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

[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.