We all swim in a sea of metaphors and symbols. They provide contexts for understanding a seemingly chaotic planet, and they act as security anchors for our ideologies and cultures. Immersed in metaphor, you and I are like fish in a bowl. We might be able to see through the water and glass, but what we see is refracted. What we see in other people’s or culture’s metaphors is not what they see; how we value is not the same.
 
At the beginning of the fifth century B.C., the Greek city states found themselves twice threatened by massive Persian armies. Part of their inspiration for valor in battle came from tales in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, stories that provided models of ideal Greek characteristics. Homer’s epics told of ancient Achaeans (aka Danaans, Argives, but not, as we identify them, as “Greeks”) of Mycenaean time and served as metaphors of bravery and ingenuity in Athens and Sparta. Just as the Homeric heroes overcame gods and warriors to conquer Troy, and return to their homelands, so the Greeks relied on that revitalized heritage to rally against the Persians. The Homeric metaphors helped to inspire the Greeks to victories at Marathon and Salamis. To be “Greek” was at least for a short while to be Homeric.
 
Metaphors change as cultures change as generation follows generation. The “historical/mythical” Trojan War would have been a Bronze Age battle. Its epic telling, however, had to wait for the Blind Poet centuries later in the Iron Age. In the interim, Mycenaean civilization collapsed, replaced by a Dark Age often ascribed to a Dorian, or Sea Peoples, Invasion. Probably in the mid-eighth century, Homer consolidated the long-lost tales and framed them as a metaphor for Greek life. His epics appear to have permeated Greek society between the mid-eighth century until well after those wars with the Persians. As a sign of their significance to Greek life in the first half of the fifth century, the builders of the Parthenon portrayed those epic characters on the metopes of the building’s north side. But Plato, born 53 years after Themistocles defeated the Persians at Salamis and a decade after the completion of the Parthenon and its statuary dedicated to the Homeric heroes, doesn’t appear to have been a big fan of Homeric symbolism as a metaphor of life. Plato’s attitude reveals that just when a metaphor reaches its peak of influence, one even carved in stone, it can suddenly collapse. We can see the process in action in the push to take down or destroy the South’s Civil War commemorative statues, in the name change from St. Petersburg to Leningrad and back to St. Petersburg in Russia, and in schools that altered their nicknames, as Indiana U. of PA did in renaming itself as “Crimson Hawks” to replace “Indians.” If we stick Greek, the metaphorical significance of Odysseus provides a great example of such change through generations and across cultures.
 
With the fall of Greek city states and the rise of the Roman Empire, Homeric heroes eventually gave way to those of Vergil. The Aeneid, recounting the journey of the Trojan Aeneas, replaced heroism of Greek character with that of the virtues of Roman character. As Robert Squillace writes in his introduction to The Odyssey, “The very qualities that made Odysseus so secure a guide to behavior in the Greek world of the eighth through the fifth centuries … rendered him a virtual outlaw in the regulated precincts of philosophical reason and Roman polity ….” (xxi) * Aeneas was more chivalrous than Odysseus who, in the Roman view, was a conman without compunction, a rascal not worthy of the designation “hero.” Suffice it to say the Romans didn’t see Odysseus the way Greeks saw him.
 
The fall of the Western Roman Empire ushered in a new Dark Age, this one in Europe. Homer’s and Vergil’s heroes were essentially lost for a millennium but were rediscovered during the Renaissance and the rise of a distinctive European culture. Even then, Dante adopted Vergil’s negative view of the Greek hero and confined Odysseus to the eighth level of the Inferno. But after Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Troy in the nineteenth century, the Greek version of Homeric metaphors of life and characters like Odysseus regained status as inspirational symbols. Odysseus, in particular, has since become a character of unparalleled ingenuity who is cool under duress, an early version of James Bond or MacGyver. Tennyson, speaking of his famous poem “Ulysses,” says Odysseus symbolizes the “need of going forward and braving the struggle of life,” as in the ending line “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” That’s definitely a different take from Vergil’s and Dante’s. Movie depictions also reflect the “heroic” aspect of Odysseus.
 
As usual, you are asking, “Where’s this headed?”
 
