Peeing in a Pool Because It’s Kidney Shaped

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“All perception of truth is the perception of analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.”—Henry David Thoreau

“All of us get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them.”—George Eliot

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—8/30/10—Humankind’s first analogies are forever lost, but there’s a fair chance the tropes began when some cave dweller sketched a woolly mammoth in charcoal and then discovered one browsing in a Provencal meadow. “Surely,” he thought, “there’s a connection.” Judging by the cave art in Southern Europe, by the time of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, such analogies and sympathetic magic must have been commonplace.

Some anthropologists think that male circumcisions began when someone noticed that vines were more productive the year after they were cut back. “If pruning worked for the vine,” thought the Cro-Magnon vintner, “why not my son’s penis?” To this day, there are farmers who jump up and down or have intercourse in the fields to “insure” the harvest. Seductively persuasive as these practices are, once they get started, they are difficult to stop even if they work only 5 percent of the time. If the ritual fails, the witch doctor can always find an explanation in the “fine print.”

In most Western circles until about 1600 AD, clever but non-rational analogies continued to be more persuasive than empirical science. For close to two thousand years, the brightest minds figured: if there are four seasons and elements, the body must have four humors or fluids. And if Aristotle thought of it first, it usually had the Church’s backing, which guaranteed its longevity. Anonymous churchmen mused, “If there are seven planets, there have to be seven sins and seven virtues.” The prospect of locating them was intoxicating, and the resulting correspondence was perfect, of course, as Aristotle predicted.

The misuse of analogies may be illustrated by Hitler’s choice of the word “vermin” to argue for the persecution of the Jewish people. With the sanction of the country’s elected leaders, Jews were publicly exposed in the Nazis’ “antiseptic searchlight” as “rodents” deserving of nothing more than “disinfection.” Many Germans without a record of violence then concluded that there was no reason to share the “harvest” with a subhuman species posing a threat to the commonweal and, with few exceptions, they didn’t.

Almost a century later, some of us know better. We know that, on one level, the metaphor is always wrong—war is not hell, Jews are not vermin, nor is love heaven. Our enemies have no horns, Jews are human beings with inalienable rights, and love is right here—always has been.

Which is not to say that analogies are useless. When a home-heating engineer explained to my wife and me why our heat pump had quit five years after its installation, he said, “Your system has worn itself out like someone sucking on a crimped straw. Next time you drink a milk shake,” he advised, “pinch the straw, suck hard, and you’ll soon feel the muscles in your cheeks ache.” Both of us understood immediately that our air-intake duct needed to be enlarged. Likewise, when my urologist finished his latest digital examination, he said with a sigh, “This is like estimating the height of the Empire State Building while standing in the basement.” I knew immediately that further, more invasive tests were at hand.

Both the engineer’s and the urologist’s analogies were of the descriptive variety. Their first obligation was not to persuade but to explain, and that is when analogies are most successful. In medical school, William Harvey was taught in the 17th century that blood “ebbs and floods” in the body like tides on a beach. It was an appealing analogy, and for centuries no one questioned it.

Then, Harvey saw a London fire wagon with two men operating a hand pump, and “Eureka!” he remembered dark venous blood being drawn steadily into the lungs of mammals in his laboratory like water entering the hand pump. He also knew from his experimental work that arterial blood is bright red and under greater pressure. Veins and arteries, he now understood, are “one-way streets,” and the heart is a pump midway through the circuit to keep the “traffic” flowing. Amazingly, he knew nothing of body’s “back roads,” called capillaries, because the microscopes of his day were not powerful enough to see them. He deduced their existence when all other explanations failed.

In a similar fashion, blind Louis Braille playing dominoes reasoned that people like himself could be taught to read by feeling raised dots pressed into heavy paper like the dots on his toy tiles. Such a description of books for the blind is all well and good, but when analogies form part of an argument, they often mislead and fail.

Robert McNamara and other hawkish proponents of American involvement in Vietnam argued via the infamous Domino Theory: if South Vietnam falls to the Communists, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and others will surely fall in rapid succession. But countries are not tall, unsteady playing tiles. States such as Tibet have fallen with little effect on their neighbors. But, thanks in part to the misapplication of the domino analogy, perhaps as many as three million people died in Southeast Asia.

Finally, here are two more analogies to test yourself. Is the following proverb descriptive or argumentative: “The whipped dog never betrays its master”?

Because it was used for centuries to justify the physical punishment of English-speaking children, it forms a tight but flawed argument.

Second, a recent description of the H.L. Hunley, a Confederate submarine, noted that its hull was heavily encrusted with sand, sediment, and shell. “Removing the crust,” said Senior Conservator Paul Mardikian, “will be like removing concrete covering an egg without breaking the shell.”

Is that sentence descriptive or argumentative?

This explicit and extended comparison attempts to illustrate how delicate and difficult the conservation of the Hunley will be. Descriptions may be used in arguments, of course, but Mardikian’s succeeds because it is primarily descriptive.

So, if you want fawning children, remember, “The kick of the dam hurts not her colt.” As the Chinese say, “Beat your child once a day. If you don’t know why, the child knows.”

If you’re still confused, just skip the analogies and follow Elbert Hubbard’s advice: “Spare the rod and save the child.”