Drop the Belt!

After a long, theoretical post (whew!), how about a more practical discussion of how metaphor does, or does not, work. Let's look at metaphor in the fields of economics and physics, both appearing in articles in the New York Times online.

The first metaphor is from Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, who also understands to a great degree the importance of language, even in the hard sciences and social sciences. In a post on his Times blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” Krugman objects to the “belt” metaphor used by so many professional and amateur economists and politicians:

“When a family tightens its belt it doesn't put itself [its members] out of a job. When the government tightens its belt in a depressed economy, it puts lots of people out of jobs. . . . So lose the belt; it's a really bad metaphor.”¹

In a later opinion piece for the Times, Krugman expands on why this “belt” metaphor is “really bad.” He reports on conversations he had with British government officials, beginning with their metaphor of the “belt”:

“They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives. . . . A family that has run up too much debt . . . must tighten its belt. . . . [but] an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other. . . . our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income. . . . when you push 'austerians' on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: 'But it's essential that we shrink the size of the state.'”

Krugman then notes that “the austerity drive” in Britain and the United States is “about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs,” that the “calls for austerity” show a “fundamental insincerity,” and that “the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it.”²

I simply must extend Krugman's analogy to say that once the belt is lost (once it's seen the metaphor does not really work) and presumably the pants drop, what we see is the emperor without any clothes. Bad metaphors are inherently dishonest, because people use metaphors to convey an idea to others in simple everyday terms. Most of us do not comprehend much about economic principles or what has been happening to the economy over the past few years, but we all understand how a belt works. Politicians rely on such simple images to convince regular people that their way of thinking of problems is a good and accurate way; and many people are quite happy to be lulled into the belief that fixing the economy is as simple as tightening a belt. But Krugman uncovers how a simple but inaccurate metaphor can be used to fool people and advance an agenda that they might not otherwise approve of.

Let's look even closer at the metaphor than Krugman does. To be exact, the belt tightening doesn't happen before taking austerity measures—the dieter can tighten his belt only after some time on a restricted diet has passed. (Technically, groups like families don't even wear belts; the belt is a concrete image that represents a more abstract concept, the family budget.) Depending on the health of the individual (family, society), a period of austerity can be either beneficial (many of us need to lose weight) or detrimental (not having enough to eat or a roof to sleep under or adequate health care can lead to illness and death). Conservative politicians, of course, believe that the federal budget is flabby, flabby, flabby—and that much of it should be excised (radical lipo-suction?). The flabbiness the conservatives complain of are the benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, what used to be called food stamps, etc. If the conservatives succeed in eliminating or radically cutting down the benefit programs, affluent people (well-nourished people) will be fine, but the already deprived (starving) will fall into a state of greater desperation. We will have the equivalent of a family that starves some of its members in order to keep other members fat and sassy.

That's why “tightening the belt” is a dishonest metaphor. We let metaphors like this pass all the time, not questioning how relevant or appropriate they are. We hear many, many metaphors a day—especially from politicians; how can we keep track of them all? How can we think in any depth of them all? Well, I think we have to overcome our natural laziness and try to assess the accuracy of metaphors whenever possible; we have to keep our language honest. Otherwise, we have no hope of keeping our politics (or even our social interactions) anywhere near honest.

The second metaphor is from physicist Victor F. Weisskopf, by way of NY Times science writer Lawrence M. Krauss, in an article on the significance of the recent apparent finding of the Higgs boson:

“The physicist Victor F. Weisskopf . . . once described large particle accelerators as the gothic cathedrals of our time. Like those beautiful remnants of antiquity, accelerators require the cutting edge of technology, they take decades or more to build, and they require the concerted efforts of thousands of craftsmen and women. . . . cathedrals and colliders are both works of incomparable grandeur that celebrate the beauty of being alive.”³

So, the particle accelerator is the modern equivalent of the Gothic cathedral—that's the metaphor, though this time it seems that we have a comparison of two concrete things, rather than a concrete thing and an abstract idea (like a belt and a budget). This is not quite true, though.

