We Are Our Own Metaphor

Whole Earth, Fall, 1999 by Mary Catherine Bateson

All thought relies on metaphor, on ways of noticing similarity so that what has been learned in one situation can be transferred to another. Scientists try to purge metaphor and intuition from their publications, but the speech of scientists is like all human speech and thought, full of metaphors, often unconscious and unexamined.

The solution is not to purge metaphors from speech; the solution is to take responsibility for the choice of metaphors, to savor them and ponder their suggestions, above all to live with many and take no one metaphor as absolute. There are truths to be discovered in equating one's mother with a toad; there are truths to be discovered in looking at a butchered sheep and recognizing heart and lungs and death itself as common.

Not long ago, in x988, a group of parents in Tennessee brought a lawsuit protesting that their children were being taught the religion of "secular humanism" in the schools, and objecting to the use of fantasy and mythology in education. A picture from a reading primer that showed a little boy and a little girl sitting at a kitchen table, with the little boy putting a piece of bread into a toaster, was cited as undermining traditional concepts of the family. This may seem extreme, yet these parents were right in their understanding of how people think and learn. Not only does such a picture undermine traditional concepts of the family but it undermines traditional concepts of God, for male dominance over females has long provided a model for the relationship between God and humankind. They would also be right to resist the metaphor of the dryad, along with any other suggestion of sacred presence immanent in the natural world, as undermining the idea of God as transcendent, ruling from outside and above.

Family systems, the organization of institutions, the way we run our country, the way we respond to other cultures and races, and the uses of political and military power--all these things are based on interlocking sets of metaphors. Our many relationships are isomorphic: they have the same form. There is a pattern that connects, and it is a pattern of dominance and exploitation, taught again and again in the most ordinary human arrangements. That pattern is expressed in the fierce and ultimately self-destructive attack on this planet that we cannot rule because we are a part of it.

In effect, because knowledge and perception are so dependent on available models, they cannot be changed without a commitment to changing basic patterns of social life. This is the most significant sense in which we are our own metaphor.

ADAPTED WITH PERMISSION FROM "TURNING INTO A TOAD," IN PERIPHERAL VISIONS: LEARNING ALONG THE WAY, BY MARY CATHERINE BATESON (HARPERCOLLINS, 1994).

Mary Catherine Bateson is a wise, generous, and original cultural anthropologist and intellectual historian. Besides Peripheral Visions, her major books include Composing a Life (Plume, reprint edition 1990) and Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (out of print), written with her father, Gregory Bateson. She has taught at Harvard, the University of Northern Iran, Damavand College in Tehran, Northeastern University, and George Mason, from which she's on leave to write a book and to oversee the Margaret Mead Centennial (see page 26).