Episode #178 ... Susan Sontag - How Much Is Your View Of Everything Affected By Metaphors?
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you for contributing to the back catalog of the show on the website at philosophizethis.org. Thank you for keeping the podcast going by subbing on Patreon. Patreon shoutouts this week, by the way. We got Tim Kujagaliev, shoutout to Kazakhstan, Astana.

We got Richard Puccio, Jackson Price, Stephen Kirsch, and Sal Acosta. Thank you to everybody out there that makes this podcast possible by supporting. I could never do this without your help. I wake up every day grateful. Today's episode is part three on Susan Sontag. I hope you love the show today.

So again, here we are, just like last time, looking at the mythology that surrounds something that's so normal to us in our everyday lives that we may not even notice it. Last time it was about pictures and videos. This time, Susan Sontag is going to critique the popular use of the metaphor in culture. How the way we use metaphors can sometimes go on to hurt people in ways that we never intended. And somebody out there at the start of the podcast today might be thinking, well, I'm safe on this one.

Look, you got me last time with the pictures and videos, but I'm pretty sure the last time I used a metaphor was in the ninth grade in a poetry assignment. I mean, who really goes around their everyday life describing things using metaphors? What are you, Walt Whitman?

But in reality, Dasanthak, when we're talking about metaphors, we're also talking about similes, we're also talking about analogies. Let's not get caught up on the semantics here. We're talking about any time you're trying to explain something in a way that compares one thing to another, and then the entire cultural mythology that surrounds a particular thing because of those comparisons.

In fact, maybe the best place to start this discussion today is how we started last time, by trying to look at the metaphor like you're an alien that comes from a different planet where they don't use metaphors to explain stuff to each other. What is a metaphor, and what function does it serve in culture? An alien might say, well, a metaphor is a linguistic tool that these human beings use when they want to compare one thing to something else that it's similar to, but not exactly like.

And these humans most commonly use the metaphor to help simplify explanations of things that are complex. Usually, one side of a metaphor is something people do understand, and the other side of it is something that's more difficult to understand. People will say things like, the stock market is a roller coaster. Finding love is a journey.

Life is like a box of chocolates. These are all examples of one strong place people like to use the metaphor, which is when you want to compare something that people do understand with something they want to improve their understanding of. A metaphor then, just like last episode with pictures and videos, an alien from another planet might say that a metaphor is something that fundamentally simplifies complexity and nuance. And some people are geniuses at coming up with metaphors.

Some people make their entire career out of it. And it probably should be said at this point that Susan Sontag views the metaphor from the same place of ambiguity that she does pictures and videos. She fully acknowledges that the metaphor is capable of good and evil, given the context. And I don't think I've got to tell anybody how much ground you can cover quickly with explaining things using metaphors. You are, after all, listening to this show right now. But

But that said, something we also have to consider about metaphors, she thinks, is that whenever somebody gets an understanding of something complex from a comparison to something else, their view of the complex thing is at least in some capacity shaped by that comparison. We gotta ask, what are the potential impacts of that process?

We're going to talk about several real-world examples of this over the course of the episode. And I guess by the end of it, we'll understand why Sontag thinks we have such a strong desire to turn certain things into metaphors, and how just like with your relationship to pictures and videos, your understanding of the world is at the mercy of the comparisons and metaphors you get from other people and how critically you choose to think about them.

So I guess the first thing that has to be said to get started on that is that to Susan Sontag, there is no reason why we absolutely have to be describing things by comparing them to something else. Again, don't get it wrong, metaphor is a pretty awesome way of describing something, but for the sake of being comprehensive here, we have to just state for the record that there are ways to describe things without using metaphors. When a physicist, for example, describes things to colleagues at a seminar,

it is possible for that physicist to talk about their work in a way that uses technical scientific terms that everybody there is familiar with. They don't need to get up in front of the podium and tell the other physicists, well, the carbon atom is kind of like spaghetti, and then the hydrogen is like marinara sauce all over the spaghetti. They don't need to talk like that because everybody's on the same page at a scientific conference. But when they talk to a non-physicist to

To explain something like molecular structure without using a metaphorical example of picturing balls and springs, or to explain atomic structure without using the metaphor of a solar system, there's a sense in which, why would you do that?