I'd first like to point out some only partially disguised prejudice for science over religion. Yes, many of the Gothic cathedrals were built hundreds of years ago, but cathedrals are still being built, even in the Gothic manner. Apparently the nickname of the Episcopal cathedral in New York City (St. John the Divine) is “St. John the Unfinished” (Wikipedia). So, while particle accelerators may indeed be very modern, cathedrals—even Gothic cathedrals—are not just “beautiful remnants of antiquity.” They have relevance for many people still these days, certainly more than particle accelerators do.

Have you ever seen a particle accelerator? That would be pretty hard to do, as the Large Hadron Collider (where the Higgs boson was apparently discovered) is about seventeen miles around and is buried several hundred feet in the ground. While a person could approach a cathedral from a distance or walk around it and get a sense of its overall structure, then wander around inside its interior, no one could see the Large Hadron Collider as a whole, much less wander around inside of it, though I'm sure many people have worked on and in many of its parts. So, on the basis of accessibility to everyday experience, a collider in not exactly a rose, or a cathedral. In that sense, the collider is the abstract idea being partly explained through its comparison to the concrete image of the cathedral.

TheAtlantic.com is presently showing on its site a rather awesome picture of a small part of the Large Hadron Collider: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/07/the-fantastic-machine-that-found-the-higgs-boson/100333/ . The photo shows a tube with what looks like a copper rim. Inside the rim are many wires woven together, mostly orange, brown, and green. Outside the rim, the orange wires and a much smaller percentage of the green wires are basically flowing away from the rim, creating an appearance of the rays of the sun. Really, it looks to me, for all the world, like a technological version of a child's drawing of the sun. I do see some beauty in it, but it also gives me a very uncomfortable feeling. I can't help but think of Phaethon and Icarus.

Yes, I can conceive of a cathedral as helping me to “celebrate the beauty of being alive.” I've never been to St. John the Divine, but I do hope to get there someday; I'm not religious, but I do respond to beauty, harmony, hope. And in this time of growing abstractions, I do appreciate any abstract idea (like beauty) being presented in concrete form, in media that I can interact with via my senses. That's when I know I'm really alive, because my brain and my body are working together, in harmony.

1Paul Krugman, “Losing the Belt,” New York Times online, 12 March 2012.

2Paul Krugman, “The Austerity Agenda,” New York Times online, 31 May 2012.

3Lawrence M. Krauss, “A Blip that Speaks of Our Place in the Universe,” New York Times online, 9 July 2012.

A Rose Is a Rose?

I call this blog “Metaphorical Times” because I sense that the extreme divisions that are so characteristic of our society these days have reference to the nature of metaphor itself. I sense, both from my job teaching college students and my casual social relations with others, that we are losing an important means of understanding our world, through metaphor. Metaphor is essentially associative and synthetic, the opposite of so many of the opposites we are bombarded with these days.

So, what's a metaphor? Well, whole books have been written on the topic, and “experts” will argue the definition forever. But I have developed a simple working definition of metaphor that I have found is very helpful in everyday life—certainly not just in English classrooms. In my definition, a metaphor is a linguistic association of two different entities; usually one entity is a concrete image, such as a rose, and the other one is an abstract idea, such as love. To take it further, one element of a metaphor makes reference to a physical entity that we can interact with, while the other element reflects mental categories. (And, in this simple definition, a simile is just a subset of metaphor, since it performs the same function, but more openly.) So, when the late eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns writes, “O, my Luve's like a red red rose . . . ,” he is using the concrete image of a rose (of a very red rose, to be precise) to describe his love—his experience of loving a particular person. Why does he do this? For two reasons, I think. First, he's probably struggling to understand his feelings, and somehow his past experiences of a red rose help him to focus the perhaps chaotic experience of love. Second, if Burns wants to convey this confused state of being to another person (i.e., his reader), he can best do so by referring to a physical thing in the common experience of his reader, such as a red rose—an experience many people share.