As usual, to questions for you: What metaphor lies behind your belief and behavior? Who are your symbolic characters, and what do they symbolize? Whose metaphors and symbols do you reject because they simply don’t fit into your worldview, a perspective that you believe to be as sound as the Greeks believed in the soundness of their heroes and their struggles with both mortals and immortals?
 
Are you the Plato of your age, looking for a manner to discover the nature of life and the world without reliance on ancient symbols and metaphors? Are you a Vergil, looking to replace an older metaphor with a newer version of the same, a version tweaked to justify your view of life? Are your metaphors as fickle as fashion or as enduring as marble statuary?
 
Need a kickstart? Think of the metaphors rejected or accepted by the proponents of political correctness, the thought police of society and government, and the philosophers and writers of your times. And note that every metaphor of life reveals itself eventually to be a refractive lens, a fishbowl where fish see only a view of the world outside that is distorted by glass and water—the world in a neighboring fishbowl. Now examine the metaphors of your times, the political, religious, and social metaphors that serve as bodies of water for fish incapable of seeing clearly or understanding why other fish in other bowls see the world differently.
 
We are limited in the number of metaphors we can apply to life and have a limited number of recurring archetypes that underlie our efforts to make sense of existence. Jung might have had a point that there are underlying metaphors we all share in general, but the specific is revealed in how we apply them. Recurring archetypes, metaphors, and symbols all appear in various guises. All of these are subject to variations. When you or someone else says the world is different now, think again. The world is as it used to be. Odysseus did what he did. His actions would be the same today. What you see as difference or how you evaluate those actions is matter of refraction.
 
 
*Homer, The Odyssey, Trans. by George Herbert Palmer.New York. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.

It’s a bit hard for you; I get it. You look around to see a world of wounded ideas, and you think, “Something needs to be done.”
 
But about what? Having the “world” agree with you? Would you have the world “adopt” your view? You realize that’s just not going to happen, don’t you? At best the “world” is more adhesive than cohesive. Regardless of the seeming like-mindedness of groups that appear to stick together because of similarities or shared views, eventually most, if not all, thought-collectives reveal themselves as adhesive conjunctions. No thinking person ever fully coheres to the thoughts of others as they express themselves in behaviors. General ideas might be cohesively bound, but specific ideas can only be adhesively bound.
 
You’ll want examples, of course. Take a look at one of the most significant bodies, the American Congress. Three groups operate there, the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Independents—four if you are inclined to include the current (2019) group that identifies as Social Democrats. The groups apparently exist because of a common purpose based on a set of ideals originally meant to address injuries. But ask members of them to define both the common purpose and ideals, and you’ll find only a connection that isn’t much more than an old piece of adhesive tape wrapped around flexible skin. 
 
So, you get a cut, run to the medicine cabinet, find the gauze and adhesive tape or a band aid, and wrap the wound to expedite its healing. The days progress; the wound begins to heal—so much so that you even forget you had a wound. As each day of healing passes, you observe your bandage; you need to change it. The old bandage frays, bends with a flexible skin, gets wet during even the simple act of hand-washing, and shows some accumulating dirt. If you were to leave it unattended, it would detach from the wound completely and fail to fulfill its original purpose—healing a fading or forgotten wound.
 
See any similarities to the members of any Congress, any group of likeminded ideologues? The reason for the initial assemblage changes with time. Newer members, recruited to replace those worn out by time, find the old bandages ineffective, frayed at the edges and dirtied by contact with the real world. The hurt of one generation isn’t fully felt by the following one; the next generation did not personally experience the wound itself, but rather an historical account of it, and maybe an account subjected to revisionism. The next generation adheres to the bandaging protocol, dutifully covering a wound that has changed, maybe even disappeared.
 
Do you adhere to a group to which you believed you had an original cohesive connection? As you look at your adherence, do you see fraying? Do you think today’s Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are driven to heal old wounds that no longer exist? You can put the questions in any context perceived as a “wound”: The definition of life, the relationship among nations, the notion of property, the extent of personal freedom, the role of government, or any other context that serves as a backdrop for political "wounds." Would it be wise for each of us to consider whether or not our sticking to ideologies is a matter of cohesion or adhesion?

