Burning Violin #17 - Empathy and Metaphor

A Question

A cat chases a model train as it loops a figure-eight around a Christmas tree, darting amongst wrapped presents and glittering electric lights. The situation is testament to the flexibility of the animal mind. There are neither model trains nor wrapping paper nor spark-filled bits of glass in the natural habitat of the domestic feline. The cat's behavior lends itself to two alternative interpretations: we can infantilize the behavior or we can anthropomorphize it. Infantilization concludes that the cat is profoundly stupid, and that it simply interprets anything small and moving as a mouse, any lumps in the way as rocks, and anything glittering as the stars overhead, if even worth noticing at all. Anthropomorphization suggests that the cat is profoundly intelligent, and that it adapts seamlessly to concepts utterly foreign to those wired into its brain. In this model, the cat chases the train knowing that it is not a mouse, but enjoying the similarity nonetheless.

Now consider a human being instead of a cat.

Telecommunications and global transportation intertwine six billion people only 500 generations removed from tribes of a few dozen drifting through the savannahs and jungles. Do our minds adapt any differently than that of the cat? That is, are human beings profoundly stupid or profoundly intelligent?

The answer is more complicated than the question, but holds insight into how individuals interact with society as a whole. It helps explain many of the contradictions and central conflicts of modern man. In short, the cat manages to be both intelligent and stupid.

Symbols

Symbols in and of themselves are arbitrary and meaningless. Their symbolic value comes from the combination of symbols together into a system. It is the pattern between the symbols that holds symbolic power.  These patterns in and of themselves should not rationally have any meaning or power since they are merely assemblages of proxies. Only proxies that are valued more than simple proxies take on symbolic value. This is of course the central dilemma of symbols: how can something we rationally know has no power, have any power at all?

The key is in understanding that the mind can be broken into two components for the purposes of this discussion: the rational and the sensual. The rational mind can appreciate and distinguish that a toy train is not a mouse, but the sensual mind responds to the toy train as if it were a mouse. In other words, the sensual mind has no concept of metaphor. If two items evoke similar emotional responses, to the sensual mind, they are the same object. The vagaries of simile and metaphor are left to the rational mind, bereft of emotional response. Symbols therefore become real, not because people are so stupid that they believe the proxy is the same as the actual, but because our brains on a sensual level respond to the proxy as if it were real. The rational mind appreciates the distinction between proxy and actual, whereas the sensual mind responds in kind to both.

This methodology explains why it does not matter what a symbol is, or even to a degree how irrational it is. Symbols can be arbitrary because their power does not reside in any sort of measure of merit, but simply as a binary calculation of emotional resemblance. A crucifix can manifest in an infinite variety of simple and complex forms, but to the believer, a cross's symbolic quality derives from the emotional reaction tied to it. That reaction may be limited to a specific orthodox cruciform, or it may be as broad as accepting anything close to the basic shape. The symbolism needs no rational basis, and in fact rational explanations for the quality of one symbol over another are gilding applied to mask the irrational from an increasingly rational world.

Empathy

The way the mind reacts to symbols also plays an important role in how societies are structured. Human relationships naturally grow out of small family and kin groups. In the natural world, the human brain does not deal with large numbers of individuals. There are a very limited number of metaphors for the relationships between individuals. These metaphors cannot always be readily applied to the complex social relationships that arise in modern society. The rational brain can invent and adapt to these logical structures at will, but the sensual mind does not have the same luxury.

The way that the sensual mind deals with concepts for which it is not wired is to shoehorn them into existing metaphors. Nations are families. Allies are friends. Other citizens are brothers and sisters. The state is both father and mother. These similar relationships are easy to dismiss as convenient but meaningless metaphors, but the sensual mind's incapacity for metaphor reveals these relationships as critical to understanding how and why individuals react in seemingly irrational ways to government and politics. It is the metaphor of "nation as family" that produces the ideological structures of contemporary conservatism and contemporary liberalism.

The basis for social relationships is empathy, the ability to see others as oneself. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that empathy is born not of rationalization, i.e. thinking that another's pain is bad because it reminds of the potential for one's own pain, but from feeling some shadow of that pain in one's own brain.  Empathy derives from being unable to disassociate oneself from one's peers. The pain of one is the pain of all.
This is why sociopaths have the most rational of minds: the disconnection from others leaves nothing but rationality behind. The profound alienation felt by so many individuals in society is a result of an overly rational society dismissing the structural underpinnings of society itself. In other words, if the connections between people are fundamentally irrational in nature, then the prizing of rationality above all else in a society will inevitably lead to a society with no social structure.

The startlingly frequent occurrence of alienation in the most educated and most successful individuals is a logical consequence when society is viewed in this context. An oft-asked question is whether education causes depression and alienation or whether it is something inborn in intelligence itself. The answer is that alienation is a byproduct of fully embracing modern society's focus on rationalism. Ergo, those most successful at the embrace of society's rationale are most affected by the byproduct.

All the complexities of symbolic systems and elaborate social structures can be boiled down to the basic building blocks upon which our minds operate. The human mind functions like a multiple choice exam. When we are faced with anything, be it an idea, a political party, an acquaintance, et cetera, we fit it into one of the bubbles. There is no option for "none of the above." That bubble, or writing in your own answer, is the reaction of two types of minds: the entirely irrational or the entirely rational. The madman or the genius. A madman has no regard for the social and mental rules that force an accepted answer. A genius may take the same route, because if none of the answers fit, the only truly rational response is to choose none of them. An average individual will choose the bubble that feels most similar, that evokes the same emotional response. Each bubble is a symbol. A mind divorced from symbolism cannot comprehend the way the rest of society interprets the most basic of concepts, because that interpretation is inseparable from metaphor.

