Migration

metaphor as plague of politics

Daniel Prokop explains how false analogies skew our comprehension of reality

Wikimedia / Gage Skidmore
Apr 25th 2017
Daniel Prokop
<p><em>This article is an edited translation of an article that originally appeared in Právo daily on April 25th 2017. It is being published with kind permission of the publisher as an appetizer to our correspondent´s acclaimed new book Slepé skvrny [Blind Spots] which you can purchase </em><a href="https://www.hostbrno.cz/slepe-skvrny/" target="_blank"><em>here</em></a><em> (in Czech).</em></p><p><strong>METAPHORS and analogies always belonged to the instruments we have used to explain the world. By the time Isaac Newton and René Descartes were exploring the regularities in the world, they demonstrated their belief in God by claiming that a mechanically perfect world necessitates an intelligent creator: much like functional watch necessitates the existence of a watchmaker. Only in the last two centuries, we have realized that the watchmaker can be blind and be referred to as evolution.</strong></p><p>We express many thoughts in both social and natural sciences through metaphors to this date. We abandoned the idea of society as a machine with cogwheels but continue to liken cities to live organisms. In physics, electrons rotating around the nucleus are likened to planets orbiting around the Sun. Biology has selfish genes “caring” about their replication.</p><p>Analogies and metaphors teach us to understand a difficult world. But they come with hazards. Their influence can persist long after they become outdated. The aforementioned model of the atom was refuted but cannot be immediately replaced in the imagination of the broader public. Historians point out that the sway of metaphors can condition the future directions of research, too.</p><p>By their allusion to crass similarity, analogies and metaphors can take the eye off details and actual relations to which they may or may not correspond. This risk was emphasized already by David Hume in his critique of Newton´s “watchmaker”.</p><p>We often do not realize the influence of metaphors. Psychologists from Stanford provided identical statistical information about criminality to two groups of people. To one group, they introduced the statistics by calling criminality “an animal”, that has attacked their city. To another group, they said it is a “virus”. The respondents who heard the word “animal” more often preferred police interventions to solve issues. Those who heard the word “virus” preferred systemic solutions targeting the sources of criminality in the city. But nearly everyone claimed they base their conclusions on the statistical data. The effect of the original metaphor to one´s views was acknowledged by 15 out of 485 people.</p><p>Due to the complexity of the problems of the globalized world and the hidden persuasive function, metaphors and analogies are becoming increasingly popular in political argumentation. When Donald Trump´s son argued against accepting refugees, he used a line of argument popular also in the Czech Republic: “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?”</p><p>The first issue in false analogies like is often lying about the scale. You can put between a hundred to three hundred skittles in a bowl. The analogy therefore presumes 1-3 % probability that a refugee will be a terrorist. Since 1975, Americans admitted 3.3 million refugees. Of those, 20 were convicted on terrorism charges (often Cubans; since the 1980 Refugee Act set systematic procedures for admitting asylum seekers, not a single refugee was involved in a deadly attack – editor´s note). The metaphor therefore overestimates the risk about 5,000 times.</p><p>It is possible to object that in Europe, the risk of attack by foreign-born terrorists was higher between 2015 and 2017 and you would not take any skittles even if only three were poisoned from a full truckload. A problem is that you might instead take some M&Ms without suspecting poison in many more of them. The Islamist <a href="https://datalyrics.org/en/how-investigators-prevent-terrorism" target="_blank">terror</a> in the West is perpetrated mostly by people who were born, grew up and radicalized in the region. If the public prioritizes the elimination of a smaller threat under the influence of a false metaphor, it can put itself at unnecessary risk.</p><p>The second common problem of false analogies are transgressions against the comparative logic. In our metaphor, an asylum applicant is a skittle while the listener who is taking a handful is a society which accepts refugees. In that case, three terrorists would have to be powerful enough to kill all the United States. Which is nonsense.</p><p>The metaphor could therefore better go like this: <em>Imagine you are about to go help your aunt with gardening. But someone tells you there may be glass on your aunt´s lawn which could cut your feet. Would you go?</em></p><p>The analogy is much less spectacular. A man hesitates: I do not want to cut my feet but I would like to help my auntie. Probably I would go and be more cautious. With accepting families from war zones, it is similar. Caution, control and acceptance of those with the right to seek asylum are in order while radical measures are hardly justified.</p><p>Why this analogy is less impressive than the Trumpian one? Because it does not lie with regard to either the scale or the comparative logic. It therefore brings hardly any new information. It does not help us decide by exaggerating some aspects of a question and surpressing others.</p><p class="ql-align-center">***</p><p>That´s not all. Neither does the latter analogy liken human beings to candies which can be flushed down the drain. After an inpetus from social psychologists, we have let respondents in one of our surveys at Median, the Czech market research agency, to assess how human they find members of various ethnic groups and nationalities. The scale was 0 to 100. Above it was a popular picture of the evolutionary sequence from a primate to a human. Czechs and neighbouring nations received scores between 95 and 100. Muslims and refugees from the Middle East and Africa about 50.