I mean, even though an atom is nothing like a solar system in actuality, why not use this powerful linguistic tool of the metaphor to your advantage? It's very useful. So the point is that there's ways to describe everything in the world with or without using metaphors. And Susan Sontag's going to say that as people that are just trying to have everyday conversations about things, one thing we do is we tend to use metaphors a lot.

We tend to lean in the direction of comparisons because of how easy and effective they are at bridging understanding. And then these metaphors end up shaping the assumptions we make about the things around us. For example, people will say stuff sometimes like "the mind is a machine." That's a metaphor, and they'll use this metaphor with totally good intentions, just trying to bring a little structure to how they think about something like the mind that's enormously complex.

But then what this can inadvertently lead to is people really thinking of their mind as being similar to a machine in other ways. They may think, "A machine is usually designed to perform a specific function. My mind must have been as well. Machines are made up of predetermined processes and fixed capabilities. My mind must be based on similar limitations." More than that, if the mind is a machine, then is there something going wrong with your mind?

Well, what do you do when something goes wrong with a machine? You take it to a technician that'll fix it for you, like a psychologist. And then if the expert can't fix it, well, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the machine. The machine must be broken. You

You can extend this metaphor as far as you want, but in actuality, there is nothing about your mind or the complexity of your experience moment to moment that is anything like a machine. It's just a set of assumptions you might make if that metaphor was the one you were using when thinking about the complexity of your mind. Now we do this with almost everything. Picture this applied to complicated mysteries in the sciences. Picture this applied to complex political realities. Picture this applied to the metaphorization of AI.

Got some episodes coming up on that soon. Let me know if that sounds cool to you. But the point of Susan Sontag's 1978 book called Illness as Metaphor was to get us to picture this use of the metaphor applied to the way we see illness and disease, and then how we end up treating people differently who get sick as a result of it. She starts the book by making a case for what's at stake when we uncritically use metaphors by examining all the different ways over the years that people have talked about the disease of tuberculosis.

Now, no doubt, hearing the word tuberculosis, you have a certain understanding of what that disease is, and that understanding is based on your relationship to the mythology that surrounds it in our time. You may think it's a disease that just older women get. You may think that most of why you get it is because of an iron deficiency. These are some common oversimplifications in today's world that may affect your understanding of it.

But something Sontag would say is really important for us to recognize is that in other points in history, people had a totally different view of tuberculosis. And it was simply because their understanding of the disease was centered around a different set of cultural metaphors. For example, back in the 19th century, people at one point thought of tuberculosis as more of a spiritual disease than a medical disease. People thought it was a mystical disease, like it was outside the purview of what science could ever figure out.

And this was further evidenced to them by the type of person that always seemed to be getting tuberculosis. See, in the 19th century, tuberculosis was considered a disease that you got if you were a creative person or a sensitive person. Delicate people got tuberculosis. Artists were thought to be particularly vulnerable to the disease.

This all really happened, by the way. Some people legitimately thought back then that the reason when someone contracts tuberculosis that they have to be bedridden for so long is because the mystical part of the disease ensures that these creative artistic types have a long time for reflection and creativity when they're getting over the disease. If you're a painter that gets tuberculosis, well, that means you should be using this recovery time to paint and get some inspiration. That was not an uncommon thing for people to assume back then.

Now, this is not scientific fact, obviously. This is cultural mythology. And this mythological explanation would further go on to affect the way that people and doctors viewed treatment options. When you got tuberculosis back then, the path to better health for you was more spiritual than medical. People thought they had to go out into nature to fix it, that they had to reconnect with something about themselves.

