I’ve said before that human beings are hard-wired to look for connections between the small and big: the atom resembles the solar system; traffic patterns resemble biological circulatory systems; our country-full of diverse persons seems to resemble the quirky, lovable families assembled in our living rooms. It’s a part of our patriotic consciousness to see the family as the microcosm of America, and to see our beloved, quirky country as a logical extension of ourselves.

So we easily buy into the “nation-as-family” metaphor I mentioned earlier. It’s an idea not specific to the United States, nor to any one political persuasion; it’s a practically universal idea. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at U.C. Berkeley, describes it in his book, Moral Politics, as a “common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor… The link between family-based morality and politics comes from one of the most common ways we have of conceptualizing what a nation is, namely, as a family.”

Historically, the nation-as-family metaphor is the foundation of many political and sociological arguments. It’s used to achieve social cohesion, a sense of community. It predicates our understanding of paternalism, as an outgrowth of English common law, Parens Patriae, which defined the British monarch as “parent of his country.” This metaphor has entered our everyday American lexicon, including such terms as “founding fathers,” “homeland,” and “big brother.” Hillary Clinton reversed the metaphor, borrowing from tribal belief, in her family-as-village argument. And other well-known articulations of this metaphor have occurred throughout history:

“The world is nothing but a huge republic, of which every nation is a family, and every individual a child.” Chevalier de Ramsay, 1730

 “We begin our public affections in families. No cold relation is the zealous citizen.” Edmund Burke, 1790

“It is striking to realize,” writes Francois Furstenberg, of John Hopkins University, “that the most prevalent metaphors of nationalism stem from the ‘private’ sphere: the nation as family, as home, as body.” It’s true; the Left coined the phrase, ‘The Personal is Political,’ and declared their intellectual allegiance with this metaphor. They’re now in the business of transposing nation & family, large and small, while ignoring any problematic differences of scale.

But what are these problematic differences of scale? Simply put, some aspects of our world are scale independent: what works for the large doesn’t always work for the small, and vice versa. In his book, Nature’s Numbers, mathematician Ian Stewart uses an elephant to illustrate the concept of scale independence: “[A]n elephant the size of a house would collapse under its own weight, and one the size of a mouse would have legs that are uselessly thick." Likewise, you can't simply enlarge the family to the size of a nation and expect things to function the same. Families and nations are scale independent - their patterns are not repeatable when their sizes are changed.

“If you have a truly complex system,” says Brian Arthur, a scientist at the Santa Fe Institute,  (as quoted in Complexity, p.334) “then the exact patterns are not repeatable. And yet there are themes that are recognizable. In history, for example, you can talk about ‘revolutions,’ even though one revolution might be quite different from another. So we assign metaphors. It turns out that an awful lot of policy-making has to do with finding the appropriate metaphor. Conversely, bad policy-making almost always involves finding inappropriate metaphors.” [emphasis added]

And nation-as-family is not only inappropriate, but dangerous. Take, for example, the earliest appearance of this metaphor, which occurs 370 years before the birth of Christ, in Plato’s Republic. Its third book, “The Arts in Education,” finds Socrates trying to convince a somewhat idealistic Adeimantus (Plato’s older half-brother) of the necessity of educating citizens in such terms that would lend support to the ideal of the State. In other words, Socrates was defending the noble uses of propaganda, a political tonic he called the “medicine of deception.” Certain national stories must be censored, others concocted that will mold the collective mind of society into allegiance.

He eventually calls for a new, national creation myth, in which the citizens “are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.

“Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxious guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race.

“[T]he fostering of such a belief,” insists Socrates, “will make them care more for the city and for one another.”

This passage, often referred to as the Myth of the Metals, shows the nation-as-family metaphor being crafted solely for political expedience. Almost 2,500 years later, a similar line of thinking would appear in the philosophy of another group attempting to craft a just society: “It is our purpose to bring out the true ‘National Identity’ of the tribes of Israel. Abraham’s seed was to become MANY nations. By definition, a nation is a family of people with a king. To be a family of people the members must be from the same father or from the same parents.” This statement, based soundly in the nation-as-family metaphor, was written by Rev. William P. Gale of the Ku Klux Klan.

Transferring microcosmic emotions, such as the emotional drive to preserve our family identity, becomes the worst form of evil when applied to the macrocosm. Projecting family emotions and family bonds onto the macrocosm is taking that emotion to excess, and can lead people to begin to see their entire race as an extension of their family. Emotional bonding on the macro scale can lead to racism – and although I don't believe that liberals are racists, I do believe that they can unwittingly promote such thinking by encouraging people to project emotion onto the wrong scale.

