I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  Etymologically, [parable] signifies356 simply to place side by side; and it is, in fact, fancy by the side of fact; it is spiritual truth side by side with natural truth; it is truth at once fruitful and floral.

  Parables are narrated metaphors; they place a fictional story by the side of a fact of life. Just as grandmother cells, neurons that fire in response to images of specific people or objects, encode both the actual image and the abstract concept of the person or object, parables encode both an actual experience and an abstract category of experiences. Thus, “Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown” is the sad tale of Diderot in debt as well as an object lesson in what happens when acquisitiveness exceeds assets.

  Parables are teaching tales. Through them, we are given that greatest of all opportunities—the chance to learn from someone else’s mistakes. And this education consists of more than mere sentimental words of wisdom like “Always live within your means,” a warning Diderot clearly didn’t heed. Neuroimaging studies show that practical learning, too, takes place whenever we read stories.

  When we read a story, our brains plot everything that’s going on357, from the characters’ physical locations in space to their interactions with objects in the environment to their pursuit of various psychological and emotional goals. Many of the brain areas active while reading are also active when we actually take part in or observe similar situations in real life. The regions involved in processing goal-directed activity and the manipulation of objects, for example, are at work during both fictional and factual encounters. Just as we understand metaphors by mentally simulating what they describe, we understand stories by imaginatively acting them out in our minds. Stories are rehearsals for real life.

  This merger of fact with fiction may have evolved as an efficient and vivid means of communicating essential information. As Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, the evolutionary advantage of stories358, metaphorical or otherwise, is that they provide an understanding of the inner lives of others, the complexities of social relations, and our own hidden motivations.

  Parables are the most compressed and concentrated form of story. They are compact metaphorical thought experiments that help us solve essential psychological and social problems in the real world.

  Parables are common to every country and culture, but few have taken the practice to such extremes as the Managalese, a people inhabiting the mountainous regions of the Oro Province in Papua New Guinea.

  The Managalese359 live in villages of anywhere between 50 and 250 people. The extended family, or kin group, serves as the basic unit of social, political, and economic organization. To preserve amity, the Managalese use circumlocutions to conduct negotiations or resolve contentious disputes. When confronting the trickiest issues—arranging marriages, reproving kinsfolk, informing relatives of the deaths of loved ones—they prefer indirection. So they tell parables. Indeed, parabolic activity is so highly prized that the Managalese often compete to see who can come up with the best ones.

  After her son eloped with a widow, one Managalese woman related the following parable, as recorded by anthropologist and Managalese parable expert William H. McKellin:

  When I was a young woman and visited people’s houses, people gave me fresh juicy young betel nuts to chew. Now I am older. When I visit I am given old, hard betel nut. When I chew it, my teeth and gums hurt and bleed. This makes me unhappy and upset.

  Betel nuts360 symbolize marriage among the Managalese. This mother clearly disapproves of her son’s decision, comparing the widow with whom he eloped to an old, hard betel nut. But she is expressing her disapproval in a non-confrontational way, through parable.

  The Managalese opt for a metaphorical mode of discourse to defuse the tension in emotionally charged situations. We do the same whenever we choose a euphemism instead of more direct speech. When we speak of “collateral damage” instead of “dead civilians” or “right-sizing” instead of “mandatory job losses,” we are seeking to cushion the blow of bad news by couching the information in a kinder, gentler metaphor. Parables and allegories are, according to McKellin, “the trial balloons or political Rorschach tests of social relations.361”

  Parables can make bitter pills easier to swallow, but they can also make difficult concepts easier to grasp, as exemplified in the moral and spiritual tales of everyone from Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad to Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka. The educational and existential aspects of parables also account for their perennial popularity. Probably no collection of parables is more popular than Aesop’s Fables362:

  A boy was gathering berries from a hedge when a nettle stung his hand. Smarting with the pain, he ran to tell his mother, and said to her between his sobs, “I only touched it ever so slightly, mother.” “That’s just why you got stung, my son,” said she; “if you had grasped it firmly, it wouldn’t have hurt you in the least.”

  Aesop’s fables are usually about animals, like the tortoise and the hare or the ant and the grasshopper. But a few, like this one, feature human beings. Either way, the stories describe some concrete scene—what Hood called a “natural truth”—from which readers must deduce an abstract message, or “spiritual truth.” In this parable, the natural truth is the boy’s encounter with the stinging nettles and the spiritual truth is, to put it proverbially, “Grab the bull by the horns.” I wonder what my son Tristan would make of this lesson.

  Proverbs were often appended to Aesop’s fables as a way to sum up and re-enforce the story’s import. In fact, if parables are metaphors in story form, then proverbs are parables in miniature.

  Like parables, proverbs often feature animals (“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”) and always contain hidden moral lessons (“A nod is as good as a wink to a blind man”). They are, in essence, one-sentence stories, which John Russell, twice British prime minister in the nineteenth century, succinctly defined as “The wit of one, the wisdom of many363.”

