Why rhetoric has such a potent effect in wartime
Death and its threat have powerful effects on people's thinking and emotions - but not always the desired or expected ones. Hence the supplementary psychological bombardments we are witnessing in Iraq (and, of course, are subject to) through the media.
The distribution of propaganda leaflets is one unadorned example. More nuanced is the national biases of the media and the progressively weakened objectivity of reporters in the field, due to bonding with the troops among whom they are embedded. Subtler still is political rhetoric, which is one of the most crucial weapons in the psychological arsenal.
Rhetoric makes use of a universal feature of the human mind - the urge to create order. The chaotic multiplicity of our day-to-day experience is simply too vast to manage. To make sense of the world, we have to boil things down. Rhetoric insinuates itself into this process. Metaphor and analogy are two of the potent tools used to influence the sort of 'conceptual shorthand' we use as we create our own internal sense of reality and truth. They attempt to get in on the psychological 'ground floor' of experience.
Take metaphor. The first US president George Bush was known for using it to sway public opinion leading up to the first Gulf war. According to philosopher Tim Rohrer, he rooted his view of the Iraq-Kuwait crisis in one of the Western world's most potent metaphors: that of 'nation as a person'.
This is important because much of his later arguments (including the since abandoned concept of the 'new world order') were 'logical' once we had been surreptitiously persuaded to accept the basic premise of this metaphor; that is, we should feel and act as if the countries involved were actual people with flesh and blood, and feelings and human rights.
To plant the metaphor in our consciousness, Mr Bush talked repeatedly about Iraq, Kuwait and the US as if they were real people. Iraq, the 'neighbourhood bully', was responsible for the 'rape' of Kuwait and the US must stand up for her friends to release Iraq's grip on that small nation's life before it was swallowed whole.
The 'nation as a person' metaphor was first used by Plato and is deeply entrenched in the thinking of Western cultures. It is hard to imagine an alternative and certainly not a better one for a nation. That is why it is so powerful; because it is so culturally ingrained, it is hard for us to think outside its logic. It is almost as if the metaphor has to be abandoned altogether to allow new arguments or thoughts, and as soon as we do so, the alternative is less coherent, so those arguments are weakened.
How else could one talk about the rape of Kuwait? 'Iraq entered Kuwait'? 'Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border'? How tame. Statements devoid of the emotive human parallel are so sterile.
Of course, there were physical rapes in Kuwait, and there was a non-metaphorical invasion. However, Professor Rohrer argues that this metaphor, used to characterise these illegal actions, was crucial to our understanding of reality at that time and that it played a key role in the decision to go to war. The metaphor gave war an emotional anchor.
By using it, Mr Bush senior appealed to our respect for individual human rights. Instead of proposing actions that directly affected those rights, however, he was able to transfer our respect for individual human rights to respect for national sovereignty. Of course, we all believe that the rape of an individual is wrong and should be punished. But was the metaphor appropriate in the case of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait? And if we go along with it, did the punishment fit the crime?
Analogy is another powerful tool of subtle persuasion. Together with metaphor, these tools of rhetoric work at a deep level. They shape our understanding and the possible pathways our logic is likely to take. We can and do 'think outside the box'. Indeed, we often may find the rhetoric obviously manipulative and consider ourselves immune. But studies show that we seldom remain unengaged. It takes unusual distance, awareness and perseverance to do so.
In the current crisis, President George W. Bush has chosen his own range of rhetoric. In his 48-hour deadline speech, he drew an analogy to World War II, while the Iraqi leadership in their pronouncements prefers to evoke Vietnam. Mr Bush, in this speech, made much reference to 'resolve', 'fortitude', 'just demands' and 'action' against a 'threat to peace'.
He contrasted this with the 'policy of appeasement', 'drifting along towards tragedy' with 'no set course'. All of this paints a picture of clarity and direction on one side, and weakness and inaction among opponents to the war, such as France and Germany. And, indeed, it has been hard for opposing points of view to create a viable set of analogies to counter these accusations because their position rests in part on maintaining the status quo and on complex arguments that are harder to 'sell'. By definition, complexity is impossible to capture using a parallel. It does not lend itself to the catchy sound bite.
It is part of our cultural training to think in parallels, to examine our experiences using analogy and metaphor. Indeed, the tendency may be universal - researchers have found much in common among English and Chinese languages in this respect. Both share the same metaphoric connections between anger and heat, for example, and between happiness and light.
So it is natural and in many ways useful to think of the current crisis at least in some respects as 'another World War II' or as 'Vietnam revisited'. It is a sort of intellectual shorthand. It helps clarify our thinking and facilitates discussion. We acknowledge the similarities and can then go on to examine the discrepancies.
But in terms of intricacy and uniqueness, a lot can be missed or misinterpreted.
So it is helpful to remember that rhetorical devices, like metaphors - to use an admittedly limited analogy - can be as familiar, compelling and powerfully detail-quashing as a national anthem.
Jean Nicol is a Hong Kong-based psychologist and writer
