15-metaphors

S Fifteen Metaphors We Kill By EXAMPLE 1 tretching back at least to that faux pas about the golden calf at Mt. Sinai, various branches of Abrahamic religions have had a thing about graven images. Which has given us aniconism, the banning of icons, and iconoclasts, who destroy offensive images on religious grounds. Orthodox Judaism has been into that at times; ditto for Calvinists, especially when it came to those idolatrous Catholics. Currently it’s branches of Sunni Islam that deploy literal graven- image police and consider the height of offense to be images of Allah and Muhammad. In September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoon images of Muhammad on its editorial page. It was a protest against Danish censorship and self-censorship about the subject, against Islam being a sacred cow in a Western democracy where other religions are readily criticized satirically. None of the cartoons suggested reverence or respect. Many explicitly linked Muhammad with terrorism (e.g., him wearing a bomb as a turban). Many were ironic about the ban—Muhammad as a stick figure with a turban, Muhammad (armed with a sword) with a blackened rectangle over his eyes, Muhammad in a police lineup alongside other bearded men with turbans. And as a direct result of the cartoons, Western embassies and consulates were attacked, even burned, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Churches were burned in northern Nigeria. Protesters were killed in Afghanistan, Egypt, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Turkey (typically either by mob stampedes or by police containing rioters). And non-Muslims were killed in Nigeria, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt as revenge for the cartoons. In July 2007 drawings by a Swedish artist of Muhammad’s head with a dog’s body provoked much the same. In addition to deadly protests, the Islamic State of Iraq offered $100,000 for the artist’s killing, Al-Qaeda targeted the artist for death (along with staffers from Jyllands-Posten), assassination plots were stopped by Western authorities, and one attempt killed two bystanders. In May 2015 two gunmen attacked an antianiconist event in Texas where a $10,000 prize was offered for the “best” depiction of Muhammad. One person was injured before the gunmen were killed by police. And, of course, on January 7, 2015, two brothers, French-born sons of Algerian immigrants, massacred the staff of Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve. I EXAMPLE 2 n the Battle of Gettysburg fierce fighting occurred between the Union First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry and Confederate Twenty-eighth Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment.1 At one point Confederate soldier John Eakin, carrying the regimental flag of the Twenty-eighth Virginia, was shot three times (a typical fate of soldiers carrying the colors, who were preferential targets). Mortally wounded, Eakin handed the flag to a comrade, who was promptly killed. The flag was then taken up and displayed by Colonel Robert Allen, who was soon killed, then by Lieutenant John Lee, who was soon injured. A Union soldier, attempting to seize the colors, was killed by Confederates. Finally Private Marshall Sherman of the First Minnesota captured the flag, along with Lee. I EXAMPLES 3, 4, AND 5 n mid-2015 Tavin Price, a mentally challenged nineteen-year-old, was killed by gangbangers in Los Angeles for wearing red shoes, a rival gang’s color. His dying words, in front of his mother, were “Mommy, please. I don’t want to die. Mommy, please.”2 In October 1980 Irish Republican prisoners at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland began a hunger strike protesting, among other things, their being denied political-prisoner status by having to wear prison garb. The British government acceded to their demands as a first prisoner slipped into a coma fifty-three days later. In a similar strike a year later in the Maze, ten Irish political prisoners starved themselves to death over forty-six to seventy-three days. By 2010 karaoke clubs throughout the Philippines had removed the Frank Sinatra song “My Way” from their playlists because of violent responses to the singing of it, including a dozen killings. Some of the “‘My Way’ killings” were due to poor renditions (which apparently often results in killings), but most were thought linked to the macho lyrics. “‘I did it my way’—it’s so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights,” explained the owner of a singing school in Manila to the New York Times. — In other words, people are willing to kill or be killed over a cartoon, a flag, a piece of clothing, a song. We have some explaining to do. — Throughout this book we’ve repeatedly gained insights into humans by examining other species. Some of the time the similarities have been most pertinent—dopamine is dopamine in a human or a mouse. Sometimes the interesting thing is our unique use of the identical substrate—dopamine facilitates a mouse’s pressing of a lever in the hopes of getting some food and a human’s praying in the hopes of entering heaven. But some human behaviors stand alone, without precedent in another species. One of the most important realms of human uniqueness comes down to one simple fact, namely that this is not a horse: Anatomically modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago. But behavioral modernity had to wait more than another 150,000 years, as evidenced by the appearance in the archaeological record of composite tools, ornamentation, ritualistic burial, and that stunning act of putting pigment on the wall of a cave.3 This is not a horse. It’s a great picture of a horse. When René Magritte placed the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) beneath a picture of a pipe, in his 1928 painting The Treachery of Images, he was highlighting the shaky nature of imagery. The art historian Robert Hughes writes that this painting is a “visual booby-trap” set off by thought, and that “this sense of slippage between image and object is one of the sources of modernist disquiet.”4 Magritte’s goal was to magnify and play with the distance between an object and its representation; these are coping mechanisms against that modernist disquiet. But for that human putting pigment to wall in Lascaux Cave more than seventeen