(What's an unmix?)

Unmixing Lessig's Remix

In early 2007, I was at dinner with some friends in Berlin. We were talking about global warming. After an increasingly intense exchange about the threats from climate change, one overeager American at the table blurted, We need to wage a war on carbon. Governments need to mobilize. Get our troops on the march! Then he fell back into his chair, proud of his bold resolve, sipping a bit too much of the wildly too-expensive red wine.

It was obvious that my friend was speaking metaphorically. Carbon is not an "enemy." Not even an American marine could fight it. Yet, as I looked around the table, a kind of reticence seemed to float above our German companions. What does that look mean I asked one of my friends. After a short pause, he almost whispered, "Germans don’t like war."

The response sparked a rare moment of recognition (in me). Of course, no one was talking about using guns to fight carbon. Or even carbon polluters. Yet, for obvious reasons, the associations with war in Germany are strongly negative. The whole country, but especially Berlin, is draped in constant reminders of the costs of that country’s twentieth-century double blunder.

But in America, associations with war are not necessarily negative. I don’t mean that we are a war- loving people; I mean that our history has allowed us to like the idea of waging war. Not out of choice, but as a remedy to a great wrong. War is a sacrifice that we have made, and in one recent case at least, a sacrifice to a very good end. We thus romanticize that sacrifice.

That romance in turn allows the metaphor to spread into other social or political conflicts. We wage war on drugs, on poverty, on terrorism, on racism. There is a war on government waste, a war on crime, a war on spam, a war on guns, and a war on cancer. As Professors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe, each of these "wars" produces a "network of entailments." Those entailments then frame and drive social policy. As they put it, in discussing President Carter’s "moral equivalent of war" speech:

There was an "enemy," a "threat to national security," which required "setting targets," "reorganizing priorities," "establishing a new chain of command," "plotting new strategy," "gathering intelligence," "marshaling forces," "imposing sanctions," "calling for sacrifices," and on and on. The WAR metaphor highlighted certain realities and hid others. The metaphor was not merely a way of viewing reality; it constituted a license for policy change and political and economic action. The very acceptance of the metaphor provided grounds for certain interferences: there was an external, foreign, hostile enemy (pictured by cartoonist in Arab headdress); energy needed to be given top priorities; the populace would have to make sacrifices; if we didn’t meet the threat we would not survive.

A fight for survival has obvious implications. Such fights get waged without limit. It is cowardly to question the cause. Dissent is an aid to the enemy - treason, or close enough. Victory is the only result one may contemplate, at least out loud. Compromise is always defeat.

These entailments make obvious sense during conflicts such as World War II, when there really was a fight for survival; my spark of Lakoffian recognition, however, was to see just how dangerous these entailments are when the war metaphor gets applied in contexts in which, in fact, survival is not at stake.

Think, for example, about the "war on drugs." Fighting debilitating chemical addiction is no doubt an important social objective. I have seen firsthand the absolute destruction it causes. But the "war on drugs" metaphor prevents us from recognizing that there may be other, more important objectives that the war is threatening. Think about the astonishingly long prison terms facing even small-time dealers — the Supreme Court, for example, has upheld a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the possession of 672 grams of cocaine. Think about ghettos burdened by the drug trade. Think about governments in Latin America that have no effectively independent judiciary or even army because the wealth produced by prohibition enables the drug lords to capture their control. And then think about the fact that this war has had essentially no effect on terminating the supply of drugs. One doesn’t notice these inconvenient truths in the middle of a war. To see them, you need a truce. You need to step back from the war to ask, How much is it really costing? Are the results really worth the price?

(Note: This text is the first section of the Preface to Larry Lessig's 2008 book Remix, and was unmixed by David Wiley on August 19, 2009. The unmix is licensed CC By-NC, just like Lessig's original.)