Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (80 page)

Khong tries to explain this distinction by proposing a few types of non-analogical arguments that the American leaders could have used during the Vietnam War. Among these are arguments based on
containment
and on
domestic politics.
Let’s consider the former. The word “containment” evokes a very concrete image. The military idea of
containing an enemy
(in this case, communism) with its strongly physical verb “to contain”, is based in part on human-size phenomena, such as a cage holding a dangerous animal or a cell holding a prisoner, and also on larger-scale phenomena, such as a surging crowd held back by a rope, a metal chain, or a police barricade, or a river threatening to flood a city and held back by sandbags, a dike, or a dam. The military idea of containment is also based on situations in team sports such as basketball or soccer, where one team has managed to surround the other team and to keep it far from any possibility of scoring, not to mention chess situations in which some of the opponent’s key pieces are holed up in a corner of the board and are stuck there, perhaps completely immobilized or able to move only in ineffectual fashions. Clearly all of these are indeed analogies (albeit with phenomena from everyday life), so Khong’s desired distinction is already on shaky grounds. But then he tries to draw a distinction between analogical thinking rooted in everyday, non-military experience, such as these scenes, and analogical thinking rooted in grand historical precedents. Does this new distinction stand up to scrutiny?

To respond to this question, let us consider one of the most frequent concepts of the Vietnam era: the so-called “domino theory”. The idea is based on the image of a chain of dominos that will all fall in a chain reaction if the first one of them topples. The standard analogy was between this tabletop situation and the countries of Southeast Asia, with a toppling domino being, of course, a country falling under the domination
of communism. This seems to be an everyday metaphor rather than a grand historical analogy. But there is more to the story. Let us go back and look at the historical precedent called “the thirties”, to which we briefly alluded above. Khong defines this historical precedent in the following manner:

We thus see that this is a mixture of several different analogues — a mental superposition of a number of different historical precedents. We will return shortly to this interesting idea, but for the moment what is of interest to us is to compare this definition with a remark that Khong makes about domino theory. He writes:

This observation shows us that the image of a chain of dominos falling in a few seconds, “victims” of earth’s gravitational pull, was tightly linked, in the minds of the American decision-makers, with the historical image of a “chain” of European countries that “fell” to fascism during the 1930s, and was also linked with the frightening image of a “chain” of Asian countries that would also “fall” to communism during the 1960s. In other words, “dominos” and “thirties” are also synonyms.

In short, the non-military, non-historic image of dominos falling on a tabletop was profoundly mixed, in the minds of the leaders, with the political, military, and historical image of a set of countries that would fall, one after another, to invading forces (whether in Europe or in Southeast Asia). Given this, can one sharply distinguish between grand historical analogies and humble, mundane analogies that come from everyday life? Clearly not, since, as we’ve just seen, sometimes dominos on a table are
seen as countries during a
recent
war, other times as countries during a
current
war, and yet other times as just plain old wooden dominos. (As Sigmund Freud might have said, “Sometimes a domino is just a domino.”) Anyone who knows the domino metaphor and the historical facts cannot help mixing all these images in an intimate fashion. (Later in this chapter we will carefully consider this kind of mental blending of situations. We use the term “frame blends”, while pioneering frame-blend researchers Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner opt for “conceptual integration networks”.)

As we have already observed, most clearly in
Chapter 3
and
Chapter 4
, any specific event — perhaps the falling of some dominos on a table, perhaps a famous historical defeat — can be encoded at various levels of abstraction, which means it is perfectly possible for us to see as one and the same phenomenon the succumbing of a series of neighboring countries to an evil empire’s domination and the successive toppling-over of many dominos neatly lined up in a chain. This universal fact of human high-level perception allows us to see far beyond the concrete details of situations and to connect events that superficially are enormously different from each other.

We now come back to the notion that Khong proposed of a “non-analogical argument” based solely on abstract concepts. The problem is that whatever abstract concept is under discussion (
dominos, containment
, etc.) in a military or political context, it will necessarily evoke, simply because of the words it involves, familiar everyday images. Furthermore, in the mind of anyone who has a decent knowledge of history, an abstract concept of this sort will also evoke a wide range of historical analogues, at differing levels of awareness (for example, activation of a concept of this sort could evoke a range of historical precedents, such as a moat around a medieval castle, the walls of medieval cities, the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, and so forth). The fact that a word such as “containment” seems abstract and somewhat bland does not mean that it is devoid of a metaphorical substrate and that it evokes no historical precedent. To the contrary, the power of abstract words comes from the fact that they evoke a set of concrete images, all derived from experiences that one has had, either directly or vicariously, over the course of one’s life. This rich halo of familiar and historical analogues constitutes the imagery that is evoked in the mind of a decision-maker, and which in turn gives rise to life-and-death decisions.

