Just a Theory

I was curled up on my couch listening to a radio program about neurobiology. Apparently there is an area of the brain that, when damaged, causes a loss of the ability to understand metaphor. If you tell certain stroke victims, for instance, that "George Bush is no rocket scientist," they understand it to mean that he is a politician with no background in the aeronautical sciences. Since this was one of the examples actually cited by the researchers speaking on the radio, it rather begged for a little meditation on literalism in politics as well as the religiously inspired fundamentalism that seems to have swept our public discourse.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I do not want to imply that literalism is a form of brain damage. But I thought the broadcast was interesting because the mental condition seemed like (as in simile) the kind of speech so prominent in debates that increasingly pit "secular humanists" against certain religious and political conservatives. If every word in "George Bush is no rocket scientist" is read only in its narrowest sense, the literalism of its "truth" would require skinning from it all unspoken, contextual, syllogistic and cultural meaning: to wit, that if rocket science is a complex area of study, George Bush is not therefore a student of complexity.

Let me make a second disclaimer for those who are quick with inference: I do not think George Bush is a dimwit. (Wrong as rain, but not a dimwit. Not, let me hasten to add, that I think rain is wrong.)

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