If We Don't Mention It, Maybe It Will Go Away

 

Joe Biden seeking Americans left in Afghanistan.

Friend Xerxes blames the debacle in Afghanistan on our tendency to use war metaphors: “Whenever America, collectively, decides to act against a perceived threat, they call it a war. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. Even a Peace Corps.” Had the Americans not seen the Taliban as enemies in 2001, all this could have been avoided.

Perhaps he is right on that specific point, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. I thought at the time the situation did call for an American incursion, if only to restore American prestige after 9/11. But I would have gone in like the British went into Beijing in the Boxer Rebellion, or into Washington in the War of 1812. Go in there, unseat the government, apprehend and execute a few miscreants, burn down a few symbolic buildings, then withdraw from the rubble. A show of force. The Americans were too ambitious.

Would that have been a war? More like a police action.

I also agree that the War on Poverty was a debacle, and so was the War on Drugs. These are cases in which the metaphor was misapplied. It was punching at shadows.  There was no Other there. It was like Conrad’s image of French warships firing randomly at the African coast.

A War on Terror similarly makes no sense. But a War on Terrorists does.

The fact that a metaphor can be misapplied does not discredit the metaphor itself; the fact that a car can be driven into a tree does not demonstrate that cars have no value.

Xerxes here is making a point made popular by Lakoff and Johnson in their influential book Metaphors We Live By back in the 1980s. The same idea was popularized at about the same time as “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” (NLP). The idea is that, by changing the way we express ourselves, we can change our behaviours and change the world. 

NLP has been comprehensively debunked; it does not work. It is, after all, a kind of primitive, magical thinking: if we choose to call a red tricycle a pink convertible, we can all afford a pink convertible.

The fact that our euphemisms inevitably come to carry the same undesirable connotations as the original seems to prove the case as well. “Washroom” replaces “toilet” which replaces “privy”: all euphemisms, yet the meaning remains. People still know you are not in there powdering your nose or buying a dog. Trust me. “Person of colour” replaces “black” which replaces “negro,” which replaces “coloured person.” All originally polite; no doubt “darkie” was also properly respectful in its day. “First Nations” replaces “indigenous,” which replaces “aboriginal,” which replaces “native,” which replaces “Indian,” which replaces “redskin”: all originally attempts to be properly respectful. “Exceptional” replaces “challenged” replaces “slow learner” replaces “retarded” replaces “idiot”—all originally euphemisms for stupid. History shows nothing is ever gained by this game of linguistic tag. Wanting to change the term is actually an implied criticism of the person, not the word for it. Wanting to change the term reveals prejudice.

The notion that changing the words can change thinking is also, more ominously, the thesis of Ingsoc in Orwell’s 1984, and the reason they create Newspeak. Were this sort of thing possible, if it is possible, any unscrupulous government or anyone else iin power could practice mind control for their own benefit. We ought to be alarmed at, and energetically resist, any attempt to legislate or restrict vocabulary, even more than we resist efforts to restrict free speech: laws against “hate speech,” mandated pronouns, and the like. It ends as might makes right.

For there is a further philosophical problem faced by Lakoff, Johnson, Xerxes, and their colleagues. If our thinking is radically conditioned by the metaphors we use, how can they suppose their own thinking is not so conditioned? How can they presume that they see things clearly, and so can tell others what to think? There can be no justification, other than the exercise of arbitrary power.

Now as for the specific metaphor of war: it is actually quite useful. While war as such is an undesirable thing, we do need words for undesirable things. It is a sad truth of the fallen universe that it takes two sides to preserve a peace, but only one to start a war. So long as anyone entertains the option of going to war, we all must. Crime is also a bad thing. But if each of us simply decided it did not exist, and disbanded the police forces, would people stop stealing, defrauding, and committing murders? Death is a bad thing. Yet if we dismissed the possibility of death, and closed the morgues and the hospitals, would we have more death, or less?

Denying the usefulness of the concept of war would similarly lead to more war, not less.

The more so in the case of radical Islam, because the radical Islamists do believe they are at war: jihad. So the choice is not up to us; to suppose so is, in a way, the greatest arrogance. It denies human agency to the other. Since they think they are at war, the only way to prevent war is to mount a strong defense.

The same is true, incidentally, in dealing with Marxism. Marxism sees society as an ongoing war between classes, a class struggle. Opting out is not an option; only resistance or submission.

Christianity is perhaps less inclined to use the war metaphor than are many other philosophies and world views. Perhaps that is a strength; perhaps that is a weakness. The Salvation Army has done a great deal of good by applying the metaphor. The Bible does as well, and often; although it specifies that this is not against human opponents:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

War as war is bad; yet there are worse things than war. Injustice, and passivity in the face of injustice, is worse. For evil to triumph, as Edmund Burke observed, “all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing.” Pacifism is most often a cover for cowardice and selfishness. It would have been immoral not to have gone to war against Hitler, and left the Jews, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to their fate. It would have been immoral not to fight to end slavery in America. It was immoral not to call the police when Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in a stairwell. 

“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” – Ephesians 6:13.