Let the wolves know that in our tribe
If the father dies, his gun will remain.
Even if all the men of the tribe are killed
A baby son will remain in the wooden cradle.
This Twitter, quoted in Rosemary Righter’s recent article on the Iranian election in the Times Literary Supplement, was posted by Professor Zahra Rahnavard, wife of reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi on June 21, in the midst of the government’s brutal crackdown on street protests following those disputed elections.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the way metaphors function in politics lately. I recently mentioned “birthers” to a friend, and she raised her eyebrows: it’s an odd word to have entered our political discourse, and if you’ve been out of the country for a while, as we both had, you might initially think that it had something to do with reproductive rights, rather than conspiracy theory, religious nationalism, and race. To proclaim someone else’s birth certificate a forgery is not simply to challenge their right to govern, but to limit the claim of American identity in a way that has a familiar ring to those of us with odd foreign-sounding names. It’s the logic of the school-yard, in which unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Birth becomes a lie, it must be a lie, because the senses don’t lie: you don’t look like us, you don’t sound like us, you don’t act like us. That’s why evidence is irrelevant to those who get caught up in this kind of argument: birth is just a metaphor for difference. “Something doesn’t smell right.”
Metaphor is an act of exchange between one idea and the next: when Homer tells us that Achilles is a lion, he means that Achilles has the courage of a lion, but also its unthinking ferocity. In return, the lion gains a strangely human dignity, an implication of reason that raises its hunting beyond simple hunger. In The Prince, Machiavelli digs into the roots of this metaphor in the myth of the centaur who trained the legendary Greek kings:
You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable. A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. Those who rely simply on the lion do not understand what they are about.
Homer tells us that the lesson didn’t take: Achilles was too much the lion, while Ulysses was the fox. But the deeper point is that we’re all divided between reason and passion, man and beast. Metaphor is the currency in this exchange between reason and sense. In politics, it marks the point where rational discourse gives way to pack behavior and the slow process of debate by which we agree upon common goals devolves into snarling and battles for dominance. At its extreme, it allows acts of genocide to be justified as hygiene or a chilling phrase like “cutting down the tall trees.”
Metaphor works because it makes an idea feel true through an appeal to sense. It makes the abstract real and ties the wind-whipped kite of a new thought to something ancient in our minds. But it can also hide the truth that it might enhance. “I believed my old song,” Mahmoud Darwish writes in his poem “At a Train Station That Fell off the Map,” “so I can disbelieve my reality.” (And by saying it, he proves it untrue. That’s the poem’s wisdom.) Metaphor counsels and consoles, but in the mouths of the angry it can become the stone that grinds the teeth sharp. Men are not wolves or lions or foxes, vermin to be killed or tall trees to be cut. Men are just men, like us.
Here’s another political metaphor I came across recently, this one in a New Yorker profile: “A flood is ferocious, but it solves no problems. In Chinese, we say that you can bore a hole in a stone by the steady dripping of water.” The metaphor reflects one editor’s view of how the Chinese media tries to remain within the government’s limits on political reporting while still advocating for reform. It works, as all good metaphors do, by offering a striking visual to embody a complex and controversial idea. Where it differs from most political metaphors is in its acknowledgment that truth doesn’t come in a flash of perfect imagery, but rather slowly, as the stone melts away under the incessant drip of water. The most potent political metaphors are like a cold wind that whips away the fog of complicated ideas. But that’s an appeal to sense, not reason. The best metaphors ??? whether political or literary ??? work more slowly on the mind, filling it not with simple truths but complex thought.
I suspect that we’re entering a new season of symbolic politics in the U.S., as arguments that can’t be won on their merits are transformed into television images designed to enrage. But political speech, especially hatred, has a short sell-by date, and over time the slow drip of an idea can wear away even the stoniest hearts. Looking back at Professor Rahnavard’s Twitter, it’s possible to see it two ways: as a warning that violent repression will be met with violent revenge (“If the father dies, his gun will remain”), or as a more potent argument that history is more than what happens to individual men and an idea like democracy can’t be killed (“Even if all the men of the tribe are killed / A baby son will remain in the wooden cradle.”) If it works as a political metaphor, that’s because it does both: violent men fear only violence, but it’s the idea that they should fear since it can’t be killed or imprisoned. That’s what a good metaphor should remind us: no good idea is simple, no truth is final, and despite what the Birthers might wish, no wolfish hatred can ever be as powerful as the hope inspired by this prophetic image of a baby in a cradle.