The more Burns himself and we, the readers, have extensive experience with roses, the more we will understand what Burns is trying to convey about his love. It would be a careless poet, indeed, who would not take into account that roses are not only considered to be among the most beautiful productions of nature with a wonderful aroma, but that they also have thorns, get diseased pretty easily, and die relatively quickly (the flowers, anyway). Indeed, cultured roses these days need a lot of human care to flourish. Only the rest of Burns' poem can guide us on which physical characteristics of a rose he intends to compare to his love--in other words, what his experience of this love has been.

A rose as the symbol for romantic love, especially a red rose, has become virtually a cliché to us modern folk, who see pictures of roses everywhere each February and at times buy or receive roses in the supermarket in protective plastic sleeves, usually de-thorned. But how often do we consider why it is a red rose that has come to express romantic passion for us? Do we stop to consider how a common component of passion is the rush of blood to the skin? Or that a person we feel we love even more than ourselves is a person we value even more highly than our own life force, our blood? In the non-fiction course I taught last spring, as we were reading an essay on Georgia O'Keeffe and looking at some of her erotic flower paintings, I asked the students if they ever wondered why we tend to give flowers to someone we have romantic feelings for. In the ensuing discussion, it seemed that only one or two students knew or remembered that the flower is the sexual part of a plant. Of course, not every young person who walks into a florist and buys roses for his or her beloved is thinking of buying vegetable sexual organs as a means of hopefully seducing the receiver to have sex with him or her. The connection is usually unconscious, but it's there by way of a long history of human associations with flowers.

The immediate conscious connection of concrete image and abstract idea has often been lost in the social process of reducing real thing to symbol--the narcotizing deception of the rose (or romantic love) as an eternal ideal of wonderful feelings, rather than the real, beautiful, hurtful natural thing it is. The latter form of knowledge—reality—wouldn't help Hallmark sell cards so much, would it? Roland Barthes has discussed this process of socializing nature, using the term “mythology” to describe it:

“Holding as a principle that man in a bourgeois society is at every turn plunged into a false Nature, [mythology] attempts to find again, under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships, the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept. The unveiling which it carries out is therefore a political act. . . . in this sense mythology harmonizes with the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself. . . .”¹

The alienation Barthes mentions here, as I take it, is our alienation from the natural world as it really is.

We humans have become so proficient through our verbal and technical manipulations in defining and controlling nature that we are hardly conscious anymore of the state of being we come from, both physically and historically. We are so used to living within an artificial world of society and culture (by artificial I mean man-made) that we easily accept the Hallmark rose as close enough to the real thing—even as superior to the real thing, since it doesn't convey any of the more negative experiences one might have with a rose, or with love. But in accepting the artificial image as, essentially, our domesticated reality, and in increasingly not minding or even happily participating in the weeding out of the real Nature, we dispossess ourselves from physical reality. We are manipulated by social markets to expect an “innocent” world, as Barthes puts it, when really we have been made “innocent” (ignorant) by our increasing distance from nature and therefore much more liable to be disappointed and hurt—or to no longer feel deeply, in order to avoid or deny the negative feelings that are not socially acceptable. (This may seem like a silly example, but one time I was camping with my family, a group from a nearby city in the opposite campsite started throwing kerosene from styrofoam cups into their fire, to get it blazing. The kerosene that dribbled from the cups away from the fire caught, and the whole campsite was at risk. I have rarely been so frightened by “innocence.”)

Anyway, what seems to me to be at the heart of all the oppositions clattering around us these days is that some people trust technology to save us from everything—even to deliver us to another planet when we use up this one. As Barthes puts it, for these people, “. . . Nature . . . is nothing but a Usage” (271). In other words, some people trust to the abstract and think our salvation lies in our increasing distance from nature. In recent discussions of the Higgs boson, Robert Wright has bravely said:

“I personally continue to have no idea what the Higgs boson is. And I think the physicists who 'understand' what it is can do so only because they don't have the lay-person's compulsion to think about the world in ways that are ultimately metaphorical. Or, at least, these physicists have dropped the idea that to truly understand something is to have a crystal-clear metaphor in your mind, a metaphor that doesn't break down at any point and doesn't contain internal contradictions. For them, apprehending a purely mathematical description of something is tantamount to comprehending it.”²

I don't go so far as to want “a crystal-clear metaphor,” because I think muddy metaphors that make us think about what works and what doesn't are far more valuable—like the natural rose and love. But Wright makes an important point here—many technologically oriented people (even pure mathematicians use technology) put their faith in the abstract, in a realm we cannot really know because we cannot directly experience it. Someday, they seem to believe, if we fund technological exploration sufficiently, it will save us from ourselves and from our rapidly degrading and disappointing physical world.

