Political analogies: Of cliffs, literature and mathematics

In yesterday's post, I made use of Thomas Schelling's famous (in political science) metaphor of two people, standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, handcuffed together, versus standing at the top of a sloping hillside handcuffed together.

Try this, if it has been a while since you took the SATs.

Analogies are to politics as coffee is to:

a)  computers

b)  pens and paper

c)  books

d)  guitars

Do you have an answer?  The answer is obviously... that the guy who wrote the question is just lookin' around the room at random stuff, and filling in a through d based on an "I spy" kind of thing.  Could I force an answer?  Sure.  Analogies may help me understand politics.  Coffee helps me write!  I do that on a computer.  I'm... doing that now!  I also do that with pens and paper, so, maybe that's b, or a, but I could go either way.  Coffee wakes me up, so it helps me understand books!  C?  It gives me some manual dexterity, as long as it's not too much coffee, so, d?  Maybe we rule out d, because if you start getting the jitters, that'd be bad, but a little might help, right?  There's that cliche of the coffee house guitarist, after all.  So, what's the answer?

Analogies can be tortured.  Press on one hard enough, and it'll give you any answer you want.

And yet, didn't I spend yesterday's post basking in the glory of analogy?  Haven't I spent the Sunday posts in this revamped blog imploring you to do things like think about politics through the lens of literature rather than more conventional political science?  That's... metaphor.  Analogy.  Um...

OK, so this is a somewhat more self-reflective, navel-gazing post, which exists as a kind of a head-check on my own past argumentation.  One of the things that happens when you publish stuff is that it's just... there.  And it remains... there.  Haunting you.  Like a ghost.  Damn, that was a simile, technically, but that's a kind of analogy.  Why does that bug me?

My first book.  Hiring and Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections.  It was a weird book, and overall, I still think, a good book, but one that was sort of out-there.  It was really about conceptual models.  Analogies.  Metaphors and similes.  Here's a popular one.  An election is like a market.  (Simile!)  Since markets depend on "competition," democracy depends on competitive elections.  The whole point of my book was to break down that line of reasoning.  An election is not a market.  It literally is a hiring mechanism, and a competitive election has nothing whatsoever to do with a competitive market.  Instead, it is just a completely bonkers way to hire or fire someone.  You don't flip a coin to decide whom to hire or whether or not to fire someone, and that's just the tip of the iceberg when you start picking apart all of the related concepts of politics, economics and law.  Basically, I was bashing the use of analogies.

George E.P. Box:  All models are wrong.  Some are useful.

Those phrases are separated by a period, not a comma, in conventional writing.  I was hittin' the period pretty hard there.

Metaphors and similes are models.  We don't tend to think of them that way.  We tend to think of them as linguistic flourishes, but they are models.  They guide our thinking.

Mathematical systems are models.  Thomas Schelling, whom I referenced yesterday, bridged the imagistic with the mathematical.  Remember, though, that any mathematical system really is a pure abstraction.  Sure, we can prove a proposition within the rules of the system we devise, but the applicability of that system to our world will always be at least somewhat debatable.  It is dependent on the relationship between the assumptions of our model and the actual world.  You know, that Philip K. Dick thing that doesn't go away when you cease to believe in it.

Game theory, from John Nash through Thomas Schelling and everything that I have ever published is a model.  Or, set of models.  The applicability of any of those models to the real world?  Um...  We're making mathematical analogies.  Thomas Schelling's cliff?  His sloping hillside?  Are those analogies any better than the ones I was bashing in my first book, with that sanctimonious attitude?

Um...

When I scrapped The Unmutual Political Blog and set up this... whatever it is, part of my idea was to spend more time writing weird, conceptual stuff about things like the connections between the modern world and science fiction.  'Cuz that's more fun than going nuts with day-to-day politics in the current era.  Last week, I told you that as politics get stranger, good writers of fiction may be at least as useful as scholars for thinking about what's happening.  Yet, that's even further into the world of metaphor than the market analogy that I spent my first book bashing.

