Parable

Parables are a powerful tool. They are maps, life lessons encoded into little stories, encapsulated ways of understanding the world. However, what a parable is is as much our understanding of the tale as it is the tale itself – it’s in the mapping from that story to our story, the understanding that its causality and morality bears some relationship to our own. Any story can become a parable as long as you can create an analogical framework – in fact, every story can and does become many parables, given different frameworks and understandings. Each parable reflects a personal understanding, a relationship between the tale’s teller, its audience, and the world, and these shift subtly, even from people whose understanding of the story and its import are largely the same – and drastically between those whose approach and worldviews are significantly different.

This causes problems. Oppressors frequently like to cast themselves as the victims, and misusing parables gives them another tool with which to do so. Any tool for guiding or leading can just as easily become a tool for misguiding or misleading – one of the worrying and saddening things regarding the many ways that art can be used for good is realizing that every one of them has a separate but equal application towards propaganda, every message of love can be turned into a message of loving hate, every message of tolerance turned into a message of tolerating intolerance. As creators, we can only do so much to control for the understanding people take of our work and how they apply that to the world we live in: In other words, we write the stories, but we don’t make the parables.

Another problem, though, is that our relationship with parables has become… strange. people have started using parables in reverse. That is, rather than creating a map from the story to real life situations and deriving actionable beliefs from that understanding, they have begun creating a map from real life to the story and deriving… nothing, usually. It doesn’t matter if this situation reminds you of Harry Potter if the only understanding you glean from that is that ‘well the good guys will probably win in the end’.

This is not to say that retrofitting a real life situation to a parable is necessarily an unproductive exercise, just that it’s not interesting or useful to stop there. The interesting part of creating an analogy is in following the line created by the analogy towards a conclusion that is itself interesting. Analogies without conclusion become an obstacle, rather than an aid, to understanding. Rhetorically we tend to pay a lot more attention to whether an analogy is apt than to whether it leads to an interesting or useful conclusion, but it has to be both for it to have any place in a persuasive argument – otherwise it’s just reference for the sake of reference, done in a context that’s even less productive than an episode of Family Guy.

What’s the point of even making a reference like that?