On the other hand are people who believe we are creatures of this Earth and should be working to respect the earth and keep it healthy as a good physical home for ourselves. Much of technology tends to spoil the earth, making it a less pleasant home—and one in which we are more dependent on the consolation of the Hallmark rose. These people tend to believe that we should fund environmental protections and universal health care and population control—dealing with real elements of this real earth. Many of the oppositions we deal with daily come from this largely unstated disagreement, I think. Are we not disturbed by global warming or mass poverty or the extinction of species because we are just going to chug off to another planet someday, where we will be in technological control? Or are we going to tend to the real experiences of abuse and suffering on this earth so that we can go on living here into the far future, we hope? Are we the creator or the creature?

If we can't think metaphorically, we are doomed to do the former—to use up the earth and then move on. If we can't think metaphorically of our constant relationship to the natural world and what it tells us about ourselves, then we cannot do the latter—the natural state of the real world comes to have no stable meaning for us. Only through a metaphorical unity of natural thing and our rationalizing, abstracting human mind can we hope to deal with the very great problems that predominantly abstract thinking has brought to this world. I'll give Roland Barthes the last word:

“. . . I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things.) . . . And yet this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.” (274)

1Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies [1957], transl. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (NY: Hill & Wang, 2012), 271. Sorry for the name-dropping, but this is one of the few times a French theorist makes sense to me! Following quotes from Barthes are also from this source.

2Robert Wright, “What This Higgs Boson Thing Really Means,” The Atlantic on-line, 7/5/12.

Where's the Cream?

It's a long time since I last wrote an entry for this blog. I wrote the first entry, all optimistic about what I wanted to say, and then I hit a wall of disillusionment and after a while took the blog down. It just hit me that in this increasingly technological world, who would have any interest in or need for an understanding of how metaphor works? Blah. 

But something happened recently that has given me new hope, and so I am re-opening this blog. I was teaching a course on literary non-fiction, the essay, and in regard to an essay we were discussing (on the quality of education these days), I mentioned that way back in the '60s, when I was in high school, we were strongly encouraged to take two modern languages (and maybe Latin as well) if we wanted to go on to college. My present students confirmed my understanding that such a strong foundation in languages is no longer needed to get into college.

Then, one student (apparently impressed with my acquaintance with ancient history) piped up with, “Could you, like, sometime tell us about how things were when you were young? I mean, I hear people actually used to get milk delivered to their houses each day—and stuff like that.” Another student joined in with, “Yeah, my mother actually remembers rotary phones!” So, I laughed and talked a bit about those old phones and party lines and my memory of how the un-homogenized milk that sat on the back porch on cold winter mornings often put up a small column of cream above the lip of the glass bottle, with the wax bottle cover perched on top of the column.

I was willing to do this, not only because it was fun, but also because we had been talking about images and metaphors, and this was a neat way to talk about images. But I also caught a hint of wistfulness in the way some of the students were listening to what the good old days were like. That was new to me. These students are so blessed with technology in so many ways, I really thought that simple things and natural things were losing value for them. But it seems there is some nostalgia for a simpler past lurking within some of these technologically gifted students.

After class, a student lingered to ask me about the difference between primary sources and secondary sources. In a way, young people today are living more through secondary sources than through primary sources. They can look up online what those old bottles of un-homogenized milk or those old rotary phones were like, but they can't directly experience them—or at least, not in everyday life. Yes, I know, when I was young, I couldn't experience certain things like horse-drawn carriages in everyday life. But I think there really is a difference now. The game I played outside after school, among trees and leaves and grass, have yielded to a great extent to the virtual reality of computer games. And, yes, I know computer games have their own virtues. But surely primary, personal experience out in the natural world is becoming a smaller segment of life for young people today. Some years ago, when I was teaching poetry on a regular basis, when we got to Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” I'd have to stop to describe for some of the students what a daffodil was. Without some experience with daffodils, how could those students understand that poem?

