George Lakoff"s "Metaphor and War, Again"

Tue Apr 1 00:39:15 UTC 2003

In a recent message to the linguistic anthropology list, Richard Senghas was asking for sources that address language, discourse, and war / conflict for a university teach-in on the war in Iraq. I am forwarding a message with a link to George Lakoff's "Metaphor and War, Again," and a text by Paul Chilton relating to Lakoff's text.

Alkistis Fleischer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Paul Chilton 
To: CRITICS-L at NIC.SURFNET.NL 
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 3:33 AM
Subject: Re: Why are we silent?

Here is a link to a paper by George Lakoff:
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15414

Also, here are some additional thoughts in the attachment, and copied below.

Brief thoughts relating to George Lakoff"s "Metaphor and War, Again"

Reaching the final days: metaphor, mind and how to make an ultimatum

In order to go to war in democracies, and even in dictatorships, you have to give your people a reason--a casus belli and some reasoned justifications, which may or may not draw in a general way on just war theory (present threat to the nation, proportionality of means, etc.). When you've done that, then you issue an ultimatum to the enemy, and if they do not do what you want, you send in the missiles, bombers and foot soldiers. 

All this is done by means of LANGUAGE. The aim is to get people's brains into a state similar to that of the speaker. A good way to do this is to use metaphors, as George Lakoff has pointed out. People store in their long-term memory learned cognitive frames and other cognitive set-ups, plus the means to manipulate them on-line in discourse-processing. One is of course free to do what one likes with these cognitive resources. In principle. In practice, especially in times of crisis, under all kinds of cognitive and emotional pressures, many people simply assimilate the verbiage coming into their minds from political leaders.

I say that in principle one is free to do what one likes with one's mind, even if one's mind has already been modified by input from the verbal environment. More than that, if Coismides (1989) and Sperber (2000), are anything like on the right track, we humans possess a "cheater detector" and a "logico-rhetorical" module that equips us to resist lies, distortions and misrepresentations. Of course, this ability needs nurturing, and some explicit tools to make us of. To some extent, linguists can help here. Being aware of metaphorical and similar cognitive processes (such as blending) can help people get a handle on what politicians, and others, say. Naturally, metaphor isn't the only persuasive process we need to look at, but we might as well start there.

George Lakoff (2003) has shown how the following metaphors are used in the Bush administration's efforts to persuade the American people, and the world to begin to massive violence against Iraq on March 20, 2003: a nation is a person, the international community metaphor, rational actor model, the self-defense story, the rescue story.

I would like to add a little more to our understanding of the cognitive processes that constitute political decision-making and political persuasion. Let's return to the question of issuing an ultimatum. If you think about it, it is an extraordinary bit of human behaviour. I would guess that our genetically near cousins, the chimpanzees, don't do ultimatums, though they apparently get up to other kinds of machiavellian tricks. In human societies, ultimata are literally the ultimate stage in the step-by-step process of going to war. How do we do it? What mental resources are tapped?

Of course, ultimata are not just aimed at the adversary. In the case of President Bush's ultimatum in his Address to the Nation ( 8:01 p.m. EST, March 17, 2003 ), the main point is to persuade the American nation, and perhaps other listeners. Nor is it enough to simply say that ultimata are a species of speech act, akin to Threatening and Warning. They are that, of course. But there is more to it. Speech acts engage cognitive processes--how else could they work?

Below I sketch some of the metaphors that constitute the cognitive process "giving an ultimatum". Time is of the essence in ultimata. You have to show that action is crucially time-sensitive. You have to show a sort of causal connection between time and two events. The causal connection is, as a number of semantic analyses have shown, frequently couched as a conditional. If X does/does not do Y by time t, then A will do B after time t. Doing or not doing Y in some way causes B.

That is a very abstract template. In practice, it seems likely that human minds engage image schemata and other cognitive objects, including metaphor, to grasp this sort of abstraction. In some curious way "grasping" it means making it (seem) "real". So, we'd expect ultimata to involve metaphors for time and action and causation. 

If one looks closely at Bush's Address to the Nation that is exactly what one does find. Here are a few examples, for others to follow up and check whether I am on the right lines.

METONYMY

Evoking a particular frame by mentioning a part of that frame (a person, object etc.) is commonplace--as we know from the famous example "the ham sandwich wants his coffee". The cognitive effect is probably that we tend to focus on the individual or item actually mentioned, and as in the case of metaphor, put the associated frame together with its details and implications into the background. If we attack "Saddam Hussein", we are obscuring the rest of the cognitive frame of which he is a part--ordinary Iraqis who would be harmed in the attack, perhaps 50 000 civilian deaths according to Amnesty International estimates. 

It can work the other way round too. That is to say, a category (or frame) name can stand for the individual parts. So if we attack "Iraq", that too takes the cognitive focus away from ordinary Iraqis. But category labels can be actors, too. Early in his address, the President says:

"the world has engaged in 12 years of diplomacy."

The ad hoc category label "the world" obscures a great deal. The individuals, and even the individual states who might have been involved in diplomacy, cannot be identified from this expression.

