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23

Metaphor, Truth, and Action

In the preceding chapter we suggested the following:

Metaphors have entailments through which they highlight and make coherent certain aspects of our experience.

A given metaphor may be the only way to highlight and coher­ently organize exactly those aspects of our experience.

Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social re­alities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experi­ence coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

For example, faced with the energy crisis, President Carter declared "the moral equivalent of war." The war metaphor generated a network of entailments. There was an "enemy," a "threat to national security," which required "setting targets," "reorganizing priorities," "establishing a new chain of command," "plotting new strategy," "gathering intelligence," "marshaling forces," "imposing sanctions," "calling for sacrifices," and on and on. The war metaphor highlighted certain realities and hid others. The metaphor was not merely a way of viewing reality; it constituted a license for policy change and political and economic action. The very acceptance of the metaphor provided grounds for certain inferences: there was an exter­nal, foreign, hostile enemy (pictured by cartoonists in Arab headdress); energy needed to be given top priorities; the populace would have to make sacrifices; if we didn't meet

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the threat, we would not survive. It is important to realize that this was not the only metaphor available.

Carter's war metaphor took for granted our current con­cept of what energy is, and focused on how to get enough of it. On the other hand, Amory Lovins (1977) observed that there are two fundamentally different ways, or paths, to supply our energy needs. He characterized these metaphorically as hard and soft. The hard energy path uses energy supplies that are inflexible, nonrenewable, needing military defense and geopolitical control, irrevers­ibly destructive of the environment, and requiring high cap­ital investment, high technology, and highly skilled work­ers. They include fossil fuels (gas and oil), nuclear power plants, and coal gasification. The soft energy path uses energy supplies that are flexible, renewable, not needing military defense or geopolitical control, not destructive of the environment, and requiring only low capital investment, low technology, and unskilled labor. They include solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, biomass alcohol, fluidized beds for burning coal or other combustible materials, and a great many other possibilities currently available. Lovins' soft energy path metaphor highlights the technical, eco­nomic, and sociopolitical structure of the energy system, which leads him to the conclusion that the "hard" energy pathscoal, oil, and nuclear power---lead to political con­flict, economic hardship, and harm to the environment. But Jimmy Carter is more powerful than Amory Lovins. As Charlotte Linde (in conversation) has observed, whether in national politics or in everyday interaction, people in power get to impose their metaphors.

New metaphors, like conventional metaphors, can have the power to define reality. They do this through a coherent network of entailments that highlight some features of re­ality and hide others. The acceptance of the metaphor, which forces us to focus only on those aspects of our ex­perience that it highlights, leads us to view the entailments of the metaphor as being true. Such "truths" may be true,

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of course, only relative to the reality defined by the metaphor. Suppose Carter announces that his administra­tion has won a major energy battle. Is this claim true or false? Even to address oneself to the question requires ac­cepting at least the central parts of the metaphor. If you do not accept the existence of an external enemy, if you think there is no external threat, if you recognize no field of battle, no targets, no clearly defined competing forces, then the issue of objective truth or falsity cannot arise. But if you see reality as defined by the metaphor, that is, if you do see the energy crisis as a war, then you can answer the question relative to whether the metaphorical entailments fit reality. If Carter, by means of strategically employed political and economic sanctions, forced the OPEC nations to cut the price of oil in half, then you would say that he would indeed have won a major battle. If, on the other hand, his strategies had produced only a temporary price freeze, you couldn't be so sure and might be skeptical.

Though questions of truth do arise for new metaphors, the more important questions are those of appropriate ac­tion. In most cases, what is at issue is not the truth or falsity of a metaphor but the perceptions and inferences that fol­low from it and the actions that are sanctioned by it. In all aspects of life, not just in politics or in love, we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.