A Strong Unifying Cultural Image, Why?
Using a Widely-Understood Language
The MetaSelf model does not presume that all languages or cultures organize experience in the same spatial terms, so it does not presume to any sort of immediate universality. Rather, its starting place is the commonplace metaphors of English, the language which at this time happens to be the most widespread and which is also extremely rich in spatial metaphors describing major aspects of experience. The model employs the body's structure and its usual position in the Earth's gravity environment, where all of us, except for the astronauts, still live.
The world is struggling to find elements of what might become an international culture, a sort of world wide cultural web linking us all together despite our differences. Certain elements of this web will have to be values that have some kind of international currency, however general these may be. I have used the MetaSelf model to summarize how we conceptualize ethical values in terms of space, values like compassion (switching places but also finding the right distance), courage (facing directly), and a balance between personal independence and interpersonal connection (the contrast between the upright axis, which expresses singularity and stand-alone agency, and the front/back axis, which expresses communion with others).
Since there is no language everyone understands, and since the project of creating an internationally viable language (such as Esperanto) has apparently failed, we must start with an existing language that is widely used. English is the obvious candidate.
The next move is to use elements of the conceptual structure of English that are found, if not in all other languages, at least in all human bodies -- the contrasts up/down, left/right, front/back, inside/outside. Cultures that do not now use these contrasts nevertheless have before them the same bodily structure to use as a model, which may serve as a starting place if they wish to adopt some of the English usages. (I put forward a similar argument, with a few additional points, near the end of the long article called What We Need: An Essay.)
Finally, these elements give English speakers a very powerful yet very open-ended framework for discussing things like virtue, social class, psychology and spirituality.
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