Cultural Mythology: American Notions of Self and Country

Karen Armstrong on Belief

Karen Armstrong is author of The Battle for God (which is on my reading list), Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, A Short History of Myth, and other titles. Armstrong is an intelligent and thoughtful commentator on the state of religion today. A friend recently turned me on to an interview of Karen Armstrong conducted by Alan Jones, in which they discuss the relationship between mainstream religious belief and mythology.

According to Armstrong, the need for certainty compels many of us to read mythology (which includes religion) as history, to debate the rather paltry fruits of a literal, factual truth and overlook the metaphorical and psychological, which is the realm of meaning. I generally agree with Armstrong and especially appreciate her insights about the changing purpose and meaning of belief in contemporary society. For example, Armstrong explains that the word “believe” changed meaning in the 17th century. For Chaucer and Shakespeare the word “believe,” meant to love, to prize, or to commit to, not “I accept certain propositions,” as it does now. “We call religious people believers now,” Armstrong remarks, “as if that is the main thing that they do.”

And, I might add, the religious life is more and more a matter of what one is willing to believe—that dinosaurs roamed the earth three thousand years ago, for example-- than what one does.

Which leads me to another valuable insight by Armstrong—to live a spiritual or religious life, it is not necessary to believe first, to erase all doubts. Instead, practice.

To listen to the full interview click here

Shape-shifting

I was struck by Todd Gitlin’s use of the word “protean” to describe Barack Obama and his presidential campaign (see the post “Heros and Old Kings for details). Protean means versatile, able to assume different forms, a notion that certainly applies to the mythopoesis or mythmaking symbolized by Obama and his call for change.

About this change, Obama says, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.” Reflection on the mythic origins of the word protean reveal interesting and important challenges for the rest of us, the voting public, who are, as Obama correctly insists, as much a part of this mythic refashioning as the candidate himself.

The word “protean” is derived from the Greek God Proteus, a wily shape-shifter with a gift for prophesy. He could be compelled to come to the aid of heros, but his assistance contained a dual challenge: to literally hold fast no matter how fearsome or slippery his permutations, and to pose the right question when the god conceded defeat. As the one chosen to embody our desire for change, Barack Obama will become what we allow, or demand. It is our collective task to expect multiplicity and to hold fast through the unsettled and unsettling times ahead.

We also need to ask the right question, of ourselves, of the candidate, and the country. Recent events and campaign rhetoric, including the discussion of “fundamental differences” during the presidential debate last week, suggest this one: Is there a meaningful role for government beyond national defense, and if so, what is it? Or perhaps we can go deeper into this idea of “government of, by, and for the people.” Abraham Lincoln delivered these words in his Gettysburg Address, at a time when the country was, as it is now, bitterly divided. Can we ask ourselves who is to be included, empowered, and served?

Heroes and Old Kings

In “Race for President Builds Characters,” (Opinion, LA Times, September 28, 2008) Todd Gitlin observes that presidential campaigns are as much concerned with American myths of self and country, as they are policies and issues. This is an important point, and Gitlin goes on to describe the primary myths or archetypes, embodied by McCain and Obama. McCain and even Palin are easily recognized as archetypal figures of the American West, but Gitlin has a harder time locating Obama, calling him “elusive, Protean, a shape-shifter.”

Obama cannot be easily categorized because we are not witnessing a collision between two myths so much as we are participating in the protracted birth of a new one. The impetus towards a new myth is apparent in the campaign slogans of the two candidates. McCain has struggled to find one. At one point, he adopted a version of Obama’s ---A Leader You Can Believe In. Now his website proclaims “Country First: Reform, Prosperity, Peace,” a fitting motto for the new sheriff in the Wild West, violent refuge of outlaws and scoundrels. Obama offers Change. The word “believe” in his slogan, “Change You Can Believe In,” is especially potent, the promise of a new social contract at a time when trust and confidence between the people and their government is almost nonexistent.

