{"id":22569,"date":"2020-04-02T14:36:02","date_gmt":"2020-04-02T18:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=22569"},"modified":"2022-01-16T14:43:19","modified_gmt":"2022-01-16T19:43:19","slug":"covid-19-is-not-a-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=22569","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 is not a metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A quick search reveals scores of articles by people who, like me, have recently read or re-read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor<\/em> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sontag\u2019s thesis is simple: \u201cillness is not a metaphor, and \u2026 the most truthful way of regarding illness\u2014and the healthiest way of being ill\u2014is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (3). She adds, \u201cThe people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease\u2019s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil” (85). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would say: It is wrong to use sick people as assets in arguments, as new reasons for conclusions you already held. If you want to use a disease as a metaphor, ask yourself whether you would make that argument in a sick person’s hearing. If that would be cruel, don’t say it anywhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no such thing as a fact that is innocent of comparison and evaluation, no \u201cwriting degree zero\u201d that lacks metaphor. But we can adopt an ethic of very close attention to known details about our actual fellow human beings, or we can venture into broader speculation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sontag explores how \u201cIllnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society [is] corrupt or unjust.\u201d She shows that \u201cto liken a political event or situation to an illness is to impute guilt, to prescribe punishment.\u201d (72) But little actual insight comes from likening a moral or social problem to a disease, or vice versa. \u201cTraditional disease metaphors are principally a way of being vehement” (83).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a warning against using the pandemic for rhetorical purposes. I am collecting examples for a short commissioned article of political theory that is mostly an argument against<\/em> theorizing casually while people are suffering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sontag’s main examples are cancer and tuberculosis. She argues that they provided rich (but problematic) material for metaphor because their causes were unknown. Their mysterious etiology gave them rhetorical power. In contrast, everyone always understood that syphilis was an infection transmitted through sex, so it never worked as anything but a crude and direct trope. Since we basically understand COVID-19 already, maybe its rhetorical uses will be limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See also: on the moral dangers of clich\u00e9<\/a>; on the proper use of moral clich\u00e9s<\/a>; and on the moral peril of clich\u00e9 and what to do about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A quick search reveals scores of articles by people who, like me, have recently read or re-read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Sontag\u2019s thesis is simple: \u201cillness is not a metaphor, and \u2026 the most truthful way of regarding illness\u2014and the healthiest way of being ill\u2014is one most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pandemic","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22569"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22577,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22569\/revisions\/22577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}