"[Trump] is like the blond alien in the 1995 movie ‘Species,’ who mutates from ova to adult in months, regenerating and reconfiguring at warp speed to escape the establishment, kill everyone in sight and eliminate the human race.”
— Maureen Dowd
“Australia is like the Robert Horry or Philip Baker Hall of continents — it just makes everything it touches a little bit better.” — Bill Simmons
A n analogy is, according to Webster’s, “a comparison of two things based on their being alike in some way.” The definition seems to capture exactly what Simmons, a sports commentator, and Dowd, a New York Times columnist, are doing in the sentences above: comparing two things and explaining how they’re alike. Being a dictionary, however, Webster’s has little to say about why we use analogies, where they come from, or what role they really play in human life.
Analogies need not, of course, all have the same aim. They’re used in different contexts to varying effect. Still, it is evident that we use analogies for mainly rhetorical reasons: to shed light, to explain, to reveal a new aspect of something, to draw out an unseen affinity, to drive home a point. As Wittgenstein wrote, “A good simile refreshes the mind.”
This Simmons’s and Dowd’s analogies demonstrably fail to do. Our understanding of Trump is unlikely to benefit from an attentive viewing of Species. The careers of the basketball player Robert Horry and the actor Philip Baker Hall, admirable though they may be, leave Australia similarly unilluminated. This kind of analogy — which often consists of an ostensibly funny pop-culture reference or of objects between which certain equivalences can be drawn (x is the y of z’s) — has become increasingly common.
You also find it in academic writing. For example, from the journal Cultural Critique: “Attempting to define multiculturalism is like trying to pick up a jellyfish — you can do it, but the translucent, free-floating entity turns almost instantly into an unwieldy blob of amorphous abstraction.” The analogy aims not to enlighten, but to enliven, adorn, divert.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with this, as far as it goes, but its increasing prominence reflects more general changes in the way we relate to the world around us.
T he virtue of analogies for Wittgenstein consists in “changing our way of seeing.” Experience is diffuse, fragmented, and isolated — modern experience increasingly so. A good analogy leaps across a wide terrain of experience to reveal connections between domains that we wouldn’t have thought had anything to do with one another. In so doing, the analogy produces the feeling of renewal to which Wittgenstein refers. It brings us up for air, elevating us into a broader expressive context that allows us to see a given phenomenon in the light of another.
Analogy, in this sense, is not just a useful technique that colors some component of an explanation or a topping for an argument. It is often the explanation itself. Analogical reasoning is, furthermore, fundamental to the way we get around in the world. When we’re confronted with something new, we resort to analogy to try to come to terms with it.
Today’s bad analogies are all invention and no discovery.
In their book on analogy, Surfaces and Essences (Basic Books, 2013), Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander write of Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter as the complex analogical application of the idea of the Moon (at the time the word only referred to our moon) to the bits of light reaching his eye through his telescope. This analogy, quite literally, changed Galileo’s way of seeing, and in so doing, changed the Moon into a moon.
Like Wittgenstein, Aristotle emphasized the connection between analogy and perception. “To use metaphor well,” he wrote, “is to discern similarities.” A good analogy implies an imaginative and attentive grasp of the world — an ability, as Wittgenstein puts it, to “see connections.”
One of Wittgenstein’s own more illuminating analogies sees language as an old city — “a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.” The analogy is remarkable because it gives us a physical representation of language. It puts the irregular verbs, baroque rules for tense formation, and irrational particles of the old city side by side with the subdivisions of scientific notation and M.B.A.-speak. What we see, Wittgenstein hopes, is no longer a means of expression riddled with ancient inefficiencies that could be refined or formalized, but a complicated medium where various eras, cultures, and visions of human life interact with one another to give a language its expressive life.
The affinity between language and a city is importantly not an accident. Both are built out of human expression and ingenuity. Both progress by way of the aging and sedimentation of these initial sparks of invention. Like a new coinage, a new building excites, inspires, offends, and then, if it is built to last, fades into the skyline, becomes cliché. Both language and the city are contrivance become convention. Of course, we can always take a step back and recognize their artifice and contingency. With effort we can once again see them as they were seen at birth. We can estrange ourselves, and tend to when we’re traveling or learning another language. We can ask, for example, why we say “cut to the chase,” or why they chose those colors for the stoplight, or why “deep thinking” is thought of as deep.
