Whenever I try to invoke an idea larger than one I can easily hold in my head, I compare something too big to fully experience to something that I know. That is to say, understanding by means of vertical symmetry: what is true at this scale may be true at a larger one.
The way an electron zooms around a nucleus mirrors (that is to say, mirrors above/vertically!) the way a planet orbits a star.
But people think so much more excitingly than that. We don’t just hypothesize and organize our lives with vertical symmetry, we use fractal symmetry. We don’t just think like this:
We think like this:
A fractal: “a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole” — Oxford American Dictionary.
Every whole definable part is analogous to every other one. Not just vertical analogies, but analogies horizontally, on every scale.
Take what is true at the level of a community — the “shape” of that community’s organization: now imagine an entire country ? Or scan over and apply it to another community? This is not to say the universe is organized as a perfect fractal; but it’s a framework worth working from.
Take that understanding of a town, and analogize: mainstreet becomes the interstate; the coffee shop becomes the web of Starbuckses; the networks of social relations are scaled up.
Where the analogy is good: we have found potential for understanding something that otherwise was too big to fit in our head. There is no way we can experience a “country” all at once. We can’t even experience a town, probably. (As Robin Dunbar estimated famously: we can only hold 150 human relationships in our head at the same time. Our brain just can’t take anymore.)
When we notice something that doesn’t fit, we get to map out differences. And there is huge understanding in those differences: solar systems don’t quite orbit the black hole at the center of the galaxy the way an electrons do — they are expanding away from the center. This reveals a force not at play (or not yet noticed!) at a smaller level, and a variable we recognize is not yet understood.
If we want to understand bigger, more abstract things, we need to bring it down to the kind of size we can wrap our heads around. And: we have to keep an eye our for what is being lost in the compression — so we don’t end up thinking orange juice is the same as an orange. Or that an Afghan town is to an Afghan city what my town in Pennsylvania is to Harrisburg.
We compare the way a playground functions to the way the world functions, say. Countries are kids, each with their own big personalities writ large, as Ruth Benedict said. It’s a helpful model for identifying moving pieces at play on a larger stage — but there are oversimplifications that might do more harm than good.
“Analogies are only analogies — they are never exact sameness — and must not be carried beyond the limits of the facts which make the thing like the thing but not the same as any other thing.” A guy named Singleton W. Davis wrote that in 1911. A lot of people have said just the same thing, but they’d all have done just the same job here. It’s good to notice when things are the same, too.
And this, then, taps into Gilles Deleuze’s well-put and much loved understanding of how our knowledge works: that identity is made only of difference. We understand what something is only by understanding what it is not.
(A whole lot worth chewing on there, but let’s just say it works for now — because you know it’s gotten dark out because it’s not light anymore, and you know the sun has risen because it wasn’t there before. And you know you’re not me because you know this isn’t a great paragraph.)
Let’s just say we do have the capacity for understanding the country…
We scale up our understanding of something smaller and similar, and we attempt to hold it in our head. Our brains are like hard drives with fixed amounts of space. Analogies are the zip files; and we have to understand our own process of coding so that we don’t read 0001100101100101101001100101001 and think that’s exactly how Shakespeare would have wanted it.
We take some of the brainspace that isn’t directly tied up in Understanding and Remembering Humans, and we apply it to developing and calibrating these analogies. That way, we can incorporate more of the humans we haven’t met into the kinds of understanding we apply to those we have.
The problems arise when the analogies are way off. Like, say: candy-to-people. Skittles standing in for people in a context so heavily infused with politics and Free Will that pieces of candy have never had the faintest common experience as the people they’re analogizing. Donald Trump Jr’s error reminds me of an ancient saying from the early days around the Mars Factory:
Said the red M&M to the brown one:
Nothing. They’re effing M&Ms, they don’t talk.
And that opens a whole can of wormy differences right there.
“Analogies never prove anything,” Singleton said, (and other scholars said, and your mom might have said when you told her disconnecting Mario Kart was like a war crime). They show us where to investigate.
Analogizing a man’s interactions with a bowl of Skittles to a country’s interaction with a population of refugees — nevermind the whole “plucking people up to eat them” thing — isn’t a terrible impulse. It pointed to a scaled-up zoomed-out view worth investigating. In this case, it took just a hot second to look into that mirror to see, not vertical symmetry in this case, but bullshit.
(Trump Jr. was right to call it a “simple metaphor.” But while simple is apt and beautiful in the context of five-ingredient ice cream, “simple” is rarely an option in. Analogies are meant to make your head expand to better fit the world in it — not to shrink a complicated world down enough to fit behind your beady eyes._
But the attempt to transfer perspective from one space to another, from one scale to an entirely other one — that’s still the key to finding ways to understand people at the scale of new human interconnection.
We can’t live with just 150 people in our head anymore — there are just too many ways we’re connected to 1,500 friends on Facebook and 150 million fellow voters, and to 150 million small groups around the world.
Analogy + calibration = some way to start understanding the organic, mushy fractals of human existence.
How’s that for a sentence?