This is a thoughtful item and pleasing to read and contemplate. We do use our metaphors far too loosely to inform and instruct our culture and decisions.
It is true that the
organization is constructed like a machine, at least in the minds of the participants. To that extent it is well and good and
successful. Yet this does not describe
the actual life experience of the human participants. My own efforts go way beyond such a concept
and carefully avoid such a structure to advance society. There it becomes a proven mistake.
We will populate the globe
with one hundred billion souls and these are best understood as one billion
natural geographically attached communities.
Participation in more complex structures will always be temporary and
mission driven. We need to perfect that
separation and natural utility.
Jesus Is an Economic
Engine: Dismantling the Metaphoric Mechanization of Everything
"We are all toadies to the
fashionable metaphor of the hour. Great is he who imposes the metaphor." -
Robert Frost (1)
In President Barack Obama's
first hundred days in office, as the Great Recession crested, with nearly
600,000 jobs lost in the previous month, foreclosures ripping communities apart
throughout the nation and General Motors on the edge of collapse, Obama needed
to find a way to buoy the waning tide of euphoria for "hope" and
"change" that swept him into power. While his hundred day speech covered the headlines, it was a little-heard set of remarks on a jobless report the next week that created one of
Obama's most enduring linguistic legacies, one to rival "hope," and
one that has changed the way we talk about not just the economy, but all
aspects of life: the "economic engine."
"Although we have a
long way to go before we can put this recession behind us, the gears of
our economic engine do appear
... to be slowly turning once again," Obama announced, describing his intention to invest in retraining opportunities
for displaced workers in community colleges (such as the one where I teach).
Not long after this speech, the phrase economic
engine - which had been used in no major headlines before this -
flooded the US press, according to data from Google Trends. Soon after, it wasn't just the economy that was an engine.
Indeed, everything now is a potential economic
engine: musical theater, national parks, lakes, polluted mines,families, Hillary Clinton, and even Jesus.
Yes, that's right -
"Jesus is an economic engine," wrote one pastor, in jest. And if
Jesus can be a machine, who can't be?
Inside the Economic Engine
Jesus aside (for
now), economic engine seems like
a rather innocuous phrase - especially when applied only to the economy itself.
To refer to the economy as an engine doesn't even seem particularly metaphoric,
as our economy is run on engines, and if the engines stop, our economy
collapses. Further, it doesn't seem original, as Christopher Werth reports
for NPR: "Since the Industrial Revolution, there's one metaphor
that's come to dominate the way we all talk about economics: the idea that the
economy is a 'machine.'" And in our automotive, automated culture, the
engine is the dominant symbol and reality of American life: Thus, an economic engine feels
completely literal, utterly commonsense. If anything, Obama selected the
most uncontroversial, most unchallenging, most status quo way to describe the
economy.
Because it hides in plain
sight, the economic engine is
"the fashionable metaphor of the hour." Unlike "hope" and
"change," which are inextricably linked to Obama, this linguistic
legacy travels unseen across the ideological spectrum, employed in earnest by
conservative pastors, Tea Partiers, Democrats, and unwitting reporters. The economic engine metaphor is
so fashionable - so deeply entrenched in our history and culture - that it's
barely noticed and its linguistic implications vaguely understood. It's this
invisible popularity that makes it so powerful. And while the power of metaphor
may seem trivial, one important to poets like Frost only, it isn't just about
poetry, nor rhetorical flourish - metaphor frames the way we see and understand
the world, as poets and politicians both know. (2) Thus, metaphor is as central to public policy as to poetry - and
in both, a poor metaphor leaves its public impoverished and misled.
While it may be part of common
usage, economic engine is a
profoundly misleading metaphor - and not just when applied to Jesus. And while
our economy currently runs on machines, it is not a machine itself - no, the
economy consists of actual human beings working, people doing things for other
people. Sure, we use machines to increase our efficiency and productivity, but
we are not pistons, nor gears in an engine, as the metaphor implies. We live; we have passions; we have families, communities - to
mechanize us in words is to strip us of our humanity in reality. It is far
easier easy to wear out a part of an engine than it is to exploit a single
mother caring for small children by providing no job security, no health
benefits and a wage that can't provide food for those children. And since the
Industrial Revolution, this poor metaphor has enabled and even encouraged such
abuse of workers in the name of efficiency,
productivity, and "economic progress."
In a brilliant linguistic
pivot, Obama freed this powerfully misleading metaphor from the shackles of the
economic jargon, allowing it to define all aspects of human experience: now, it
is not just that the economy is an engine, but also, everything else in the
world can be an economic engine.
In other words, by turning the phrase into an adjective, economic engine could now
go viral, attaching itself to the most unusual, unlikely, and inapt nouns -
such as Jesus. Now, everything - our religions, our lakes, our parks, our
schools - can be metaphorically mechanized, and thus understood and valued
solely in terms of terms of economic value and productivity.