Doctors trying to treat them sent people to sanatoriums, sometimes in these beautiful locations surrounded by other creative artist types to try to talk their way out of the illness, almost like rehab in today's world with about the same success rate. In other words, doctors are people too, and the everyday popular discourse between people starts to have an impact on medical discourses.

And these metaphors were reinforced in the art and literature of the time period. So many examples in books, paintings, poetry, from Charles Dickens to John Keats, portraying tuberculosis as a disease that you got if you had a certain kind of personality. And when people talked about the symptoms of the disease, it was described with very specific metaphors as well. It was said that tuberculosis consumed the patient from the inside.

That these sensitive, delicate people with their weak constitutions were being eaten alive from the inside by the disease. All of this on top of other metaphors about being sick, that disease is inherently an evil thing, that it's an unnatural thing, that it's wrong somehow to be sick.

But Sontag might want to interject here and slow down the momentum of all this and just point out a couple things before we get too far down this rabbit hole of the mythology of the time. She'd probably want to plant a flag on the ground here and say that there's a way to think about disease and illness that isn't at the mercy of 19th century metaphors. First of all, she might say, the idea that getting sick is evil or that it's unnatural.

Listen, living in a world that's filled with uncertainty and risk and bodies that deteriorate over time, that's about as natural a part of the human condition as you can possibly find. People get sick. That's a part of this whole process we got going on. And seeing it as unnatural is just either willfully misunderstanding your place in nature or willfully being ignorant to the complex thing that you are, your body included in that, obviously.

But how about this other way of seeing disease, she would say? That there's this thing inside of you, this creature called tuberculosis, that's eating you alive from the inside.

Well, that's yet another very human tendency to personify or to create a metaphor to explain the disease that really has no basis in reality. There's no reason you have to be thinking of disease like it's this autonomous thing that's eating people. You can just as easily see disease in other ways. You can describe disease as a natural reaction in response to certain environmental factors, or to describe it purely in terms of its symptoms or the things we know about it, not speculating about all the things we don't know.

In other words, there's a way to talk about tuberculosis at a medical level or at a more scientific or ideological level. And Sondheim says there's no reason we had to view tuberculosis as this mystical intervention from the outside that's unnaturally consuming the body of these frail and delicate artistic types.

But we did in the 19th century. And when we did, it affected the way the person with tuberculosis saw themselves. It affected the way they were viewed by other people. It affected the medical and cultural discourse surrounding the disease, which then went on to impact what treatment was recommended. For example, lots of people diagnosed with the disease didn't seek further help because they thought it was their fault that they were the type of person who gets tuberculosis.

Lots of doctors and scientists didn't push too hard about doing studies for other treatment options because they more or less just accepted the cultural mythology that the cure was a psychological cure. And people suffered and died as a result of this, similar to Sondhag's view of pictures and videos from last episode.

To Susan Sontag then, something very important that we have to notice, that we often don't consider about the process of getting sick, is that these social constructions about an illness or a disease become an inescapable part of having that disease.

Now this can all seem like a very distant world that's completely different from our own today. Like of course people back in the 1800s thought about stuff this way.

They were stupider than us back then. They used to play marbles. They used to wear those little propeller hats and say, "Ooh, this is fun!" They didn't have the kind of science that we do now. After all, look at what happened in the future. In the 1850s, when microscopes become more widely available to look at the cells affected by tuberculosis, the mythology that surrounds the disease starts to change a bit. Yep, starts to change even more in 1944 when antibiotics are prescribed to people. Somebody could say that maybe these metaphors that we were using

were kind of like religious explanations. That we needed them at one point. You know, we needed to believe that thunder was just the gods throwing rocks at each other up in the clouds. But now that people have access to information on something like the internet, now that we have science, we don't need to sit around and create mythology anymore. We've more or less grown out of that method of explaining things, right?