The pronoun we can also act as a label for ad hoc social categories, usually when they are ill-defined ones. The pronoun we picks out a very vague category, that can be filled out in different ways by different listeners. President Bush says:

"we have passed more than a dozen resolutions.". Who exactly?

"the United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat".

Who exactly passed more than a dozen resolutions? Who exactly are the nations that are put into the category who are threatened yet do not deserve it, i.e. are innocent? How many facts and questions do these representations conceal?

EVENTS ARE THINGS, THINGS MOVE and POINTS IN TIME ARE MOVING THINGS

Things move. Generally things move when some force, typically coming from a human agent, moves them. But language lets us talk as if things propel themselves. It follows that, by the metaphor events are things, events too can propel themselves. In other words things can "just happen":

"if war comes"

"every measure has been taken to avoid war".

Here the underlying image schema has a moving object--"war"-- approaching us. Time, as we know from a great deal of research on metaphor, gets metaphorically imagined as a moving thing, or as a landmark toward which the observer moves. 

The President opens his Address to the Nation by saying:

"events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision..".

"before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed".

"all the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end"

"the day of your liberation is near.

So, without specifying exactly which events and which horror, we have a spatial representation in which something has (on the President's assertion) come to an end point. In the same representation, something that by implication is on the same path, is coming towards us--as the word "come" alone presupposes. Therefore, there's a space (of time) between the end point and the approaching object--between the the "end" of one series of events and the coming "days of horror". 

What does a human do in a such a scenario? You can get out of the way, or you can act to stop the approaching object. Since we gotta act (see below), it follows--at least within the presidential discourse--that, well, we gotta act to stop the approaching object. The causal link is not spelled out but it is implied that the approaching object will be stopped. The implication emerges through the other part of the scenario. There is a different object approaching: liberation is "near".

This scenario plays an important background role in the President's address. Setting up a time scale is crucial to doing ultimatum acts. Answering the questions "why now?", "why at the time you say?" is crucial. The scenario above, in which one thing has moved to a stop, and another thing is approaching, gives the answers by defining what is "too late" and what is "not too late". Thus,

"it is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain" (because his regime has "reached an end").

On the other hand, "it is not too late" for the Iraqi military to surrender to the American forces, before "war comes". Moreover, within the same metaphorically defined scenario, the approaching object ("danger") will be physically taken displaced--it will be "removed". So, it is not "too late" to act.

In this way the scenario pinpoints "now" as the moment to act. It is forced (or caused) by the oncoming object. Why are "we" acting now?

"We are acting now because the risks of inaction would be far greater."

OK, what does that mean and how do you make it "real"? Well, bearing in mind that the threat-object is on a collision course with where we stand now.

"We can choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities".

The questions of whether any actual connection exists between Saddam Hussein"s government and the potential for terrorist attacks on the USA, or whether he possesses the potential for nuclear attacks on the USA or for biochemical attacks on the USA--such questions are obscured by the metaphors. Possibly, however, facts and reasons are unnecessary because the entrenched metaphorical processes are so cognitively powerful.

THINGS ARE PERSONS

We can have double metaphors, such that events are things and things are persons. Since persons are intentional agents with desires and beliefs, so are events. Persons make mistakes, too, and often fail. Hence, "peaceful efforts", which only indirectly evokes persons who do things, may "fail":

"peaceful efforts . have failed.". 

Whose efforts, exactly, and what were the efforts? The metaphors, built into our lexical ways of speaking, obscure the details and obscure the questions. 

ACTIONS ARE PATHS

Not surprisingly human actions are conceptualised as movements along a path towards a goal. Our image schemata for Paths--i.e. our intuitive grasp of moving around in space--inherently have locations, obstacles, etc. as parts. There is strong pressure for politicians, especially national leaders, to represent themselves as very active actors. Presidents and Prime Ministers believe that they must be seen to be "doing something". They also believe it is their job to get others to do things--or to "go in certain directions". This why political leaders talk of "guiding", "steering", leading", "being in the driving seat", and so forth. This is also why the "ship of state" has been a profound metaphor in the political discourse of western nations: ships have to have commanders to keep them on course. So, unsurprisingly.

We find the President saying, for example: 

"the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honourable efforts."

and, more graphically,

"instead of drifting toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety".

As if "tragedy" and "safety" were locations. In the case of "safety" the intuitive feeling that "safety" is indeed a place, runs deep. But it is not necessarily helpful. (cf. Chilton 1996). The ship metaphor has a range of possible entailments. For example, if you are captain of a vessel, it is certainly your duty to seek to stay on course. So , President Bush:

"No act of theirs [of enemies] can alter the course.of this country".

REFERENCES

Cosmides, L. 1989, the logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason?, Cognition, 31: 187-276

Chilton, P. 1996, Security Metaphors, Peter Lang

Chilton, P. and Lakoff, G.. Foreign policy by metaphor. In C. Schäffner and A.L. 

Wenden (ed.), Language and Peace, Harwood, 1995

Lakoff, G. 2003, Metaphor and war, again. www.alternet.org

Sperber, D. 2000, Metarepresentations. A Multidisciplinary Perspective, OUP

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