Metaphors in Mind

The Family Metaphors of Invincible

Amazon’s gory animated series, Invincible, can teach us something important about family metaphors. And how the differences in these metaphors frames two, incompatible world-views. That of the Strict Father – and the Nurturant Parent family. (Spoilers ahead.)

Frames & Conceptual World-Views

Before we get into the meat of Invincible, I want to layout a little background. Language is littered with thousands of conceptual metaphors. You get your world-view from a set of conceptual frames in your life experience. To get an idea of what a frame is, think of a restaurant. What can you find there? A Maître D, Cooks, Waiters, Tables, Music – all these comprise the restaurant frame, (with some overlap in the ‘business’ frame.)

Each of the entailments can also call back the restaurant frame. For example, when you think of a Maître D or a Cook, you associate the restaurant. Therefore, it is through the structures of frames that words find meaning. They express how we subconsciously understand reality and the values we each hold. Depending on your life experience, your culture, your background and family, your frames can bring about different values and beliefs, all grounded in the metaphors we use to communicate our ideas.

Frame Semantics

Frame Semantics was discovered by the late Charles Fillmore, professor of Semantics at UC Berkley. In 1977, a trial in Boston came to the attention of Charles Fillmore and George Lakoff. At the time, a doctor was being tried for murder after conducting an abortion. What Fillmore and Lakoff noticed were the differing frames used by the defence attorney and prosecutors. The defence used the word foetus while the prosecuting attorney used the word baby. That is to say, this was a clash of world-views, values and differences in how each side perceived the situation. Above all, it was a clash of two world-views that tie into morality, moral authority, family and, by extension, politics.

Viltrumite Values – Strict Father Family Metaphors

Morality is about well-being and all our ideals are based around what is best for us and how we ought to live. For instance, fairness, justice, virtue, tolerance, freedom, compassion etc. For Omni-Man, what is right is strength. And just like physical strength, moral strength must be built upon – no pain, no gain! The denial of pain is also a form of self-denial and discipline. The values of these family metaphors hold that punishment and pain can be good for you in service of something greater, the moral ideal itself, discipline. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Stiff upper lip. Take it on the chin. 

On the surface, Omni-Man comes across as an up-standing citizen, somebody who has saved the world from peril time and again. The moral strength metaphor considers Evil as a physical force that one must be able to stand-up to.

THE MORAL STRENGTH METAPHOR

Being Upright > Being Good

Being Low > Being Bad

Falling > Doing Evil

A Destabilising Force > Evil (Internal & External)

Strength (To Resist) > Moral Virtue

[Philosophy In The Flesh – Lakoff & Johnson]

Somebody morally weak will not be able to stand up to evil and so will often commit evil. This metaphor regards moral weakness as immoral and sees a lack of self-control, and self indulgence (the refusal to engage in self-denial) as immoral.

Courage & Willpower

If the evil is an internal evil, then Willpower is necessary to overcome it, and is tied to resistance (physical) of the flesh. The seven deadly sins categorise internal conflicts and antagonists for the internal evil. On the other hand, external evil requires Courage to overcome fear and hardship. When Omni-Man tells Mark the truth about his past, he explains that it took all their strength and courage to destroy the weak to make Viltrum an unstoppable force.

On Moral Authority & Moral Order

Moral authority is linked closely with physical control, such as that of a parent over a child. In the family metaphors modelled by Moral Authority and Moral Order, the father has total control and must be obeyed. As a Viltrumite on Earth, Omni-Man does not uphold his true values, but synchronises with the opposite moral structure of Nurturant Parent. This is only made clear during Mark’s confrontation with his all powerful father and the mask is finally off. To quote Omni-Man:

I was wrong to raise you as a human! I should have prepared you better, taught you more. Your life has been soft and painless. You’re a Viltrumite in blood only. Well your true education begins – now!

Paternalism is about parental authority in the family. There are legitimate reasons for authority, for instance preventing your child from endangering themselves and physically stepping in to save them. Whereas absolute authority deems that the child has a moral obligation to obey their parents no matter what.

Moral Order Metaphors

There are many different kinds of moral authority. Omni-Man happens to be almost god-like in his power and a master over his son. Since the Viltrumites are hardened by war and violence, their culture projects a clear hierarchical one with the strongest of them, Grand Regent Thragg, at the top. The moral order is a type of Folk Theory of Natural Order based on physical dominance and has some biblical and religious linkages. The dominance hierarchy looks like this:

God is naturally more powerful than people (& has moral authority over people.)

