Commentary: Living on a Lifeboat
that it is probably impossible to ap-proach an unsolved problem save through the door of metaphor. Later, attempting to meet the demands of rigor, we may achieve some success in cleansing theory of metaphor, though our success is limited if we are unable to avoid using common language, which is shot through and through with fossil metaphors. (I count no less than five in the preceding two sentences.) Since metaphorical thinking is in-escapable it is pointless merely to weep about our human limitations. We must learn to live with them, to understand them, and to control them. "All of us," said George Eliot in Middlemarch, "get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. " To avoid unconscious suicide we are well advised to pit one metaphor against another. From the interplay of competitive metaphors, thoroughly de-veloped, we may come closer to meta-phor-free solutions to our problems. No generation has viewed the prob-lem of the survival of the human species as seriously as we have. Inevitably, we have entered this world of concern through the door of metaphor. Environ-mentalists have emphasized the image of the earth as a spaceship-Spaceship Earth. Kenneth Boulding (1966) is the principal architect of this metaphor. It is time, he says, that we replace the wasteful "cowboy economy " of the past with the frugal "spaceship econ-omy " required for continued survival in the limited world we now see ours to