The metaphor wars

If you want to understand why apparently nice people can be so intolerant over religion -- including people who seem constantly to be talking about the importance of tolerance (but who can't say the word "fundamentalist" without sneering) -- then you have to understand the role dominant metaphors play in religion. There are seven critical points you must grasp.

(1) Whenever someone thinks about religion, he thinks of religion in terms drawn from a particular dominant metaphor. That metaphor makes it possible for him to think about religion meaningfully, but it also puts limits on his religious thought. It is also from that metaphor that he draws -- without even thinking about it -- his assumptions about what a person ought to feel about various situations in which religion is involved; when it comes to religion, all his motivations and emotions are drawn from the metaphor, not from religious beliefs standing on their own.

(2) Very, very few people have consciously chosen which metaphor they are going to use -- in fact, very few people are aware that they are using any metaphor at all. It's rarely the case that people have looked at the different metaphors available, weighed the choices, and chosen the one they think is most appropriate. The vast majority of the time people are conditioned by their upbringing (by all the complex human relationships and formative experiences that we subsume under the word "culture") to use a particular dominant metaphor to make sense of religion. Furthermore, when they do become aware that there is a difference, somewhat more often than not they automatically assume that their own culture's metaphor is the "right" one.

(3) Therefore most people assume, without thinking about it, that everybody else who talks about religion is working from the same metaphor they are, and they draw conclusions about other people's motivations and emotions by trying to figure out what motivations or emotions would cause those actions or opinions to be generated from their own metaphorical framework.

(4) Two people who are using exactly the same words, but working from different fundamental metaphors, can mean radically different things -- but if they don't realize they are working from different metaphors, they usually think they understand what the other person is saying, and pass judgment accordingly on the other person's opinions and/or character.

(5) Historically there seem to be four dominant metaphor-families that people have used to think about religion:

(a) Religion as superstition/opiate/poison.

(b) Religion as family/culture/clan membership/sense of belonging.

(c) Religion as therapy/tool/hobby/emotional pragmatism.

(d) Religion as fact/truth/science/medicine.

I need names for these other than just the letters; so purely for the sake of having names I'll refer to them as "Superstition," "Family," "Therapy," and "Fact."

(6) The predominant metaphor in modern Kazakh society (a particular interest of mine) is what I'm calling "Family." The predominant metaphor in modern American society is "Therapy." However, there is a very significant subculture of American society (which used to be the dominant culture and is extremely displeased at having now been relegated to minority status) for which the dominant metaphor of religion is "Fact." And then much of the American Jewish subculture, and especially the more Orthodox variants of Judaism, come from a passionate attachment to metaphor "Family." Finally, there is a small but vocal element that sees religion as "Superstition."

(7) Most of the bitterness, hatred and intolerance in American society comes not from a disagreement on specific religious doctrines such as whether or not there is a hell that all infidels (from whichever perspective) will wind up in, but from a fundamental disagreement on whether religion ought to be thought of in terms of "Therapy" or in terms of "Fact." And since this is not recognized as the fundamental issue -- in fact it's hardly recognized as an issue at all -- all of the talking and arguing and mutual recrimination do absolutely nothing to move us toward any sort of reconciliation, since practically all of the sound and fury manages to miss the point entirely.

I'll talk more about this topic in future posts, starting with this one.

UPDATE (27 September 2005): When I first wrote this out, I used the term "Truth orientation" rather than "Fact orientation." I have been uncomfortable for a long time with the term "Truth orientation," because the word truth is one of the words that means either of two radically different things, depending upon whether the person using it comes from a Therapy perspective or a Fact perspective. Driving to the coffee shop this morning it suddenly occurred to me that "Fact" would be a more accurate, and much less ambiguous, designation than is "Truth." Mr. Data, make it so! (That's not a Star Trek reference; it's a TMQ reference.)