People are naturally more powerful than nature (moral authority over animals, plants, objects etc)

Adults are more powerful than/have moral authority over children

Men are more powerful than/have moral authority over women.

The Folk Theory here mixes with the ‘natural’ metaphor to make a hierarchy of power relations, moral superiority and authority. This obliges people to their duties and their roles within a Viltrum society. Furthermore, it is an example of a framing we can all clearly recognise, even though we may not have lived it.

Consequences Of The Moral Order

Omni-Man retains his responsibility towards his son, Mark. When his son first gets his powers, Omni-Man is keen to train him, although, initially reserved about it. This reservation is later revealed because he knows he will have to kill Mark if he gets in his way, or if Mark does not see things on his terms. Omni-Man’s ‘loyalty’ to Viltrum brings to the foreground his true values and beliefs. He tells Mark that he loved his mother, Debbie, like a ‘pet’ a subhuman category in the hierarchy of this moral order.

In Philosophy In The Flesh, there are consequences to this metaphor of Moral Order that lead to a repugnant and dangerous world-view, Quote:

The metaphor legitimises a certain class of existing power relations as being natural and therefore moral. In this way, it makes certain social movements, such as feminism, appear to be unnatural and therefore counter to the moral order. It legitimises the view that nature is a resource for humans and that humans should be good stewards of that resource…It undermines alternative views of nature.

In short, the Moral Order metaphor gives us a window into the meaning of fascism, and how people may fall in line to their duties by framing their understanding of reality, through this world-view, as upright and virtuous. After all, Omni-Man truly believes Earth will benefit from being subservient to Viltrum. But, there is just one small matter within this character’s internal struggle that’s worth exploring.

Nurturant Parent Family Morality

The principle value here is that for children to be fulfilled and happy in life and to become nurturant themselves. It involves caring for others, living as happily as possible and finding meaning from mutual interaction and care. This model puts empathy at the forefront with cooperation and kindness and the maintenance of social ties as supportive pillars. To do this requires strength, respect, self-discipline and self-reliance that emerges through caring and being cared for. Debbie, Mark’s mother and Omni-Man’s wife, represents the Nurturant Parent and upholds these values. During the scene where Omni-Man is beating Mark to death, he slips into a memory, a flashback of his younger son playing baseball. It’s at this point Debbie reminds Omni-Man:

Look at Mark! You and I, we made him. He’s ours. When he feels joy, we feel joy. See that look on his face? How can you see that and not feel the same way? As we get older it’s harder to feel that.

Her nurturing attitude extends to Omni-Man here, teaches him the ways of people on earth, and for a moment she reaches him and he feels that joy. This pivotal moment is what ultimately saves Mark’s life in the future and prevents Omni-Man from killing him. He had not the willpower to battle this internal conflict and so, in the end, he flees the planet to retain his self-denial and recuperate his integrity.

Strict Father Vs The Nurturant Parent

The nurturant Parent frame is very different from the Strict Father frame, but they share a commonality. Both moral systems assume their children will carry on the values of their upbringing. Parents of the strict model will teach their children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and tighten their belts. They’ll teach them that the world is cruel and you must be strong and not emotionally burdened in order to face it. In this way the child takes self-discipline into adulthood and disciplines others. On the other hand, the Nurturant Parent hope that their model of love and care is incorporated to eventually become self-nurturant (to take care of one’s self) and others. The nurturant model also has some religious links to the Virgin Mary in Catholicism, and in the kabbalistic traditions in Judaism. Both models understand strength differently, yet both subscribe to Moral Strength.

It’s worth mentioning that the lived experience of family will seldom measure up to these two idealised family metaphors. They are conceptual metaphorical values that say something about our cognitive world-view. When we think about political messaging, when we listen to presidential speeches, we hear these frames and metaphors take center stage. Family values play a huge role here. And so too does empathy. The type of leaders leaning either Democrat or Republican, Tory or Labour, can reflect either a Strict Father tone of voice, or a Nurturant Parent, depending on the values of the demographic they wish to address.

