After the Future

Bolton as a Witness?

I don't really care if the Republicans refuse to allow Bolton's testimony. It will make what is already obviously a charade more obviously one. It will give Democrats more to run on in November, and makes Trump's being voted out and a Democrat Senate majority more likely after the election. They already know Trump is guilty, and they don't care. It remains to be seen whether the American people care enough to get rid of these craven Trump stooges. 

So what matters in the long run is not what happens in the Senate but how more damaging information continues to come out in the media between now and the election. The impeachment has had value only insofar as it puts Trumps malfeasance more in the public spotlight. The senate's inevitable acquittal is not important if the public continues to become increasingly aware of how corrupt Trump is and how coopted by his corruption Republicans have become.

Bolton's testimony won't add more to what we already know, and it won't change the basic dynamic moving toward a party-line acquittal. It will be astonishing to me if they won't go through the motions of allowing witnesses for political appearance's sake. The GOP's refusal of witnesses gives me hope that their obsession with winning every little battle with brute force might eventually lead to their long-term losing the war come November. 

But the bottom line is that the witness question is lose/lose for Republicans. If Bolton and others do testify, that prolongs things in ways that keeps Trump's malfeasance and Senate complicity with it continuously in the public eye. The significance of the Senate Republicans acquitting Trump will have more significance in November than it will have in the short run. More terrible stuff will continue to come out about Trump and their vote for acquittal will be more difficult to defend later than sooner. 

Fear of the Future

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.

But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society,” my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror.  

--Michelle Goldberg

Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals. Fearlessness is not an option, because there is too much genuinely to be feared. And so courage is called for. 

Perhaps the biggest test of courage for the contemporary intellectual is to risk appearing naive. But that's what's called for now in the coming years. We need people to be courageous in the naïveté of their convictions. But naïveté is useless if it's not working hand and hand with a certain shrewdness. I think this is essentially why Matthew's gospel entreats us to be as children, but to be "as" or "like" children is not the same as to be childish. It points to what Paul Ricoeur calls 'second naïveté', which I understand in the light of the same gospel's admonition that when we are out among the wolves, we must be shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves. The guileless dove part is the childlike part, but its being balanced by the shrewd/serpent part keeps guilelessness from being childish. 

I think that an excellent example of this kind of thinking is found in Gary Lachman's Caretaker's of the Cosmos. It's both shrewd and naive, and it assumes a certain sophisticated naïveté it its readers. It points to the kind of imagination of what it means to be human that might actually get us out of the death spiral. But I want here to assert something again that I've been saying for years, but maybe not as explicitly as I want to do now and in future posts. The challenge is to activate a dormant archetype that lies slumbering in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. The awakening of this archetype in the broader culture must happen if we're ever to find a positive, humanly enriching way forward. This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype. 

Now most people don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Second naïveté is prerequisite, and that's in short supply because we are living in a decadent phase during which no archetype is defining our zeitgeist. I think that Jungian archetypes need to be understood in Platonic or Neoplatonic ontological terms, and Platonic archetypes in Jungian psychological terms, but explaining what I mean by that is a post for another day. It's not a matter of "believing" in archetypes, it's about feeling their energies and working with them. During a decadent historical period the Chaos Archetype provides most of the energy we feel. It plays a positive role in dissolving cultural forms and beliefs that have died in order to clear the way for a new, creative archetype to emerge.  

When an archetype is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when under the sway of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. Some individuals are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because they are more than others in touch with the energy of an archetype. This is the meaning of 'genius' for the Renaissance artists. 

[I talk more about this in a review of Kelly and Dreyfus's Book, All Things Shining.]

So for instance, I would assert that there is an archetype for justice, and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was justice, and he channeled that to the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with people in ways they only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work. But here's the point I want to make: Unless an archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society.

What I mean by archetype here might be more understandable in relation to the term zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no positive archetype to shape it. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in a way that Douthat feels compelled to write about it.

But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of collective future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative archetype working first among those most sensitive to it--poets, philosophers, prophets--and then rippling out from them into the broader culture. 

Archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So just to look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever. The energies that shape the Age of Whatever derive from the chaos archetype, which is the one constant archetypal presence from age to age. It provides fuel, so to say, that energizes a more positive archetype with which it is in creative tension. But chaos reigns when there is no energizing, positive collective archetype to work with it, to counterbalance it in some actively positive way.

The Age of Whatever, as I see it, is the age of whatever-comes-next, because we must be vigilant in our awaiting the emergence of a new transformative archetype and its zeitgeist. In this interim, all the energy derives from the chaos archetype, weakly counterbalanced by the inertia of all-but-dead cultural forms from the decayed previous positive archetype of Modernity. With this archetype North Atlantic societies enjoyed historically unprecedented degree of optimism about a positive future enabled by reason, science, and technological development. Goldberg's quote in the epigraph exudes how changed our hope for a better technological future has become. I'm arguing that the only power that can counter the dehumanizing, chaotic energies of Baconism run amok in consumer technocapitalism--energies that lead inevitably to a mechanomorphic transmutation of the human into something that clearly is not human--is the awakening of the anthropos archetype referred to above. 

