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.