The drive towards a new paradigm is also apparent in the generational differences, which brings to mind the archetypal pattern for this mythmaking process. In mythology, and in the mirror of human history, there are many stories about societies in distress, plagued by natural disasters, war, and internal discord that can only be relieved by the ascendance of a youthful hero who breathes new life into the body politic. It is time for the old king, literally and metaphorically, to step down.

Click here to read Gitlin's piece in its entirety.

Making Music

Poetry is essential to my life, my spirit, and my thinking. William Carlos Williams writes: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." I will often post the poems that currently sustain me and I hope they please and inspire you too.

The word "poem" comes from the Greek poiein to make, do, create, compose. Mythopoesis, the making of myths, is an elegant word to describe the purpose of this blog. Alas, I feared that few would do a google search using the term. Something for us to rectify together.

Poem, poesis, to make. Interestingly, David Bohm notes that the root meaning of the word "fact" is "that which has been made," as in manufacture (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 2002, p. 55).

Here is a poem for this week. Make music, and play it loud.

A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time I thought, and time to spare,
With only birds and streams for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world's artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile, I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

--Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems

Real Americans are White

In my last post, I talked about Robert Wuthnow's analysis of the American mythos of identity and our troubling inability to speak the whole truth about who we are, what we value, and how Americans operate. A good example of this syndrome is the active part that race is playing in the presidential contest and the bizarre ways that our collectively unacknowledged racism is deforming and distorting the dialogue, in the press, at the podium,and between ordinary people.

The denial that race is an issue for voters reached an absurd height in August, when McCain accused Obama of "playing the race card" because Obama told voters that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." Absurd because Obama would obviously be the first black president, which is not inconsequential in a country that turned a blind eye to lynching less than fifty years ago. Absurd because being black has rarely, if ever, been an advantage in this country. And absurd because the Obama campaign engaged with McCain's incoherent accusation, and denied any attempt to make race an issue.

Yes, we all just one big happy family here in the United States.

In "This is Your Nation on White Privilege," Tim Wise provides examples of the many ways that racism colors the rhetoric that surrounds the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin tickets. For example, Wise writes:

"White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen, like Bristol Palin, and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because 'every family has challenges,' even as black and Latino families with similar 'challenges' are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay."

"White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and then Harvard Business school, and yet, still be seen as just an average guy (George W. Bush) while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then to Harvard Law, makes you 'uppity,' and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks."

"White privilege is being able to sing a song about bombing Iran and still be viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the U.S. should speak
with other nations, even when we have disagreements with them, makes you 'dangerously naive and immature.'"

Wise concludes that "White privilege is, in short, the problem."

I say yes, and no. White privilege, the flipside of a disowned racism, is a huge problem. But if there is one problem, THE problem, it is our lack of mythological consciousness, which would foster complexity and facilitate greater awareness of what we repress and deny.

View the Tim Wise post in its entirety.

The Rest of the Story

I recently encountered American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to be a Better Nation Fall Short by Dr. Robert Wuthnow. Wuthnow, a sociology professor at Princeton University, defines “American mythos” as the stories that we tell about ourselves as a people. His study of American cultural mythology focuses on immigrants and their relationship to central American narratives about identity, the Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches myth, for example.

What concerns and intrigues Wuthnow about our collective stories, or the mythos that define an “American,” is that we don’t tell the whole story. As a culture, we leave out the shadow, the failures, the sacrifices and trade-offs, or other aspects of our stories that would undermine its desired message. In the rags-to-riches mythos, one rarely hears about the people who worked hard but did not make millions, or about the crimes committed in that scramble to the top, or the discounted privileges of the successful, the education or the well-connected father, that would undermine the cherished idea that the United States is equally the Land of Opportunity for everyone.

In other words, Wuthnow highlights the collective habit, even compulsion, to simplify our ideas and beliefs and to make them, (these are my words here), less complex, more ideological and less mythological. This is the problem that this blog is designed to combat, and interestingly, Wuthnow calls on Americans to engage in “reflective democracy,” to begin by thinking about one’s own ideas and beliefs about America and Americans so that we can collectively recover and grapple with the untold part of the story.

You can start here.

