The Power of Myth
by
by
Stories Which We Share… or Don’t
Joseph Campbell spent most of his life promoting the positive, therapeutic, and restorative aspects of myth. His influence on culture and inter-cultural appreciation is tremendous. The effect of his writing on me over six decades is incalculable. But while Campbell was critical of those who would take myth and use it for harm - several totalitarian states are obvious targets - he was , I think, much more sanguine about the power of myth in his own country. This book, a series of interviews with a well-known American journalist, typifies the implicit ‘exceptionalism’ that Campbell seems to have applied to the United States and its founding myths. I think he missed some important, and not very encouraging, conclusions.
According to Campbell, myths have no inherent meaning. This is, of course, remarkable, for a man who has devoted his life to the spreading of mythical knowledge. But it is crucial to an understanding of why and how myths are significant in our lives.
Myths do not explain what life is about, its purpose, or the structure of the psyche. They are a record of the spiritual experience of our forebears. This experience is beyond what language is capable of expressing. So, as with any poetry, myths are meant to commemorate and sometimes evoke that experience.
Myths are not a guide to life in general. They are certainly not directives intended to describe a good life, or a moral life, or a successful life. They are stories which are on hand as we need them and in which we can identify our own experience and from which it is possible to glean suggestions for action (Carl Jung called them the Collective Unconscious, with a different but compatible function). Myths, in other words, are timely advice offered by those long dead to those who will eventually join them.
Ritual is myth acted out, essentially a play. While myths are shared stories, rituals are shared activities in which stories of birth, development, decline, and death are embedded. Together myth and ritual are the foundations of culture and establish what we casually call society and its institutions of marriage, government, the military, education, justice, art, even things as mundane as our currency.
All myths are spiritual in character. Some myths and their associated rituals become embedded in the institutions of religion. These tend to be treated as sacred stories, that is, not just as stories of experience but as truths in themselves which must be defended against change and given fixed meanings. Thus they become dogmatic and are directive rather than suggestive. And since dogmatic religion is notoriously fractious, it tends to fragment rather than unite the larger society.
Fundamentalism takes dogmatic myth one step further and claims that such myth is not only true but the only truth worth considering. Such fundamentalism often is, but need not be, religious. The secular culture of the United States, for example, is fundamentalist in insisting that its particular form of government is sacred and must be protected at all costs from variation in the interpretation of founding (fundamental) texts. So the political history of the country is one of conflicting dogmatisms.
To say that America is a religious country seems to be confirmed by the commitment of a large proportion of its population to religious sects and denominations. Some see the decline in participation in religious ritual as indicating a decline in the influence of myth. On the contrary, the religion of America is America, that is what its citizens take as the America they want it to be. This secular religion is increasingly fundamentalist and has generated the growing factional stance of religious leaders and their congregations.
In short, America necessarily dogmatised its founding myths in order to create a country of law based on a written constitution. This is so to such an extreme degree that the only relationship among its various levels of government is through courts of law. Religion, overwhelmingly Christian, was an essential social glue uniting people across independent, widely separated, legal jurisdictions. But the overriding myth has been the American Way of Life with its virtues of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Religious congregations, churches, conferences and coalitions in America are political action groups within the secular religion.
That society does not function at all well when it is dependent upon the shared interpretation of a sacred text is historically fairly evident. No matter how congruent with human welfare the text itself, it can never cover the taken-for-grated norms of behaviour of everyday life, the shared traditions which lubricate the frictions of being together. The self-image of a melting pot has masked the reality of the anvil on which most immigrants were annealed into American society.
But these historical frictions seem insignificant in light of the current divergence of secular fundamentalisms in the country. The American Way of Life has become (arguably always was) a zero-sum game. The factional ideals are not just contrary but contradictory. Each faction has its interpretation of the sacred text which it attempts to enforce at the expense of opposing factions through the electoral process - and if necessary through the manipulation of this process.
Technology has only made acutely clear what has always been the case - there never has been a shared myth in America, despite the one shared by the Deists who wrote the original sacred texts. These men believed that God and the Universe (which meant the same thing to many of them) shared their commitment to Reason. That most of the populace had no knowledge of this myth is likely. It is even more likely now. The attempt to create a shared myth was, according to Campbell’s logic was an intellectual conceit, a presumption on poetic metaphor, and bound to fail. Many other elites have made the same mistake.
