The Power of Myth

As anyone who's been reading ATF for awhile knows, I'm a big proponent of the the power of mythic narratives. To live without a narrative is to live without meaning, and even nihilists have narratives. Who was a greater mythmaker with his Eternal Return and Zarathustra stories than nihilist-in-chief, Friedrich Nietzsche. The choice is not between believing in myths or not believing in them, but in recognizing that some myths have quality and others have none. A myth that has quality is not a head trip the way ideology functions in that way, and it does not function to meet the infantile need for security. It is complex and multivalent, and works in soul depths.

So ultimately we don't ever really have a battle of ideas; we have instead a battle of narratives or myths. Mythos does not answer all the questions, but it provides a context within which we search for answers using Logos. And we can only fruitfully argue with one another within the context of a shared Mythos. The contemporary culture war is 'war' because because argument on the level of Logos is an impossibility if there is no shared Mythos.  Even the things both left and right supposedly share, like a reverence for the constitution and Bill of Rights are interpreted in radically different ways because the there is no common ground on the level of Mythos. 

Lincoln resisted evangelical Christianity all his life, but he understood it and was shaped by its ethos. He many not have bought what the evangelical Christians were selling, but the evangelical Mythos was the pond he swam in, and his rhetoric is suffused with biblical allusions. But by the the time of the Scopes trial about sixty years later, a secular Mythos had emerged that saw itself in radical opposition to the evangelical Mythos the country took for granted for most of the 19th Century.

Most myths have some grounding in factual truth; but they operate primarily on the level of imagination. The facts are almost always secondary: It took the jury all of nine minutes to find poor Scopes guilty. The power of myth almost always trumps the power of facts because facts in themselves are inert and meaningless; they have value only insofar as they are bricks in a mythic edifice. The facts that don't fit are unimportant because 'importance' is conferred only by a thing's relationship to the larger mythos. Western medicine has a hard time with Chinese medicine because it makes no sense in the Western mechanistic medical mythos. 

Facts have no power; they are inert and passive. Myths actively catch up the facts  and weave them into patterns of meaning, sometimes, rarely, in magnificent patterns of meaning that meet our need for profundity.  In order to get mythic truth, you have to have a faculty for getting at the multi-valent truth that's in poetry.  Scientific truth is just about things; mythic truth is always in one way or the other about meaning-saturated struggle. 

But a good myth, like a good poem, has to resonate in the depths of the soul, and it can't be contradicted by incontrovertible facts. New information comes to light that cannot be dismissed.  Most doctors accept that acupuncture works even though they cannot explain it. If the myth is not supple enough to absorb new information, it will usually lose its capacity to confer robust meaning. That's why the fundamentalist Christian myth has no broad appeal: it has neither poetry nor facts--it lacks suppleness, and if it resonates with anything in the human soul it's a rather primitive emotional need for unthinking certainty. Fundamentalism is the crudest kind of mythmaking, and it doesn't just infect religious thinking. There are Marxist, Freudian, and feminist fundamentalists. There are environmental fundamentalists and pro-choice fundamentalists, and their discourse is crudely ideological, not mythological. They are ideo-myths; real myth has to have multivalence and poetry and suppleness to work.  Real myth always subverts ideological thinking.

As a Christian I would unhesitatingly affirm Darwin's evolutionary mythic narrative as superior to the Christian fundamentalist narrative, but that doesn't mean that Darwin's myth gets the job done--it leaves too much out; it's too one-dimensional. The fundamentalist Christian ideo-myth has zero resonance for me, but read Teilhard de Chardin and tell me that his great myth of differentiation and convergence has no resonance.  It's not perfect, but I honor him as one who is struggling to develop a myth of reintegration, and it resonates deeply with people like me, at least.

But rationalists are wrong if they think that they have no need of myth. If they think so, they are almost certainly unconscious of the mythic structure that undergirds their worldview. They think they are being rational when in fact all they have done is substitute a new mythic or ideo-mythic narrative for an older one.  For some it's the dream of progress through rationality embraced by the Enlightenment. For others it's the great Darwinist narrative of random mutations and adaptation. 

I'd argue that these are all sub-narratives of the larger, deeper Christian narrative.  Marxism, for instance, and all of the modern myths about human progress are Christian eschatology repackaged in materialistic categories. But none of the modern sub-narratives has much resonance anymore, and more primitive, regressive, brittle myths are emerging to fill the space left by the crumbling of the modern Enlightenment mythic narrative. For the zeitgeist in a decadent era such as our own is a spirit of disintegration and fragmentation. This spirit pervades our art, politics, philosophy and religion. The Libertarian ideo-myth, for instance, resonates with so many these days because it ratifies the social atomization that accompanies this disintegration. Nevertheless, some like Teilhard know that disintegration is not the end of the story, and they are trying to prepare the ground for the emergence of a new zeitgeist and with it a new myth of reintegration.