Family Values in Political Speeches

The speech writers for Obama’s campaign understood their political messaging needed to be tied into family, unity, empathy and nurturance. I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Obama emphasised one United States of America, and he ran on Hope. By contrast, Trump’s campaign to Make America Great Again framed the country as broken, disunited, emphasised wealth, money, jobs, and touted the need for a strong leader who has the strength and courage to tell it as it is and fight the real evil and external forces of China, or Isis or Mexican immigrants. Trump ran on a campaign of hate and fear. 

Argument Is Struggle & The Family of Man Metaphor

One of the first intuitive things we learn about childhood is that Argument is Struggle. [This maps onto our language in terms of Argument is War metaphors, which you can read more about, here.] We learn about struggle and argumentation together, and this later extends to more violent iterations in later life. What’s important to notice here, is that just like in the courtroom abortion case, the values of the two moral world-views discussed will not align. One sees the other as weakness, while other sees one as depraved. This difference produces a tension, an on-going struggle to resolve our differences and alter how we perceive our reality.

In Philosophy In The Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson explore THE FAMILY OF MAN METAPHOR, which frames the family metaphors as humanity in one large family. It binds a moral obligation to all people, and calls us to treat one another as we do our own family. This framework entails family, children, moral relations, moral authorities, family morality and nurturance as human kind, human being, universal relations, authorities, moralities and universal moral nurturance. As a model, it certainly feels more inclusive. Perhaps future political messaging will speak of unity and inclusion with the Family of Man Metaphor in mind. If we accept that empathy can change the mind of a dangerous bi-conceptual thinker like Omni-Man, who knows, maybe there’s hope in its real world practical application as well.

Conceptual metaphors are not just tools for poetry. They reflect the way we think and understand our reality. A great deal of our subjective life is rich in judgements about abstract things. Consider the phrases “I got a good grasp of her idea,” or “that idea flew right over my head.” We use these conceptual metaphors to talk about one domain of experience (ideas as a subjective experience) in terms of another (sensorimotor experiences to catch or miss.) Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible because there are metaphor circuits (gestalts) in our brains. And this leads to some very interesting conclusion about how we see the world and make meaning. But what is most striking about this discovery is that there are universal conceptual metaphors in all human cultures around the world that present a common understanding of how meaning is made.

From Physical To Abstract Concepts

How we experience reality grounds how we conceptualise something else. This is why ‘stock markets fall’ and why ‘rates skyrocket,’ because we conceptualise the non-physical in terms of the physical. In their groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explore how the brain makes meaning from an embodied mind. A deeper dive into these discoveries can be found in the book Philosophy In The Flesh, which explores in detail how the brain does this, crediting discoveries and investigations by prominent figures in cognitive science.

Primary Metaphors

The most important realisation was the significance of Primary Metaphors. Since most of how we reason and conceptualise things come from our physical sensorimotor domains of experience, it stands to reason that the sensorimotor cortex became the locus of inquiry. What emerged from the research were metaphors consistently appearing cross-culturally in many languages, such as Affection Is Warmth (the primary experience being initiated as a baby held affectionately.) Another is Important Is Big, (a primary experience based in the childhood experience of your giant guardians watching over you.) Or what about Happy Is Up (an experience primarily in being happy and energetic as upright in posture and orientation.) Our bodies are always sensing temperature, verticality and objects, which is why these experiences are the prime domains for other metaphorical networks.

These associations are not conscious, they are a product of millions of neural connections being recruited to communicate an experience coherently in any given culture. This coherence relates to how we reason about reality and understand one another, and is also why new metaphors may only find niche appeal to subcultural groups. But how do our brains first make these connections? What are the conditions before the conceptual metaphors that allows the brain to achieve these neural recruitments?

Conflation & Language Development

During his research into conflation, Christopher Johnson learned that connections between two domains in early childhood development (like seeing and knowing) are coactive and experienced together. Later in development there is a secondary stage of differentiation, whereby these previously coactive domains are metaphorical sources and targets for more complex expressions and understandings. So, knowing is seeing for a baby, while something can be illuminating for an older child who can differentiate the meaning from the coactive experience. It is from this conflation that primary metaphors are made, later growing to more complex metaphors. But this raises more questions. How is the brain able to make assessments about the world outside itself? Is there are way it specifically speaks to its various different elements? And when we use terms like into and out of, how can the brain manage these concepts as merely a structure for sensory inputs?

