A Moratorium on Analogies

That’s it. I’m calling for a moratorium on analogies. What’s my authority? Do I need authority? I’m making my own authority. The fact of the matter is that the use of analogies has gotten so completely out of control someone has to step into the breach and if that someone has to be me, so be it.

I’ve been involved in debating since I was 13-years-old and arguing from long before that. I was taught some, and picked up on a lot of the other, tricks for winning arguments: the rhetorical question, the definitional squabble, the even-if counter (why am I struck at this point with the notion for a debating simulation video game and how awesome it would be?). The most powerful weapon in my arsenal, however, was always the analogy.

It’s just a fact of life that convincing people to change their minds is difficult. People become attached to certain ideas and once a position is staked out we are all reluctant to relinquish it. Although it’s absurd we think of a change of heart not as a sign of strength (which is what it ought to be) but as a sign of weakness, a defeat. Heroic is the individual that holds the line no matter the circumstances, pathetic is the flip-flopper who changes his mind whenever the wind changes direction.

It is in accomplishing the difficult task of bringing another person around to your point of view that the analogy can be so powerful. It acts as a wedge, taking hold in a proposition the reader or listener already accepts and then opening the mind to the suggestion one is advocating. The internal logic is seductively simple. Here is proposition X. You already agree with proposition X. Here is proposition Y. Proposition Y is really just proposition X if you look closely enough. Therefore you must agree with proposition Y.

This desire for internal consistency is a powerful one in the human psyche and the analogy plays on it. To suggest that one agrees with proposition X while disagreeing with proposition Y is to invite the charge of being a hypocrite – one of the worst insults left in the modern vernacular. But like the child let loose in the proverbial candy store we have made ourselves sick through overindulgence. In the age of bulletin boards, blogs and other social networking web sites a sharp increase in debate and discussion about everything from politics to pigeon racing, from foreign policy to football have created an enormous population of verbal combatants reaching for whatever rhetorical device they can find. Easy to use and, thanks to those bloody SATs, familiar to many is the analogy.

And so the analogy has become overused and because of this its impact steadily reduced. I wince now whenever I see it wheeled out. Gone are the days when it would rip through the bluster of another’s stagnant argument. Instead it has become the new Nazi Germany; the sign that the debate is at an end and it’s time to move on.

I think there is something beyond the prevalence of the analogy that offends me, though: the laziness. When an analogy is used well part of the appeal is the way in which it opens up your understanding by drawing a parallel to something with which you are already familiar. I use the word ‘parallel’ intentionally. The concept one is holding up in comparison needs to be, well, analogous. Too many analogies drawn these days aren’t worth the time you waste trying to understand how the two things are even remotely related. They rely less on a congruence between concepts and instead prey on the fear in criticising a sacred cow lest you be damned for disagreeing with something that, after all, is sacred. The best analogies, though, aren’t the ones that rely on sacred cows and claim that this is what you’re disagreeing with; they’re the ones that make connections you didn’t even realise were there to begin with. They illuminate and help others understand your point. They don’t strap it to a locomotive and count on no one being brave enough to stand in its path.

It is for the continuation of lively discourse that I’m advocating we lay down our analogies. There are many other devices out there we can use. Simile and metaphor, analogy’s lesser-loved cousins, are crying out to be used more. Or you could try explaining what you mean rather than going for the shortcut.

So try to avoid the temptation the next time you’re arguing a point. If you can’t win without resorting to analogy maybe your argument wasn’t all that great to begin with.