So, a decadent zeitgeist emerges by default when a society is between positive, transformative archetypes. Chaos rules by default. Nietzsche called what I'm calling the chaos archetype the Dionysian, and it is always there energizing, counter-pressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms the zeitgeist produces. During a positive transformative period the chaos archetype is a Shivanic source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks transformative vitality. There is a lot of energy in chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't an equally powerful positive, or transformative archetype to counter it. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures. In such moments the Dove in us needs to defend what it knows about transformative truth, even when there are few social supports in the culture to validate it.  

In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of the chaos archetype in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by the chaos archetype. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are themselves ciphers who are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from the chaos archetype.

But I digress. Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype because it reached its full development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline. Decline ensues when the chaos archetype is more powerful than than the positive, transformative archetype. The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about chaos than about positive cultural transformation. More on Romanticism below. 

The strong emergence of any archetype tends to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so creates a psychic instability that leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. This is what Hegel and Marx mean by 'contradictions'. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.)

I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values was important for human development insofar as it awakened parts of the larger 'anthropos' archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being. But its gains were unstable because they led in a historically unprecedented way to an experience of alienation--a radical disembedding--from the life world. It might have been temporarily necessary for human evolution, but it is not sustainable. The challenge for humans going forward is to find a lawful way to reconnect to the life world without losing their gains in autonomy and freedom. Surrender to the Dionysian is one way to reconnect, but it's regressive. It's not a way forward. 

So Romanticism was an attempt, often suffused with nostalgia, to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted. But it's also where the chaos archetype--the Dionysian--begins to play a more dominant role, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism. And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter, the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism.

Romanticism and German Idealism from Fichte through Hegel was the last, dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny in the West. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and premodern traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in total wars around the world. As the first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment archetype and the Age of Reason. 

And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal agents through which the chaos archetype is destroying the Liberal social order, which is, rickety and inadequate though it might be, the only order that we have. 

Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the chaos archetype. The Trump cult has very little to do with him personally; it has everything to do with the chaos archetype that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this cipher of a human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to command the zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges. Until it does, the rest of us, because there is no broadly recognized positively energizing archetype perceivable in the culture, can only say No. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might buy us time and create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political Liberalism, in the meanwhile, is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment archetype performing a role like little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke. 

So, Liberalism has a role to play because it's the only positive way to say No to chaos in the political sphere. If its No fails, order will be imposed by regressive, fascistic political forms because people will choose order, even fascistic order, rather than live with chaos. But Liberalism on its own is not enough. It has now as much archetypal energy in the political sphere as Monarchy had in the late 19th century--close to zero. Sure, it's there in the collective subconscious. But like the old monarchy archetype that can be activated nostalgically by a royal wedding, it has no future-shaping power. I think similarly someone like Bernie Sanders activates a nostalgia for the old Enlightenment Liberal archetype, more concretely, a nostalgia for FDR and the New Deal. So in this sense Liberals are ruled by nostalgia in the same way that traditionalist conservatives are, and while nostalgia has energy, there's no future in it.

I call it Lot's Wife Syndrome--paralysis by the fear of the future. But it's fitting that such an elderly, physically frail person like Sanders should be its most robust champion--especially among young people. Bernie isn't the answer; he's just a way to say No. He's a stopgap at best. 

This is the chief source of my anxiety at the moment. Things just might be too far gone. Democrats are all but divided and conquered. While Democrats might have the numbers, they have no energizing, unifying center in the way that the Right has the energy of the chaos archetype. The Left is energized only in its No to Trump and the broader forces of chaos he represents. That No is a sign of health, but the energy of No is not enough for the long run. Even if Liberals find enough energy to get rid of Trump, it isn't enough to solve the larger problem. The chaos archetype can be held in check only so long. You can't destroy chaos, you can only counterbalance and integrate its energies in a higher synthesis, and that counterbalancing synthesis has to come from the emergence into the collective consciousness of a positive, transformative archetype that might energize us toward embracing positive future possibility.

I feel certain that a new aspect of the anthropos archetype will emerge--I think Lachmann's book, if only in a preliminary way, is one of many signals of what it might look like. But I'm not at all certain that humans today will be attuned to its emergence if it does. We might be too buffered, too far gone in our alienation from the Real. In the Age of Whatever, machines and screens have sealed off so many humans from the Deep Real from where the archetypes arise. Will there be human beings enough open enough, awake enough, naive or guileless enough, to notice and be energized by such an archetype when it arises?