“Dissimulation warning! Dissimulation warning!” my robot just said. “Don’t expect anything in your future to be anything like your past. Memory is unnecessary according to some. We can make a new world just by saying it, just by making a new symbol or two, and just by virtue of interminably being in the public eye. And those symbols don’t have to represent anything real. The New World is whatever we say it is, and no consequence of previous actions requires as a law of human nature that a similar consequence will occur.”
 
That robot sounds a bit like Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulation, talking. Or maybe like some character out of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? aka Blade Runner. We’ve entered fully the world of “If you can say it, it’s real because the real is difficult to detect.” It isn’t a matter of things just looking like something real; life now is matter of living symbolically on the basis of symbols themselves, on the basis of constructs of our imaginations, and on the basis of ideals that have never historically proved themselves to be anything other than empty symbols or pipe dreams.
 
Baudrillard has received his share of criticism for his psychology, philosophy, and social ideas, and maybe deservedly so, but he makes some points that might apply to our burgeoning
Blade-Runner-World in which we have to give someone a test to see whether or not he or she is a real person—or, should I say, represents a viable reality. In his Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard discusses the 1971 TV verité program that became the model for all reality TV. It was the show that followed the Loud family for seven months of uninterrupted shooting, during which time the family, in Baudrillard’s words, “fell apart.” Baudrillard writes, “Was TV itself responsible [for the breakup]? What would have happened if TV hadn’t been there? More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren’t there.” (27,28) *  
 
Living our lives as we do in the midst of cameras, we are all characters in a movie or reality show similar to The Truman Show. Everyone is a potential video producer with unlimited access to the world stage. Any action of ours might be broadcast at any time. That’s not good for privacy, but it is certainly good for turning a make-believe world into a perceived reality. For some, the ubiquitous cameras are self-serving in the extreme, as exemplified by a young congresswoman from New York, the 2018/2019 TV darling AOC, as she is known. Apparently, she can simply say that an economic system is ideal regardless of what the past has shown us. In this instance, the saying is about socialism as an ideal.
 
Now, most of us can acknowledge that in a world with seven billion people, collective social support is a worthy cause, particularly because so many require assistance of some kind to achieve the first two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (physiological and safety needs). Beyond those two needs that society in general might be able to supply in part with a distribution of wealth, lie those other “needs” that Maslow identified: Love/social acceptance, esteem, self-actualization, and, from his later work, transcendence. Apparently, those who advocate the complete or nearly complete distribution of wealth believe that those “higher” needs can be attained through an economic solution.
 
Baudrillard has said that symbols no longer symbolize the real. The “originals” that symbols symbolize are nonexistent. Symbols symbolize other symbols, most of which apparently aren’t based on any historical precedent. In general, there’s nothing wrong with dreaming the dream, that is, with a young congresswoman’s seeking an “ideal.” But the proof lies in the pudding itself, and there are, to be redundant, historical precedents. Those precedents (e.g., Cuba’s, Venezuela’s, the old Soviet Union’s economies and histories of human indignities fostering millions to attempt escape) bespeak of despotism and a circle of the elite who deem what is or what isn’t a “need.” Imagine the young congresswoman in her old age, not pandered to by a fawning media oblivious to the content of her stream-of-consciousness ramblings, seeking some help from a system that says, “Sorry, for the greater good, we’re going to have to cut you off from this ‘need.’”**
 
Here’s what Baudrillard writes: “It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the active, critical mode, the analytic mode—the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive…between the end and the means. It is in this sense that one can say: TV manipulates us, TV informs us….” (30) * Think of how dependent we all are—or if not “dependent,” then “accustomed to”—on the words of pundits and commentators. Remember that the “announcerless game” between the Jets and the Dolphins broadcast by NBC in 1980, was a failure. Fans demand commentators for perspective. News junkies demand commentators to tell them what to think, to explain the symbols, the metaphors, and the models of the times. And it doesn’t matter to the uninformed if the commentators are themselves “informed” or “uninformed,” simulating or dissimulating. Such is the manner of our dependence on simulations, rather than on history or personal, rational analysis.
 
