Metaphor and War, Again
By George Lakoff, AlterNet
March 18, 2003
Metaphors can kill.
That's how I began a piece on the first Gulf War back in 1990, just
before the war began. Many of those metaphorical ideas are back, but
within a very different and more dangerous context. Since Gulf War II is
due to start any day, perhaps even tomorrow, it might be useful to take
a look before the action begins at the metaphorical ideas being used to
justify Gulf War II.
One of the most central metaphors in our foreign policy is that A Nation
Is A Person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation
of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein.
The war, we are told, is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but
only against this one person. Ordinary American citizens are using this
metaphor when they say things like, "Saddam is a tyrant. He must be
stopped." What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the 3000 bombs to
be dropped in the first two days will not be dropped on that one person.
They will kill many thousands of the people hidden by the metaphor,
people that according to the metaphor we are not going to war against.
The Nation As Person metaphor is pervasive, powerful, and part of an
elaborate metaphor system. It is part of an International Community
metaphor, in which there are friendly nations, hostile nations, rogue
states, and so on. This metaphor comes with a notion of the national
interest: Just as it is in the interest of a person to be healthy and
strong, so it is in the interest of a Nation-Person to be economically
healthy and militarily strong. That is what is meant by the "national
interest."
In the International Community, peopled by Nation-Persons, there are
Nation-adults and Nation-children, with Maturity metaphorically
understood as Industrialization. The children are the "developing"
nations of the Third World, in the process of industrializing, who need
to be taught how to develop properly and to be disciplined (say, by the
International Monetary Fund) when they fail to follow instructions.
"Backward" nations are those that are "underdeveloped." Iraq, despite
being the cradle of civilization, is seen via this metaphor as a kind of
defiant armed teenage hoodlum who refuses to abide by the rules and must
be "taught a lesson."
The international relations community adds to the Nation As Person
metaphor what is called the "Rational Actor Model." The idea here is
that it is irrational to act against your interests and that nations act
as if they were "rational actors" individual people trying to maximize
their "gains' and "assets" and minimize their "costs" and "losses." In
Gulf War I, the metaphor was applied so that a country's "assets"
included its soldiers, materiel, and money. Since the US lost few of
those "assets" in Gulf War I, the war was reported, just afterward in
the NY Times Business section, as having been a "bargain." Since Iraqi
civilians were not our assets, they could not be counted as among the
"losses" and so there was no careful public accounting of civilian lives
lost, people maimed, and children starved or made seriously ill by the
war or the sanctions that followed it. Estimates vary from half a
million to a million or more. However, public relations was seen to be a
US asset: excessive slaughter reported on in the press would be bad PR,
a possible loss. These metaphors are with us again. A short war with few
US casualties would minimize costs. But the longer it goes on, the more
Iraqi resistance and the more US casualties, the less the US would
appear invulnerable and the more the war would appear as a war against
the Iraqi people. That would be a high "cost."
According to the Rational Actor Model, countries act naturally in their
own best interests preserving their assets, that is, their own
populations, their infrastructure, their wealth, their weaponry, and so
on. That is what the US did in Gulf War I and what it is doing now. But
Saddam Hussein, in Gulf War I, did not fit our government's Rational
Actor model. He had goals like preserving his power in Iraq and being an
Arab hero just for standing up to the Great Satan. Though such goals
might have their own rationality, they are "irrational" from the model's
perspective.
One of the most frequent uses of the Nation As Person metaphor comes in
the almost daily attempts to justify the war metaphorically as a "just
war." The basic idea of a just war uses the Nation As Person metaphor
plus two narratives that have the structure of classical fairy tales:
The Self Defense Story and The Rescue Story.
In each story, there is a Hero, a Crime, a Victim, and a Villain. In the
Self-Defense story, the Hero and the Victim are the same. In both
stories, the Villain is inherently evil and irrational: The Hero can't
reason with the Villain; he has to fight him and defeat him or kill him.
In both, the victim must be innocent and beyond reproach. In both, there
is an initial crime by the Villain, and the Hero balances the moral
books by defeating him. If all the parties are Nation-Persons, then
self-defense and rescue stories become forms of a just war for the
Hero-Nation.
In Gulf War I, Bush I tried out a self-defense story: Saddam was
"threatening our oil line-line." The American people didn't buy it. Then
he found a winning story, a rescue story The Rape of Kuwait. It sold
well, and is still the most popular account of that war.