McConnell's Calculation

It would seem that McConnell feels a need to disguise the fact that the Senate impeachment trial is a sham and a cover up. Americans expect a fair trial. Assuming most Americans have retained at least some shred of sanity, McConnell's obvious cover up would lead them to vote out Trump and the senators who participated in this cover up next November. It's clear that what we know about Trump is just the tip of the iceberg, and more awful stuff about Trump will be coming out after the Senate trial. McConnell and most of the Republican senators know how bad Trump is. The question is why they would risk their own political careers in protecting him, if it's inevitable that the American public will find out just how horrible he is. Won't this backfire on his GOP defenders? 

So why would McConnell be willing to take this risk? Does he think that the Fox News world view is the one that most Americans share? Does he believe that most Americans don't care and are not paying attention? Does he believe that public perception no longer matters because the only thing that matters is the use of raw power to get the results he wants? Is he right about that in a way that people like me, who do care and who are paying attention, cannot understand? I guess we won't know for sure until November. 

But it would seem that McConnell's bet is that he has no future if Trump has none, and so he and the rest of the GOP must go all in and do whatever it takes to insure he stays in office. And if that means running a sham trial in the Senate, so be it. Once he gets past that, then he will do whatever is necessary to insure he gets elected. If that requires Moscow Mitch to work with the Russians to subvert the election, so be it. If this makes him look bad in the history books, so be it. History is written by the victors, and he intends to win. And so that's what's at stake. The Democrats are going to run on what we know and will continue to learn about Trump's corruption, and they will run in the House and Senate against the cultists who support him. We'll find out what kind of a country we have become.

Maybe most Americans don't care that the GOP has become this cult of raw power. I honestly don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter what most Americans think anymore, because most American by a 3-million-vote margin voted for HRC in '16, and that didn't matter. And it's likely if the election is close again, as it's likely to be, then the interference of Russia and others could throw it to Trump once again. This is McConnell's bet. If he's going to lose, he's going to lose fighting on this hill, and he'll fight with all the raw power he has or can enlist from elsewhere. 

His winning is not a sure thing, but if it turns out that McConnell's calculation is correct, if next November Trump gets reelected, and McConnell and enough GOP senators get elected to retain the majority, then we will have clearly passed the point of no return. For the last three disgraceful years under Trump and McConnell, the United States has become a dysfunctional banana republic. Elected Republicans and the people who support them either don't understand that or they want it. The election in November will provide Americans a last chance to decide if they want to make it permanent. 

McGilchrist's Reading of Nietzsche's Misreading of Plato's Misremembering of Socrates

This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be known by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years. The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’ 

Degeneration, by this account, begins relatively late in Greece, with Plato, and involves the inability to trust what is implicit or intuitive. ‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols :

one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this.

With the loss of the power of intuition, 

rationality was then hit upon as the saviour ; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational: it was de rigueur , it was their last resort.

The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or – to be absurdly rational. And if this seems to be just the pardonable excesses of Nietzschean furor , the ravings of an inspired madman, consider these words from Panksepp the neuroscientist:

Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith … It is possible that some of the fuzzier concepts of folk-psychology may lead us to a more fruitful understanding of the integrative functions of the brain than the rigorous, but constrained, languages of visually observable behavioural acts.

In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.

Great philosopher that he undoubtedly was, Plato is not quite straightforward in this respect. Even Plato had intuitions he could not dismiss. What is quite moving, even tragic, in the true sense (because it involves Socrates’ hubristic trust in his own dialectic powers), is to see Socrates/Plato torn between his own intuitions and the awareness that he is no longer at liberty to trust them. Plato was originally a poet and it was his association with Socrates that impressed on him the need to forsake poetry for dialectic.

In The Republic Socrates fulminates against the works of tragedians and other dramatists – such representations definitely harm the minds of their audiences … representations at the third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the truth … all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us a superficial representation … So great is the natural magic of poetry. Strip it of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to … the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and … his art is something that has no serious value.

The work of painters and artists of all kinds, including poets are ‘far removed from reality’, and appeal to ‘an element in us equally far removed from reason, a thoroughly unsound combination’. Art is ‘a poor child born of poor parents’, appeals to ‘a low element in the mind’, and has ‘a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters’. Poets are to be banished from the Republic. 131 All those involved in creative arts deal in deceit: the metaphor is a lie. Calculation (logic) is to be preferred to imagination: denotation to connotation. Being a poet also involves imagining one’s way into many things, and ‘is unsuitable for our state, because there one man does one job and does not play a multiplicity of rôles’: so much for Heraclitus’ insight that one needs to inquire into many things, not just one, if one is not to be led astray. 132 Plato’s proscriptions on music, like so much else about his Republic, remind one of a Soviet-style totalitarian state. There is no need of a wide harmonic range; most rhythms and modes are outlawed; flutes, harps and ‘harpsichords’ are banned, as are all ‘dirges and laments’; and there will be need only of two kinds of music, the kind that encourages civil orderliness, and the kind that sternly encourages us to war. 133 All has been reduced to utility in the service of the will to power. 134

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7729-7772). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

While McGilchrist sees Socrates and Plato through a Nietzschean lens, I see him through the Christian Neoplatonic lens. I would argue that it’s ironic that the Socrates that Nietzsche sees is the Socrates that comes to us through the Left Brain bias that McG would warn us about.

