Some positive and negative metaphors of war
Answers
War metaphors are ubiquitous in discussions of everything from political campaigns to battles with cancer to wars against crime, drugs, poverty, and even salad. Why are warfare metaphors so common, and what are the potential benefits and costs to using them to frame important social and political issues? We address these questions in a detailed case study by reviewing the empirical literature on the subject and by advancing our own theoretical account of the structure and function of war metaphors in public discourse. We argue that war metaphors are omnipresent because (a) they draw on basic and widely shared schematic knowledge that efficiently structures our ability to reason and communicate about many different types of situations, and (b) they reliably express an urgent, negatively valenced emotional tone that captures attention and motivates action. Nevertheless, we find that the meaning (and consequences) of war metaphors is intimately tied to the context in which they are used, which may result in either positive or negative outcomes, depending on the situation. Thus, blanket statements about whether or not a war frame is useful are misguided or overly constraining. Here we situate our case study results in relation to popular theories of metaphoric representation and processing and offer some guidelines for using a war framing effectively. This work helps illuminate the complex, dynamic, and nuanced functions of metaphor in cognition in general, and in public discourse in particular.
Advantages
Peace, love, and money are all advantages of war, but debt, death, and sadness are all disadvantages of war. Wright said "War arises because of the changing relations of numerous variables-technological, psychic, social, and intellectual. There is no single cause of war. Peace is an equilibrium among many forces.
Disadvantages of war include death and injury of large numbers of people, loss of economic resources, destruction of the environment, loss of productivity and lasting damage to military personnel. The most costly war in terms of loss of life was World War II, with 84 million people killed.