This is the sixteenth in a periodic series of reflections on Brian D. McLaren's everything must change. Quotations used by kind permission of the author, with page citations from the edition featured on the Emerging Church Reading List to your right.
After identifying in Chapter 6 the Top Global Problems as enumerated by the Copenhagen Consensus, the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, J. F. Rischard of the World Bank, Rick Warren's five-point PEACE Plan, the fifteen-point United Nations University's list, and the "New Vision Group," Brian turns in the next chapter to consider the "solution deadlock."
To explain this "solution deadlock" Brian uses a metaphor, a metaphor I have decided not to use, at least for now, because I find it problematic. (If your curiosity drives you to buy his book in order to find out this proscribed metaphor, he will be grateful to me.)
Brian then offers an excellent essay on metaphor:
"Metaphors help us see invisible or unfamiliar things by comparing them to visible and familiar things. . . . For all the help they gives us, they do not give us exhaustive knowledge of the thing they seek to explicate. . . . So we should remember that the most helpful metaphor can give us a false confidence, and we should use metaphors with appropriate caution.
"Even further, we must acknowledge that metaphors can be terribly dangerous. For example, when tribal conflict was brewing in Rwanda leading up to the genocide in 1994, one tribe (the Huru) used two powerful metaphors to dehumanize the other (the Tutsi). By calling them cockroaches or tall trees, it became easier to squash them and cut them down, so that genocide seemed more like pest control or landscape improvement than the grotesque and inhuman mass murder it was" (page 53).
Without naming Brian's specific metaphor, I am happy to identify his core metaphor to describe our "solution deadlock": Machine. More tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm reminded of a cartoon that appeared years ago in The New Yorker. A man with a knife in his back is seated on a chair, facing his doctor across the desk. The doctor is telling him, "I'm afraid it's not just a metaphor."
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