Sontag would say that advances in the sciences have definitely changed the mythology that surrounds tuberculosis. But this tendency to use metaphors to describe things that we don't really understand still goes on all the time. We've just switched the sickness that we do it with. How about cancer, she would ask. In 1975, Susan Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And again, in 1978, she writes one of the books we're referencing today called Illness as Metaphor. So she has a pretty unique level of insight about what it was like to be one of these patients that was affected by the way people talk about cancer.

She talks about how the way patients were thought about in the 1970s is just a different version of what we used to do with patients of tuberculosis. She says in the 70s, it was not uncommon for people to think of cancer as something that's explained by your personality as well. People would commonly say things like, oh, oh, well, of course you're the kind of person who gets sick all the time and gets cancer. I mean, you're such a worrier. You bottle up all these emotions. You're stressed out all the time. You're the kind of person that's more vulnerable to getting cancer.

People would hear about somebody getting cancer and they'd say, "Well, you know why that is, right?" That's because at some deep level, I think, that person has lost their will to live. This is their body turning on them and manifesting something that they're feeling deep down inside. Now, is there the slightest bit of accuracy when it comes to this metaphor being an explanation for why people get cancer across the board?

Well, no, not across the board. But this is what makes metaphors attractive. There are factors that probably put people at a higher risk of getting cancer, and stress may be one of those factors in select cases. There may be a glimmer of truth, just like when you see a picture claiming to represent the truth about reality. And if you were sufficiently motivated, you could turn that glimmer of truth, or the single picture, into your entire view of reality.

And then if you were a doctor, and you had these metaphors dictating how you see things, you could use them to justify treatment options that were mutually exclusive from each other, just because the metaphors themselves were so shaky. For example, if you believe, as some did at the time, that the cause of cancer was mostly psychological, and it's how you deal with your emotions,

Then on one hand, some people in the 70s are told by doctors that they need to learn to regulate these bad emotions internally. You know, the reason you got the cancer, they're told, is because you're just not skilled enough at keeping your emotions in like a healthy person does. Learn to keep them inside. Visualize yourself walking on a cloud and let them drift away.

But then on the other hand, people are also told in the 70s that primal screaming therapy is the way to stave off cancer. I don't know if you've seen it, but doctors used to tell people to just scream at the top of their lungs to let out pent-up energy. The thinking being that civilizations got everyone all cooped up, and now you need to let this energy out or else your body's going to turn on you and you're going to get cancer.

I mean, can you imagine just coming home from school in the 70s and seeing your dad screaming at the wall in your living room? Vain popping out of his forehead. Oh, hi, son. Daddy's screaming at the wall right now because he doesn't want to get the cancer. This is what doctors told people to do. And there are other examples of this. People in the 70s are told that they're getting cancer because they're eating too much, that your body's overfed. It doesn't know what to do with all this energy that you're putting into it. It's growing cancerous tumors.

Others are told it's because they're not eating enough. It's malnutrition. It's a micronutrient deficiency. Point is, just like with pictures and videos that provide a false sense of familiarity and enough obscurity to allow you to see almost opposite takes of the exact same situation, metaphors allow us to do the same. And Susan Sontag is going to say that they certainly didn't end with these metaphors that she experienced in the 1970s.

Because it's not just the doctors using metaphors that are having an impact on the experience of someone getting cancer. Think of how cancer patients are viewed by society more generally today. Think of the metaphors and think of how they're affected by these metaphors.

First off, Sontag says, someone gets sick in our modern world, and they are instantly cordoned off into this group where they're the other now. Now they're part of the kingdom of the sick, as she calls it. We're all over here. We're all part of the kingdom of the well. And now you over there, you're part of the sick group. And Sontag says, just like people often do with people who come from different kingdoms culturally in other parts of the world, they're part of the sick group.

where people think of them as the other. People don't often put in a lot of effort to try to understand their experiences. In fact, their very existence scares people sometimes that they'd ever have to consider something more complicated about what the human condition is. People treat the experiences of the sick in a similar sort of way. Sick people are in a weird spot in today's world, Sontag would say.

how it feels to get diagnosed with cancer. What does that feel like? Like a common metaphor that people use to think about people with cancer is that everybody with cancer is fighting a battle against cancer.

