Read Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking Online
Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (30 page)
“The Fox and the Grapes” (after Æsop), by Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695):
A certain fox from Normandy (though others say the South)
Was at death’s door from hunger, when he spied, upon a vine,
A tempting bunch of grapes that he would fain place in his mouth,
All covered with a lovely skin so red it looked like wine.
The plucky fox would happily have made of them a meal,
But due to the chance happenstance that they were up too high,
He snapped, “Who’d want such sour grapes? They’re food fit for a heel!”
He just was letting off some steam, for foxes never lie!
And now our readers, having read these four versions of the classic fable, are invited to supply the missing conclusion to the following brief anecdote:
Professor C. had campaigned very hard to be elected Head of the Department, but Professor A. won the election hands down. At that point, Professor C. declared to everyone in the Department…
Here we have no animals, no vine, no trellis, no grapes, and no hunger, but rather some humans, a university, a department, an election, and a lust for power. And yet the reader most surely guessed the kind of sentence that Professor C. might have uttered. For example:
“I ran for office solely out of my selfless dedication to our department’s welfare. However, having lost the election, I am at peace with my conscience and luckily I will not have to do a thankless job.”
“Whew! Now, at last, I’ll be able to dedicate myself to my true passion — research.”
“This responsibility would have eaten me alive. I’ll be much happier being able to devote myself to my family, and to watch my kids grow up.”
“This department is just a bunch of prima donnas. Lucky for me that I escaped the nightmare of trying to run it!”
What amazing psychological insight allows us to come up with these conclusions to a story that has so little to do with Æsop’s fable? Well, of course, there is no miracle here. The story of Professor C. is clearly understood as belonging to the same category as the fable itself — namely, the category of
things that one once craved deeply but that one failed to obtain, and that one therefore disparages.
This category of situations is well known to many people in our culture who have never read Æsop’s fable itself. The familiar expression “sour grapes” is a very standard label for such situations.
Curiously, although a roughly equivalent expression exists in French — “les raisins sont trop verts” (“the grapes are too green”) — it does not enjoy anything like the popularity of its English counterpart. This phrase, borrowed from La Fontaine’s rhyming version of the fable, appeared in the 1832 edition of the official dictionary of the French language published by the French Academy, and it has remained in the dictionary ever since then. But even a speaker of French who has never run into the expression is quite likely to have observed that people often deprecate things that they have failed to obtain; such a person has thus already constructed the category without being aware of it.
If one hasn’t already created the category, then reading the various versions of the story of the fox and the grapes will naturally and easily lead one to manufacture it. Once the fable has been understood, the category thus created has a decent chance of being evoked on occasions when a failure to obtain something cherished is followed in short order by a revised estimate of how desirable the original goal was.
We’ll now take a brief look at some flagrant cases of the category of
sour grapes
— short scenarios that should very easily trigger the category, especially in the mind of a native speaker of English, for whom the category comes pre-equipped with a familiar, standard label.
A. didn’t want his son to go to the local high school and tried to get him into an elite private school whose admission standards were very high. When his son was not accepted, A. declared to everyone in hearing range that he was actually very glad it worked out this way, because now his son would get to live in an environment of great social diversity, rather than finding himself cut off from reality and surrounded only by arrogant and superficial people.
B. wasn’t able to purchase last-minute airplane tickets to Hawaii and thus had to give up his elaborate vacation plans. But he said to his friends that he was in fact relieved, not disappointed, because all the best spots in the islands are always hugely overcrowded during vacation periods, and that ruins all the fun of going there.
C. ’s great dream was to become an actor, but after suffering a number of rejections, he finally said he had dropped that goal and would look for a more conventional kind of career. He added that the unhealthy atmosphere in the world of acting would have corrupted him, and that he would be far happier leading a more balanced life far from the glare of the footlights.
D. has just been dumped by her boyfriend, whom she’d always described to her friends as “Mister Right”. Now, though, she’s telling all her friends that their breakup has taken a great weight off her shoulders, and that she can finally breathe again; deep down, she’d always known that their love affair was doomed, but she just hadn’t been able to take the step of breaking off with him herself, because she hadn’t wanted to hurt him.
E. learned that her favorite rock band was going to give a concert in her town. As fast as she could, she scrambled to get a ticket, but unfortunately she was too late; they were already all sold out. E. said to her friends, “The auditorium is so huge that no one will really be able to see anything at all; you’re probably better off watching the concert on television.”
All the situations in the list above belong to a single category whose members, though very different, all share the same core — namely, the moral of the fable of the fox and the grapes. Each of these scenarios exemplifies, in its own way, the notion of
failure followed by belittling of the original goal
, and they are all located quite close to the core of the category
sour grapes
, which comes from the fable itself. Although the resemblances among all these scenarios probably strike you as glaringly obvious and thus of no interest, it’s that very fact that is so remarkable. We all tend to pay so little attention to the surface level in these stories that it is very easy to slip into the belief that seeing the
sour grapes
concept in all these diverse contexts is utterly mechanical and trivial; the
truth, however, is that spotting this pattern beneath the surface is anything but a mechanical act. No search engine today is anywhere near being able to spot the deeper aspects of an anecdote like this, and to detect the
sour-grapes-
ness of all sorts of situations. Indeed, making these kinds of seemingly trivial perceptions has been a stumbling block for many years for researchers in artificial intelligence. Rapid spotting of this kind of essence is (at least so far!) a uniquely human capacity, and computers can only dream with impatience of that far-off day when they, too, will at last be able to perceive that two situations so different on their surface level are nonetheless “exactly the same thing”. In the meantime, though, they all pooh-pooh the interest of such a goal…
Æsop’s fox-and-grapes fable, more than two millennia old, insightfully anticipated some rather recent ideas. From the 1950’s onwards, thanks to the pioneering work of social psychologist Leon Festinger, the notions of cognitive dissonance and its reduction have been part of psychology, and they are direct descendants of the fable, which, in expositions of the theory, is often given as a quintessential example. The basic idea of the contemporary theories is that the presence of conflicting cognitive states in an individual results in a state of inner tension that the individual tries to reduce by modifying one or another of their conflicting internal states. Thus, the fox is in a state of cognitive dissonance, since his desire to eat the grapes conflicts with his inability to reach them. He thus modifies one of the two causes of the conflict by denying that he wants to eat them. Since they are sour (so he says), they are no longer desirable, so his failure to reach them is no longer upsetting.
