Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (72 page)

It thus appears that one single mental phenomenon is at work both in the “Sources of Essence” trap and in the Towers of Hanoi trap — namely, memories of analogous situations impose themselves without consulting the person who matters — the person in whose head all this is happening. The standard excuse that one gives is along the lines of “I didn’t quite catch what they told me”, or “They sure didn’t make it clear what it was all about”, or “I didn’t pay close attention” — but in fact a more accurate explanation is that one unconsciously succumbed to an inappropriate categorization.

When the entire process is unconscious, as in the cases we’ve been discussing, only through very meticulous research will the hidden analogies be revealed. Sometimes the existence of categories shared among people in a culture or subculture furnishes a particularly clear demonstration of the way categories influence the perception of a situation, since people who do not belong to this community would be amazed by a point of view that strikes them as extremely odd.

The following example of this phenomenon will speak directly to readers who live in large metropolitan areas, and may intrigue those who live in less traffic-congested locales. It shows why the loveliest spot in a city isn’t necessarily what one might think.

Surely, for a non-resident of the City, one of the above would fill the bill, but a true San Franciscan sees things differently. Finding a place to park one’s car in the City without worrying about getting an astronomical fine or having to go pick it up at the pound can verge on the miraculous, especially in certain areas and at certain times of day. Thus it is not infrequent that one finds oneself driving up and down steep hills, back and forth on broad avenues, crisscrossing one’s prior pathway umpteen times in desperate search of a parking spot, knowing full well that the likelihood of finding one is microscopic. This plight is so common and so upsetting that San Francisco drivers tend to be powerfully drawn to vacant parking places, finding high esthetic value in simple concrete rectangles as long as it is legal to park in them. The rarity of such a spot turns it into a precious entity.

It’s not uncommon to hear one local say to another, as they walk down the street, “Just look at that beautiful spot! Wow!” The intimate relationship that San Francisco drivers have with untaken parking spaces thus engenders the category of
lovely spots.
As anyone who’s driven in the City can testify, spotting a lovely spot when one doesn’t need to park in it always evokes a tempting counterfactual scenario of chancing upon exactly that empty spot just when one needs it desperately, and thus a sense of “if only” or “too bad” is triggered.

The abstract category of
lovely spots
deeply affects how these people perceive the physical spot. This example shows how powerfully categories impose a view of the world. If Kazimir Malevich’s famous
White Square on White Background
is a member of the category
works of art
, then surely Market Street’s
Gray Rectangle on Gray Background
is a member of the category
lovely spots.
The intense feeling of longing that the gray rectangle inspires in so many people shows how irresistible is the psychological force that pushes for categorizing it in that fashion. And yet such a categorization, for all its emotional intensity, doesn’t drive people into paroxysms of irrationality. So far as we
know, no one has yet succumbed to the siren song of a lovely spot by suddenly throwing their Saturday-evening plans out the window, screeching to a halt, and parking their car then and there, fatally seduced by the lovely spot that was winking at them.

Certain categorizations, however, have very powerful influences on our thought and behavior. For example, people’s perception of the October 11th crash was very different from what it would have been had the event occurred a few years earlier.

In the middle of the afternoon on October 11, 2006, an airplane crashed into a tall building in New York City. On first hearing this breaking news, no one, unless they had spent the last few years on a remote island, could fail to think of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. One would automatically assume it was a terrorist attack, and one would retain a lingering feeling that this must be the case even after learning that it was only a four-seater private propeller plane, not a huge jet, that the only deaths were of the pilot and copilot, that the fire in the building was quickly extinguished, and that the building was never in danger of collapsing.

The analogy with the events of September 11th sweeps in immediately, profoundly coloring one’s perception of this event. It would thus be hard for anyone to imagine, on first hearing about this event, that it was simply a random accident of the sort that takes place frequently and in many different ways all over the world — an unfortunate incident, to be sure, but with limited consequences, and without any link to religious fundamentalism or terrorism. That’s a most unlikely first thought! As a matter of fact, the Dow Jones average declined for a short while after the collision was announced.

The September 11th events cannot fail to be evoked front and center when one hears about the October 11th crash. Because of September 11th, the broad category of
terrorist attack
is instantly activated, and so is the more specific category of
September 11 attack
, perhaps even more strongly so. Thus one tends to think, “Oh, no — September 11th all over again!” or “Is this another September 11th?” Together, the broader and the narrower category provide the inevitable framework for understanding an event that would have been perceived totally differently had September 11th never occurred.

Someone might object, saying “Hold on, now — ‘September 11th’ isn’t the name of a
category
but of an
event
!” We would counter this claim by reminding the objector of categories such as
popes, bibles, meccas, Bachs, Einsteins, Picassos
, and
Rolls-Royces
, discussed in
Chapter 4
, which show that apparently single-member categories, no matter how unique or
sui generis
they might seem to be (even the super-specific
Château Beaucastel Hommage à Jacques Perrin 1998
), will be quite effortlessly pluralized by the similarity-driven human mind, when the proper situation shows up.