Let's talk about how it feels to have everybody looking at your life like you're constantly battling something evil all the time. See, on one hand, Sontag says, a person diagnosed with cancer has all the privacy in the world. People hear about it through the grapevine. Oh, oh, we're not supposed to talk about that. Don't bring it up at lunch today, Roger. Don't do it.

Nobody asks about it unless the information is offered up. And it's because we have a taboo and a mythology in our society that says that's what we should do. We're trying to be considerate. We think, hey, I'm just going to leave them to deal with their disease. I'm going to let them know that I'm available if they need me. But this is something I'm going to give them some space on. That just seems like the right thing to do to just leave them alone with it for a while.

But then on the other hand, Sontag says, a cancer patient has almost zero privacy. Remember, cancer is seen by people as a battle, which means metaphorically, you are fighting against this evil that has invaded your body from the outside. So your body, Sontag says, becomes the battlefield for this impending fight. First thing that happens is you are objectified. You were turned from a person into a patient.

Then they start talking about you in the third person. The tumor has spread into the southern hemisphere of the lung. The biopsy revealed elevated levels of... Wait, wait, wait. That's not the biopsy or the lung you're talking about. That's me. And the idea of having any semblance of privacy. Doctors are constantly running tests to medically quantify what's going on with your body. Then that information is passed around casually to every doctor within earshot that might want to weigh in on the matter.

Then everyone in your family wants to know what the latest results are. The idea of telling them no, the idea that you'd want privacy about that stuff now that you're a member of this kingdom of the sick. Well, that's just outrageous. Privacy isn't a luxury you can really afford anymore, my friend. What you need to do is just sit back and allow the doctors to use your body to wage war against this cancerous alien that's trying to take over with their radiation weapons. Also, if cancer is seen by society as a battle that someone's going through,

then in a good fight, what we respect as a culture is someone who faces this battle and acts like a warrior. In other words, someone who bravely, with stoicism, faces their disease and then stands up and fights really, really hard to beat the disease. Oh, I got so much respect for you fighting and beating that disease. Nice work. But of course, cancer isn't a battle and you're not a warrior fighting against it. That's just a metaphor that we tack onto something mysterious to help us explain it.

But think about how that metaphor might affect someone with cancer. What if somebody can't beat the disease? And what if it has nothing to do with how much willpower they're putting into it? What if it's genetics? What if they don't have access to the best medical care? What if it's just bad luck? Think of the added burden of guilt you potentially put on someone who has cancer where they might think,

Is this happening to me because I'm not strong enough? Am I dying because I'm not a good enough warrior in this battle that I'm fighting? Not only that, but knowing that this isn't actually a battle. Is fighting a battle the only proper response to have when it comes to facing something about your own mortality? Is a stoic resolve the only way to face your mortality? Or are there many other potentially valuable experiences to have when navigating this piece of the human condition?

The metaphor of the battle shapes our understanding of a cancer patient. Just as metaphors about tuberculosis affected the way we saw patients then, this happened with AIDS in the 1980s, this happened with COVID in 2020. Think of all the mythology that surrounded COVID near the beginning when we knew almost nothing about it. All the speculation, the types of people that are more prone to get COVID.

the types of people that are more prone to die from it, the completely baseless takes on how you got COVID, or even worse, all the different ways you can keep COVID away or cure COVID. Again, mutually exclusive things were justified depending on the metaphors you were being given by your news sources if you were uncritically accepting those metaphors.

Each and every person listening to this knows what it feels like to see the cultural mythology that surrounds an illness change in real time. And everybody knows what it feels like to view the people that have an illness differently based on the status of that cultural discourse. Point is, this is not something that just went on in the 19th century or the 1970s. We keep doing this. We keep creating metaphors that help us feel like we understand something that we don't when people's lives are hanging in the balance.