Analogies like Wittgenstein’s accomplish a similar kind of estrangement. They lift the reader into a higher register, militate against the biases that naturally arise from sealed, prolonged existence inside particular languages, communities, ideological formations — ways of thinking. These analogies are discoveries, rather than inventions. They light up a single pathway across an expansive terrain — instead of leaping haphazardly from one thing to another. They resemble the way a translator finds an apt way to render a foreign expression in his native tongue, or how a physicist, scales falling from her eyes, suddenly sees an old problem in a new way.
I t would be manifestly unfair to hold Simmons-and-Dowd-like analogies to such a standard. They don’t pretend to seek this level of illumination. In fact, they don’t seek illumination at all — just entertainment. They follow on a long tradition of analogy in comedy that has made its way into public discourse.
The fake news in particular makes heavy (sometimes tiresome) use of this kind of analogy. Jon Stewart, for example, compared the NSA phone-surveillance program being ruled in violation of the Patriot Act to someone getting thrown out of an Olive Garden for eating too many breadsticks. At its best, this kind of analogy denigrates self-important individuals or institutions by partnering them with the mundane. George Carlin once compared organized religion to an orthotic insole. At its worst, though, this kind of analogy simply serves as distraction for an audience conditioned to check their phones at the first sign of boredom. Here, the point is not to bring the self-important down to earth but to keep the audience from looking at Facebook.
This is especially evident on the HBO show of the Stewart acolyte John Oliver. There the analogies are a formal element of the show’s structure. Even when they’re good, they have a paint-by-numbers quality. His show quite openly takes the form: Please listen to a modicum of political analysis, and I will show you a video of a bucket of sloths. Oliver’s show, at times, seems little more than a streamlined summary of a week’s worth of web-surfing in the writer’s room.
This is, not incidentally, the logic according to which college classes are increasingly taught. To maintain a semblance of student engagement, professors must offer digressions on pop culture, or audiovisual sugar to help the medicine go down. But these digressions rarely serve to bring the material to life or help students look at it differently. They leave the material behind, providing relief from what now appears even more like drudgery than it did before. The material is not meant to “go down,” as its saccharine accompaniment suggests, but to be questioned, criticized, struggled over. Both on Oliver’s show and in college classrooms, pandering diversion reinforces a model of consumption that applies just as much to the substance as to the fluff that makes it bearable. Ideas — if they’re ingested at all — are swallowed whole.
In the end, the analogies of Simmons and Dowd fulfill no role except, like the Stewart-Oliver analogies at their worst, to keep an audience entertained and their authors self-satisfied. They’re all invention and no discovery, an embedded distraction that anticipates the readers’ own impulse to change the channel or succumb to sidebar clickbait or check Instagram to instantly fill a momentary but intolerable void in their experience. The Simmons-Dowd analogies fill the void for us without our even having to leave the article.
They draw attention, in this sense, to wholesale changes in the structure of reading itself, which has become more like watching TV. Where before we scanned a newspaper or table of contents for something to read, now we scroll down a constantly updating feed, freed from the constraints of time and paper, and privileging the new quite literally above all else. We are more likely to swipe up and wait for our app to refresh than to keep swiping down to read about a yesterday that’s happening much longer ago than it used to.
Once we’ve chosen an article, moreover, we can rest assured that a number of escape routes will be available should it try our ravaged attention spans. At the very least there will be links, preferably to videos. More than likely we will be able to maneuver left and right as well, and, at the impetuous jerk of a thumb, leave midparagraph and consign the article to the heap of the half-read.
And of course, the whole reading enterprise teeters on the brink, since the home button and its embarrassment of distractions presides silently over the entire process. This is a reading environment no longer conducive to fortuitous discoveries, close reading, or reflective pauses. How often do you see someone look up from an iPhone and stare contemplatively into the middle distance?
What exactly has changed here is hard to say. The endurance of our attention has certainly suffered, but so has its character. We are in danger of losing not just our ability to concentrate, but a way of seeing. The items of experience no longer occupy regions of a coherent whole, comprising a terrain that, as Wittgenstein says, we can “crisscross in all directions.” Instead they pass before us like the shadows in Plato’s cave — images disconnected from each other and the world at large.
The Simmons and Dowd analogies are evidence of the impact of our experience of the internet and other media on our language. These analogies are like the links that often accompany them. They remove us from the established context and load new content for our perusal, underwriting in the process an image of a world that is nothing more than an agglomeration of isolated, arbitrarily connected items. We hop from one to another, using them up and then moving on.
Alexander Stern is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
