The Allure of Faulty Analogies
Italian astronomer Francesco Sizzi posed this analogy in the 17th century: “There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. From this and many other similarities in nature … we gather that the number of planets must necessarily be seven.” Today we see this as nonsense, but the analogy had traction half a millennium ago.
Analogies are still popular - and often as ill-founded. An analogy proposes a logical connection between one thing (the source) and another (the target). When 7,000 shoes were left at the Capitol to represent victims of gun violence, a pro-gun analogy showed the shoes of Holocaust victims, arguing that if they had guns they would have prevented their extermination at the hands of the Nazis. An analogy supporting gun laws argued that a government that tests food stamp recipients for drugs should be allowed to test the mental health of prospective gun owners.
Analogies can be as seductive. They engage our emotions - often a primary goal - but don’t necessarily lead to careful thinking. Analogies are constructed to suggest a complex issue is easy to understand, but complex issues require complex thinking. Further, analogies by themselves don’t prove anything. They offer surface “explanations.” They try to transfer feelings of certainty about one thing to another. An analogy is often an attempt to frame an issue, diverting us from other ways of considering it. If we create an analogy that illegal immigration is an invasion, for example, we accept a law enforcement or military frame for dealing with it and ignore potentially useful economic, humanitarian, and legislative frames.
Faced with an analogy, one key step is to check your emotional reaction. If you find your emotions heightened, stop and step away from it until you can calm down. Another key step is to ask: who is presenting it? What is their motivation/interest? In the posts above, advocacy groups are clearly the sponsors. That should signal the need to think more carefully.
In their book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May suggest an essential next step: how are the two things compared similar and how are they different? In the case of tests for gun purchasers, one similarity is that there are tests for drug use and for mental illness. Another is that drug use and mental illness are both social problems. But what about the differences? Guns and food stamps are very different things. Gun ownership is a legally-protected right. Food stamps are a legally-granted government benefit. We don’t test for every Constitutional right (e.g. the right to vote).
Comparing similarities and differences suggests another Neustadt and May step: What is the historical context for the analogy and is that history applicable to the argument made? This would reveal that the Nazis actually relaxed gun ownership laws for most Germans (not Jews, however). For those who had guns, were they of any use in halting the Nazi terror? The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising resulted in about 7,000 deaths of Jews and the deportation of 50,000, compared to estimates of at most the deaths of a few hundred German soldiers. The power of the Nazi state was overwhelming to any domestic resistance. While that uprising was heroic, the vast majority of Germans who had guns never used them to try to stop Hitler.
In evaluating an analogy, it’s also helpful to ask: what might be unintended consequences of the action proposed? Would unrestricted gun ownership lead to more violence and death? More resistance to legitimate government action? Could mandatory mental health testing stigmatize millions of Americans? Would it be an invasion of privacy? Would files be kept for other uses?
Analogies aren’t always faulty, of course. One of the most popular is the appeasement analogy, arguing that armed invasion of another nation must be resisted or we repeat what happened when Europe ignored Hitler’s takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, ultimately leading to World War II. President George H.W. Bush used this analogy when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, saying in part: “Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930's, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.” The First Gulf War was a success and ended when Iraqi forces had been driven out of Kuwait. In 1950, President Truman appropriately invoked the appeasement analogy when North Korea invaded South Korea. Yet he showed the danger of allowing a good analogy to be forgotten, leading to actions going well beyond it. Having pushed North Korean forces back across the 38th parallel, he decided to expand war aims to take all of Korea and make it a democracy. That drew in hundreds of thousands of Red Chinese troops, leading to a military stalemate and an armistice that today confronts us with a nuclear-armed North Korea.
As Sigmund Freud put it, is: “Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.” That is their benefit – and their drawback.
Photo Credit: ManvendraPSingh@pixabay.com
