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PARTISAN REVIEW
at Florida International University, explored the book's contribution to
our understanding of Latin America; Robert Packenham, Professor of
Political Science at Stanford University, considered Veliz's perception of
the new English-speaking global culture; and Irving Louis Horowitz,
Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, elaborated
on the book's understanding of modernity. Together with the
comments from our audience, and with Veliz's lively responses, we did
advance our understanding of the apparently endemic reasons for this
North-South divide. Following are the proceedings of the meeting.
Roger Scruton: I
want to begin by talking about the fundamental idea
behind the book, namely the use of a metaphor, or rather two
metaphors, to explore an extremely complex historical phenomenon and
a very important historical contrast.
Veliz begins with a discussion of the principal metaphor of the
hedgehog and the fox, famously taken over by Sir Isaiah Berlin from
Archilochus. He makes the very important observation that a metaphor
by its nature is false; that is, when we say of something that is not a fox
that it is a fox, we are saying something false. Indeed, the whole point
of a metaphor is that it is false; this is what distinguishes a metaphor from
a simile. A simile is, if effective, true; a metaphor is, if effective, false . Of
course in saying false things one can convey truths in an oblique way, but
the interesting question is, what kinds of truths are conveyed by a
metaphor?
Metaphor plays a large role in poetry and in art generally and is also
extremely important to our everyday life. Certain linguists have written
about metaphors which are so deeply embedded in our language that we
could not remove them without changing the structure of our experi–
ence. Veliz's metaphor apparently is not of that kind, so what is the
point of using it? I would suggest, just as a tactical first move, that the
point of this metaphor really is not so much to compare two things as
to bring together our experience of them,
to
make us see one thing in
terms of the other. Rather than noticing analogies particularly, we have
something in the back of our minds which, as it were, transforms the as–
pect of something. A useful example is our habit, when listening to mu–
sic, of hearing it as being in motion. The idea of movement is in the
back of our minds and causes us to hear this sequence of sounds in a
completely distinctive way, embarking on a journey through space. That
is an example of a metaphor which changes our experience. I think that
Veliz's metaphors are in a similar way intended to change our perception
of an enormously complex chain of events - a chain of events which led
to the modern world being, as he puts it, "made in England." That in
