Let's do a thought experiment. Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang some bananas by a string from the ceiling and place a ladder underneath it. Before long, one of the monkeys will go to the ladder and try to climb towards the bananas. As soon as…
Behold the incredibly evil Grinch!
“I know all about him,” you might think. “He’s the guy who almost dumped Christmas over the cliff. Thank goodness that he saw the light in the nick of time.”
In the classic Dr. Suess story, the Grinch’s heart grew three times right there by the edge of the cliff. But it was at that same precise location that the true evil of the Grinch manifested itself. How so? Let me tell you!
It was at the edge of the cliff that the Grinch realized that Who villagers had just about learned a huge lesson that night. They had almost learned that they did not need all those Christmas baubles. They learned that forging a meaningful community didn’t require decorations, sugary treats or glittery whatnots. They realized that maintaining a strongly-knit community could be accomplished without the things money buys.
As already mentioned, the residents of Who-ville held hands and sang together, their angelic voices drifted up to the precipice where the evil Grinch (small “e”) was disrupted in his evil (small “e”) quest to dump the Christmas kitsch where it actually belonged: into some far-away God-forsaken place. If the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day, though, his capacity for evil simultaneously grew tenfold.
[This was predicted by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” Arendt wrote that it was thoughtlessness, not intentional or premeditated acts, that predisposed people to engage in the greatest evils.]
The Grinch’s (capital “E”) evil impulses then took …
I have long been confounded that otherwise intelligent people can claim, straight-faced, that the earth is only 6,000 years old or that a virgin got pregnant. Such people are utterly sincere, of course. Many of them excel at highly technical jobs and they generally embrace the results of science (they choose doctors who use high-tech medicine and they dare to fly on airplanes) and they are capable of great skepticism (they scoff at the dogma of everyone else’s religion and if one of their own unmarried daughters gets pregnant, they don’t believe her story that she didn’t have sex).
I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand this unevenness of skepticism. Though fundamentalists are generally intelligent, inquisitive, and skeptical, they are science-adverse only with regard to a limited range of topics. While in their “Believer” mode, they seem to be totally transformed people. What is grabbing their brains and making them say such things, I’ve often wondered.
The deepest, most treasured, assumptions of many religious Believers are somehow cordoned off. Once hooked on religion, they seem incapable of truly considering whether God exists. They seem psychologically and intellectually incapable of considering that the writings and history of the Bible seem flawed, self-contradictory and all-too-human.
Before you start thinking that I’m picking on religious fundamentalists . . . well, I am. But I’m also picking on anyone else who’s ever shuddered and become glassy-eyed at simple questions aimed at their most basic assumptions. I’m talking about all of us, …
In a recent post (http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166), I discussed God's attractive nuisance in His garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge. Let's take that discussion one step farther. Not only did God plant his deadly tree smack in the middle of His garden (bad garden design), not only did He fail to…
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others. It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities.
Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world. In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts. Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc.
Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics). More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts. Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things.
Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples. This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.
In Metaphors We …