Much as the concept
once bitten, twice shy
contains the essence of the modern psychological notion that a traumatic experience leaves lasting after-effects in its wake, so the sour-grapes fable contains the essence of the notion of reduction of cognitive dissonance, and more generally, the notion of
rationalization
, where a painful situation is rendered less painful by the unconscious generation, after the fact, of some kind of arbitrary and often unlikely justification.
The blatant nature of the fox’s lie makes the fable an ideal core member of the
sour grapes
category, and allows one to understand the structure of all
sour grapes
situations. The genius of Æsop was to have come up with such a simple, appealing situation in which dissonance is reduced. For this reason, his fable not only has survived many centuries but it also anticipated developments in modern psychology.
To see how the sour-grapes fable relates to the notion of cognitive dissonance in its full generality, one can cast the notion of
disparagement of an unrealized yearning
, which is the fable’s crux, as a special case of the more general notion of
regaining a peaceful frame of mind by distorting one’s perception of a troubling situation
, which is what the reduction of cognitive dissonance is all about. Equipped with this new category, we will far more easily and more rapidly recognize situations in which people spontaneously invent novel justifications, sometimes rather bizarre ones, in order to reconcile themselves with disappointing outcomes. And this new, more general category will start expanding in
an individual’s mind as that person encounters unexpected situations that have varying degrees of similarity to the most central members of the category.
Let’s now take a look at a sampler of situations that might fit into the new, broader category.
F. has reserved a table for two in a fancy restaurant highly recommended by friends. However, he and his date are caught in a traffic jam on his way, and their reservation is canceled. F. says, “There are terrific restaurants everywhere around here; let’s go find one ourselves. It’ll be much more romantic that way.”
G. has a tradition of buying slashed-price theater tickets from a special agency. Tonight is the last night of a play that’s received rave reviews from the critics, but it is sold out, and G. has to give up his plan. He muses, “That’s the first time this has happened to me in all these years of using this strategy. That’s a pretty darn good track record!”
H. is drooling over a certain
à la carte
dish in a restaurant. When orders are being taken, the server has disappointing news for H.: they’ve just run out of her dish. “Oh, well,” says H. with a philosophical, on-the-rebound chuckle, “this way I’ll save myself hundreds of calories and some cholesterol to boot.” And she orders a lighter, healthier dish from the menu, one that her eye hadn’t been so drawn to when she was first scanning the menu.
I. has just learned that her deeply-desired request for a transfer within her company has been denied. “All right, then — so be it!” says I. “I’m not going to let it bother me; I’ll just quit and get another job in another firm. And my chances to make headway in my career will be a lot better than if I had stayed in this stodgy old place.”
J. wasn’t admitted by the art school he’d applied to. He says that only people who pull strings ever get admitted there; that’s how everything is in today’s corrupted society. The thought of so much rampant injustice everywhere in the world makes him sick.
K., after several years of marriage, is taking stock. He still feels great affection for his wife, but physical passion and spiritual intimacy are largely things of the past. “Everything has a way of eroding with time,” K. thinks to himself, “and so it is with our marriage. But even if what I feel isn’t as intense as it once was, our love has grown ever so much deeper.”
L. just barely lost an election to represent his district in the state legislature. Months of sacrifice and day-and-night work have gone up in smoke. But L. says to himself that failures are part of the learning curve of politics; through this defeat he is becoming broader and deeper.
All these ingenious rationalizations do the job, in one way or another, of reducing some kind of tension created by the gap between hopes and reality. But do we easily see these as cases of
sour grapes
? Probably not, and this is in part because the device of dissonance reduction is a defense mechanism, and it’s in our own best interest not to be
aware of how we protect our delicate psyches by deluding ourselves with defense mechanisms. If everyone saw through all defense mechanisms — their own as well as other people’s — it would be a loss in many ways. In any case, the successful survival of the dissonance-reduction “trick” over eons reveals that we all have a certain kind of blind spot concerning it.
Sour grapes
is certainly not the sole way of categorizing the string of anecdotes shown above. One could also see, in each of these (mis)adventures, a kind of instinctive wisdom in reacting to their various disappointments, an optimism that focuses on the positive and minimizes the negative. If we wished to categorize these little vignettes in different ways, we could focus on this aspect of the people’s reactions, and could perfectly reasonably cast them as instances of the category
seeing the silver lining
(presumably at the edges of a storm cloud). Then again, some of them fit the category
walking on the sunny side of the street
or the category
counting your blessings
or the category
thanking one’s lucky stars
or the category
being thankful for what you have.
And then again, some of them might arguably best be placed in the clichéd but nonetheless perfectly valid category
seeing the glass as half-full instead of half-empty
.