Regardless of how many ills all economic systems engender in a society, for achieving the top-level needs of Maslow, the facts of history favor those systems that from an individual’s perspective work top-down. That is, those who have self-esteem derived from individual effort are usually those most capable of providing the first two need levels—physiological and safety needs. But that is irrelevant, isn’t it? As we move closer to passivity supported by a dictatorial society and away from individual activity, the only reality is the simulated one, the one projected on TV screens, spoken by commentators of varying levels of erudition, and shown by videos taken by phone cameras. Everyman, in the allegorical sense, is a producer. Given enough cameras, enough coverage, any symbol, any “ideal,” can become the truth.
 
“Warning!” the robot said.
 
I know this will appear to be a bit farfetched to some, but bear with me for a few more thoughts. In the Philip Dick novel, the character Phil Resch says, “It doesn’t seem possible. For three years I’ve been working under the direction of androids. Why didn’t I suspect…Garland has been my superior from the start…Then at one time an authentic Garland existed..And somewhere along the way got replaced…Or—I’ve been impregnated with a false memory system.” (127) ***
 
Is it possible that Baudrillard has a legitimate point when he says that the originals on which symbols were based are all gone—or never existed? Is it possible that we are immersed in a world of symbols based on symbols, on simulations. As he writes, “It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real….” (2) *
 
*Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press. 1994.
 
**Of course, given a certain level of fame, independent wealth can grow. She will be able to write books and give speeches for handsome compensations as so many ex-politicians do.
 
***Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York. Del Rey Book/Ballantine Books, 1968. 

Just when we think we have a handle on how the world works, some New Ager comes along with a strange coupling of mysticism and science. Many such couplings (entanglements?) have attracted the attention of “followers.” The “new” thinking takes effect among a passionate few and then spreads as by osmosis through a culture, reshaping it forever, future generations not even realizing they are, at least in part, also followers. Sometimes I ask myself, “Am I a New Ager or a New Age cult follower without my knowing? Do I have so little knowledge that I am easy prey for any seemingly new metaphor of life? Do my writings reflect any New Age beliefs?” You might ask yourself the same questions.
 
Let me hop onto the train of arguments made by Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan in their book Doubt and Certainty. * One of the questions they pose centers on Einstein’s “relativity.” If you read Einstein’s book Relativity, you find that he stresses the importance of “invariants” in his work on special relativity. Rothman and Sudarshan ask whether or not the intellectual history of the twentieth century might have been vastly different if Albert had labeled his work the Special Theory of Invariants. Do you understand why they might ask that? Think for a moment before reading on…
 
 
I’ll pose an answer, but let me put it in the context of two other tracks of thought and one event. First the event. In January, 2019, Indian scientists protested speakers at a convention organized by the Indian Science Congress Association. ** Some of the convention’s speakers claimed that Einstein and Newton blundered, that ancient India was the site of discoveries in the physical and biological sciences long before the development of modern science, and that proof that ancient people had invented aircraft, test-tube babies, and stem-cell research could be found in the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. A retired professor and general secretary of the non-profit Breakthrough Science Society, Dhruba Mukhopadhyay told Reuters, “This is very harmful for the growth of scientific temper because these ideas are being propagated through the Science Congress which gives it respectability.”
 
Now the context of two tracks of thought other than Relativity. What might have happened to the intellectual history of the twentieth century had Darwin not injected the principles of survival of the fittest and natural selection into Western Culture? And what would have happened if the train tracks of thought leading to the present moment hadn’t included a line for the Orient Express? “Huh? This is getting complicateder and complicateder, Donald. Pare it down.”
 
Given a boost by nineteenth-century influences like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism, English Romanticism, and the cultural opening of the East to the machinations of western “intellects,” Eastern Mysticism began to merge with Western Thought like rail lines thrown together by some “switch monkey.” Three intellectual influences came together to form a single-track, taking different train cars—Relativity, Evolution, and Mysticism—to New Age Thinking that has now become a part twenty-first century culture, including current-day politics.
 