</p><p>What is more interesting is that the level of dehumanization of these out-groups was significantly associated with the willingness to accept refugees. People who unequivocally refused accepting refugees gave an average score of around 35, scores from people open to accepting some averaged around 70. The relationship can go both ways. We may be shunning refugees because we do not understand them as human. But we can also be justifying our otherwise hardly justifiable attitude through dehumanization.</p><p>Dehumanizing metaphors about poisoned candies serve to colour burning dilemmas in which we compare security and willingness to help. In the Czech context, these work particularly well because the word <em>uprchlík [runner]</em>, unlike the English <em>refugee</em>, refers also to a prison escape and therefore raises the impression of an unwarranted claim. The closeness of Czechs which is often ascribed to deep-seated xenophobia, may simply be the consequence of the way in which we discuss issues.</p><p class="ql-align-center">***</p><p>Some Czech publicists have built their careers on analogies. It is the main type of argument used, for instance, by Václav Klaus Jr., a son of the former president: After a terrorist attack, someone warned against denouncing all Muslims, Mr Klaus asked if Winston Churchill also “babbled” after the bombing of London that “we cannot condemn the whole German nation because of a few aggressive pilots”.</p><p>There are all the pet fouls: Mr Klaus compares incommensurable attacks (the bombing of London killed 43,000 people). He breaches logic since the analogy of Nazi Germany, directly represented by pilots, is not Germany but ISIS, represented by the terrorists. Furthemore, he suggests that the refusal to condemn nations or religious beliefs goes hand in hand with inability to act. But did Mr Churchill ever ruminate whether the attacks emanate from the character of German nation?</p><p>Similar or more exorbitant analogies can be found in about two thirds of authors´ texts published in the first four months of 2017. It is probably no coincidence that those articles in which he did not need false analogies feature arguments of higher quality.</p><p>Analogies bring inner satisfaction at a moment when we understand what they symbolize. We often mistake understanding the analogy for comprehending reality. All metaphors and analogies in political statements as well as other texts should instead lead us to maximum caution. That applies also to the “plague” in the headline of this article. Metaphors and analogies are not plague, they make it easier for us to comprehend the world. But they can turn into serious illness once we accept them uncritically and let them manipulate us.</p>
<p><em>This article is an edited translation of an article that originally appeared in Právo daily on April 25th 2017. It is being published with kind permission of the publisher as an appetizer to our correspondent´s acclaimed new book Slepé skvrny [Blind Spots] which you can purchase </em><a href="https://www.hostbrno.cz/slepe-skvrny/" target="_blank"><em>here</em></a><em> (in Czech).</em></p><p><strong>METAPHORS and analogies always belonged to the instruments we have used to explain the world. By the time Isaac Newton and René Descartes were exploring the regularities in the world, they demonstrated their belief in God by claiming that a mechanically perfect world necessitates an intelligent creator: much like functional watch necessitates the existence of a watchmaker. Only in the last two centuries, we have realized that the watchmaker can be blind and be referred to as evolution.</strong></p><p>We express many thoughts in both social and natural sciences through metaphors to this date. We abandoned the idea of society as a machine with cogwheels but continue to liken cities to live organisms. In physics, electrons rotating around the nucleus are likened to planets orbiting around the Sun. Biology has selfish genes “caring” about their replication.</p><p>Analogies and metaphors teach us to understand a difficult world. But they come with hazards. Their influence can persist long after they become outdated. The aforementioned model of the atom was refuted but cannot be immediately replaced in the imagination of the broader public. Historians point out that the sway of metaphors can condition the future directions of research, too.</p><p>By their allusion to crass similarity, analogies and metaphors can take the eye off details and actual relations to which they may or may not correspond. This risk was emphasized already by David Hume in his critique of Newton´s “watchmaker”.</p><p>We often do not realize the influence of metaphors. Psychologists from Stanford provided identical statistical information about criminality to two groups of people. To one group, they introduced the statistics by calling criminality “an animal”, that has attacked their city. To another group, they said it is a “virus”. The respondents who heard the word “animal” more often preferred police interventions to solve issues. Those who heard the word “virus” preferred systemic solutions targeting the sources of criminality in the city. But nearly everyone claimed they base their conclusions on the statistical data. The effect of the original metaphor to one´s views was acknowledged by 15 out of 485 people.</p><p>Due to the complexity of the problems of the globalized world and the hidden persuasive function, metaphors and analogies are becoming increasingly popular in political argumentation. When Donald Trump´s son argued against accepting refugees, he used a line of argument popular also in the Czech Republic: “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?”