Politics

As historical forces, as opposed to their contemporary political buzzwords, conservatism and liberalism have championed opposite sides of the rational/sensual spectrum. Conservatism champions the return to the way things were, the embrace of traditional values and symbols. Liberalism champions the dismantling of the traditional in favor of the rational. Each taken to its extreme is dysfunctional and horrific. Fascism's worship of symbol consumes the actual. Communism's orgy of atheism consumes the symbolic.

Both forces can also be understood through the primal symbols they embody. Conservatives sees government fundamentally as a father. Liberals see government fundamentally as a mother. These archetypes exemplify the arbitrary nature of symbols: different individuals invest different meanings in the same entity depending on their own emotional reaction to the entity in question. One cat may chase the train/mouse, where another will flee from the train/snake. It is then a logical consequence that fascist soldiers fought for the fatherland even as communist troops defended the motherland.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is a reaction to an overly rational society, a society that forgets or explains away its old symbols. The gist of the traditionalist mindset is that things used to be better, and that they can be again if only the symbols and values of that time can be restored. The two natural consequences of conservative ideology are scapegoats and eternal war. If the world used to be better, the logic inevitably goes, then someone must be responsible for the decline. Tied back to primal concepts, the father must discipline and take control in order to fix the social disorder of the tribe. The symbols and values of society once restored must be protected lest they be eclipsed again either by other symbols, or worse, a mindset of no symbols at all.

Two potent forces of traditionalism rage against each other in the world today: Islamic traditionalism centered in the Middle East, and American conservatism centered in the rural areas of the United States. These forces provide a valuable insight into the general pattern of traditionalism since they have in many ways defined themselves as each other's opposites.

There are two important notes about the uniqueness of Islamic traditionalism. First, it is unexpectedly centered in the most prosperous Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. Second, the violence is not directed at the governments the militants see as having failed, but at foreign governments in Europe and America. These two trends are explained best in the context of primal relationships expanded to symbolically encompass societal relationships. The relationship between the west and Arab oil states has produced a small group of nations with extraordinary wealth, but little in the way of an actual economy. Islamic radicals target the most blame within their society at women, and anyone westernized and liberal.

Rural America sees a similar streak of traditionalism, which at face value has little in common with Islamic traditionalism other than its association with religion (Protestantism in place of Islam) and its general alarm at the threat modern society represents to values. The conservative renaissance of rural America has followed along with the gradual collapse of the economies of rural areas, as industry and agriculture have been increasingly exported to foreign countries. The fascinating nuance of American traditionalism is that it finds fault not with big business taking these steps, or a conservative government for allowing them, but with two scapegoats: liberals and foreigners.  On this level, American traditionalists march in step with Islamic fundamentalists. Their variations are in the particular symbols in which they invest meaning, but the pattern of those symbols is the same in American and Islamic traditionalism. They follow the same metaphor.

The reaction of Islamic fundamentalists and American traditionalists is at its most visceral the reaction of children of a cuckolded father. The reaction of children to a father who through inaction allows his wife to be raped by another man, a father who furthermore cannot provided economically for his family, is not one of revolt but of rage and shame. The target of their rage would not be their impotent father, but the invader. The source of their shame is not the attacker, but the mother who invited the attack through immoral behavior.

Liberalism

Liberalism in the modern world has demons of its own to confront. The status of modern liberalism, be it anywhere on the spectrum from communism to socialism to the mild leftism of American democrats, can be summarized simply as bewilderment. Prizing rationalism in the place of symbolism, liberalism cannot comprehend the malice of the right wing. It cannot understand what motivates traditionalists of any stripe. Internally, it cannot understand why the most alienated and lost souls in society come from the ranks of the liberals themselves.

Liberal thought is ill-equipped to deal with problems fundamentally symbolic in nature. The alienation of intellectual liberals is essentially the alienation of a child without a father. The mystification of liberalism by the disillusionment of their own ranks, and the revolt of the right wing is the reaction of a mother mystified by rebellious male children.

Power

In the ubiquity of shared natural metaphors lies power to manipulate society. No metaphor can completely describe its associated real concept. These orphaned elements are items that have no linkage to a specific element of the metaphor. For example, in the metaphor of seeing a nation as a family, what metaphorical mapping can possibly apply to the space program, or to campaign finance reform, or to the balance of federal power versus states' rights? Concepts that do not map easily into the metaphor can be hidden, whereas concepts that readily map can take on disproportionate importance.

Metaphors can be used to control debate on political action by channeling the discussion through metaphors. Political victory is assured not through a rational victory of superior ideas, but through an emotional victory of empathy for a candidate's metaphors.

Final Thoughts

The power that symbols and metaphors hold over our minds seems irresistible, a force that controls our relationships with society, a force that can be manipulated, a force that undermines the rational revolution of liberalism that in fits and starts has come to dominate the world since the Renaissance. Are we nothing more than slaves to symbols then, captive to the whims of those with the ability to manipulate those metaphors? We are slaves only to the things to which we are blind. A harmonious society requires balance, but we cannot achieve that balance unless we understand that something is out of balance in the first place.