A symbol is something that represents something else. A symbol can be a mark, a sign, a number, an icon, an actual material thing, a plant, an animal or a human being. Various animals can be used as totemic symbols by preliterate tribes. Small objects like stars of David or crosses are used as religious symbols by major world religions. Queen Elizabeth is considered a royal symbol by the United Kingdom.
But
why is it that human beings use symbols to represent different phenomena. It is my contention that public symbols have
been used primarily for two distinct purposes: one for pre-industrial societies
and one for modern technological societies.
And the way that these symbols have been used in these two different
situations is reflective of how these two kinds of societies have been
structured. For now, I am putting aside
more personal uses of symbols in dreams and the arts.
A
symbol in pre-industrial society was meant to organically connect people to the
material external world and to the unbounded infinite spiritual world. It was meant to ground people to help to
prevent them from floating in an experiential vacuum of meaninglessness. If an
animal is my totem, then I am especially connected to that animal in
nature. I can absorb that animal’s
positive traits, and by connecting with it, I become connected to the whole
ecosystem of flora and fauna that is my natural living environment.
Stars
of David and crosses are religious symbols that not only connect people to
their respective conceptions of God, but also to their respective communities
of believers. By wearing these symbols,
a person becomes one with the spirit world, rather than floating randomly
within it. One’s spiritual existence is
able to expand out.
To
the extent Queen Elizabeth is a symbol of Britain, she ties each and every Brit
to a large community of people. She
helps to expand the number of traits, of historical events, of common
experiences to what each British individual can feel connected. Being British becomes so much more than an
individual’s pared-down basic defined discrete sense of self. Queen Elizabeth as a symbol becomes the
foundation for a larger grounded identity.
Traditional symbols, in general, give a person a form of psychological
grounding. That is what they are created
for. A grounding in nature – the
physical terrain of where they live and its ecosystem of flora and fauna – and
a grounding in the community and nation that they are a part of.
Finally,
let’s not forget flags. Flags are a very
important symbol that connect people to their country, to their state or
province, to their municipality, to their organization or club or fraternity or
sorority, and to their sporting team.
When one flies ones flag, or salutes a flag, one is symbolically
expressing one’s connection to a larger community and creating psychological
grounding.
Symbols
primarily serve a very different purpose for many people in modern
technological society. Rather than
provide a fuzzy grounding where evocative flowing blendable continual stimuli
emanate from them, symbols today contract meaning into defined discrete
essences. They are not meant to be
suggestive of something larger than themselves, but rather something
narrower. In symbolic logic, symbols are
used to pare down statements about truth, so that they can be more precise
about truth than any normal verbal statement that could be made using ordinary
language. Symbols in this case are used
to create and facilitate a language for science and math. It’s not that there weren’t symbols before in
math. But math in traditional society
wasn’t used to capture reality in the way it has been used in modern
technological society, where mathematical symbols have become very important in
science and engineering.
In
photographic terms, symbols are used in traditional societies to facilitate a
wide angle view of the world, whereas, in modern societies, symbols are
increasingly used to facilitate a telephoto view of the world. On a psychological level, traditional symbols
tend to deal with human connections with other people and with the external
world. They build on flowing blendable
continual stimulation to help satisfy that most fundamental of human needs:
grounding in one’s living environment.
Modern symbols help to pare down entities to their bare essence,
independent and apart from all the other entities that surround it. By working to create mostly defined discrete
figures, modern symbols model for humans today, who are looking for strong
self-definition as a strong defense against sensory distortion: the abrasive
overstimulation from overcrowding in urban areas, noise pollution, air
pollution, light pollution, clusters of high rises, speeding cars, traffic jams
and construction sites, as well as the numbing understimulation from minimalist
modern architecture, smooth featureless asphalt and concrete-covered walking
and driving surfaces, cookie-cutter housing projects, frictionless machine
processes from blenders to electric toothbrushes, and smooth-riding car
interiors for passengers. Finally, there
is the numbness-creating screen technology and the Internet of Things. All this sensory distortion pushes people to
withdraw into themselves in order to defend themselves against living
environments with patterns of stimulation for which as mammals, they weren’t
built. The belief is that people can
control their internal living environments in ways that they can’t control
their external living environments. And
modern symbols in symbolic logic and with the hard sciences and engineering
mirror this desire to gain control over one’s internal living environment: a
well-defined sense of self as a defense against sensory distortion.
In
general, we can say that symbols are important in creating solutions to
concrescences of the most important existential needs that people may have in
particular cultural and historical periods.
To the extent that so many people today do not directly benefit from
symbols of logic and math and science and engineering, because they, when they
are students, aren’t taught very much about them and, therefore, don’t
understand them, such people are bereft of the benefits of the main new meaningful
symbols that are available and accessible today. This is particularly true among people who
have given up on the connecting symbols of religion and royalty and larger
strong group identities in general. Such
people are experiencing all the dangerous downsides of the resulting numbness
and experiential vacuums.
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