A good narrative distinguishes itself from a bad one by resonating with the spirit of the times and in accounting for our experience and the facts that we are aware of in a plausible way. The Marxist mythology has all but been exploded, and I believe someday the same will be true of Darwin's narrative. The facts are not in dispute, just the narrative that links the facts in an intelligible pattern. Surely what we don't know now is far far greater than what we do know, and what passes for scientific knowledge is just intelligent guesswork, people doing the best they can to make sense of things with only a fraction of the evidence available to them. The bricks from which Darwin's edifice is built can be used to build another mythic edifice.

For do any of us really believe that in a thousand years human beings will more or less understand the world as we understand it now? It would be ridiculous to think so.  So what will have changed in that time?  What will we know then that we don't know now?  Will we just have more facts, or will we have a radically different mythic narrative?  What factors will contribute to changing the narrative over the centuries? 

I take solace in my belief that we are at the end of a crudely materialistic era waiting to wake up again to what our premodern ancestors took for granted--that the world is shot through with spirit or mind or the Logos. To remember is not to regress. There is no going back, but there is retrieving what was lost. The soul faculty for recognizing spirit in its many modes has withered in most moderns, but it's atrophied, not destroyed.  And when enough people start working with this awakened faculty, new powerful narratives will emerge.  And like the disintegrating narratives that dominate the cultural landscape today, they will then resonate with the spirit of the times and they will plausibly account for the known facts.

Here's an example of mythological thinking that I think has great resonance. It comes from Marshall McLuhan's 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine of all places, long before the impact of the personal computer and Internet was felt. What he hopes for in the future could all be dismissed as moonshine, but among the icons of the sixties, there is no one for me, at least, beside Teilhard and McLuhan--who curiously like their contemporary mythmaker J.R.R. Tolkien, were both doctrinally conservative Catholics--who has as much staying power. Read any Herbert Marcuse or Norman O. Brown lately? Would you want to? Read McLuhan's stuff today, and he's still ahead of our time. He didn't get everything right, but he got right more than most.  And he's our best guide in learning how to ride the technological tsunami into the post-literate future:

I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society--free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age--emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don't enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest. No one could be less enthusiastic about these radical changes than myself, I am not, by temperament or conviction a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale. TV and all the electric media are unraveling the entire fabric of our society and as a man who is forced by circumstances to live within that society, I do not take delight in its disintegration.

But:

There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man's consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential to realize the Antichrist--Yeats' rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants.

It's inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

Personally I have great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man's potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny--if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image--tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

The narrative here is death and rebirth. Disintegration and reintegration. Do we know for sure that the current disintegration we are suffering will at some point shift into a movement of reintegration? Do we know for sure that the sun will come up tommorrow?  We're in a disintegrative phase right now, and it's not much fun. But that's just one beat in a larger rhythm. We can't know it in scientific terms, but we can know it nevertheless. Death and rebirth is one of the fundamental rhythms of existence. And at least people like McLuhan and Teilhard, both deeply and perceptively grounded in empirical reality, are focusing their mythic imagination toward a possible positive future while most of the rest of us are looking at the future in what McLuhan called our rear-view mirrors.  We badly need this kind of looking forward, but most us are not ready to do it yet.

The timing isn't right. We're too focused on holding on to the little that we have rather than looking forward with hope and eager expectation the New that comes to us from the future. If we fear the future, we cannot see it what comes to us, and we cannot embrace what we cannot see. The culture heroes of the 21st century will be those who have mastered their fear and in doing so will have developed the clear vision and visionary thinking that will bring the rest of us through to the next stage. 

We don't know what's going to happen, but I do know this. The kind of thinking, the habits of mind, that are reflected in our politicians, in our media personalities, in all the conventional thinking we take for granted as defining the real world, is caught up in habits of mind that became obsolete decades ago, and in some cases centuries ago. Such persistence in obsolete patterns of thinking would be facetious if they didn't have such destructive power in the short run, so we must take it seriously if for no other reason than to defend against it. None of it points us to where we need to go. But assuming that we manage not to destroy the planet, all these petty squabbles will seem irrelevant by the end of this century. Events are moving too fast, and they will have overtaken those still preoccupied by these obsolete, fear saturated mindsets. The spirit that would move us forward is struggling to emerge whether we're aware of it or not, and when it does it will bring with it an integrative mythic narrative.

[Ed. Note: Revised and reposted 9/15/10.]