Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (78 page)

T.’s caricature analogy has no trace of mockery. The image evoked in his mind by S.’s well-intentioned declaration activates the word “turnaround”, which denotes both the abstract concept of
major alteration in life
and the more concrete concept of
U-turn.
The latter brings to mind the image of a very quick U-turn made by a vehicle traveling at high velocity. Actually, what makes it hard for a speeding object to flip around very quickly is its momentum, which involves both its speed and its mass, and so T. tries to think of a familiar highly massive entity moving along at a substantial clip. Among the most salient candidates is a train (but trains, being confined to motion along preset tracks, don’t make U-turns, so they’re ruled out); other candidates are a very massive ship, a missile, or perhaps even a planet in orbit. Why didn’t T. say to S., “You know, a missile can’t spin around in a tenth of a second”, or “Unfortunately, a planet can’t just jump out of its orbit”? Perhaps because these objects are less familiar than ships, and perhaps also because missiles are so light that they might seem agile, in contrast to an ocean liner, which doesn’t seem maneuverable in the least. In addition, boats move in the viscous medium of water, preventing them from turning easily. In short, the naïveté of thinking that an ocean liner could carry out a very rapid about-face is easy for anyone to see, and so the image T. chose seems very apt for the situation.

It would nonetheless have been possible for T. to use the image of a missile or of a planet, had he been in a slightly different frame of mind. Likewise, had T. isolated a different conceptual skeleton in S.’s claim, he might have cast his caricature analogy in a different direction. Thus he might have quoted a proverb such as “A leopard can’t change its spots” or “A zebra can’t change its stripes”, suggesting that it is nearly impossible for a person’s character ever to change profoundly. Or thinking about how hard it is to bring about bodily changes, he might instead have said, “A sprinter can’t become a long-distance runner overnight” or “You can’t lose 50 pounds in a week.”

Quite clearly, the production of caricature analogies is no more a deterministic process than is the choice of words, phrases, proverbs, and so on. Thus even if certain analogies are particularly likely to be chosen in a given context, there are plenty of others that are easily imaginable, even if they are less likely to be produced.

This type of creative cognitive act is an outcome of several facts about the mind. First is our irrepressible human tendency to abstract situations that we encounter in order to pinpoint their most central core; second is the fact that we possess a vast repertoire of mental categories at many levels of abstraction; and third is our ability to select a fresh new category that is vivid and familiar and that very closely resembles the original situation.

The device of caricature analogy is sometimes used simply to express something ordinary in a colorful fashion. Such rhetorical flourishes, not just humorous but seemingly offhand, are frequent in sports announcing. Here are two such remarks made by baseball announcers on American television:

Many readers will doubtless pick up on the fact that the second of these quips is reminiscent of the caricature analogy in which oars for stirring are replaced by javelins for rowing. And yet someone might think that the image of failing to drink coffee by using a fork to scoop it up was chosen pretty much at random by Willie Stargell as a humorous example of an impossible challenge, and that he might just as easily have come out with the phrase “Trying to get a hit off of Sandy Koufax is like trying to construct a skyscraper with one’s bare hands” or “is like trying to draw a square circle”. But substituting either of those metaphors into Stargell’s quip results in an utter
non sequitur.
There was a good reason for Stargell’s choice. The image he evoked of coffee easily dripping between the long, straight tines of a fork has much in common with that of a ball easily slipping past a long, straight bat. Stargell’s choice of metaphor was thus
very well-tuned, and it would have been far less effective had he alluded to a randomly chosen impossible task, even if, we repeat, he was probably unaware of the cognitive mechanisms pushing him towards his witty choice.

It’s tempting to ask what would happen if batter Henry Aaron found himself up against pitcher Sandy Koufax. Given the very striking descriptions that we’ve just quoted of these two individuals’ abilities, one has the feeling that it would be a case of the famous category
an irresistible force meeting an immovable object
, and one can’t help but wonder: what would give?

Spontaneously invented caricature analogies can be excellent tools for explanation, as the following example shows. A boy of age ten meets a vegetarian for the first time in his life and tries to understand what lies behind her choice. He asks her, “Why won’t you eat a hamburger, since the cow is already dead?” The woman explains to him that eating a hamburger is merely the last link in a complex economic chain that stretches all the way back to feedlots and cattle ranches, but the boy sticks to his guns, insisting that the cow was already dead and that that’s the only thing that matters. At this point, the woman changes tack and says, “Think about those large-size bottles of soft drinks that stand upright on supermarket shelves. They’re all lined up on a slope, one behind the other. When a customer removes the closest one, all the ones behind it slide down, so the second one winds up at the front, the third slides into second place, and so on. At the very back, the last bottle slides down, leaving an empty space that a store worker will have to fill with another bottle, or else the store’s soft-drink supply will run out soon enough. Well, when you eat a hamburger, it’s like removing the closest bottle. The hole that it leaves at the far end of the chain will have to be filled, or else the meat supply will run out pretty quickly. Sure, the specific animal whose meat you are eating had already been killed, but your seemingly innocent act will help bring about the killing of
another
animal, far away and unseen by you.”

This caricature analogy draws on a drastically simplified picture, since the full situation is clearly too unfamiliar and remote for the boy to grasp. The long chain that slowly moves upstream towards the source — from the hamburger itself to the grocery-store display case, then to the butchers in the back of the store, then to a large meat-transport truck, then to the slaughterhouse, then further back yet, to an animal-transport truck, then to a feedlot, and finally all the way back to the pastures of some far-away farm — that whole long chain, invisible and spread out over a vast territory, has been deftly replaced by a short straight line containing just a handful of bottles that can slide on a gentle slope. And the fact that a piece of meat is but a tiny part of a large animal has been left out of the picture, since it is not crucial to the key idea, which involves only the notions of
supply
and
demand
.

