On 25 November 2010, Melvyn Bragg and his In Our Time guests discussed the history of metaphor, famously encapsulated in Shakespeare's As You Like It, where the melancholy Jaques declares: "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players."
Generally, the use of metaphor gets the thumbs up. Yet metaphor has its dark side too: e.g. Jonathan Haidt argues that viscera and emotion often drive our decision-making, with conscious cognition mopping up afterward, trying to come up with rationalisations for that gut decision. Haidt even suggests that part of the emotional contagion of the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda arose from the fact that when militant Hutu propagandists called for the eradication of the Tutsi, they iconically referred to them as "cockroaches".
(Will we individually, or as societies, ever to be able to "count to 10" before launching ourselves into such negative spirals?)
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