High Minds Lie with Models and Metaphors

Language creates our models of reality, but some models are false

In Metaphors We Live By (1980), cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that figurative language is more than literary decoration. It is a fundamental aspect of human thought and language. Metaphors also help us navigate the world with a degree of efficiency that literal language can't offer.

Metaphors can even change our perceptions of reality.

Words on this very page can evoke physical sensations in our minds. One brain study showed that participants reading the sentence "he had a rough day" activated the part of the brain associated with texture. Likewise, when I write about human systems as flow systems, I hope to evoke the concept of a liquid, even though I might be talking about an economy. 

So far, so good.

But therein lies a paradox: less accurate or even less truthful statements can be more persuasive than true ones. So if we’re being truthful, we might have to sacrifice persuasive power. Likewise, persuasively powerful messages can lack truth content. 

So how far can we take such insights?

Armed with a view of figurative language as frames, George Lakoff has become one of the most celebrated political messaging consultants. He's written books that urge partisans to use metaphor more consciously and "reframe" ordinary concepts like freedom in ways that make illiberal ideas more palatable.

Even if that's a good strategy for one's political party, it might not be that good for the goal of tracking truth. After all, models and metaphors can lie.

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker thinks Lakoff goes off the deep end with framing. For example, in response to Lakoff's Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (2007), Pinker accuses Lakoff of "cognitive relativism," a view that reduces "mathematics, science, and philosophy [to] beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality." So who's right?

Is reality to be rewritten, or should metaphors track the truth?

One of the biggest problems we face as a civilization is that too many people, especially experts, speak and see falsely through metaphor. That means some of our metaphors and models are misleading us. The very language we use to understand ourselves and our society is breaking down.

Mission Control

The Apollo missions are now a part of our collective consciousness. Very smart people from the U.S. government's most celebrated agency sat in a big room in Houston. The room had giant display screens and machines. The machines had toggles, switches, and rheostats. The astronauts had instrument panels in space. All those complicated machines were spread out before the team to help them do one job: get a spacecraft of astronauts to the moon and back. Complicated calculations for a simple objective. They called it "mission control."

Men controlling machines made it all happen.

Machines have parts—gears, pumps, valves, wires, dials, and buttons—that make up a whole. These parts fit together in a certain way that can be known. Indeed, if these are things that can be known, they can also be designed and manipulated. The whole machine can be broken down into parts, which are static. The relationships among the parts are cause-and-effect. So if you're smart enough, you know how one thing affects another. When everything is working correctly, machines run well. If something breaks down, it has to be fixed. Ultimately, machines work better due to good engineering: the product of a mind or group of minds tasked with designing or operating a complicated system.

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that people think it extends to society. 

Society is Not a Machine

The idea that you can order society is a kind of fallacy.

If we can design and build a nuclear submarine, we can design and build a society.

We can compare society's administrative ordering to the piecing together of a machine with its transistors, cogs, and pumps. Proponents, struck by the progress made by useful machine inventors, came to think of nature and society as machines, too. 

It's no wonder: In the first half of the twentieth century, technocrats witnessed the introduction of the automobile, electricity, and nuclear power. If geniuses could be hustled together to build a weapon capable of razing whole cities instantly, surely social engineers could be gathered to make great civilizations.

But that would take more than largesse. It would take power.

As we moved into the second half of the twentieth century, we saw the development of even more sophisticated machines. Computing devices could solve seemingly intractable math problems. Experts could use computers to predict the weather, design buildings, or simulate the development of cities. With each advance, it seemed like humans could design anything. 

High Minds and High Modernism

Why not society?

"I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements," writes political scientist James C. Scott.

The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society,.... 'High modernism' seems an appropriate term for this aspiration.

Folks across ideologies began to share this aspiration. Its exponents included planners, technocrats, administrators, architects, scientists, and utopians. Call these faithful High Minds. They are fond of scientism, which is the notion that science can and should be applied to domains once belonging to philosophy.