The Ghost in the Teaching
Machine
As an educator, I find
it sacrilegious to the soul of public education to imagine our school system as
an economic engine - and
unfortunately, this is where the misleading metaphor has exercised its most
power. Obama has placed the full weight of his executive power in imposing
the engine metaphor onto our
public school system, recasting learning as a primarily economic - and
essentially mechanical - enterprise. Obama's entire education policy is explicitly framed
around the idea of education as an engine for unimpeded economic expansion: "America's education system has always been one
of our greatest sources of strength and global economic competitiveness, as
well as an engine of progress in science, technology and
the arts" (emphasis added). Further, the vocabulary of the engine is
beneath all the Obama's discussions of education - phrases like efficiency and acceleration - are both
common in speeches and official documents. Obama's signature education
policy Race to the Top reinforces
the metaphor, casting education as the motor which will help us speed past
other countries, ensuring our position as an economic superpower. Most notably,
the Obama administration dubs the education system the "cradle-to-career pipeline," suggesting that
children are the fuel for the engine, a natural resource pumped out of our
communities, and used to drive American economic supremacy (for a lush visual
representation of this metaphor, see my comic with Josh Neufeld, "This School is Not a Pipe." (3)
In this case, it would
be preferable if Obama's discourse on education was just poetic flourish:
Unfortunately, it accurately depicts his administration's approach to running
the school system as if it were an engine, one used primarily for powering
industry. Most obviously, Obama has not just maintained, but extended the
scope of President George W. Bush's No
Child Left Behind high-stakes standardized testing machine.
Since he stepped into office, Obama has sought ways to make the educational
engine run more efficiently, by giving corporate America - and Silicon Valley
in particular - a major hand in the design, as we heard in a 2014 speech: "And I want to acknowledge, by the way - we've got
companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, Verizon - they're going to help
students and teachers use the latest tools to accelerate learning,"
as if education is a process which can be accelerated
by tools, like an engine in need of a tune-up. Indeed, Race to the Top - and the
now established
corporate/tech/government network engineering its
ascent - only makes sense if you can imagine children and teachers as uniformly
sized pistons, rather than diverse, individual citizens in a democratic state
(of course, this is the perfect educational system for children if the economic
system treats their parents the same way).
No doubt, public education
is literally becoming this metaphor, an economic
engine designed and engineered by politicians in federal and state
governments to serve corporate America. This is not to say that preparing
students for work is not one very important function of schooling, but it is
not the only function - nor is it the most important one. Under the imposition
of this mechanical metaphor, all other educational purposes - personal
exploration, cultural awareness, physical and mental health, spiritual
understanding, democratic engagement, and education as an end in itself - have
become inefficiencies, sources of friction, impediments to acceleration in the
engine, as are children and adults who don't fit the "standard,"
because they have different learning styles, a different culture, a lower
socioeconomic background, or dissenting thoughts.
Education - except that
which directly serves economic growth - becomes just a ghost in the machine.
The Metaphor Less Traveled
To stop the spread of this
linguistic virus, one which poses a real threat not just to our economy, but
also to our education system, our democracy and our environment, we must
inoculate our minds against this misleading mechanical metaphor, to ensure that
we don't become "toadies to the dominant metaphor," as Robert Frost
warns us.
This is no easy task.
First, we must dismantle
and dispose of the longstanding, Industrial Revolution-era metaphor of economy
as a gas-guzzling, smog-belching machine. Indeed, it is this very metaphor -
and the policies that went with it - that resulted in the economic collapse of
2009, and will ensure a similar economic collapse, if left to the same
mindless, mechanical ideology. And beyond economy, this same Industrial
Revolution-era mindset of constant acceleration - and thus constant consumption
of natural resources to support it - endangers our very existence through
climate change.
In the machine's place,
we can plant a new metaphor for the economy - perhaps an ecosystem,
as Princeton's Tim Leonard has suggested, one in which equilibrium and quality of life
are the dominant values (though, obviously, this metaphor has its own
sand-trap, as equilibrium can be achieved in all sorts of brutal ways in the natural
world). An economic ecology, viewed in the most constructive light, encourages
collaboration, environmental and cultural awareness, and most of all, an
understanding that the economic system is composed of living, breathing
organisms, and not unfeeling machines. Such a powerful, creative,
life-affirming metaphor could then spread across other institutions - such as
education and democracy - healing the damage wrought by generations of grinding
gears, directing us from a self-destructive,
violent empire, and towards a sustainable
civil society.
The path of a new metaphor,
requiring a new, more humane language of economics, of education, of American
life, is rough one, as it asks us to climb linguistic pathways well outside the
well-trod discourse. But here again, Frost advises us on our next step forward
(with a little remixing assistance):
"I shall be telling
this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two metaphors diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference." (4)
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two metaphors diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference." (4)
Notes:
(1) See the complete 1936 letter from Robert Frost to Louis
Untermeyer in Hass, Robert Bernard. Going by Contraries: Robert Frost's
Conflict with Science. University of Virginia Press. 2002. Pages 191 – 192.
(2) For more on the cognitive-linguistic foundations of metaphor,
see: Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. University of
Chicago Press. 1980.
(3) For much more on the technicalization of education, see my
October 2013 essay for Truthout "The Answer to the Great Question of
Education Reform? The Number 42."
(4) See the original poem: Frost, Robert. "The Road Not
Taken." Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt. 1920.
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