Metaphors – What are they good for?

Metaphors steer political discussions. Most debates revolve around choosing an appropriate metaphor to get your view across to voters and decision makers.  You pick a metaphor as you think it can explain how something complicated works. You pick a particular metaphor because you believe it highlights an important characteristic or attribute of the thing it is difficult to explain. You use the metaphor – it seems to work, people seems to understand the complicated thing in the way you do.

You might, for example, believe that national finances are just the same as household finances so you use the metaphor to explain why the nation shouldn’t get into debt. You extend the metaphor – you add attributes to the complicated thing that the metaphor suggests. For example extending the national finances = household budget metaphor you believe that just as families should budget for the important things, the necessities first and then the luxuries, so the nation should spend only on the necessities first – of course you know what the necessities are and what the luxuries are.

Eventually, the metaphor becomes synonymous with the complicated thing you were trying to explain. Problem is was it the right metaphor? Has it been extended in an appropriate way? Has the metaphor now become so synonymous with the thing that understanding of the complicated thing has become simplified to just what the metaphor tells us?  Household budgets, for example, are not the same a national finances but the continual repetition of the metaphor makes any counter argument difficult. (why a federal budgetis not like a household budget)

There is now an inbuilt assumption that the household budget metaphor accurately described national finances so any counter metaphor or explanation is often viewed as suspect. This is partly because the metaphor has become ingrained into people’s understanding, they understand national finances only through the metaphor of a household budget and so can only view any argument, any presentation of facts, through the lens of that metaphor. The metaphor limits understanding of the complicated thing and so ends up guiding not only how people think about the thing but also how they try to manage it with potentially disastrous results.

Metaphors are vital in communicating ideas but they are also constraining. A way around the impasse with something like the household budget is to extend the metaphor again and find attributes that highlight the differences between the metaphor and the thing. Extending the metaphor to explore the absurdity of its attributes in relation to understanding national finances in one approach. Trying to construct an alternative metaphor that highlights other characteristics of national finances is another way to try to prise people out of their metaphorical thinking. Metaphors work because they provide a framework within which to interpret and underfund facts. Facts on their own have little impact unless they fit within a framework of understanding, such as that provided by a good metaphor, that resonates with the individual and which they invest their belief in (what if the national economy is like a household budget).