</p><p>The first issue in false analogies like is often lying about the scale. You can put between a hundred to three hundred skittles in a bowl. The analogy therefore presumes 1-3 % probability that a refugee will be a terrorist. Since 1975, Americans admitted 3.3 million refugees. Of those, 20 were convicted on terrorism charges (often Cubans; since the 1980 Refugee Act set systematic procedures for admitting asylum seekers, not a single refugee was involved in a deadly attack – editor´s note). The metaphor therefore overestimates the risk about 5,000 times.</p><p>It is possible to object that in Europe, the risk of attack by foreign-born terrorists was higher between 2015 and 2017 and you would not take any skittles even if only three were poisoned from a full truckload. A problem is that you might instead take some M&Ms without suspecting poison in many more of them. The Islamist <a href="https://datalyrics.org/en/how-investigators-prevent-terrorism" target="_blank">terror</a> in the West is perpetrated mostly by people who were born, grew up and radicalized in the region. If the public prioritizes the elimination of a smaller threat under the influence of a false metaphor, it can put itself at unnecessary risk.</p><p>The second common problem of false analogies are transgressions against the comparative logic. In our metaphor, an asylum applicant is a skittle while the listener who is taking a handful is a society which accepts refugees. In that case, three terrorists would have to be powerful enough to kill all the United States. Which is nonsense.</p><p>The metaphor could therefore better go like this: <em>Imagine you are about to go help your aunt with gardening. But someone tells you there may be glass on your aunt´s lawn which could cut your feet. Would you go?</em></p><p>The analogy is much less spectacular. A man hesitates: I do not want to cut my feet but I would like to help my auntie. Probably I would go and be more cautious. With accepting families from war zones, it is similar. Caution, control and acceptance of those with the right to seek asylum are in order while radical measures are hardly justified.</p><p>Why this analogy is less impressive than the Trumpian one? Because it does not lie with regard to either the scale or the comparative logic. It therefore brings hardly any new information. It does not help us decide by exaggerating some aspects of a question and surpressing others.</p><p class="ql-align-center">***</p><p>That´s not all. Neither does the latter analogy liken human beings to candies which can be flushed down the drain. After an inpetus from social psychologists, we have let respondents in one of our surveys at Median, the Czech market research agency, to assess how human they find members of various ethnic groups and nationalities. The scale was 0 to 100. Above it was a popular picture of the evolutionary sequence from a primate to a human. Czechs and neighbouring nations received scores between 95 and 100. Muslims and refugees from the Middle East and Africa about 50.</p><p>What is more interesting is that the level of dehumanization of these out-groups was significantly associated with the willingness to accept refugees. People who unequivocally refused accepting refugees gave an average score of around 35, scores from people open to accepting some averaged around 70. The relationship can go both ways. We may be shunning refugees because we do not understand them as human. But we can also be justifying our otherwise hardly justifiable attitude through dehumanization.</p><p>Dehumanizing metaphors about poisoned candies serve to colour burning dilemmas in which we compare security and willingness to help. In the Czech context, these work particularly well because the word <em>uprchlík [runner]</em>, unlike the English <em>refugee</em>, refers also to a prison escape and therefore raises the impression of an unwarranted claim. The closeness of Czechs which is often ascribed to deep-seated xenophobia, may simply be the consequence of the way in which we discuss issues.</p><p class="ql-align-center">***</p><p>Some Czech publicists have built their careers on analogies. It is the main type of argument used, for instance, by Václav Klaus Jr., a son of the former president: After a terrorist attack, someone warned against denouncing all Muslims, Mr Klaus asked if Winston Churchill also “babbled” after the bombing of London that “we cannot condemn the whole German nation because of a few aggressive pilots”.</p><p>There are all the pet fouls: Mr Klaus compares incommensurable attacks (the bombing of London killed 43,000 people). He breaches logic since the analogy of Nazi Germany, directly represented by pilots, is not Germany but ISIS, represented by the terrorists. Furthemore, he suggests that the refusal to condemn nations or religious beliefs goes hand in hand with inability to act. But did Mr Churchill ever ruminate whether the attacks emanate from the character of German nation?</p><p>Similar or more exorbitant analogies can be found in about two thirds of authors´ texts published in the first four months of 2017. It is probably no coincidence that those articles in which he did not need false analogies feature arguments of higher quality.</p><p>Analogies bring inner satisfaction at a moment when we understand what they symbolize. We often mistake understanding the analogy for comprehending reality. All metaphors and analogies in political statements as well as other texts should instead lead us to maximum caution. That applies also to the “plague” in the headline of this article. Metaphors and analogies are not plague, they make it easier for us to comprehend the world. But they can turn into serious illness once we accept them uncritically and let them manipulate us.</p>
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