Volunteerism

Probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my life has been my experience as a volunteer for the Extra-Judicial Youth Measures and Sanctions Program form the John Howard Society of Kitchener/Waterloo. Founded on the belief that everyone deserves second chances, the John Howard Society provides counselling, support, and opportunities for people who have broken the law. In my role, I represent the Kitchener/Waterloo community and discuss the consequences and implications of crime with young offenders who have been diverted by the courts—this means that a judge or the police feel the offender deserves the opportunity to perform services in lieu of criminal charges.

Every two weeks, once around 7:00 and again around 8:00, I meet with a young offender and their parent or guardian. These young offenders have been charged with a variety of crimes, typically Theft Under $5000, Assault, or Possession of a Controlled Substance (almost always marijuana). Over the past year, I estimate I’ve met with 40 youth. But tonight, I met a really special young person. I can’t tell you anything about this individual. I can’t tell you their age, gender, appearance, or family background. That’s all confidential. What I can tell you is that this young person changed my life.

It’s funny how the world works: there are haves and there are have-nots. But I think it’s more important to focus on how the haves and have-nots behave in society. Tonight I realized how amazing it is that some people are born with every opportunity presented to them, and they’ll never amount to anything; others are born ‘doomed from the womb,’ but go on to positively change many lives.

So this brings me back to central point of this post: do you volunteer? If you don’t, I really recommend that you do. Sure, it’s kind of a pain to ‘donate’ your time when you have a million other things to do. You work hard, study hard, raise your kids, etc. The last thing you want to do at the end of the day is offer your time to someone for free. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to volunteer for a while but haven’t gotten around to it yet?

I know the feeling: before every trip the John Howard Society, I can think of ten reasons to cancel. But you want to know what keeps me going? The feeling I get when I leave. It’s not relief, like when you finish writing an exam. It’s the feeling that I made a difference in someone’s life; or, like today, the feeling that someone made a difference in mine.

In my opinion, volunteering is the most important civic service an individual can offer their community, even more important than voting. So if you know a volunteer, shake their hand; and if you’re not a volunteer, think about it.

The Shock Doctrine and the Power of Extended Metaphor

I think one of the most beautifully rendered, extended allegories of 2008 was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Beginning with an interesting study of the relation between early psychological shock therapy experiments conducted by Ewen Cameron, whose strategy for correcting madness theorized memory erasure and psychic rebuilding, Klein outlines how the CIA and capitalist pundits found Cameron’s work particularly useful. Funded by the CIA, Cameron headed Project MKUltra, a project aimed at understanding and developing strategies for mind-control:

Cameron believed that by inflicting an array of shocks to the human brain, he could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate. (31-2)

Klein uses the tenants of MKUltra as an extended conceit for the deliberate deployment of corporatist, capitalist economic reforms across the world from the 60’s to the present. Klein’s analysis follows the spread of professors from Milton Freidman’s ‘Chicago School’ of economics across the world’s states, outlining the metaphorical relation between Cameron and Freidman that sets up the rest of the book:

Freidman’s mission, like Cameron’s [shock therapy research], rested on a dream of reaching back to a state of ‘natural’ health, when all was in balance, before human interference created distorting patterns. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Freidman dreamed of de-patterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests. Also like Cameron, Freidman believed that when the economy is highly distorcted, the only way to reach that pre-lapsarian state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks[.] (57)

While Cameron’s experiments required only a laboratory and patients on which to experiment; drastic means of crisis were required if entire nations were to be ‘shocked’ into new ideologies. “Like a prison interrogator,” Klien writes, globalizing agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) used the “pain” of “crisis” to reduce “countries to total compliance” (334). Klein’s entire book, one of the best critical political histories of the world ever written, shows how research on the human mind broadly applies to research on society—what can work on one mind can also work on many; a fascinating perspective on the metaphor of the ‘body politic’.

Klein, like all great writers, is a master of the art of the metaphor. I share this particularly striking passage, about the deliberately instigated Asian economic crises of the late 90’s (a prime example of the dark side of globalizing “stabilization programs”), as an example of her beautiful style and an invitation to read this important book:

The truth is that Asia’s crisis is still not over, a decade later. When 24 million people lose their jobs in a span of two years, a new desperation takes root that no culture can easily absorb. It expresses itself in different forms across the region, from a significant rise in religious extremism in Indonesia and Thailand to the explosive growth of the child sex trade

Employment rates have still not reached pre-1997 levels in Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea. And it’s not just that workers who lost their jobs during the crisis never got them back. The layoffs have continued, with new foreign owners demanding ever-higher profits for their investments. The suicides have also continued: in South Korea, suicide is now the fourth most common cause of death, more than double the pre-crisis rate, with thirty-eight people taking their own lives every day.