That democratic liberalism has come to mean debate rather than violence for one faction, and armed response rather than verbal confrontation for another shows what happens when mythical poetry is considered more than it is. Powerful indeed, but not necessarily in a good way
Joseph Campbell spent most of his life promoting the positive, therapeutic, and restorative aspects of myth. His influence on culture and inter-cultural appreciation is tremendous. The effect of his writing on me over six decades is incalculable. But while Campbell was critical of those who would take myth and use it for harm - several totalitarian states are obvious targets - he was , I think, much more sanguine about the power of myth in his own country. This book, a series of interviews with a well-known American journalist, typifies the implicit ‘exceptionalism’ that Campbell seems to have applied to the United States and its founding myths. I think he missed some important, and not very encouraging, conclusions.
According to Campbell, myths have no inherent meaning. This is, of course, remarkable, for a man who has devoted his life to the spreading of mythical knowledge. But it is crucial to an understanding of why and how myths are significant in our lives.
Myths do not explain what life is about, its purpose, or the structure of the psyche. They are a record of the spiritual experience of our forebears. This experience is beyond what language is capable of expressing. So, as with any poetry, myths are meant to commemorate and sometimes evoke that experience.
Myths are not a guide to life in general. They are certainly not directives intended to describe a good life, or a moral life, or a successful life. They are stories which are on hand as we need them and in which we can identify our own experience and from which it is possible to glean suggestions for action (Carl Jung called them the Collective Unconscious, with a different but compatible function). Myths, in other words, are timely advice offered by those long dead to those who will eventually join them.
Ritual is myth acted out, essentially a play. While myths are shared stories, rituals are shared activities in which stories of birth, development, decline, and death are embedded. Together myth and ritual are the foundations of culture and establish what we casually call society and its institutions of marriage, government, the military, education, justice, art, even things as mundane as our currency.
All myths are spiritual in character. Some myths and their associated rituals become embedded in the institutions of religion. These tend to be treated as sacred stories, that is, not just as stories of experience but as truths in themselves which must be defended against change and given fixed meanings. Thus they become dogmatic and are directive rather than suggestive. And since dogmatic religion is notoriously fractious, it tends to fragment rather than unite the larger society.
Fundamentalism takes dogmatic myth one step further and claims that such myth is not only true but the only truth worth considering. Such fundamentalism often is, but need not be, religious. The secular culture of the United States, for example, is fundamentalist in insisting that its particular form of government is sacred and must be protected at all costs from variation in the interpretation of founding (fundamental) texts. So the political history of the country is one of conflicting dogmatisms.
To say that America is a religious country seems to be confirmed by the commitment of a large proportion of its population to religious sects and denominations. Some see the decline in participation in religious ritual as indicating a decline in the influence of myth. On the contrary, the religion of America is America, that is what its citizens take as the America they want it to be. This secular religion is increasingly fundamentalist and has generated the growing factional stance of religious leaders and their congregations.
In short, America necessarily dogmatised its founding myths in order to create a country of law based on a written constitution. This is so to such an extreme degree that the only relationship among its various levels of government is through courts of law. Religion, overwhelmingly Christian, was an essential social glue uniting people across independent, widely separated, legal jurisdictions. But the overriding myth has been the American Way of Life with its virtues of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Religious congregations, churches, conferences and coalitions in America are political action groups within the secular religion.
That society does not function at all well when it is dependent upon the shared interpretation of a sacred text is historically fairly evident. No matter how congruent with human welfare the text itself, it can never cover the taken-for-grated norms of behaviour of everyday life, the shared traditions which lubricate the frictions of being together. The self-image of a melting pot has masked the reality of the anvil on which most immigrants were annealed into American society.
But these historical frictions seem insignificant in light of the current divergence of secular fundamentalisms in the country. The American Way of Life has become (arguably always was) a zero-sum game. The factional ideals are not just contrary but contradictory. Each faction has its interpretation of the sacred text which it attempts to enforce at the expense of opposing factions through the electoral process - and if necessary through the manipulation of this process.
Technology has only made acutely clear what has always been the case - there never has been a shared myth in America, despite the one shared by the Deists who wrote the original sacred texts. These men believed that God and the Universe (which meant the same thing to many of them) shared their commitment to Reason. That most of the populace had no knowledge of this myth is likely. It is even more likely now. The attempt to create a shared myth was, according to Campbell’s logic was an intellectual conceit, a presumption on poetic metaphor, and bound to fail. Many other elites have made the same mistake.
That democratic liberalism has come to mean debate rather than violence for one faction, and armed response rather than verbal confrontation for another shows what happens when mythical poetry is considered more than it is. Powerful indeed, but not necessarily in a good way
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ November 19, 2021
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