerful not because they touch the truth; they’re powerful because they can create the truth. Up to a point, reality is a product of the stories people tell themselves.

But only up to a point, because reality is just too vast and complex to be harnessed by a story. Hence the fact that analogies always break down: stories have limits, and reality is infinite.

I stared at this bit for a while. Especially the part about stories creating, not touching the truth. I believe that the stories we tell each other alter our perception of the truth, but I also believe that some truths are absolute, or as close to absolute as it is possible to get, even if they aren't entirely knowable. I am thinking of science vs. religion here. Modern science tells us the story that we live on a round planet that orbits a sun in a solar system, that is one of many in a vast, expanding universe that was created in the Big Bang, and that Humans evolved from a common ape ancestor, that evolved from single-celled organisms, that evolved from the molecules and atoms that collected and bonded on our primordial planet. There is probably a great deal of truth in this. The Christian religion tells us the story that God created our world in seven days, the plants and animals upon it, and men and women were born from Adam and Eve. There is possibly truth in this story too. In the absence of 100% solid, proof that the science story is 100% true (and this story is constantly changing and being added to), who is to say that the Christian story of a divine creator, Heaven and Hell, and the existence of the human soul isn't true? And, since my biases are showing, vice versa for those who would argue the opposite world-view.

What I think can be said for both of these stories is that as divergent as they are, absolute truths can be found in both. A lot of human behaviour is determined by biology and our origins as a certain species of animal. Morality and culture, however we conceive them, are hallmarks of civilization that define our species: Killing is wrong. Art is beautiful (or ugly, too, in the modern age). Knowledge is valuable but can be dangerous. Another absolute truth is that much as supporters of both stories might say otherwise, the boundaries of both of these stories are still unknowable to us, and yet this knowledge is worth striving for.

I think that Cinderella's story wouldn't be told over and over, in those high school English classes, if there weren't things in there that spoke to many people about things that resonated with them personally: the human experience, or being a woman, or coming of age, or overcoming adversity. If there wasn't something in there that was able to be communicated to many different individuals (one truth? many truths? a different truth for each reader?) then the story would only be a curiousity and not a story.

And I have written far too much. You need to stop being so interesting.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I'll try to stop being interesting, but sometimes it just burbles up spontaneously. Alas! I have no control.

I am confused how truth can be both subjective and absolute. Are you talking about two different kinds of truth? Because it seems to me that, by definition, an absolute truth can't be subjective--it's true even if the spectators don't believe it.

"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

I like this quote--one of the fascinating things about LJ is finding out which parts of a story or essay catch people's interest, because it's often unexpected which bits of flotsam stick in the psyche.

But I think art mirrors life (and, for that matter, the author), not just the spectator. Wilde does go for the pithy instead of the accurate, which is probably why I find him frustrating as an author. He has no charity.

On the subject of beauty and morality--I tend to agree with everything you said--what I find fascinating is the way that people often use beauty to confer morality. Like assassin's guilds in fantasy novels: there's often a sense that these highly trained assassins are morally better than other murderers, even if the murderers kill for the same reasons as the assassins, because the assassins' work is elegant--artwork.

Stories are powerful not because they touch the truth; they’re powerful because they can create the truth.
***
Especially the part about stories creating, not touching the truth.

I worded the original sentence unclearly--I didn't mean that stories never touch the truth, but that their power is derived from their ability to create/manipulate truth-as-we-know-it, regardless whether or not they touch absolute truth.

(There need to be more words for truth. Language is so imprecise!)

I think what you're arguing, with the examples of the competing creation stories, is that stories (or at least good stories) are infinite as reality? They reach toward absolute truth, and humans, through the stories, try to reach it too--but the stories are so big as to be ultimately unknowable, although we should still strive to understand.

Tangentially--I find discussions of the meaning of art, and what makes something art, and what it means to be art, fascinating--but the topic is probably worthy of another post, once my brain has regenerated.

I feel like I ought to say something about Cinderella, but I got nothing.

[anait.livejournal.com]

Tangentially--I find discussions of the meaning of art, and what makes something art, and what it means to be art, fascinating--but the topic is probably worthy of another post, once my brain has regenerated.
I'm with you on both points here. What seemed very clear when I was typing a few nights ago is not as obvious now-- my brain is also fried.

Like assassin's guilds in fantasy novels: there's often a sense that these highly trained assassins are morally better than other murderers, even if the murderers kill for the same reasons as the assassins, because the assassins' work is elegant--artwork.
Yes, that new Angelina Jolie/James McAvoy movie that came out recently was catering to exactly this kind of mentality.

I think what you're arguing, with the examples of the competing creation stories, is that stories (or at least good stories) are infinite as reality? They reach toward absolute truth, and humans, through the stories, try to reach it too--but the stories are so big as to be ultimately unknowable, although we should still strive to understand.
Yes, that sounds about right for what I was trying, in a very vague sort of way, to say.

I am confused how truth can be both subjective and absolute
Me too. I think I had some idea that there are sort of three levels of truth: the personal and subjective, the societal/cultural/national (which are a consensus agreement but subjective to that particular population), and the big, absolute truths that approach reality, even if they're incomplete. The first two kinds are subject to change, as a person goes through their life and gets new beliefs, or as a society or country changes over time--slowly, or, after a drastic event, quickly. Whereas the absolute truths are arrived at by the human race as a whole, over the history of our species: starting far off in the distance from the truth and converging on it gradually, but never quite getting there (like asymptotes).

Somehow it didn't seem like a paradox when I came up with this; that a truth could be changed for another truth without either one being any less true in their own right, even though they weren't yet accepted or were later discarded. ...I wasn't drinking... honestly...

*scratches head*

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Truth is asymptotic. That would make a good icon. Without the context it wouldn't make a great deal of sense, but it sure sounds cool.

I rather like the idea of three different kinds of truth, all of which have varying relationships to absolute truth.

For personal or societal truths, I think that the idea that the truth can morph into another truth without either truth 1 or truth 2 having been untrue, isn't paradoxical at all. These are the kinds of truths that are made true because people believe them--thus, if a society believes that having premarital sex will ruin a women's life, it will. Society will act in a way that makes its prophecy come true.

[anait.livejournal.com]

it sure sounds cool
It does indeed!

I rather like the idea of three different kinds of truth, all of which have varying relationships to absolute truth.
Me too. I also like the way you take my bizarre ideas and make them sound logical!