The idea that Socrates was merely a clever left-brained dialectician like the other Sophists strikes me as silly. If he were only that, I wouldn't find him interesting at all. I see Socrates as a man who was enlightened in the Buddhist sense, as someone who had a satori experience, a deep revelatory experience regarding the nature of the Deep Real, and he came to understood that the world as we ordinarily experienced it was like a shadow compared to the real thing. He used dialectic not as an end in itself but as a technique  to wake his listeners up to the fact that the world of opinion, the world given to us by custom, was mostly an illusion, a state of sleepfulness from which one needed to awaken. It is rather like Aquinas and the proofs of God—they do not render the experience of faith, they lay a foundation for it when it is experienced as gift, as revelation. As Tomberg (I think) says of Aquinas's comment about his theology as being like straw--Yes, but what wonderful tinder straw makes to ignite the soul when lightning strikes it. 

The true, certainly the more interesting, Socrates is the ecstatic prophet of Love who in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the disciple of Diotima, someone inspired by Divine Madness who seeks for a deep intuitive experience of the Good, its truth and beauty. The true Socrates was an ecstatic prophet, not a dry logician. The Socrates of the Republic is the Socrates of an aging Plato who like Augustine became cranky and forgetful of what he once felt and understood with such power. Indeed McG seems to recognize this, but sees it as the exception not the rule—

But at the same time, Plato himself needs to use myth in order to explain things that resist formulation in language or dialectic: the allegory of the Cave, or the ring of Gyges, for example. In fact Plato appears ambivalent, and gives hints, particularly in the Symposium , that the realm of the Forms attracts us in a way that transcends the logical; and that those who have intuited the Form of the Good, and the Form of the Beautiful, are compelled to pursue them, and to try to convey them to others, exactly as I have suggested the ideals towards which the right hemisphere is drawn act upon it, contrasting these with the purely abstracted forms of things which are created by the left hemisphere. While awaiting death in prison, Socrates’ daemon (conscience) visited him and repeatedly told him to make music. 135 ‘Whatever urged these exercises on him’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘was something similar to his warning voice’:

it was his Apolline insight that, like some barbarian king, he did not understand the noble image of some god and, in his ignorance, was in danger of committing a sin against a deity. The words spoken by the figure who appeared to Socrates in dream are the only hint of any scruples in him about the limits of logical nature; perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessary correlative and supplement of science? 136

But there is no doubt that it is ultimately the left-hemisphere version of the world that Plato puts forward, for the first time in history; puts forward so strongly that it has taken two thousand years to shake it off. And so it is that perhaps the most profound legacy of the Greeks, their myths, come to be seen as ‘myths’ as we now use the term, false histories. But here is Malinowski on the true nature of myth:

These stories live not by idle interest [that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity], not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them. 137

This kind of truth cannot be apprehended directly, explicitly; in the attempt, it becomes flattened to two-dimensionality, even deadened, by the left hemisphere. It has to be metaphorised, ‘carried across’ to our world, by mythology and by ritual, in which the gods approach us; or as we begin to approach them, when we stand back in ‘necessary distance’ from our world through sacred drama. So Kerényi writes:

In the domain of myth is to be found not ordinary truth but a higher truth, which permits approaches to itself from the domain of bios [not just life, but ‘the highly characterised life of a human being’, perhaps best rendered, despite the apparent chasm of two millennia, as Dasein ]. These approaches are provided by sacred plays, in which man raises himself to the level of the gods, plays too which bring the gods down from their heights. Mythology, indeed, especially Greek mythology, could in some sense be considered as the play of the gods, in which they approach us. 

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7772-7813). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

And whether or not this is special pleading, is it not possible that Plato as reacting not to the great poets and playwrights but to their second-rate imitators. He could not have been too happy the “truth” of Aristophanese depiction of Socrates. There was a lot of theater in his day, and most of it was not great. Homer was for most Athenians what the Bible has become for most Christians, a dead text that presents fundamentalist truths, rather than sacred mythos in the Malinowski sense. What Plato and Socrates were doing was trying to get those who would listen to go to the source of Deep Truth, not to simply accept its rendering in second-hand form. Neoplatonism as an experience grounded mystical, i.e., irrational, philosophy is not so alien from Socrates/Plato as Nietzcche and McG would have us think.