And Sontag would say one reason people keep doing this, with illness in particular, is because at some level people are terrified that the illness, whatever it is, is going to happen to them. She says at one point, it probably all stems from a good place. It probably all comes from us wanting to maintain social order at some level. But make no mistake, a lot of what we're doing here is out of fear.

There's a scary new illness that comes about, nobody knows exactly what causes it or how to get rid of it, and then good people, trying to figure things out, look at the limited data that's available to them and create a cultural mythology around the illness that makes them feel less vulnerable.

That it's only a certain type of person that gets this. Only the creative types get this for tuberculosis. Or the people who are stressed out all the time for cancer. Or the moral degenerates, it was said about AIDS. This is the same tendency by people manifested in different time periods. And there's this thing we do as people more generally, I think, where we want to believe that if something bad happens to someone, that there must have been a reason why that bad thing happened to them. That they must have done something wrong that caused this bad thing to happen.

And sometimes there's a connection. Someone gets lung cancer after smoking four packs a day for 30 years, and there's a part of people that wants to look at them and be like, see, see, they did the bad thing, and now the bad thing happened to them. Sometimes we want to believe that there was always a connection between the things that happened to people and something they did to deserve it. But the sad reality is that sometimes if something bad happens to you, there was just nothing you could do about it. There was nothing you did wrong. There's no amount of worrying that would have saved you from it.

The sense of cosmic justice that's bottle-fed to us in Western culture from the time we're born is just not real sometimes. But as people who are always striving to see patterns in behavior and see which people succeed or fail, we create this mythology to explain the things that we're the most terrified of.

Sontag says these metaphors, if you analyze them enough, will teach you a lot more about the collective fears of humanity than they ever will about the reality of the disease that they're talking about. We want to believe that if we can identify the exact psychological flaw in the type of person that gets the illness, and if you can make sure that you aren't that kind of person, well, then I must be safe.

"Cancer won't happen to me, and I'm not one of those people that get cancer. I don't do the things that the people that get cancer do." And of course, it's never in actuality that simple. Susan Sontag says that one day we're gonna understand cancer in a similar way that we now understand tuberculosis.

And when we do, she predicts that the mythology that surrounds the illness will change, as will the way the patients are treated by society and by the doctors that diagnose them. And the point that she's making here is not that we should stop using metaphors. Just as last episode, she was not saying that we should stop using pictures. The point is that if we can understand this tendency that we have to create mythology surrounding things we don't understand mostly out of fear...

then when it comes to how that intersects with subjects like disease, where people's well-being and humanity often hangs in the balance, it is possible to be more critical of the metaphors we're using and how they might be negatively impacting people who are at the mercy of medical discourse. Because this isn't just cancer and tuberculosis. Think about other illnesses we know about today, where the way culture talks about them can make people feel embarrassed about getting help.

Think of substance abuse, obesity, depression or anxiety, STDs, eating disorders, many more examples here. But the point is that there are certain states of being that for whatever reason we've decided as a culture that not only are we going to talk about the symptoms someone's experiencing, we're also going to talk about the character of the person on top of that. And just like the people with tuberculosis or cancer and other times that didn't seek out treatment,

The thinking of the people afflicted with this stuff today could easily be, well, look, I'm the problem here. I'm the cause of why I have this. What am I going to go bother a doctor about this for? There could be somebody really sick that needs the doctor that day. In other words, simply to make ourselves feel better about our fears that this stuff is going to happen to us one day, we're just further complicating the life of someone that's going through stuff like this.

Sontag would say that there is no reason why the language and the metaphors that surround illness can't be more empowering towards someone who's going through it. There is no reason illness can't be framed in a different way. I mean, imagine a world where someone gets sick, and instead of being socially isolated because of some taboo we have that we don't talk about the fact someone's sick,

Imagine the process of getting sick being talked about as a more natural, expected part of life that most people go through at some point, and that while it's certainly not the greatest thing in the world, throughout this process, you are getting an opportunity to come to terms with your own mortality and take something valuable from the process, to learn something about yourself, to have a greater perspective. That's a possible experience for someone to have as well.