As I drove home, I was thinking about that column of cream some more, and then the metaphorical phrase “the cream always rises to the top” came to mind. What would that phrase mean to these students who had never seen un-homogenized milk, frozen or not? How could it be anything other than an abstract idea to them? I remember the cream on the top of the milk and how my mother would skim the cream off the top and use it later to make whipped cream for chocolate pudding—a frequent dessert after dinner in our family. And, of course, I remember how much richer the cream tasted than the milk. So I do have a gut sense of how the richest people rise to the top of a society or how the smartest students often rise to the top of their graduating class. It's not just an abstract idea to me, but also a known reality—a part of my experience of the world.

I am so glad I have physical, sensory experiences like this to add real physical, sensory understanding to metaphorical phrases like “the cream always rises to the top.” I actually do feel sorry for this young generation that has never experienced milk in bottles or cream on top of the milk. This is probably very un-PC and Luddite to say, but I do at times feel sorry for younger people who lack these simple experiences because we now live in a world that is so technologically altered to be so convenient and easy, so human-comfort-centric.

I do appreciate technology in many of its forms. My two sons pooled together to get me an iPad for Christmas, and I really like that device. I can sit in front of the fire in the evening and read the latest issue of The New Yorker in a format that is actually “softer” and more congenial to me than the paper version of the magazine. I NEVER thought I would say that or give up my paper subscription, since the paper version of The New Yorker is always a very artistic piece of work. But my iPad turns pages and the like with the most subtle touch of a finger—almost as if I'm caressing the damn machine! And the colors are beautiful. And then I can just go on to the next issue. It's just really a sensual pleasure to read that magazine on my iPad.

So, I get it. I do understand many of the pleasures of technology. But I'm also very glad that I can remember some direct experiences of the natural workings of the real world—and, not incidentally, that I have enough money to live in a rural area close enough to an urban area where I can teach. I feel blessed to have access to both worlds. Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that my writing about metaphors and the images they are based on just might have some value to some others. And it gives me pleasure to write about these things. So, I'm going to tell you about how things used to be!

(January 2012)

"Metaphorical Times"

I sat in a Quaker meeting for worship this morning, after a couple of years of not attending Quaker meetings for personal reasons. One person stood and talked about a conversation she had had recently with some young Dominican adults. When one young person asked her what a Quaker meeting was like, she asked in return if any of the young people had any experience of sitting silently with others. One of the young people responded, "Fishing!"

This is a wonderful metaphor for a Quaker meeting. Whenever I attend a meeting for worship from now on, I suspect I will imagine us all (sitting on four sides of the room, facing the "empty" space in the middle of the room) as holding rods with our lines dipping into the silent emptiness (which becomes fullness) at the center. We all are linked to the same pool--what I like to characterize as the unconscious realm of spirituality. We all are seeking an image or a message from that pool, and if one of us succeeds in pulling up a message we share it with the others, almost like Christ sharing the few fishes with the multitudes. We are all then to some extent spiritually nourished in a good meeting for worship.

I start this new blog on metaphors with this particular metaphor, and in coming posts (soon!) I will develop the idea of metaphor and how it is used (or not) in everyday life. Why metaphor? I think it is an important missing link in much of our conversations with each other and with the natural and social worlds around us. And I mean "real" metaphor, not the superficial sense of metaphor that most people are aware of. (Yes, I am an English professor--you caught me!)

I'd just like to add here a poem by the great modern Irish poet W. B. Yeats--my favorite poem of his, which the comment in meeting today brought back to my mind.

"The Song of Wandering Aengus"

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped a berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Next time, a brief discussion of metaphor in this wonderful poem.

(Originally posted months ago.)