What's with all the war metaphors? We have wars when politics fails
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Version 0 of 1. So Tony Abbott has had a near death experience. His foot soldiers in the war room are preparing for a campaign of shock and awe. There may be a bloodletting soon. The fight with Malcolm Turnbull is not over. The next election may be a rout. Shorten is fighting to define himself. The electorate is a battleground. There has been a holocaust of jobs. Notice something in all these phrases which, by the way, are drawn from news articles over the last week? The only metaphor used to talk about politics is violence and war. It is one of the truisms of journalism that conflict is newsworthy. It is hardly new. Nevertheless I wonder about the damage caused by our use of battle, violence and war metaphors to describe political processes. It isn’t confined to politics. Battle is a journalistic cliche just as much as phrases like “devout Catholic”, “leafy suburbs”, “unsung hero”, “at the end of the day” or (my pet hate at the moment) “comfort zone”. Every major life journey or challenge tends to be described in terms of war. Some experts in language and end of life care say that the battling metaphors used about cancer actually damage the terminally ill, leading them to feel guilty or a failure if they are “losing the battle” and imposing a sense of personal responsibility for things that are not their fault. People are said to fight or battle depression – which seems to me to be particularly wrong. When I think of the people I know who have been through depression, I have images of journeys through dark forests, of living with the black dog. Depression is a process, surely, or a journey or a state of being, more than a battle. And if it is a battle, who is the enemy? Many depressed people could do with compassion for themselves, rather than suggestions they must fight their own heads. Then there is the battle to control weight (rather than working at it, or learning to do it, or finding how to do it). It goes on. We fight inner city congestion. We battle our way to work, and so on. The use of wartime metaphors to describe politics is particularly damaging, and one of the causes of the rift between the political class and the average citizen and voter. Imagine that voter. He or she is undecided – perhaps generally disillusioned with the leadership on offer, perhaps torn between competing policy options, or perhaps bored by politics and relatively uninformed. There will be nothing in the least bit military about trying to get their vote, trying to inspire them with sufficient hope or confidence to persuade them to vote one way or the other. Nor will people screaming at each other in parliament, or running each other down, be likely to move them one way or the other. Could it be that the use of violence metaphors leads those in politics to actually believe that their job is to grind the opposition into the ground in order to win votes? Well, it doesn’t work that way. Not for most people in any case. Our use of battleground metaphors obscures the fact that politics is largely about working out how to live together – how to build wealth, and how to share it. How to balance freedom and responsibility for others. It is about ideas, communication, persuasion and process – and nothing to do with war. We have wars when politics fails. Most people who live their lives among the workplaces, schools and everyday realities of society instinctively know this. The battleground metaphors are, I suspect, deeply irrelevant and off-putting, and one of the reasons for the widespread contempt for politicians and politics. Rather than images of pugilistic politicians scrapping, most citizens surely want a sense that politicians can govern harmoniously, working through the issues, balancing competing priorities, leading and managing the country. It is, in fact, hard to imagine anything less like a battleground than an election campaign. Yet I have seen even the process of doorknocking described as some kind of conflict. There are gender issues here as well. While women can be warriors as much as men, in our own tradition, soldiering has been mainly a male activity for most of the last few centuries. Are the military metaphors one of the reasons that we find it harder to imagine female leadership, or accept that there are many different ways of being a female leader? And think, finally, of the truly successful leaders of our time. Bob Hawke talked consensus, not battle. Nelson Mandela is remembered because having being a warrior he became a peacemaker. Winston Churchill was a war leader, but he lost power as soon as Britain began to prepare for peace. Most of the politicians revered in history are not remembered for their battling skills. They are remembered as people of ideas. So let’s conduct a journalistic experiment. Mark every military metaphor used to describe politics in the next week, and try to imagine a more appropriate use of words. I have been doing this over the last week, and I can promise you the exercise transforms your understanding and way of thinking about what is actually going on. |