Today, Dennis Prager spent the better part of two hours on the radio discussing what he believes unifies nearly all liberal positions: a basis in feelings. I’ve heard this idea before, but Dennis added something that no other discussion of it has ever included: the idea that feelings reside in the realm of the microcosm.

In fact, Dennis, himself, said that in the microcosm – the world of the individual, the family, the smaller units – he tends to be more politically liberal. Most of us are. Six years ago it occurred to me that, here in my own home, I’m the perfect socialist. Back then, in an article entitled, “The Smallest Proletariat,”* I took a position that actually irritated many conservatives I know who believe that socialism never works. The idea, in a nutshell, is that all families (small-scale entities) employ socialism beautifully:

THE SOCIALIST MECHANISM has a pleasing, almost lyrical prelude; it never starts out as a totalitarian thought. Nobody embarks on the socialist road whistling Orwellian hymns or worrying about someday burning dissenting books at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

To thinkers just starting out, socialism represents cooperation and kindness and a strong social tapestry. It represents humanity. It represents, oddly enough, the way I was raised by two capitalist, free-market, patriotic conservatives.

Our small family of three enjoyed a communal lifestyle, as most families do: We lived according to the common good. We shared in the overall prosperity of the family, which meant collective ownership of all income, from Dad’s paycheck to my babysitting money. We also shared in the family work; Mom and Dad’s shares were more valuable, while my share was usually forced upon me.

Do I regret being forced? Not now; it was good for me to nourish the dog, scribble out my homework, and abuse our spinet piano for 35 minutes every afternoon. It was also good to eat food that a ten-year-old like me could never pay for. It was socialism at its finest.

I got some flack for writing that; most conservatives miss that socialism works very well when utilized on the proper scale. Small groups of emotionally bonded individuals can’t survive without employing socialism. It’s a system tailor-made for the microcosm, and tailor-made for the liberal mind – it resides in the realm of feeling, and the realm of the personal.

Which brings us back to Dennis Prager on the radio today. He correctly pointed out that feelings are what make us human, and conservatives should never discount them. But using personal feelings (micro) as the basis for political theory (macro) is extremely problematic.

Take, for example, the well-known and much used political metaphor: Nation as Family. We feel for members of our families - much emotion is wrapped up in our family bonds - so likewise, we should feel for members of our country, or the world, for that matter. We are, after all, one big family. Not only should we feel for our nation/family, but we should employ the same financial systems for that nation that we would employ for our own families. The nation-as-family metaphor may seem full of brotherly love at first glance, but such a worldview, as I'll show in my next post, has the potential for real damage... which is usually the case when you try to apply the rules of one scale onto another.

Hezbollah is the little terrorist organization that could hold out against the mighty IDF.

Naveed Haq, according to his lawyer, "had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had been taking medication to help control its symptoms, which generally include drastic mood swings."

And Gibson is the anti-Semitic rant-maker and Oscar-winner in whose explosive wrath upon arrest Arianna Huffington found  "a chance for reasonable people to stand up and be counted. For the sane among us to identify, separate, and condemn the extremists, the fanatics, the fundamentalists, the bigots, the hate-mongers and say 'no more.' "

We are, it seems, in danger of losing any sense of priority, of scale, of genuine importance.

As Hewitt writes, the millions of people Castro has killed, injured, imprisoned, and tyrannized fail to stack up to those Mel Gibson offended. To the left, size rarely matters, and scale and perspective are often ignored.

It all stems from our desire for universal theories. Take, for example, the problem that currently plagues physicists today: Our universe seems to be based on two sets of physical laws, and unfortunately, these two sets of laws conflict.

PBS recently aired a documentary, The Elegant Universe, explaining the problem and a possible solution in the form of string theory. In it, Brian Greene explains that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the law that governs the large objects in our universe – things like planets and anvils and gnats. In terms of scale, these objects would all fall into the macro realm, and are all governed and described by a certain set of physical rules. Small things, like subatomic particles, are governed by a different set of rules we call quantum mechanics. One set of laws for the macrocosm, and another for the microcosm. It's this dichotomy that annoys many physicists. They would much rather discover a

Universal Theory of Everything,

not one theory for the large and a separate theory for the small.

The fundamental failure of liberal philosophy is its application of microcosmic rules onto the macrocosm.