In Gulf War II, Bush II is pushing different versions of the same two
story types, and this explains a great deal of what is going on in the
American press and in speeches by Bush and Powell. If they can show that
Saddam = Al Quaeda that he is helping or harboring Al Qaeda, then they
can make a case for the Self-defense scenario, and hence for a just war
on those grounds. Indeed, despite the lack of any positive evidence and
the fact that the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist bin Laden
despise each other, the Bush administration has managed to convince 40
per cent of the American public of the link, just by asserting it. The
administration has told its soldiers the same thing, and so our military
men see themselves as going to Iraq in defense of their country.
In the Rescue Scenario, the victims are (1) the Iraqi people and (2)
Saddam's neighbors, whom he has not attacked, but is seen as
"threatening." That is why Bush and Powell keep on listing Saddam's
crimes against the Iraqi people and the weapons he could use to harm his
neighbors. Again, most of the American people have accepted the idea
that Gulf War II is a rescue of the Iraqi people and a safeguarding of
neighboring countries. Of course, the war threatens the safety and
well-being of the Iraqi people and will inflict considerable damage on
neighboring countries like Turkey and Kuwait.
And why such enmity toward France and Germany? Via the Nation As Person
metaphor, they are supposed to be our "friends" and friends are supposed
to be supportive and jump in and help us when we need help. Friends are
supposed to be loyal. That makes France and Germany fair-weather
friends! Not there when you need them.
This is how the war is being framed for the American people by the
Administration and media. Millions of people around the world can see
that the metaphors and fairy tales don't fit the current situation, that
Gulf War II does not qualify as a just war a "legal" war. But if you
accept all these metaphors, as Americans have been led to do by the
administration, the press, and the lack of an effective Democratic
opposition, then Gulf War II would indeed seem like a just war.
But surely most Americans have been exposed to the facts the lack of a
credible link between Saddam and al Quaeda and the idea that large
numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians (estimates are around 500,000) will
be killed or maimed by our bombs. Why don't they reach the rational
conclusion?
One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people
think in terms of frames and metaphors conceptual structures like
those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our
brains physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the
facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.
It is a common folk theory of progressives that "The facts will set you
free!" If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye,
then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain
hope. Human brains just don't work that way. Framing matters. Frames
once entrenched are hard to dispel.
In the first Gulf War, Colin Powell began the testimony before Congress.
He explained the rational actor model to the congressmen and gave a
brief exposition of the views on war of Clausewitz, the Prussian
general: War is business and politics carried out by other means.
Nations naturally seek their self-interest, and when necessary, they use
military force in the service of their self-interest. This is both
natural and legitimate.
To the Bush administration, this war furthers our self-interest:
controlling the flow of oil from the world's second largest known
reserve, and being in the position to control the flow of oil from
central Asia as well. These would guarantee energy domination over a
significant part of the world. The US could control oil sales around the
world. And in the absence of alternative fuel development, whoever
controls the distribution of oil throughout the world controls politics
as well as economics.
My 1990 paper did not stop Gulf War I. This paper will not stop Gulf War
II. So why bother?
I think it is crucially important to understand the cognitive dimensions
of politics especially when most of our conceptual framing is
unconscious and we may not be aware of our own metaphorical thought. I
have been referred to as a "cognitive activist" and I think the label
fits me well. As a professor, I do analyses of linguistic and conceptual
issues in politics, and I do them as accurately as I can. But that
analytic act is a political act: Awareness matters. Being able to
articulate what is going on can change what is going on - at least in
the long run.
This war is a symptom of a larger disease. The war will start presently.
The fighting will be over before long. Where will the anti-war movement
be then?
First, the anti-war movement, properly understood, is not just, or even
primarily, a movement against the war. It is a movement against the
overall direction that the Bush administration is moving in. Second,
such a movement, to be effective, needs to say clearly what it is for,
not just what it is against.
Third, it must have a clearly articulated moral vision, with values
rather than mere interests determining its political direction.
As the war begins, we should look ahead to transforming the anti-war
movement into a movement that powerfully articulates progressive values
and changes the course of our nation to where those values take us. The
war has begun a discussion about values. Let's continue it.
George Lakoff is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and
Conservatives Think," University of Chicago Press, Second edition, 2002.
He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at
Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.
-- There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it". A.R LuriaNate vygotsky@charter.net http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 01 2003 - 01:00:07 PST