The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers

Jacques Attali has recently suggested that it is the image of the labyrinth which nowadays comes to dominate, even if surreptitiously, our thinking about the future and our own part in it; that image becomes the principal mirror in which our civilization in its present stage contemplates its own likeness. The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers. Millennia have passed, and the settlers have finally acquired the self-confidence and courage to rise to the challenge of the labyrinthine fate. 'In all European languages', Attali points out, 'the word labyrinth became a synonym of artificial complexity, useless darkness, tortuous system, impenetrable thicket. "Clarity" became a synonym of logic.'

The settlers set about making the walls transparent, the devious passages straight and well signed, the corridors well lit. They also produced guide-books and clear-cut, unambiguous instructions for the use of all future wanderers about which turns to take and which to avoid. They did all this only to discover in the end that the labyrinth is firmly in place; if anything, the labyrinth has become yet more treacherous and confusing owing to the illegible tangle of criss-crossing footprints, the cacophony of commands and the continuous addition of new twisting passages to the ones already left behind and new dead ends to the ones already blundered into. The settlers have become 'involuntary nomads', belatedly recalling the message they received at the beginning of their historical travels and trying desperately to recover its forgotten contents which – as they suspect – may well carry the 'wisdom necessary for their future'. Once more, the labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition – and it means 'the opaque place where the layout of the roads may not obey any law. Chance and surprise rule in the labyrinth, which signals the defeat of Pure Reason.'

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 138