  Proverbs, again like parables, are found in every country and culture, like this one from China

  It is hard to dismount from a tiger364

  and this one from Korea

  Chase two hares, both get away365.

  The proverb and its close relation, the aphorism, are the world’s oldest written art forms. They are also the oldest written examples of metaphor.

  In ancient Sumer366, where writing itself was invented around 3500 B.C.E., proverb collections were used as textbooks. A handful of museums hold small oblong clay tablets, thousands of years old, on which ancient Sumerian students have copied out proverbs as both school spelling assignments and exercises in moral education. Some of the tablets still bear the scratch marks where a student made a mistake, crossed it out, and started over again.

  Despite their antiquity, these proverbs still ring true, instantly calling to mind contemporary echoes. The Sumerian saying

  Wealth is hard to come by, but poverty is always at hand367

  anticipates

  The poor are always with us.

  The ancient admonishment

  Possessions are sparrows in flight that can find no place to alight368

  reminds us that

  A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

  The Sumerians used proverbs as moral instruction manuals; we use them in the same way today. Proverbs are trotted out whenever someone (usually an older person) decides that someone else (usually a younger person) needs to be taught a lesson. Lectures on frugality invariably include the catchphrase “A penny saved is a penny earned” and monologues about the birds and the bees inevitably feature the warning “Better safe than sorry.” In this way, proverbs remain one of the few forms of oral literature still actively practiced around the world.

  Practice perfected the proverb in many African cultures, where these metaphorical words of wisdom are invoked for everything from resolving arguments to socializing children to settling legal disputes.

  Among the Igbo, an
ethnic group of about 9 million people who live in the rain forests of southeastern Nigeria, proverbs are a highly esteemed form of communication. Adults, especially men, establish their authority and maintain their status in large part through the deft deployment of proverbs. “Knowing proverbs and using them appropriately369 means that you are intelligent,” according to one Igbo man, “because it’s just like being able to find out something in a textbook or dictionary.”

  The Igbo and other African ethnic groups consult their proverb dictionaries daily. Proverbs feature prominently in court cases370, with both the prosecution and the defense enlisting them to bolster their arguments. Judges will often cite a proverb at the end of a case much as Western judges cite legal precedents. One judge, a member of the Anang, another Nigerian ethnic group, regularly deployed the saying

  If you visit the home of the toads, stoop371

  to emphasize that litigants must conform to the law.

  The Igbo, Anang, and other African ethnic groups place so much faith in the problem-solving power of proverbs that they even have a proverb for it:

  If something that demands a proverb happens372, a proverb will be cited.

  Africans are not alone in using proverbs for moral instruction and, perhaps just as often, moral justification. Psychologist Daniel Stalder asked university students to read stories373 in which they took part in behavior—engaging in unsafe sex, wasting hundreds of gallons of water during a drought, or joyriding in a stolen car—that contradicted their personal values. After reading the story, some participants then read a short list of irrelevant proverbs (e.g., “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”), some read relevant proverbs (e.g., “Everybody makes mistakes”), some read a mix of relevant and irrelevant proverbs, and the rest didn’t read any proverbs at all. Those who had read relevant proverbs expressed fewer feelings of regret and guilt than those who had read only irrelevant proverbs or no proverbs at all. But, Stalder found, this effect was evident only in men. He concluded that men were quicker to use proverbs to excuse their behavior because the sayings placed their actions in the context of a social norm—After all, everybody makes mistakes now and then. What’s the big deal? Women, in contrast, did not accept that the proverbial social norm, however reassuring, offered justification for their actions.

  Giambattista Vico, always ahead of the pack in spotting metaphor’s formative role in thought, also noted the cross-cultural importance of proverbs. “The nature of human institutions presupposes a conceptual language374 which is common to all nations,” he wrote in New Science. “This language uniformly grasps the substance of all the elements of human society, but expresses them differently according to their different aspects. We witness the truth of this in proverbs, which are maxims of popular wisdom. For their meanings, while substantially the same, are expressed under as many different aspects as there are ancient and modern nations.”

  Though proverbs are universal, the metaphorical menageries through which they tell their stories vary. One survey of economics texts from the United Kingdom and France, for example, found that the British375 used gardening proverbs more than three times as often as the French, while the French used food proverbs nearly five times as often as the British. National stereotypes, it seems, contain more than just a proverbial grain of truth.

  There are also cultural nuances in the way proverbs are visualized. Asked to provide imagery for the idiom “spill the beans376,” a phrase used metaphorically more than 99 percent of the time, Americans reported that the beans are uncooked and in a container about the size of a human head377. Brits, on the other hand, preferred baked beans in a tin can. There is no accounting for taste, not even proverbially.

  Both nature and nurture are at work in the choice of proverbial metaphors. Cultural preferences, such as the British passion for gardening and the French love of food, play a role, but so does the physical environment. This is especially evident in Afrikaans, a form of Dutch spoken by the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa.