thousand years ago, the point was the opposite: to minimize the distance between the two, to be as close as possible to possessing the real horse. As we say, to capture its likeness. To gain its power, as imbued in a symbol. The clearest human mastery of symbolism comes with our use of language. Suppose you are being menaced by something and thus scream your head off. Someone listening can’t tell if the blood-curdling “Aiiiii!” is in response to an approaching comet, suicide bomber, or Komodo dragon. It just means that things are majorly not right; the message is the meaning. Most animal communication is about such present-tense emotionality. Symbolic language brought huge evolutionary advantages. This can be seen even in the starts of symbolism of other species. When vervet monkeys, for instance, spot a predator, they don’t generically scream. They use distinct vocalizations, different “protowords,” where one means “Predator on the ground, run up the tree!” and another means “Predator in the air, run down the tree!” Evolving the cognitive capacity to make that distinction is mighty useful, as it prompts you to run away from, rather than toward, something intent on eating you. Language pries apart a message from its meaning, and as our ancestors improved at this separation, advantages accrued.5 We became capable of representing past and future emotions, as well as messages unrelated to emotion. We evolved great expertise at separating message from reality, which, as we’ve seen, requires the frontal cortex to regulate the nuances of face, body, and voice: lying. This capacity creates complexities that no one else—from slime mold to chimp—deals with in life’s Prisoner’s Dilemmas. The height of the symbolic features of language is our use of metaphor. And this is not just flourish metaphors, when we declare that life is a bowl of cherries. Metaphors are everywhere in language—we may literally and physically be “in” a room, but we are only metaphorically inside something when we are “in” a good mood, “in” cahoots with someone, “in” luck, a funk, a groove, or love. We are only metaphorically standing under something when we “understand” it.6 The renowned cognitive linguist George Lakoff of UC Berkeley has explored the ubiquity of metaphor in language in books such as Metaphors We Live By (with philosopher Mark Johnson), and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (where he demonstrates how political power involves controlling metaphors—do you favor “choice” or “life”? are you “tough on” crime, or does your “heart bleed”? are you loyal to a “fatherland” or a “motherland”? and have you captured the flag of “family values” from your opponent?). For Lakoff language is always a metaphor, transferring information from one individual to another by putting thought into words, as if words were shopping bags.7 Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when ordering all of them on deck, that Kafka’s Metamorphosis isn’t really about a cockroach, and that June doesn’t really bust out all over. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We learn that the orchestral sounds constituting the 1812 Overture represent Napoleon getting his ass kicked when retreating from Moscow. And that “Napoleon getting his ass kicked” represents thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home. This chapter explores the neurobiology of some of the most interesting outposts of symbolic and metaphorical thinking. It makes a key point: these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that “it’s only a figure of speech”—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors. We start with examples of odd ways our brains handle metaphor, and the behavioral manifestations of those oddities; some have been introduced previously. C FEELING SOMEONE ELSE’S PAIN onsider the following: You stub your toe. Pain receptors there send messages to the spine and on up to the brain, where various regions kick into action. Some of these areas tell you about the location, intensity, and quality of the pain. Is it your left toe or right ear that hurts? Was your toe stubbed or crushed by a tractor-trailer? These various pain-ometers, the meat and potatoes of pain processing, are found in every mammal. As we first learned in chapter 2, the frontal cortical anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) also plays a role, assessing the meaning of the pain.8 Maybe it’s bad news: your painful toe signals the start of some unlikely disease. Or maybe it’s good news: you’re going to get your fire-walker diploma because the hot coals only made your toes throb. As we saw in the last chapter, the ACC is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. And pain from out of nowhere surely represents a discrepancy between the pain-free setting that you anticipate versus a painful reality. But the ACC does more than just tell you the meaning of a painful toe. As we saw in chapter 6, put a subject in a brain scanner, make them think they’re tossing a Cyberball back and forth with two other players, and then make them feel excluded—the other two stop throwing the ball to them. “Hey, how come they don’t want to play with me?” And the ACC activates. In other words, rejection hurts. “Well, yeah,” you might say. “But that’s not like stubbing your toe.” But as far as those neurons in the ACC are concerned, social and literal pain are the same. And as proof of the rooting of the former in sociality, there isn’t ACC activation if the subject believes the ball isn’t being thrown to them because of a glitch connecting them to the other two subjects’ computers. And the ACC can take things a step further, as we saw in chapter 14. Receive a mild shock, and there’s activation of your ACC (along with activation of the more mundane pain-ometer regions). Now instead watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. Pain-ometer brain regions are silent, but the ACC activates. For those neurons, feeling someone else’s pain isn’t just a figure of speech. Moreover, the brain intermixes literal and psychic pain.9 The neurotransmitter substance P plays a central role in communicating painful signals from pain receptors in skin, muscles, and joints up into the brain. It’s got pain-ometer written all over it. And remarkably, its levels are elevated in clinical depression, and drugs that block the actions