Other clear signs of the plural nature of the category
September 11th
(more often called “9/11”) are the standard use of such phrases as “India’s 9/11” (the bombings of many buildings in Mumbai, including two luxury hotels, in late November of 2008), “Russia’s 9/11” (which has been exploited by various political groups to denote various massacres of innocent people), “Pakistan’s 9/11”, “Spain’s 9/11”, and so forth. In
particular, the bomb attacks that took place in Madrid on March 11, 2004, claiming the lives of over 200 people, soon acquired the label “Spain’s 9/11”, and Spaniards very understandably quickly took to using the analogy-drenched nicknames “11-S” (for the attacks on New York and Washington) and “11-M” (for those on Madrid).

On the Web, one can also find such phrases as “the 9/11 of the seventeenth century”, “the 9/11 of New Orleans”, “the 9/11 of World War II”, “the 9/11 of the Scriptures”, “the 9/11 of rock”, “the 9/11 of hormone replacement therapy”, “the 9/11 of commercial shipping”, and on and on. Moreover, one easily finds scads of Web sites that refer, using explicit plurals, to such categories as “the 9/11’s of the future”, “the 9/11’s of the 1960’s”, “the 9/11’s of history”, and so forth.

In brief, the concept of
September 11th
is now a common category having many members of different strengths (Pearl Harbor being a fairly strong member — and, amusingly enough, in a sad way, 9/11 itself being a fairly strong member of the category
Pearl Harbors).
Just think how many birthdays and wedding anniversaries were sabotaged in the years following 2001 simply because, many years earlier, someone happened to be born on the 11th of September, or because a couple had perfectly reasonably picked that date for their nuptial celebration. And for quite a while after 2001, all sorts of receptions, openings of shows, and other public events were carefully scheduled so as to avoid being stigmatized by the irrepressible association with the “radioactive” date September 11th, which poisoned everything that came close to it.

As we have seen, analogies constrain one’s perception of situations. Whether we’re talking about members of the category of
lovely spots
or that of
9/11’s
, analogies constitute filters through which the world is seen. This statement may seem surprising, since it’s easy to forget that whoever one is, one sees the world through filters that powerfully control the flow of one’s thoughts. But the lessons learned from the preceding categories apply throughout everyday life, and they apply to any idea, however small or large, that occupies center stage for a while.

This little episode provides a useful illustration of the constantly ongoing process of
filtering.
Because certain concepts had just gotten activated, the previously unnoticed elephant became, in this new context, cognitively salient; it thus moved above the threshold of Y.’s attentional filtering system and became visible.

As this anecdote shows, our perception is profoundly biased, but this is fortunate rather than problematic, for our biases are generally very useful and efficient. If our brains tried to pay equal amounts of attention to all things around us, we would drown in confusion. Thus our categories act as filters, and as such, they are crucial elements of our mental life, allowing us to deal with the flood of stimuli constantly bombarding us. Since our categories are our organs of perception of the world, whatever affects our system of categories affects our perceptual organ. The rather haphazard course of our thoughts as we drift through life deeply colors our way of seeing the world.

Thus learning a new fact or having a new experience can profoundly alter our perception of our environment. A pregnant woman sees pregnant women everywhere around her, and after giving birth she runs into newborn babies everywhere she goes. Someone who decides to embark on psychotherapy soon finds out that everyone they know has done the same thing. If one starts going down the pathway of divorce, all at once divorce stories start cropping up whoever one talks to. If one indulges oneself in a new car, one is shocked to see exactly the same model turning up on every street corner. If one starts noticing a tiny gesture or microscopic verbal tic in a friend, all of a sudden it becomes the dominant feature of the friend’s face or speech, even though one had never noticed it before. If at a party one makes the acquaintance of the mother of a child who attends the same school as one’s own child does, and who regularly picks up her child there, thereafter one notices her every single day at school despite never having seen her before for years.

Categories that are activated in one’s mind are always on the lookout for instances of themselves in one’s life. The more highly activated they are, the fewer cases they miss, and the more fluid and creative they are in spotting instantiations of themselves in all sorts of guises.

The preceding examples have shown how this holds for relatively concrete and familiar categories (
ceramic elephants, pregnant women, divorce stories
, and so forth), but we are often involved in blurrier situations whose boundaries are extremely ill-defined. In such cases, our mind’s unconscious scouring of its surroundings for resonances with its active categories still goes on just as feverishly as in the simpler situations, but the search takes place at a more abstract level of perception. This abstract filtering of the world can give rise to connections that would seem very strange to an observer who didn’t share the obsession, whether fleeting or long-term, of the analogy-spotter.

What we perceive is the result of a compromise among our environment’s offerings, our repertoire of categories, and our current concerns. If a concern verges over into an obsession, it seizes control and everything in sight winds up being perceived over and
over again in terms of this obsession. Thus after the death of a loved one, the themes of death and sadness are bound to pervade a person’s perceptions. Virtually every object and situation is tinged with the loss. A tilted parasol evokes tears, reminding one of a tree about to fall, of an imminent ending, of universal mortality. A stopped watch represents the fact that time has ceased to exist for the deceased one. A cloudy sky is seen as death hovering above, sending down a pall of gloom. A spoiled peach, a withered rose, a chipped cup, a broken toy, a tipped-over garbage can, a closed shutter, a lowered awning, a dented car, a hunk of ham — each of these is death once again. And then on the other hand, merrily laughing strangers, tenderly gazing lovers, a kissing couple, a happy family strolling by — all these symbols of joy in the world suddenly become cruel attacks reminding us of people’s blithe indifference to the sufferings of others, and highlighting the bleak solitude of every suffering soul.