That is the untold story of the policies that the IMF calls ‘stabilization programs,’ as if countries were ships being tossed around on the market’s high seas. They do, eventually, stabilize, but that new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists. The ugly secret of ‘stabilization’ is that the vast majority never climb back aboard. They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or in cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited, those described by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke as “ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.’ (332-3)

Metaphors part 3: Metaphors and Thought

As promised, this is the last of my three part series on metaphors (sorry for the delay, Amy). I’m going to discuss why metaphors are becoming one of the most provocative new topics in the field of cognitive science—the study of thought and intelligence. You’ll recall in this series’ initial post that I discussed dead metaphors like fishing for a compliment or planting seeds of doubt. After all, there is nothing inherently seed-like about doubt, nor does seeking a compliment resemble the sport of fishing. Yet these terms became parts of our daily language because at some point in the past some group of speakers related seeds and fishing to doubt and seeking compliments. But, as the saying goes, this is just semantics. Or is it?

Metaphors operate at much deeper level in human language than just leaving behind dead metaphors. In fact, research on metaphors is changing the way language scholars envision how our minds process language. Take, for example, the concept of cognitive metaphors, originally developed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. The theory behind cognitive metaphors proposes that instead of thinking of language as a massive dictionary of words and meanings contained in our brains, human language actually relates quite closely to the way our minds situate our bodies in time and space.

For example, think about what you’re doing right now. Likely sitting in a chair, reading this post from a computer screen. Your mind has a 3-D model of the room you are situated in; you know approximately how far you are from the walls and ceiling; you know where the room is in relation to the rest of the building; you know that if you pick up a pen from the desk, lift it over your head, and drop it, that the pen will fall; you also likely know about the weather outside and how that will affect your plans later in the day. You’re not aware that your brain is doing this, but as you read this paragraph it probably conjured a few mental images—called image schemas.

Whether or not you’re aware of it, your mind is constantly creating image schemas that orient you as you do something seemingly simple, like looking across the room, or something seemingly complex, like skating backwards. Cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Turner argue that this process of image schemas is also fundamental to human language. They argue that perception of space and time has built a model of time and space into language as well, and not just English, every language.

But we’ll stick to English. Take the following example from Metaphors We Live By: “Things are looking up. We hit a peak last year, but it’s been downhill ever since. Things are at an all-time low. He does high-quality work.” According to cognitive linguists, these metaphors all contain an inherent cognitive metaphor: GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN. Similarly, this cognitive metaphor explains phrases like on top of the world, down and out, top notch, and under the weather. These phrases all use words of spatial orientation, called prepositions, to connect concepts and emotions to space and time.

Metaphors have always been considered frilly language, just decoration to bring extra attention to a message—as I mentioned in my previous post on metaphors in marketing. But as it turns out, there is something much deeper and fundamental about metaphors:rather than decorating the meaning of a message, metaphors are required for language to exist in the first place. As a developing language scholar, I find this possibility quite exciting.

Metaphors part 2: Metaphors and Marketing

Shakespeare was the master of metaphors, but today’s modern metaphor masters work in marketing and advertising.

Marketing, advertising, and the Arts

One of the questions that most Arts graduates are familiar with is, “A Bachelor’s of Arts, what are you going to do with that?” Yet Arts graduates are keenly familiar with the art of persuasion, rhetoric:

1. Arts students write persuasive assignments such as personal essays, research papers, and text analyses.
2. Arts professors critique students’ assignments based their persuasive ability.
3. Ideally, Arts students improve their persuasive abilities.

So Arts students learn rhetoric, and great Arts students become great rhetoricians. Let’s return to the original question, the question an English major, like me, is used to hearing from his computer programmer friends, “what are you going to do with that?”

What are you going to do with the ability to persuade others?

The art of persuasion

Every business needs to convince consumers (the public or other businesses) to buy their products. Marketing agencies create advertising that sells products, and effective rhetoric is the backbone of great marketing.

Think about those catchy ads that stick with you over the course of days or weeks, or the humorous ones that have you and your colleagues doubled over at the water cooler. Those ads stimulate your emotions, which persuades you to purchase a product or pay for a service. That’s advertising.

But every ad must relate back to the product or service it’s selling. That relationship between the product and the advertisement is inherently metaphorical—the ad carries the meaning of the ad beyond its referent.

 

 

Metaphors in advertising

Some of my favorite commercials are for the Government Employees Insurance Company (GEICO). The GEICO commercials are examples of really great advertising, especially in how they’ve created two excellent company mascots: the Caveman and the Gecko. And, to illustrate the purpose of this post, the GEICO Caveman is a metaphor for an ancient being, incapable of modern human understanding. Yet the caveman uses GEICO because they want to relay the message that they’re services are “so easy even a caveman can do it.”

So the caveman metaphorically stands in for two things: something pre-modern and GEICO’s simplicity.

Advertising does this ALL THE TIME.

Nike’s “Just Do It” advertising fuses their athletic products with speed, fame, and success; Tony the Tiger does the same thing with Frosted Flakes; the new RBC claymations fuse banking with something fun, animated, and unique; and the list goes on and on.

Good Marketers take one central idea that metaphorically represents the perceived benefits of using a product or paying  for a service. They then fuse that idea with the content of their communications, and create themes or storylines amongst—a process called branding.

This process of allowing symbols and words to carry different meanings is just another way metaphors pervade our everyday lives.