Frequently, one appeals vaguely to science, which gets used to justify attempts by a single mind (or small group) to order society along some dimension. The trouble with scientism is that science is ill-equipped to answer the question of whether societies ought to be administratively ordered, much less whether they can be.

Behind appeals to science and its methods is almost always the urge to control.

There are Low Minds, too, those who play handmaidens to High Minds. The Low Mind gathers in the square with a raised fist, ready to tear down whatever they don't understand and had no hand in creating. High Minds call them citizens or constituents, but only if they find them useful. If they don’t find them useful, they call them all manner of things.

Some High Minds are envious. Some are sanctimonious. Some are downright pious. But all share the idea that society ought to be arranged. Sometimes they'll move heaven and earth to get what they want, even if it means exploiting a crisis. But it will take more than useful idiots and money to fashion society in their image.

"The second element," writes Scott of this episode, "is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs." 

It's not merely that you needed the smartest people at the rheostat banks of mission control, America’s toggles and switches would have to do something.

Hoary old charters, the courts, and local yokels can only get in the way. We know what is best, they think.

"The third element," writes Scott, "is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans."

The weakening of civil society is central to our collapse thesis, but I will bookmark that for another day. As we'll see, it's not technology per se that has made us more atomized and alienated. It has been our exorbitant monuments to High Modernism.

In sum, according to Scott, High Modernism provides the desire, the modern state the means to act, and the weakened civil society "the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias."

The managerial state has assumed responsibility for everything from the middle class's income to the success of large corporations; don't forget scientific and technical progress. It found perhaps its fullest expression in Otto von Bismarck's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. The High Mind would never admit to anything resembling fascism, yet:

"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim," wrote Mussolini in 1932.

Similarly, High Minds prefer declared goals such as economic development or national greatness over liberal values such as freedom and charity. They carry out their plans in the name of the public good, but are happy with so-called “public-private partnerships.” (Mussolini would be proud.) Maybe benefits trickle down to the public, but more often it’s to favor-seekers: agribusinesses, airlines, and investment banks deemed "too big to fail." The administrative state chokes off the dynamism of a more decentralized, unplanned order.

The Tab

Lethargic, wasteful, and well-connected firms exist at the expense of dynamic upstarts. The closer we move to the fusion of corporation and state, we find we have a zombie economy.

The columnist Walter Lippmann, writing at the height of the New Deal, reflects on the High Mind as he begins to intervene in the economy:

The thinker, as he sits in his study drawing his plans for the direction of society, will do no thinking if his breakfast has not been produced for him by a social process that is beyond his detailed comprehension. He knows that his breakfast depends upon workers on the coffee plantations of Brazil, the citrus groves of Florida, the sugar fields of Cuba, the wheat farms of the Dakotas, the dairies of New York; that it has been assembled by ships, railroads, and trucks, has been cooked with coal from Pennsylvania in utensils made of aluminum, china, steel, and glass. But the intricacy of one breakfast, if every process that brought it to the table had deliberately to be planned, would be beyond the understanding of any mind. Only because he can count upon an infinitely complex system of working routines can a man eat his breakfast and then think about a new social order.

Despite the coordination miracles described in this classic paragraph, the damage wrought by "the thinker" (High Mind) is even less visible. 

If accounting were just tallying up the visible wins, High Modernism is on the scoreboard. The Hoover Dam. The War Effort. The Apollo Missions. Those victories shaped people's ideas for a generation. Their enormity even helped but a salve over so many other failures and losses.

But even the successful projects of High Modernism represent massive opportunity costs. Government largesse pulled from the productive sector has a way of steamrolling over all the little projects that would otherwise germinate.

Today, the costs of High Modernism are far more visible.

If High Minds uses false models and metaphors to control society’s most important levers (pun intended), what is a superior metaphor?

A picture is worth a thousand words.