Let’s begin again with the Theory of Invariants: Rothman and Sudarshan say that because Einstein and his followers used the term relativity, the products of science have been cast as “social artifacts.” (277). Again, think. What if invariance, and not relativity, had been the key term of the twentieth century? Would you have the same worldview? Would your language reflect a different psychology? The same applies to evolution and mysticism, whose development includes situation ethics, social Darwinism—even lethal eugenics—Progressive Politics, and Zen. In the common mind, all is relative, all progressive, and all as easily mystical and as verifiable as “scientific products” are under Karl Popper’s falsification principle. In fact, since social and intellectual relativism dominates, all is verifiable just by virtue of one’s saying so. Truth lies in the individual mind, a principle that is most likely believed by many tripping into “higher” orders of awareness under the influence of Timothy Leary’s cult of LSD and other hallucinogens. Of course, as we all know, such awareness is beyond articulation and objective, or “scientific,” repetition. But we can’t deny that a sizable portion of Western populations have perspectives—however varied—derived from a culture of drugs and corrupted or usurped definitions of Relativity, Darwinism, and Mysticism. If anything has become “invariant,” it is relativism.
 
We can’t discount Darwin’s influence in the making of the modern mind. Here’s what Rothman and Sudarshan say:
 
          “…in the waning half of the nineteenth century, the concept of social Darwinism is having enormous impact on all aspects of society. ‘Survival of the Fittest’ becomes not just an evolutionary principle but a battle cry. On the right, robber barons cite Darwin as a justification for economic exploitation of the lower classes and to buttress their opposition to child-labor laws. On the left, Karl Marx wishes to dedicate volume one of Das Kapital to Darwin…[and] George Bernard Shaw advocates his brand of socialism with the help of ‘creative evolutionism.’” (267)
 
Is there any wonder why we find ourselves in the state were in? We don’t need verifiable proof for anything. If you believe it, it’s true. Witness the numerous informal statements in social media and in man-on-the-street interviews of everyday citizens, youthful protestors, special interest groups, and political pundits. There’s a difference between the rise of individualism that can be traced back to eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the individualism of today. Thomas Jefferson, an advocate for the worth of the individual (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) had portraits of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton on his office walls when he was Secretary of State. That was in pre-Darwinian, pre-Einsteinian, and pre-New Age times. Locke was an empiricist; Bacon, and experimentalist; Newton, both.
 
I can’t blame the youth of today for wallowing in the mire of subjectivism. Every intellectual benchmark has been corrupted by popularization. Who has read Darwin? Who has read Einstein? Who can explain Zen koans? (By the way, what is the sound of one hand clapping?)

​Meaning is whatever one means meaning is. The age of the logical argument is long gone.
 
In practice, just about every—if not every—perspective becomes its opposite. Those who proclaim the worth of the individual do so only for their own self-perceived worth. The modern individual is a mystic who searches for meaning in ways not possible to share. The modern definition of anything depends on the definer. All has risen through a social evolutionary trend under the misused term relativity. All might have been different had Einstein given us the Special Theory of Invariance, Darwin had given us the Theory of Random Mutation, and Eastern Mysticism had remained separate from physics.   
 
In the New Age, we adopt various mixtures of Relativity, Darwinism, and Mysticism. Unfortunately, we can’t really share exactly what we mean, and in many instances, can’t even articulate what we mean even to ourselves. We do, however, share some common and very vague generalities about all three intellectual influences. But under the merger of those three misunderstood influences, emotion reigns over worldview. Like and dislike, love and hatred, and attraction and revulsion govern daily life.
 
You might have reasonable arguments for your positions on the topics du jour, topics involving social, ethical, and political problems. Chances are you aren’t going to find an opponent willing to address the logic of your arguments. The question that you might ask yourself is whether or not you are capable of framing and articulating a position while responding without emotion to opposing positions.
 
Until we can cast off the corrupted versions of Relativity, Darwinism, and Mysticism, everyone will very much be “one hand clapping.”
 
*Rothman, Tony and George Sudarshan. Doubt and Certainty. Reading, Mass. Helix Books (Perseus Books), 1998.
 
**Science News. Indian scientists protest congress speakers discrediting works of Newton, Einstein. January 7, 2019. Online at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-science-idUSKCN1P11XT  Accessed January 31, 2019.