We Need a New Metaphor of Us

Pluralism has a messaging problem. Part of the reason why is that there is no common emotionally intuitive metaphor for the collaborative co-creation of governance across differences that is a pluralistic democracy.

This matters because humans do not think politically through abstract principles alone — we think through metaphor.

While I am constitutionally optimistic, this last challenge of messaging around pluralism is a sticky one. And recently, I had an “aha” moment that helped me understand a little bit better why that is, and what pluralists can do to improve their messaging.

The most common metaphor for “us” is structurally incapable of holding both the diversity of pluralism and the co-creation of governance of a democracy because it defaults either to purity or hierarchy.

We need different metaphors. Here, I’ll walk us through the most common metaphor and how it fails us, why metaphors are so important, and offer my hot take on a few of the best candidates for our shared messaging problem.

The Body is Us

The human body is the oldest, most universal, and most influential metaphor for a social group. The image of the body is helpful in defining community because its skin defines in or out, and knowledge of it and a basic visceral understanding of it as a collection of parts is a universal part of our human, bodily existence.

In the language of linguists, the “social body” is a root metaphor that allows the speaker and audience together to develop a shared, nuanced understanding of the complicated reality of social groups.

The social body can be healthy, be ill, have headship, working members, and functioning organs; all of which means that each individual in a social body is affected as well.

While most folks wouldn’t recognize the phrase “the social body,” pretty much everyone recognizes the “body politic” or “the Body of Christ.”

These “body politic” and “body of Christ” phrases stem from the Greco-Roman political tradition and early Christian traditions. Body metaphors are also endemic to South Asian Hindu traditions and East Asian Confucian traditions. So, the social body metaphor has both shaped and become ingrained in everyday language over thousands of years, shaping—and limiting—our very sense of what it means to belong.

Why This Metaphor Matters

The science of cognitive linguistics tells us that metaphors are what enable wee human brains to make sense of the overwhelming quantity of information coming at us all the time. We really can’t process it all.

Metaphors allow us to “carry over” meaning from one thing to another, helping us understand complex ideas by giving them a familiar shape. I want to stay with metaphors for the moment.

Some metaphors are simple ideas that have lots of ways to call them to mind, and sometimes they become so embedded that we stop noticing them.

That’s important to know because metaphors structure our internal reality. Once we use a metaphor to describe a situation, we then perceive the situation through that lens and act based on that, instead of on the objective situation.

Take “time is money.” We talk about spending, saving, wasting, or investing time—even though time isn’t a material resource. But because the metaphor is so ingrained, it shapes how we behave.

Or “argument is war.” We say:

• “He shot down my argument.”
• “Her critique hit the target.”

Once that “war” idea is activated, we’re more likely to escalate, defend, attack.

So metaphors don’t just help us understand our reality, they create and limit our perceptions of it.

So if the body metaphor shapes and limits our expectations for our society, if it can’t speak to pluralistic governance, it undermines pluralistic governance.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the body metaphor is that it helps us understand very quickly who is in, who is out, and what to do with those who don’t quite fit. That means that the body metaphors we use actually shape social policy and social expectations for belonging and exclusion. That’s a big deal to pluralists.

Exactly how the metaphor shapes exclusionary social policy today is a topic I explored in this paper for the Center for Faith, Identity, and Globalization. Check that out if you’re interested in the mechanics and realities of exclusion and control.

Here, I want to focus on one main issue. The social body has never developed metaphors that describe the collaborative cocreation of governance across difference.

Therefore, its universality means we are fighting a difficult messaging battle, and we cannot use this profoundly influential metaphor in our own language.

Control and Expulsion are Not What We’re Going For

The social body helps people intuitively and emotionally to understand what kind of difference is acceptable and what to do with what doesn’t fit. But the social body tends to resolve difference in only two recurring ways: control or expulsion. In other words, body metaphors naturally convert disagreement about the common good into the illnesses of disobedience or contamination.

A social body can be wildly diverse, but it manages that diversity with hierarchical control.

The Roman Empire is a good example. The empire was astoundingly diverse in language, culture, and religious ideas, and emperors didn’t much care what your identities were. But they did consider failure to pay taxes or follow imperial orders a real sickness in the body. They dealt with that by trying first to “heal the sickness” and control the misbehavior before expulsion. But any hint of rebellion against the empire meant immediate removal, or “amputation of the gangrenous limb.”

On the other hand, a social body can manage diversity by limiting it with strict purity rules.

Christian communities of the first and second centuries are good examples. The Apostle Paul, an educated Greek Jew, used the body metaphor to describe the Christian community like this: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” (1 Cor:12)

Deeply concerned with living and believing right, early Christians jettisoned some of the hierarchical expectations of Roman society (“in Christ there is neither slave nor free” Gal 3:28) and developed collaborative lay leadership. However, Paul’s insistence that “a little yeast leavens a whole loaf” (Gal 5:9) justified the rapid excommunication of those who failed to keep to the standards because one sinner could contaminate the whole. Christian group purity became an enduring theme, along with exile, excommunication, accusations of heresy, and unending amounts of personal hurt.

Neither of these versions of the body is capable of explaining or structuring the collaborative cocreation of governance across difference.

The problem is that these are the two ways that the body metaphor structures diversity. And because the body metaphor is sooooo deeply ingrained in English and in many religious traditions – with very similar patterns of hierarchy or purity – I think that’s one reason that pluralistic messaging is just so hard.

Our most common metaphor for society is just not capable of managing diversity without reliance on a strict hierarchy. And humans absolutely need metaphors to help us process our immensely complex environments.

Boo for pluralists.

Allison K. Ralph is a Senior Research Fellow at Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University and the principal of Cohesion Strategy LLC.