Metaphors of The

By LANCE MORROW

Forty-eight intellectuals from around the world recently assembled to help celebrate the sesquicentennial of Boston University by trying to find a metaphor for the age in which we live. It was an elegant game, but also inadvertently right for an age of television and drugs, in which the world is reduced to a sound bite or a capsule, a quick fix of meaning.

"Postmodern Age" has always been an empty description, and "Postindustrial Age" was a phrase about as interesting as a suburban tract. They are not metaphors anyway, but little black flags of aftermath. An age that is "post"-anything is, by definition, confused and dangerously overextended, like Wile E. Coyote after he has left the cartoon plane of solid rock and freezes in thin air, then tries to tiptoe back along a line of space before gravity notices and takes him down to a little poof! in the canyon far below.

The metaphysics of the possibilities can flare and darken. The Holocaust and other catastrophes of the 20th century invite the term post-apocalyptic. But a world veering toward the 21st century sometimes has an edgy intuition that it is "pre-apocalyptic." Last summer Francis Fukuyama, a State Department planner, resolved the matter peacefully. He published an article proclaiming the "end of history," a result of the worldwide triumph of Western liberal democracy. Hence this is the posthistoric age, a fourth dimension in which the human pageant terminates in a fuzz of meaningless well-being. Intellectuals sometimes nurture a spectacular narcissism about the significance of the age they grace.

Is there one brilliant, compact image that captures the era of Gorbachev and the greenhouse effect, of global communications and AIDS, of mass famine and corporate imperialisms, of space exploration and the world's seas awash in plastic? The Age of Leisure and the Age of the Refugee coexist with the Age of Clones and the Age of the Deal. Time is fractured in the contemporaneous. We inhabit not one age but many ages simultaneously, from the Bronze to the Space. Did the Ayatullah Khomeini live in the same millennium as, say, Los Angeles?

The era's label should be at least binary, like Dickens' "the best of + times, the worst of times," again no metaphor. It is a fallacy to think there is one theme. Like all ages, it is a time of angels and moping dogs -- after Ralph Waldo Emerson's lines: "It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs."

In Boston, Historian Hugh Thomas (Lord Thomas of Swynnerton) said the world now is a "tessellated pavement without cement." He was quoting something Edmund Burke said about Charles Townshend, a brilliant but erratic 18th century British statesman. Not bad, but somewhat mandarin. The audience had to remember, or look up, tessellation, which is a mosaic of small pieces of marble, glass or tile. This age, thinks Lord Thomas, is a mosaic of fragments, with nothing to hold them together. Is it an age of brilliant incoherence? Yes. It is also an age of incoherent stupidity.

One might put the mosaic in motion by thinking of this as the age of the hand-held TV channel changer. The electronic worldmind (and such a thing is coming into being, a global mass conformed by what passes through its billion eyes into the collective brain) has a short attention span and dreams brief dreams. When history vaporizes itself this way -- its events streaming off instantly into electrons fired into space and then recombining mysteriously in human living rooms and minds around the world -- then people face a surreal pluralism of realities. The small world that the astronauts showed us from space is also, down here, a psychotically tessellated overload of images. The planet reaches for the channel changer, a restless mind-altering instrument. Like drugs, it turns human consciousness into a landscape that is passive, agitated and insatiable -- a fatal configuration.

Historians can speak of the Enlightenment or the Baroque Era or La Belle Epoque and not fear that they are describing developments in only a fraction of the world. Now the metaphor must be global. There is no figure of speech so powerful or acrobatic that it can cover such a drama, the world that looks like the product of a shattered mind, without some immense event (an invasion by aliens perhaps) that overrides all else. Michael Harrington once called this the Accidental Century. Intellectuals sometimes ignore the role of inadvertence. "The fecundity of the unexpected," Proudhon said, "far exceeds the statesman's prudence." If scientists ever perform the alchemy of cold fusion, the age will have a name, and the future of the world will be immeasurably altered.

Metaphors for the age tend to be emotional and subjective, as poetry is. Perspective, passion and experience choose the words. Betty Friedan, saturated with the history of feminism's Long March and where it began, speaks of amazing freedom, as if that were the song of the past 20 years. Others are haunted by the obliteration of artistic form, of moral values and all traditional stabilities. Some know that by now humankind has exhausted its capacity to surprise itself in the doing of evil.

Language takes its life from life, and gives it back to life as myth, as metaphor, something that has a counterlife of its own. In a world of blindingly accelerating change, language can no longer fashion its metaphors fast enough to stabilize people with a spiritual counterlife, and so self- knowledge may deteriorate to a moral blur, like the snow of electrons on a television screen. In some sense the world is plunging on without benefit of metaphor, a dangerous loss. The eyes do not have time to adjust to either the light or the dark.