We thus see that caricature analogies are not limited to situations where a speaker wishes to communicate a sense of outrage or perplexity; they can also be the natural outcome of a desire to transmit subtle ideas in a vivid, clear manner.

We can use caricature analogies to help us understand a situation we find ourselves in, a thought we are having, a sudden feeling triggered by an event, and so forth. In such cases, the caricature may reveal or set in sharp relief a conceptual skeleton of which we had been only fleetingly aware. Such analogies, rather than being created to show somebody else something, are created for ourselves alone. A familiar example will demonstrate how the explanation of some phenomenon — in this case, an explanation that a driver comes up with — can come about thanks to analogies that one manipulates.

As any San Franciscan knows only too well, parking in Baghdad by the Bay is always hellish. One night, though, in the wee hours of the morning, as E. was driving home through downtown San Francisco, he suddenly had a surreal sensation. On Market Street, where it’s normally hopeless, he saw empty spots left and right. All around Union Square, perhaps the city’s most nightmarish zone, were dozens of parking places crying out to be taken. And as he arrived in his own neighborhood, always jam-packed with cars, his gaze was met with vacant spots galore. E. felt mounting outrage as he stared at these priceless gems for which any driver would have given their eyeteeth and yet for which he had no use at all. Should he simply stop and park in one of them, to savor this astonishing godsend? No, that would be too silly… E. realized he had no choice but to resign himself to letting these amazing rarities (which in this case were a dime a dozen) sail by untouched, one treasure after another. It gave him little consolation to think that in just a few hours, all these streets would once again be clogged to the gills, obliterating this improbable sight.

E. tried to understand more deeply just why he felt so frustrated to see all these “lovely spots”. A few analogies came to mind and helped him out. He said to himself that these spots were like a mountain of gold in front of someone who had no tools to extract even the tiniest nugget from it, or like the discovery in an attic of a huge fortune in banknotes no longer accepted as legal tender. Next, he imagined himself utterly stuffed after wolfing down a mediocre meal and then having to decline a whole series of delicious gourmet courses brought to the table.

As he continued ruminating, E. decided that what he was seeing was not so precious after all. He started coming up with happier analogues: “This is like being admitted for free into the city’s trendiest nightclub moments before it closes, when no one wants to be there any more, and the last few souls there all drunk as pigs and looking sickly in the bright glow of the overhead lights that have been turned on for the cleaning service that’s about to arrive.” Then again, “This is like being given free access to the Fillmore Auditorium the morning after the Rolling Stones perform there, when the place is totally empty.” And also, “This is like being on a secluded tropical island, normally the playground of billionaires, but in monsoon season.” In this fashion, a new vision emerged in E.’s mind: rather than being hugely frustrated by vast riches before him that he couldn’t touch, he was now simply in a terrific place but at a terrible time to be there.

We see that caricature analogies can help us strip a new situation down to its core, shedding fresh light of all sorts on it, bringing out in the open one or more conceptual skeletons that were vaguely lurking in the shadows when the situation first arose. Such caricatures spring spontaneously from the “halo” of rapid generalizations that any new scenario of interest tends to evoke in the mind of a curious person, and they help reveal the conceptual skeleton at the root of such generalizations.

In this case, two different types of caricature analogy allowed E. to take two possible perspectives on the situation he was facing. The first type, mapping the empty spots onto treasures that seem ripe for the taking but that are inaccessible due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances, helped him to understand just why, as a San Francisco driver, he was so frustrated. Tending to reinforce his initial impression, these first caricatures had little pedagogical use, but at least they allowed him to see a bit more clearly why he was feeling so unlucky. In contrast, the second wave of caricature analogies, as their common underlying conceptual skeleton started emerging into the light, helped him find a happier way of looking at things. His plight was now mapped onto various scenarios in which timing is everything: all these lovely spots, totally available because it was in the middle of the night, were like concert tickets after a great concert is over. Different essences can thus be brought out by different caricatures.

A caricature analogy can sometimes clarify subtle phenomena that at first came to mind only as intuitions without any clear logic to them. When one runs through a number of caricatures, the hidden conceptual skeleton that one had only vaguely sensed at the outset starts to come out into the open much more clearly.

To see this, let’s consider a paradox that users of big-city bicycle rental systems (such as are found in Washington, Miami, Montreal, and a few other North American cities, as well as in various other cities around the world) have almost surely all noticed. Rentable bicycles are locked to long racks in many parts of the city; with a credit card or membership card, you can unlock one, ride it here or there, and then leave it, locked once again, in another rack, where other people will be able to use it in turn. But alas, one soon notices that there is scant cause for joy when one walks up to a rack where there are only a few bikes left. Indeed, chances are high that they’re all defective, so the rack is as good as empty. Contrariwise, when a rack is full, one generally has a wide choice among many bikes in great shape. At first, this fact about nearly-empty racks might seem surprising, for it involves a “double penalty”: not only are there fewer bikes to choose among, but adding insult to injury, the few that are there are almost sure to be unusable. Thus a rack’s bike-sparseness is doubly rough on any hopeful rider who arrives, since sparseness is also a sign of defectiveness. You may already have figured out why this phenomenon, rather than being surprising, is in fact to be expected; if so, more power to you. But if you don’t see it yet, then you might appreciate some help in identifying a much more general phenomenon of which this bike-renting paradox is just one particular example.