  In 1652, some intrepid Dutch farmers and their families settled along the coast of what is now South Africa. The settlement was initially intended only as a supply station for the ships of the East India Company, but it eventually grew into a thriving colony in its own right. As time passed, the form of Dutch spoken there veered from the mother tongue as spoken in the Netherlands to become the Afrikaans vernacular. Comparing proverbs from the two languages illustrates how the metaphorical landscape of a proverb may change while the meaning remains the same.

  The Dutch language possesses an embarrassment of proverbial riches. Proverbs are present in all forms of communication, from political discourse and journalism to ordinary conversation and even painting, which is in itself a rich source of visual metaphors. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs378, painted in 1559, includes lurid, lavish, and often ludic depictions of more than one hundred sayings from the Low Countries, including perennial favorites like

  No one looks for others in an oven unless he’s been in there himself.

  (It takes one to know one.)

  Fill the well after the calf has drowned.

  (Shut the barn door after the horses have bolted.)

  He who eats fire shits sparks.

  (Play with fire and you’ll get burned.)

  Bruegel was someone who clearly took Addison’s test of a true metaphor—“whether or not there is sufficient detail for it to be painted”—literally.

  Many Dutch proverbial expressions are nautical in nature, because of Holland’s seafaring past and the fact that more than half the country lies below sea level. “To carry water to the sea,” for example, is the Dutch equivalent of the British expression “to carry coals to Newcastle”; both phrases mean “to perform a superfluous task by adding more of something that is already in abundance.”

  The Dutch saying “That doesn’t add any sod to the dike” has a related significance, meaning “to perform a task that does not have the desired effect.” In English, this might be rendered by the equally delightful, “It butters no parsnips.”

  And then there is the evocative “to jab someone under water,” which means “to surreptitiously undermine someone’s position.” The saying is derived from what happens when a ship’s hull is breeched below the waterline; the damage is invisible and therefore all the more dangerous.

  The Dutch landscape is, of course, dotted with windmills, and windmills, too, turn up in dozens of Dutch proverbs379, such as:

  Turn the mill to the wind.

  (Equivalent to the English proverb, Trim your sails to the wind.)

  That’s grist for his mill.

  (It’s in the works. Literally, in Dutch, “It’s in the mill.”)

  She got hit by the windmill.

  (She has a screw loose.)

  Unlike the Netherlands, however, South Africa has no windmills, so windmills are conspicuously absent from South African proverbs.

  South Africa and the Netherlands have different animal populations as well as different landscapes, so the proverbs from each country also feature different non-human casts of characters. The Dutch expression

  The fox may lose its fur, but not its tricks

  is replaced in Afrikaans380 by

  Jackals may change their fur, but never their tricks

  because there are few foxes381 in South Africa but plenty of jackals. Afrikaners carried over the original proverb from Dutch but endowed the native jackal with the fox’s proverbial reputation for slyness and cunning.

  To be effective, though, proverbs and parables must not be too culturally specific. The scene must be detailed enough to be credible but general enough to be universally applicable. Otherwise, minutiae outweigh metaphor and parable degenerates into anecdote.

  As G. K. Chesterton wrote in his introduction to Aesop’s Fables, “For a fable, all the persons must be impersonal382. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess.” The parable of the farmer and his chickens is a case in po
int:

  A farmer was proud of his prize chickens383. But he started to lose some of them to raids by skunks on the henhouse. One night he heard a loud cackling from the chickens and crept out with his shotgun to find a half-dozen of the black-and-white critters running in and out of the shed. Thinking to clean out the whole tribe, he put a double charge in the gun and fired away. Somehow he hit only one, and the rest scampered off. The neighbors asked why the farmer didn’t follow up the skunks and kill the rest. “Blast it,” the farmer said. “It was eleven weeks before I got over killin’ one.”

  This fable is not by Aesop but by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln told this story after he dismissed his Secretary of War Simon Cameron for incompetence and corruption during the Civil War. At the time, Lincoln’s advisors urged him to carry out a much wider shake-up of the underperformers in his administration. He explained his reluctance to do so not with a detailed exposition of the political chaos that would result from a more comprehensive purge but with this folksy, homespun tale.

  Lincoln was a great lover of all forms of parable. His favorite books were the King James Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare, and Aesop’s Fables. He carried Shakespeare, along with Burns and Byron, in his saddlebags while riding across Illinois making court appearances during his years as a lawyer. As a boy, he spent a lot of time poring over Aesop in particular. Lincoln occasionally cited one of Aesop’s sayings in political tracts to bolster his arguments, just as Anang judges cite proverbs as precedents. His cousin, Dennis Hanks, used to tease Lincoln about his preoccupation with Aesop: “Abe, them yarns is all lies.” Lincoln glanced up from his book and replied: “Mighty darn good lies384.”

  Lincoln was such an effective orator because he could tell such mighty darn good lies himself. “No man could tell a story as well as he could385,” one friend recalled. “He could convey his ideas on any subject through the form of a simple story or homely illustration with better effect than any man I knew.” The paradox of parable and proverb is that issues as complex as governing unruly Cabinet members can be compressed into such simple stories.