Nbadan
03-13-2005, 03:47 PM
And they say Irony is dead...
When Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, was on the NPR program "Fresh Air" a while back, he casually made a comparison that left the host, Terry Gross, sputtering in disbelief. "Excuse me," she said. "Did you just ... compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?" Yes, he did.
We are living in the age of the false, and often shameless, analogy. A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a new documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Kenneth Lay compares attacks on his company to the terrorist attacks on the United States.
Intentionally misleading comparisons are becoming the dominant mode of public discourse. The ability to tell true analogies from false ones has never been more important. But to make room for the new essay portion of the SAT that was rolled out this weekend with much fanfare, the College Board has unceremoniously dropped the test's analogy questions, saying blandly that analogical reasoning will still be assessed "in the short and long reading passages."
Replacing logic questions with writing is perfectly in keeping with these instant-messaging, 500-cable-channel times, when the emphasis is on communicating for the sake of communicating rather than on having something meaningful to say. Obviously, every American should be able to write, and write well. But if forced to choose between a citizenry that can produce a good 25-minute writing sample or spot a bad analogy, we would be better off with a nation of analogists.
To the literature of embarrassing childhood revelations, let me add this: When I was growing up there was a Miller Analogies workbook on our living room bookshelf, and I spent many a happy hour flipping through the pages and quizzing myself. The questions looked something like this:
Poverty: money::
(A)Wealth: gold; (B) Hunger: food; (C) Car: Driver; (D) Cook: Stove.
On a good day, I would guess (B), because just as poverty stems from a shortage of money, hunger is the result of a shortage of food.
Questions of this sort are the building blocks of arguments by analogy, which are a mainstay of many disciplines. Philosophers like Aristotle relied on analogies to reason about man and nature. Scientists have long analogized from things they know to things they do not, to form hypotheses and plot experiments.
Law is almost entirely dependent on analogies. In my first year of law school, my contracts professor, Gerald Frug, said something brilliant in its simplicity: "All things are alike in some ways and different in other ways." It was a warning that for the next three years, we would hear endless arguments that a case must be decided a particular way because a previous case or a statute required it. The two cases, or the case and the statute, would always be alike in some ways and different in others - and law school was really about arguing whether the similarities or the differences were more important.
Nowhere are analogies more central than in politics. When Karl Marx wanted to arouse the workers of the world, he compared the proletariat's condition to slavery and, in "The Communist Manifesto," urged them to throw off their figurative chains. When Roosevelt argued for a balanced budget, he put it in homespun terms. "Any government, like any family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns," he said. "But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse."
The power of an analogy is that it can persuade people to transfer the feeling of certainty they have about one subject to another subject about which they may not have formed an opinion. But analogies are often undependable. Their weakness is that they rely on the dubious principle that, as one logic textbook puts it, "because two things are similar in some respects they are similar in some other respects." An error-producing "fallacy of weak analogy" results when relevant differences outweigh relevant similarities. On "Fresh Air," Mr. Norquist seized on a small similarity between the estate tax and Nazism and ignored the big difference: that the Holocaust, but not the estate tax, involved the murder of millions of people.
The last election was decided, in significant part, on specious analogies. A man who went to war, and came back to protest that war, was compared - by a group whose name helpfully contained the phrase "for truth" - to men who betray their country. Today, the federal tax system - which through much of the nation's history kept government income and expenditures in rough balance - is being compared to "theft" and recklessly dismantled.
The College Board's Web site explanation that analogies are being dropped because they are "less connected to the current high school curriculum" itself shows a stunning lack of logic, since it does not explain what the "less connected" refers to. Less connected than they used to be? Than other parts of the test? But in any case, it is a dangerous concession. Since the SAT no longer contains analogy questions, here is one: A nation whose citizens cannot tell a true analogy from a false one is like - fill in your own image for precipitous decline.
By ADAM COHEN, Op-Ed NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/opinion/13sun3.html)
Repeat after me:
"Comprehending analogous thinking gives one the power to NOT be persuaded by bogus and nonsensical allegories". The new essay part of the SAT should not be a replacement for this type of creative and critical thinking, but an addition too.
When Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, was on the NPR program "Fresh Air" a while back, he casually made a comparison that left the host, Terry Gross, sputtering in disbelief. "Excuse me," she said. "Did you just ... compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?" Yes, he did.
We are living in the age of the false, and often shameless, analogy. A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a new documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Kenneth Lay compares attacks on his company to the terrorist attacks on the United States.
Intentionally misleading comparisons are becoming the dominant mode of public discourse. The ability to tell true analogies from false ones has never been more important. But to make room for the new essay portion of the SAT that was rolled out this weekend with much fanfare, the College Board has unceremoniously dropped the test's analogy questions, saying blandly that analogical reasoning will still be assessed "in the short and long reading passages."
Replacing logic questions with writing is perfectly in keeping with these instant-messaging, 500-cable-channel times, when the emphasis is on communicating for the sake of communicating rather than on having something meaningful to say. Obviously, every American should be able to write, and write well. But if forced to choose between a citizenry that can produce a good 25-minute writing sample or spot a bad analogy, we would be better off with a nation of analogists.
To the literature of embarrassing childhood revelations, let me add this: When I was growing up there was a Miller Analogies workbook on our living room bookshelf, and I spent many a happy hour flipping through the pages and quizzing myself. The questions looked something like this:
Poverty: money::
(A)Wealth: gold; (B) Hunger: food; (C) Car: Driver; (D) Cook: Stove.
On a good day, I would guess (B), because just as poverty stems from a shortage of money, hunger is the result of a shortage of food.
Questions of this sort are the building blocks of arguments by analogy, which are a mainstay of many disciplines. Philosophers like Aristotle relied on analogies to reason about man and nature. Scientists have long analogized from things they know to things they do not, to form hypotheses and plot experiments.
Law is almost entirely dependent on analogies. In my first year of law school, my contracts professor, Gerald Frug, said something brilliant in its simplicity: "All things are alike in some ways and different in other ways." It was a warning that for the next three years, we would hear endless arguments that a case must be decided a particular way because a previous case or a statute required it. The two cases, or the case and the statute, would always be alike in some ways and different in others - and law school was really about arguing whether the similarities or the differences were more important.
Nowhere are analogies more central than in politics. When Karl Marx wanted to arouse the workers of the world, he compared the proletariat's condition to slavery and, in "The Communist Manifesto," urged them to throw off their figurative chains. When Roosevelt argued for a balanced budget, he put it in homespun terms. "Any government, like any family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns," he said. "But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse."
The power of an analogy is that it can persuade people to transfer the feeling of certainty they have about one subject to another subject about which they may not have formed an opinion. But analogies are often undependable. Their weakness is that they rely on the dubious principle that, as one logic textbook puts it, "because two things are similar in some respects they are similar in some other respects." An error-producing "fallacy of weak analogy" results when relevant differences outweigh relevant similarities. On "Fresh Air," Mr. Norquist seized on a small similarity between the estate tax and Nazism and ignored the big difference: that the Holocaust, but not the estate tax, involved the murder of millions of people.
The last election was decided, in significant part, on specious analogies. A man who went to war, and came back to protest that war, was compared - by a group whose name helpfully contained the phrase "for truth" - to men who betray their country. Today, the federal tax system - which through much of the nation's history kept government income and expenditures in rough balance - is being compared to "theft" and recklessly dismantled.
The College Board's Web site explanation that analogies are being dropped because they are "less connected to the current high school curriculum" itself shows a stunning lack of logic, since it does not explain what the "less connected" refers to. Less connected than they used to be? Than other parts of the test? But in any case, it is a dangerous concession. Since the SAT no longer contains analogy questions, here is one: A nation whose citizens cannot tell a true analogy from a false one is like - fill in your own image for precipitous decline.
By ADAM COHEN, Op-Ed NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/opinion/13sun3.html)
Repeat after me:
"Comprehending analogous thinking gives one the power to NOT be persuaded by bogus and nonsensical allegories". The new essay part of the SAT should not be a replacement for this type of creative and critical thinking, but an addition too.