Just like when someone gives you a picture, and the default should be asking a series of questions about the picture, whenever you hear a metaphor that's claiming to be a representation of a super complex thing, the default mode you should be in is one where you're asking more questions as well. Who is giving me this metaphor? Why are they giving me this metaphor? What is the metaphor obscuring about the complexity of this thing that I may not be considering? And if I continue to not consider that complexity, what kinds of people might be affected by that?

There is no reason to Susan Sontag why being a thinking person in this world cannot include that level of critical analysis. And once you recognize how these metaphors impact the people who are being described by them, Susan Sontag thinks you have a responsibility. The same way that to be able to survive, we need to bring a critical eye to every image that's presented to us, or else accept your fate as someone being constantly finessed by the people who are giving you your pictures and videos.

we have a responsibility to deconstruct the metaphors we use to understand complicated things like disease, or else accept a similar fate as someone at the mercy of the people giving you your comparisons. But it's interesting to consider, who are the people that are giving you your comparisons? I mean, if the news is where you're getting a lot of the images you consume, and you got to be more on guard when you're taking in those pictures and videos, where do people typically get their metaphors that help them simplify cultural complexity?

Like I said at the beginning of the episode, some people are amazing at coming up with metaphors. Some people make their entire career out of it. There's writers, there's teachers, there's lawyers. A lot of people use metaphors in their jobs. But maybe one profession that's really good at commenting on social issues in particular are comedians. In fact, in terms of where people are getting their metaphors, we live in a world where the reality is that a lot of people get their news and understanding of things from comedians.

It's been this way for decades, and you can understand why, with the news being what it is most of the time. And then you add in someone talented that can come up with comparisons between things that are hilarious. Look, people gravitate towards other people that can connect dots you didn't otherwise see connected, and then do so in a way where it all corresponds with people's lived experiences of the world.

In other words, with a comedian, it's not an academic seminar. They're not going over advanced statistics, giving representation to every angle, or analyzing culture at the most detailed level. But it is often reflecting how people feel about cultural realities in their everyday lives, and then they're making it fun to listen to. And one piece of a comedian's arsenal when they do that is the metaphor.

Now obviously there's a billion examples of this, but one particular one from years ago, and I'm picking one this far back so that hopefully everyone understands. I'm never trying to politicize anything here. I'm just trying to give an example of a comedian that uses a metaphor to talk about a social issue. But the comedian was talking at the time about the very complicated problem of men out there conceiving a child and then not sticking around to take care of the child.

Some would say that's an epidemic that's hurting children in the United States. And the comedian was making fun of a quote from President Obama at the time. Obama says in a speech back then, quote, Now this comedian thought that this was a bit of a non-point by Obama.

That the reason men are abandoning their children has much more to do with them not sticking to their responsibilities than anything to do with a lack of courage. So this comedian uses a metaphor to sarcastically characterize the entire social issue. They say, okay, okay, I think I see what the president's saying here. He's saying that anyone can eat at an IHOP, but it takes courage to pay the bill.

Now I'm sorry, but that's funny. Okay, that is a funny way for a comedian to characterize the supposed cause of the problem. It's very visual, it's quick, it cuts to the core of the oversimplification of the feel-good statement that this issue somehow comes down to the courage levels of men out there who aren't taking care of their kids.

