All Things Being Equal
Making metaphorical comparisons is a dangerous, but enlightening business
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I’m a bit confused about something
Exactly when is it alright to claim that two different things are, in some ways, equivalent?
OK, this is terribly vague, so let me take a different angle at this.
Imagine that it’s six or eight years ago, and you find yourself at a professional academic humanities conference. Inevitably there will be a paper that suggests that some technology, or as what academics used to term “New Media,” may have certain drawbacks. Say that the paper argues that social media or streaming content or whatever has a particularly negative impact on attention span, emotional well-being, or student motivation or something.
Inevitably at this panel, there will be a very smug junior professor or grad student who will confidently and dismissively say some version of the following:
“You know, of course, that people said the same thing about the novel when it first emerged.”
Or, perhaps:
“You know, of course, that pencil and paper is also a form of technology.”
What has happened, of course, is that the doomed presenter has inched their way across some imaginary border, into some other specialist’s home turf. This kind of vigilant border-patrol is an essential part of academic culture.
And in cases like this, the border guards make gleeful use of claims of equivalence. And the comparison our hypothetical (yet all too real) academician makes is, in fact, noteworthy. I personally do find it fascinating that the novel, a form that many people today find laborious and demanding of too much attention, was once received by some the way people like me react to TikTok. Certainly there is something to consider there.
And yet, when in these situations, I would respond with some form of the following:
“Yes that is certainly true, but you do understand that there are fundamental differences between a technology that’s gone essentially unchanged for 200 years and entirely new, instantaneous, short form, electronic communications directed by copyrighted algorithms don’t you?”
At that point in an academic conference, the festivities turn to the ritual appendage-measuring contest about what theoretician one has or hasn’t read or properly understood.
Cognitive Mapping
Here’s the rub. I actually enjoy drawing comparisons like the ones the above academic drew. In fact my brain is, I believe, naturally wired to experience the world in this way. Thinking of one thing as a metaphor for another often gives me insight into the new thing I’m encountering. Psychologists often refer to what I’m talking about as a form of Cognitive Mapping. It’s a way of understanding a complex new thing by referring back to conceptual models you’ve developed from past experiences.
This has kind of become my shtick as a writer of cultural criticism. Very often I’ll write something about a piece of pop culture that draws a parallel to something else as a way of gaining some insight into that piece of pop culture.
A few examples:
Some time ago, I was sick of everyone on social media passing off lazy criticisms of Zack Snyder’s DC films as witty or insightful. So I drew a comparison of his style to some archaic literary criticism by Matthew Arnold.
One of my favorite old movies is White Zombie. And it occurred to me that there is an interesting inverted metaphor for the Christian Easter holiday there.
I won’t bore you with every example I can think of. If you’re interested you can browse my Authory page.
Jokers and Critics
There is one essay of this type that got me into some minor internet fracas, and it’s a good example of the philosophical inconsistency I’m writing about here.
Few movies have ignited Twitter like Todd Phillips’ Joker. Liberal critics openly railed against the film, many seeing it as a justification of Alt-Right shenanigans. As for me (a person who generally liked the movie and its overt homage to Scorsese’s 70s work), I was confused about what these critics were actually looking at when they were watching it. Perhaps I’ll dive into this more at a later date, but I thought the criticisms were very narrow and, dare I say, moralistic. The implication of the Liberal response was that this film would have an almost supernatural effect and persuade masses of people to do bad things in the real world. I asserted (correctly, I think) that this fear was ridiculous.
The cognitive map I relied on for this analysis is one that I often rely on: my upbringing in a corner of Evangelical Christianity. The moral panic that Liberals were bringing to Joker, mirrored, quite precisely, similar moral panics about Ozzy Osbourne records and, ironically, Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ. The parallels were pretty obvious to me, so I wrote about it for Popular Culture and Theology.
Sometime after its publication I was accused by a very unhinged Twitter-person of being a Gamergate, Alt-Right troll for making such a comparison. (I distinctly remember seeing these tweets while at the drive-in movie theater watching Sonic the Hedgehog with my daughter and her friend — strange the way memory works). I looked at the maniac’s Twitter feed and it was filled with links to news stories, quote-tweeted with the phrase “Kill All Cops.” So we were clearly dealing with a rational person here. I believe the account must have been deleted, justifiably so.
I do have to say that it made me consider my whole method, though. What was so wrong with broad, metaphorical comparisons in this case? Metaphorical comparison is clearly not always frowned upon; see the opening of this essay. And it isn’t exactly rare to find Extremely Online Liberals flippantly comparing everyone slightly to their right to literal Nazis. It seems that in some cases, drawing equivalence is not only justified, it is sanctified.
Let me say that I do understand that there are limits to the comparison I made about Evangelicals and Liberals in my piece on Joker. While I maintain that the structural moralisms of both groups lead to MANY behavioral parallels, I also understand that there are differences between the moralism of a religious block and the moralism of a political one. This is where academics would chime in to highlight those differences and maintain the epistemological borders of their profession.
And I value those professional borders. The work of academics is important. But those zoomed-in-upon differences do not obliterate the big picture of my cognitive map. I assert we can understand some things by comparing them to our experience with others. And having emerged from Evangelicalism, I see many patterns replicated in its other side of the coin, Liberalism. The differences are important to note, but they should not blind us to the similarities.