Image Schema & Spatial-Relations

It turns out that the heart of our conceptual system are concepts of spatial-relations that help us make sense of our environments.  These concepts are not simple and vary wildly from language-to-language. We impose them onto our physical world. Take for instance, a rock. We impose upon the rock object a front-back orientation. (E.g. Where is the ball? It’s in-front of the rock.) A rock doesn’t have an inherent front or back until we put it there.

Another example of this is the phrase into, a composite of the elementary relations in and to. The word on is composed of elementary spatial relations above, in contact with, and supported by. These are called image schema. A container schema frames how we understand containment, from boxes to rooms to houses – anything with an interior, a boundary and an exterior. Another sort of frame is a source-path-goal schema with a trajectory that moves through it. Incredibly, we infer from this metaphors that express time passing by, or ideas as objects we didn’t catch.

You can think of image schemas as circuit maps in the brain. How these maps communicate determines how well we understand new concepts.

Neural Binding

Hold tight, this bit gets a little heavy. Thoughts are physical circuits embodied in the brain. People’s brains have several functions and each function has a map of the body. The motor cortex has one, so too does the sensory cortex, your visual cortex and so on. Brain chemicals help to bind neurons in order to build these topographical maps and these circuits fire repeatedly to strengthen the synapses and reinforce learning. (This is known as Hebbian learning.) So when we see a glass fill with water, we understand more is up. Two parts of the brain are being activated, a schema for verticality, and for quantity. The more they activate together the stronger the circuit, until it becomes the metaphor More Is Up. With the right connections across maps, our brains compute containment, motion, lines, and a range of other image schema in much the same way.

Therefore, when we understand into, our brain links several maps through neural binding. For example, In is a containment schema. It links to the source-path-goal schema To, which itself is a whole schema with three semantic roles (a source domain, a path and a goal.) When we understand new concepts, our brains recruit pre-existing neural maps (neural recruitment) to make sense of new ideas.

Systematic Metaphor

So, you may be wondering at this point, why is this important? The systematicity of metaphorical concepts means the way we understand one thing shapes how we talk about it. Since it shapes how we talk about it, it also shapes our behaviour. For example, consider the metaphor Argument Is War. There are linguistic expressions for talking about argument in terms of warfare. She shot down my argument. He’s dodging the point. She’s gaining ground. His position is indefensible. When we talk about the aspects of battle, we highlight the conflict aspects but inevitably hide other concepts, like collaboration or constructive learning as in the metaphor Arguments are Buildings. 

“Corporations Are People, My Friend”

In 2011, Presidential Candidate, Mitt Romney, set the record straight during the Iowa State Fair. “Corporations are people, my friend.” The statement caused quite a stir with his audience, but not long after, corporate personhood was endorsed by the Supreme Court. What’s more, according to Huffpost, these institutions have been legally endowed with more rights than individuals. What this demonstrates is the powerful nature of conceptual metaphors in changing our reality. Supposing, in our crisis-ridden-world, that the COVID19 virus had been framed as a Thief, or the Earth as a Person, how different our understanding of complex systems like viruses and climate change might be. What systematic entailments would follow if such aspects were more common place in our conceptual metaphors? Would it make them easier to understand? Would that understanding change our behaviour?

Well, yes and no – as with most things, there’s a catch. Just as we don’t all accept that corporations are people, many would not so easily accept other innovative metaphors. They first need to be grounded based on coherent structures. And to do that, we must meet people where they are at and understand their values. Truth depends on understanding, and we are not all equipped to understand a new domain of experience when the gestalt circuits are not in place to do so.

New Realities

Nevertheless, metaphors are pervasive in our lives and these discoveries have come at a time most needed. Our myths of pure objectivism can no longer weave together the fabric of our fragile world. Science and innovation alone can no longer promise to save us from a horrifying path of mass extinction. Humanity has always been able to change the world through its ability to conceptualize cognitively and reinvent itself, a stable fact we must not take for granted now. We have the ability to think and build something new, and it seems we will need new metaphors and narratives to do so. Cognitive science has overcome a traditional view of mind and matter as separate and distinct. In fact, they appear to be two aspects of life – process and structure. If mind is process and matter is structure, then we have the power to construct and actualize new realities.

To change your mind is to change your brain, a potential that can change the world.