Khong’s book abounds in vivid expressions such as “No more Munichs!”, “another Hitler”, “a series of Koreas”, “the next Chamberlain”, and “replays of 1917”. As we saw in
Chapter 1
, when we discussed words like “Mother” and “Moon”, a one-member category is, from the moment that it comes to exist in a mind, capable of being pluralized and used just like any highly abstract notion. (
Chapter 4
, too, in the section dealing with Platos, popes, Mozarts, meccas, Bachs, and bibles, gave many examples of this sort.) In the above expressions (and others) in Khong’s book, a term like “Hitler” or “Munich”, seeming on its surface to denote
a particular historical entity
(a person, a place, a defeat, a war, a strategy) is used as the label of
a general category
, of which there
could exist dozens or perhaps hundreds of instances, sometimes actual, and sometimes imaginary. As this makes clear, it is not even remotely possible to draw an ironclad distinction between “concrete” and “abstract” usages of a concept in one’s memory.

Nonetheless, Khong tries to draw a clear line between
analogues
and so-called
schemas.
A
schema
is defined as the mental superposition of several historical precedents, whereas just one historical precedent all by itself would be an
analogue
(one side of an analogical bridge, to recall the image from
Chapter 3
). It’s tempting to imagine that this is a sharp and unambiguous distinction, but as we just saw, the concept of
thirties
, although Khong treats it as if it were
one
specific event, is not one event at all; he himself defines it by blurring together at least
five
different events, and so, by his own definition, it is a quintessential schema! And yet this plurality does not keep him from speaking about “the analogy to the thirties”, as if such a thing involved making a mapping to
one single
historical precedent, every bit as concrete, local, and specific as the Munich agreements or Mussolini’s annexation of Ethiopia. Thus we see that sometimes Khong says that a schema is an abstraction and that seeing an event as covered by a schema is
not
the making of an analogy, while other times he treats a schema and an analogue as completely indistinguishable (both serving as ends of analogical bridges).

In
Chapter 3
, we saw that when someone reminds us of another person, what takes place inside our head is the building of an analogical bridge between two mental representations, and that when we categorize an object that we see, such as a cup, the same mental process is involved. In the case of the reminding, the mental entity that gets freshly activated is our memory of a
specific
person, whereas in the case of the categorization, the freshly activated mental entity is based on a lifelong series of perceptions of
different
objects (or situations), and we have little or no recollection of the “founding members” of the category. Despite this difference, the two processes are cut from the same cloth, since analogy-making is at their core; that is, in both cases, what is going on is an act of analogical mapping that builds a link between a fresh new mental representation and an older mental representation stored in our brain.

Khong’s notion of a schema is not significantly different from a many-membered category such as
cup
, while his notion of a particular historical precedent is essentially the same as the mental representation we have of an old friend. One might think that mental processes involving schemas versus those involving historical precedents are very different, but all that is involved in either case is the building of analogical bridges between mental representations. Moreover, as we saw in the case of the slowly accreting
Twain–Grieg–Einstein
concept in
Chapter 3
, a schema can slide gradually from very concrete to very abstract, which means that it makes no sense to try to draw a sharp dividing line between making an analogy and using a schema.

Let’s take a concrete example. If you are arriving for the first time in a lawyer’s office, you might have this anticipatory thought: “I’m probably going to have to wait for a long time in this waiting room, just as I did the last time I went to get a physical at Dr. Blahblah’s office.” Or you might instead think: “I’m probably going to have to wait for a long time in this waiting room, just like when I have doctor’s appointments.” Then again, you might well have this thought: “People who have private practices and
fancy offices always make you wait a long time.” In the first case, which would seem comparable to one of Khong’s historical precedents, the source situation (the checkup with Dr. Blahblah) is equally concrete as the the target situation (the meeting with the lawyer), and you superimpose your recent experience of a long wait in your doctor’s office onto this new situation. In the other two cases, which would correspond to Khong’s schemas, the source situations are more abstract: a generic visit to your doctor, or an even more generic visit to any kind of professional. But in all three cases, you are using a familiar source analogue in order to make educated guesses about a brand-new situation. As soon as you scratch a little, you find that, under the skin, the putative distinction between using an analogue and using a schema vanishes into thin air.

In a section toward the end of his book, instead of pressing on with his major thesis that analogies are omnipresent in political thinking, Khong promotes the curious idea, pushed by certain historians, that analogical thinking plays
no role at all
in decisions about
domestic
politics. One can’t help wondering how the mental mechanisms involved in thinking about domestic politics could differ fundamentally from those involved in thinking about foreign events. Indeed, such a distinction is most implausible.

Imagine a historian of physics suggesting that physicists, when tackling questions in thermodynamics, always depend on analogies, but that when tackling questions in electrodynamics, they never use them at all. Now why would one area of physics be
resistant
to a certain set of thought mechanisms while another area of physics
required
those exact mechanisms at all times? The idea is as silly as suggesting that Capricorns always use analogies but Geminis never use them. The fact is, as
Chapter 8
will show, that all areas of physics depend on analogies. And what holds for thinking in physics should (by analogy!) hold just as much for political thinking. Indeed, there are good reasons for believing that the mechanisms underlying human thought are universal.