But that said, doesn't this metaphor also drastically oversimplify the complexity of the issue by implying that it's about responsibility? I mean, clearly there are a lot of reasons this problem's going on, and to say the cause of it is that people are just not being responsible, that's transparently someone who's not interested in solving the social issue as much as they're interested in assessing blame. And then, in keeping with the theme of this episode so far, if you accepted that metaphor and you were uncritical towards the metaphors you use, if

If your goal was to explain reality generally and not suffer nuance too much,

you could take this thinking and extend that metaphor as far as you want. You could use this to think that if only everyone was more responsible out there, then all of society's issues would be magically solved. If only we all focused much more on parenting our children to value education and responsibility. In other words, if everybody was exactly like me, we wouldn't need laws. Everything would be perfect. If you were sufficiently committed to your metaphors uncritically like this,

You could truly believe that the solution to everything just lies in vague platitudes, like we gotta focus on parenting and education and responsibility. But then on the other hand, there's a sense in which we can't legislate morality. So a discussion about how to deal with any social issue actually can only begin once you accept that people aren't all like you. People aren't always responsible, people aren't always educated.

This type of metaphor may work in your everyday life in smaller numbers, with people you know and people you can talk to. But on the level of the government or fixing societal issues, we can't think this simplistically about it. But again, it's intoxicating to be able to say, oh, everyone's just stupid. Everyone just needs to be more responsible and then everything would be fixed. Seems much more concerned with the ego boost of assessing blame than actually fixing anything.

Now this is just one example of how a metaphor about a social issue can be used to reinforce a more globally oversimplified view of everything. And there's been this tension for years between people who claim they're trying to analyze culture on the highest level, who take issue with comedians who are making social commentary by using metaphors like this. Because metaphors are almost always oversimplifications, then the comparisons comedians are making with metaphors almost always have to be oversimplifications as well.

To which the comedian says back, "Yeah, I'm a comedian. The point of comedy is to make people laugh. I'm not going up on stage claiming to be a world-class sociologist." And by the way, for the record, to the sociologist that's criticizing me as a hypothetical comedian here, you guys aren't exactly making it easy for people to engage in these higher-level conversations either.

First of all, you're boring as sin, usually. You instantly cut down all the people who aren't initiated enough in your eyes to have the conversation. Look, at least at a comedy show, it's getting people into the conversations about cultural issues, oversimplified or not. To which the sociologist says back, well, isn't that dangerous?

Like we have these enormously complex cultural issues going on. People's lives are hanging in the balance. What about the person that goes to one of these comedy shows and then takes what the comedian is saying to be the gospel truth? And this is where I think the work of Susan Sontag can offer a bit of a bridge between these two camps. See, again, she's going to hold people accountable while also empowering people to be better. To her, it is our responsibility to bring a critical eye to these comparisons we pick up through everyday participation in the world.

If you were one of these people that supposedly exist out there, where you're going to a comedy show, drooling all over the table in front of you, and taking everything you hear there to be a high-level take on social issues, then sure, I guess you need to be taking comedy shows with a bit more of a grain of salt. Just like the high-level cultural critics need to do a cultural analysis of what a comedy show actually is as well.

But in the real world, where the rest of us exist, Susan Sontag would say that if you're an intelligent person and you're self-aware of the fact that you get most of your understanding of cultural issues from comedians...

fully acknowledging all the good reasons given so far as to why you'd want to do that, then you should also try to be aware of the fact that comedians, and by extension comparisons and metaphors, are not in the business of giving all the details. They're in the business of trying to get people to laugh and to relate to people's everyday experiences. Comedians don't have the luxury of providing every angle on a social issue, just as policymakers don't have the luxury of making jokes about generalizations.

Just like a quantum physicist has to operate in two different realms of complexity, where they live their life talking about quantum mechanics, fluctuating between colleagues at their office and non-physicists where if they ask about their work they got to explain it using metaphors, we have the ability to operate in these two different modes as well. The problem isn't the comedian who dares to make a comparison in an attempt to make something funny and relatable.

The problem is with the person who approaches their metaphors so uncritically that they confuse someone like Joe Rogan with the Oracle at Delphi. It's not fair to Joe Rogan. It's not fair to the Oracle at Delphi. And to Susan Sontag, it's certainly not fair to the people whose lives are caught up in the conversations based on this confusion. We have a responsibility to know the difference. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.