Honestly, the moral can always be dismissed as applicable if you want to dismiss it. - Edit 2
Before modification by Legolas at 05/12/2009 12:26:31 AM
Yes, metaphor allows people to access audiences that might be less than open-minded. However, let's get back to the Star Trek episode you mentioned. I could see a racist person living in the Deep South in the 1960s watching the black/white episode and saying, "I see what they're doing, but it's not really like that. Segregation is right because it's not just about skin color. There's a difference in culture." In other words, removing the moral from the context runs the risk (a very high risk, in fact) that the moral can be dismissed as inapplicable.
It would be much harder to deny the pernicious effects of racism if that person read (or watched) To Kill a Mockingbird. There's nowhere to hide. There's no way to justify the inapplicability of the situation. It IS the situation.
It would be much harder to deny the pernicious effects of racism if that person read (or watched) To Kill a Mockingbird. There's nowhere to hide. There's no way to justify the inapplicability of the situation. It IS the situation.
Obviously TKaM is a much more direct attack on the race attitudes of the sixties than the Star Trek episode, but that doesn't mean people couldn't reject its conclusions out of hand or say "it's not like that in my town". Werthead has a valid point that people in that situation were much more likely to watch a show not directly related to those issues, than to read a book like TKaM that is known for criticizing race relations - and those open-minded enough to accept that they might be doing things wrongly could learn a lesson from the show without having to read a book that they knew was a direct attack. It's much the same point as what Ellestra made in her post about SF in Poland and other communist countries during the Cold War - the points made were cloaked and took some imagination and open-mindedness to apply to the real world, but at least the books could be and were read.
There are many other examples of "metaphors divorced from the reality", of course, including a few from the canon of world literature, like Animal Farm and Gulliver's Travels, and from highly acclaimed contemporary literary authors like AS Byatt or Thomas Pynchon.