of substance P can have marked antidepressant properties. Stubbed toe, stubbed psyche. Moreover, there is activation of the cortical parts of pain networks when we feel dread— anticipating an impending shock. Furthermore, the brain becomes literal when we do the flip side of empathy.10 It’s painful watching a hated competitor succeed, and we activate the ACC at that time. Conversely, if he fails, we gloat, feel schadenfreude, get pleasure from his pain, and activate dopaminergic reward pathways. Forget “Your pain is my pain.” Your pain is my gain. T DISGUST AND PURITY his is our familiar domain of the insular cortex. If you bite into rancid food, the insula activates, just as in every other mammal. You wrinkle your nose, raise your upper lip, narrow your eyes, all to protect mouth, eyes, and nasal cavities. Your heart slows. You reflexively spit out the food, gag, perhaps even vomit. All to protect yourself from toxins and infectious pathogens.11 As humans we do some fancier things: Think about rancid food, and the insula activates. Look at faces showing disgust, or subjectively unattractive faces, and the same occurs. And most important, if you think about a truly reprehensible act, the same occurs. The insula mediates visceral responses to norm violations, and the more activation, the more condemnation. And this is visceral, not just metaphorically visceral—for example, when I heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, “feeling sick to my stomach” wasn’t a mere figure of speech. When I imagined the reality of the murder of twenty first-graders and the six adults protecting them, I felt nauseous. The insula not only prompts the stomach to purge itself of toxic food; it prompts the stomach to purge the reality of a nightmarish event. The distance between the symbolic message and the meaning disappears.12 The linking of visceral and moral disgust is bidirectional. As shown in a number of studies, contemplating a morally disgusting act leaves more than a metaphorical bad taste in your mouth—people eat less immediately afterward, and a neutral-tasting beverage drunk afterward is rated as having a more negative taste (and, conversely, hearing about virtuous moral acts made the drink taste better).13 In chapters 12 and 13 we saw the political implications of our brains intermixing visceral and moral disgust—social conservatives have a lower threshold for visceral disgust than do social progressives; the “wisdom of repugnance” school posits that being viscerally disgusted by something is a pretty good indicator that it is morally wrong; implicitly evoking a sense of visceral disgust (e.g., by sitting in close proximity to a foul odor) makes us more socially conservative.14 This is not merely because visceral disgust is an aversive state—inducing a sense of sadness, rather than disgust, doesn’t have the same effect; moreover, moralizing about purity, while predicted by people’s propensity toward feeling disgust, is not predicted by propensities toward fear or anger. The physiological core of gustatory disgust is to protect yourself against pathogens. The core of the intermixing of visceral and moral disgust is a sense of threat as well. A socially conservative stance about, say, gay marriage is not just that it is simply wrong in an abstract sense, or even “disgusting,” but that it constitutes a threat—to the sanctity of marriage and family values. This element of threat is shown in a great study in which subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria.15 All then read a history article that used imagery of America as a living organism, with statements like “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the United States as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration (without changing attitudes about an economic issue). My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the nebulous entity that is the American way of life. How cerebral is this intertwining of moral and visceral disgust? Does the insula get involved in moral disgust only if it’s of a particularly visceral nature— blood and guts, coprophagia, body parts? Paul Bloom suggests this is the case. In contrast, Jonathan Haidt feels that even the most cognitive forms of moral disgust (“He’s a chess grand master and he shows off by beating that eight-year- old in three moves and reducing her to tears—that’s disgusting”) are heavily intertwined.16 In support of that, something as unvisceral as getting a lousy offer in an economic game activates the insula (a lousy offer from another human, rather than a computer, that is); the more insula activation, the greater the likelihood of the offer being rejected. Amid this debate, it is clear that the intertwining of visceral and moral disgust is, at the least, greatest when the latter taps into core disgust. To repeat a neat quote from Paul Rozin, introduced in chapter 11, “Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker.” First you’re disgusted by how Others smell, a gateway to then being disgusted by how Others think. Of course, insofar as metaphorically being dirty and disorderly = bad, metaphorically being clean and orderly = good.*17 Just consider the use of the word “neat” in the previous paragraph. Similarly, in Swahili the word safi, meaning “clean” (from kusafisha, “to clean”), is used in the same slangy metaphorical sense of “neat” in English. Once while in Kenya, I was hitching a ride to Nairobi from somewhere out in the boondocks and got to chatting with a local teenager who was curious about me. “Where are you going?” he asked. Nairobi. “Nairobi ni [is] safi,” he said wistfully about the far-off metropolis. How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen the neatness of Nairobi? Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress—just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.18 And consider how the displaced need to impose cleanliness and order runs and ruins the lives of people suffering from the archetypal anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder. The ability of literal cleanliness to alter cognition was shown in one study. Subjects examined an array of music CDs, picked ten that they liked, and ranked them in order of liking; they were then offered a free copy of one of their midrange choices (number five or six). Subjects were then distracted with some other t