By Fr Gavan Jennings, Catholic Herald. (Image: public domain)
There is a lot of anticipation – much of it negative, I’m afraid – regarding Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of Homer’s saga The Odyssey.
I hope that the film, Ulysses, manages somehow to include the story of the landing of Ulysses and his men in the land of the Lotus Eaters, a kind of Greek hippie commune where the natives are essentially stoned all day on the fruit of the lotus plant. I hope it does, because this little episode in the saga has so much to say to our society.
When they land in the region of the Lotus Eaters, Ulysses sends three men ahead of him to explore the land. However, they unfortunately fall in with the Lotus Eaters and:
“Never cared to report, nor to return:
they longed to stay forever, browsing on
that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.”
Ulysses has no alternative but to force them back to the ship:
“I drove them, all three wailing, to the ships,
tied them down under their rowing benches,”
It never crosses Homer’s mind that the trio might have been right to settle down in the commune and spend the rest of their lives in blissful amnesia.
In the same way, Plato never for a moment sympathises with his famous imprisoned cave-dwellers in The Republic; men who have to be dragged away from the fourth-century-BC version of the computer screen: the cave wall onto which those infamous shadows are projected. They will not go willingly, given the discomfort of the climb out of the cave and the pain unaccustomed sunlight causes their eyes. For Plato, they, like Homer’s Lotus Eaters, will be glad afterwards to have escaped.
And so what of those millions of latter-day caves where young men, in particular, gaze at their cave walls for hours on end, immersed in a world of pleasure-inducing phantasms – ones which AI will soon make immeasurably more seductive?