Um...

Head check.

Some are useful...

Some are useful...

Let's return to that second sentence of Boxie's aphorism.  (I can call him that.  He's, like, totally cool with it.  Also, he's dead.  More than cool-- he's cold.)

How do we evaluate the usefulness of a political analogy?  The conventional, political science answer (read: boring answer) is that a model is useful if it makes empirical predictions.  Actually, that's the general scientific answer.  We can make an associated normative argument that an analogy that gives bad advice is a bad analogy, which is closer to what I was doing with Hiring and Firing Public Officials.  The market analogy said that we should encourage competitive elections.  My argument:  don't do that.  Bad advice based on a bad analogy.

What about literature?  What about an author like N.K. Jemisin?  I am pretty consistent in my effusive praise for Jemisin generally, and The Broken Earth trilogy in particular.  If someone wants an example of science fiction that rises to the level of high art, the first place I'll send them these days is The Fifth Season.  Does she make empirical predictions?  I wouldn't say so.  The whole trilogy takes place amid environmental collapse, and I, personally, interpret the trilogy as actually taking place on our Earth, far into the distant future.*  However, that's not to say that Nora Jemisin is making a prediction of total societal collapse, or anything like that.  That's just world-building, and my interpretation is based on a few subtle details, which are debatable.

But, that means we can't test a Jemisin prediction the way we can test, for example, the predictions that Anthony Downs made in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), which has sort of set the stage for my entire subfield of political science since it was published.  As a metaphor.

How do we determine, then, whether or not Jemisin's metaphors are useful, in George E.P. Box's terms?  There's no mystery about what Jemisin was addressing in that trilogy.  Bigotry, environmental collapse, and lots of other big topics that are clearly intended to relate to the here-and-now.  But, without the ability to test predictions in the conventional scientific way, the process by which we evaluate the metaphor must necessarily deviate from how I evaluated the market analogy in my first book.

If you are looking for a clear answer in this post, sorry.  You aren't going to get it here.  This is something that is bugging me.  This is hard.  I see bad social science, and I understand a clear process by which I can evaluate it to be bad.  I understand how to structure my arguments, and the process by which we determine which models work, and which ones don't can be relatively similar from one case to the next.  For all of my analogies-suck posturing in my first book, though, the "some are useful" part of Boxie's aphorism is vital, and the process by which we determine which models are useful gets harder when we deviate from the strictly scientific model.

For all of their visual appeal, Schelling's cliff and hillside analogies were scientific rather than literary models.  They were the basis of mathematical models, and those models give us one particular, and clear method of evaluation, models... analogies though they were.  The process by which we connect them to the real world, then, follows a consistent structure.

Novels?  When well-written, they too are models.  The variability in their structure, though, and in how they relate to our world, will mean that the process by which we evaluate their Box-y usefulness will vary more than conventional scientific rules allow me to write.

So... that was weird and abstract.  I'm just trying to puzzle through some stuff and not contradict myself.  Conclusions?  Uh...



*Jemisin uses the word, "Earth," but there is a single super-continent.  Huh?  Here's the deal.  There was a highly technologically advanced civilization called Syl Anagist, which was responsible for everything going to hell.  They had the technology to affect plate tectonics, and essentially created the precursors to the orogenes, who are the individuals with the power to affect tectonics themselves.  The planet had one supercontinent rather than what we have because Syl Anagist made it that way.  The key for me, though, was emphasis on language.  At several points, characters emphasize the phonemes in, for example, "moon," as a dead word in a dead language, for a very specific reason.  That means they are referencing our language.  In contrast, Jemisin makes it clear in the Dreamblood Duology and the Inheritance Trilogy that she is writing about different worlds altogether.  Feel free to disagree if you have read it, but I take the Broken Earth trilogy as set in a distant future here, after Syl Anagist destroys everything.  You could say I'm an obsessive fan, if I theorize to this degree, even across Jemisin's body of work.