I'd like to point out a great essay on how things get messy in society when metaphors are misused or outright abused: John Lanchester's “Money Talks,” New Yorker online, 4 August 1914.1 Lanchester discusses a process he calls “reversification” in the “language of money”--the tendency of financial terms to come to mean the opposite of what they seem to mean in ordinary language. He illustrates his argument with a discussion of the term “hedge fund.”
“The idea is that, by putting a hedge around a bet, clever gamblers can delimit the size of their potential losses, just as a real hedge delimits the size of a field. . . . A hedge is a physical thing. It turned into a metaphor; then into a technique; then the technique became more sophisticated and more and more complicated; then it turned into something that can't be understood by the ordinary referents of ordinary language. And that is the story of how a hedge, setting a limit to a field, became what it is today: a largely unregulated pool of private capital. . . . This is reversification in its full glory.”
Lanchester also discusses the misuse in financial circles of the terms “securitization” and “austere.” Those terms are, of course, not metaphors, because they are not based on concrete images. When Lanchester refers to “a real hedge” as being part of “the ordinary referents of ordinary language,” he is obliquely referring to the hedge as an image, as when he more clearly describes a hedge as “setting a limit to a field.” I want to stick in this discussion to the misuse of this metaphor and not get into the misuse of abstract terms like security and austerity—because we can do something to monitor the misuse of metaphors.
What Lanchester says happens in financial language is a removal of the meaning of words from ordinary people—when we can't correctly understand what a hedge fund is, we need an interpreter to guide us—a “priest” of financial mysteries. And as soon as we do that, we tend to enrich the priests and impoverish ourselves, in several different ways. As Lanchester says about the misuse of the word “austerity,” “The word 'austerity' reflects an attempt to make something moral-sounding and value-based out of specific reductions in government spending that result in specific losses to specific people. For people who don't use any of the affected services—for the rich, that is—these cuts may have no downside. They're a case of you lose, we win.”
But back to the hedge. The reason that speaking and thinking in real metaphors can protect us from such avaricious financial priests is that we can relate to an objective thing, an image, with our senses within our imagination. In other words, the basis for understanding reality is within ourselves and not vested in outside authority when we use metaphors. The deception comes when people in power (often politicians and financial experts) move language away from the images we can easily relate to and understand. A “hedge fund” is still based on an image, but it deceives us in that, as Lanchester explains, it is really the opposite of a carefully hedged bet.
When we allow authorities to misuse metaphors (or to use too much abstract language, lacking imagery), we give up our own power to judge for ourselves and we place our futures in the hands of people who wish mostly just to enhance their own power—the very people who brought about the recent financial crisis that affected so many of us! Our language is literally our power; to let some people redefine or obscure what words mean is to yield our power. We need to use language that we can think with and understand—and, even more importantly, we need to insist that others do that also when talking to us.
When I taught literature in college, I came to feel that the literary theory that was taking over basically all English departments was seriously disadvantaging students. Their professors became a kind of priesthood that could decipher the very abstract thinking of literary theory, and this put an unnecessary step between the student and the literary work. Literature is based on metaphor; theory is based on abstract ideas. I sought to return students to the literary text in front of them by getting them to respond sensually, imaginatively to the images and metaphors within it.
Lanchester believes that the misuse of language by financial experts is “not a process intended to deceive,” but in fact it does deceive—and, personally, I cannot see how the financial experts can be not aware of that. Results in a case like this matter more than intentions, which are always slippery. (You can never really know an author's intention, but you can know how his language affects you—and that's what matters most. The author is not in your head; her words are.) But Lanchester calls for a new insistence on honesty in language.
“The language of money is a powerful tool, and it is also a tool of power. Incomprehension is a form of consent. If we allow ourselves not to understand this language, we are signing off on the way the world works today—in particular, we are signing off on the prospect of an ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else, a world in which everything about your life is determined by the accident of who your parents are.”
Education should be the process of achieving equality, since in part education guides us toward metaphorical thinking (as long as we are studying the liberal arts, anyway). Personally, I think private schools and charter schools and religious schools and home schooling are a really bad idea, because they lead to impoverishment of the public schools and to our children growing up without a common cultural language, in effect. But I can't do anything about that. What I can do is insist that the people I talk to use language I can relate to, so that we are sharing an idea and so that I am not wholly dependent on the other person to guide me toward a decision that would be in my best interest. As someone said of World War I, war is too horrible to leave to the generals. Any process that removes the power of metaphorical thinking from us disempowers us. We need to insist on the integrity of our own language.
Bravo, Mr. Lanchester!
1http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/money-talks-6?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20%28226%29&spMailingID=6827528&spUserID=MjQ4NTYwMzUwNzIS1&spJobID=482987526&spReportId=NDgyOTg3NTI2S0
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