Find Wuthnow's book

More on shadows in the presidential campaign

I continue to think about Chopra's characterization, his pairing of Obama and Palin as light and shadow. From a slightly bigger perspective, one could imagine that the Bush administration and the campaign we are witnessing contain a collective shadow, one that I believe is fed by our shared tendencies to reduce the "United States" and principles like "democracy" to abstractions.

In other words, Americans treasure the notion of individual freedom and have embraced the image of "small government"-- the shadow or downside of this is government run by those who want to dismantle it, who don't believe in government, and who have abandoned service to the public good in favor of cronyism. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about the way the Bush administration has turned the federal government into a client that purchases services from the private sector (think private security forces in Irag and private contractors in charge of rebuilding New Orleans, and the replacement of public schools with private charter institutions) instead of a service provider.

In the context of the campaign, we confront racism and misogyny, for example, and watch bitter class divisions play themselves out in a society that is ostensibly dedicated to "equal," as well as "free."

I am sure that you can think of many other examples.

The problem is not with our ideals, but with the inherent complications and tensions within them that we fail to grapple with as a society.

Read more about Naomi Klein.

Going Down With the Ship

The language that is used to describe or explain a situation is not accidental, and the meaning that a metaphor carries often goes beyond what is consciously intended. This past week, the Federal Reserve voted to bailout the insurance company AIG. The first bailout in the current financial crisis was Bear Stearns. Earlier this summer Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bailed out, as was IndyMac bank. Lehman Brothers was allowed to go under, and Merrill Lynch hopes to stay afloat via a quick sale of the company to Bank of America.

The word “bail,” comes from the Anglo-French baille, or bucket, and the original meaning of “to bail” is to clear (water) from a boat by dipping and throwing over the side. This rhetoric, in particular “to bail” or “bailout,” immediately brings to mind the image of a sinking ship. (I imagine the corporate execs that cashed in their stock options and collected their bonuses, while reassuring investors and regulators that their boat would float, must be the proverbial rats). The best known sinking ship, which, like the financial ships we are now busy bailing, was once thought to be too big, too sophisticated, too well engineered and skillfully captained, to ever sink, was ---the Titanic.

In his essay “Re-Sink the Titanic,” Dr. Glen Slater explores the connections between the technological masterpiece named the Titanic and the Titans of Greek mythology, a race of powerful giants that included Prometheus (Spring Journal 62, 1998, p. 104-120). The Titans, Slater reminds us, were “architects of hubris,” characterized by an irresponsible arrogance and a disregard for natural limits or cosmic balance. They were overthrown by the Olympians, champions of order, and banished to the underworld. For a time, the Titans had the power and freedom to run roughshod over common notions of decency, community, and justice, but as their mythology suggests, this cannot be sustained.

This current crisis is the result of hubris and unbounded greed, and a collective delusion that somehow, this time, what goes up will not go down. But the ship is sinking. What will be the collective response? Many people are protesting the recent bailouts and calling for other solutions. There is a lot of talk about what is fair (see stopthehousingbailout for example) and I share in the outrage. But as we move forward, whether slinging the buckets or manning the lifeboats, or both, it is important to pay attention to the fundamental notions that repeatedly sink these grand ships (the savings and loan crisis, Enron).

The United States is “the land of the free,” and Americans place a high premium on freedom. But freedom comes in many forms. The freedom of the Titans, the unbounded and unlimited, is the unchecked freedom to act out of self-interest, to resist governance. There is no collective action in the world of the Titans, no limitations or sacrifice for the common good.

The vast majority of us did not make millions, did not rip off the public, and are not calling on the government to bail us out of our personal predicaments. But as we debate and reflect upon what should be done with AIG and the rest, we are really discussing our ideas about personal freedom, collective responsibility, and the role of government. The confrontation with the Titanic in American culture involves each of us, and an honest assessment of our personal willingness to accept limits.

Bailouts, banks, and what else tomorrow, tumbling down

For The Children

The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics lie before us. the steep climb of
everything, going up, up, as we all go down.

In the next century or the one beyond that, they say, are valleys,
pastures, we can meet there in peace if we make it.

To climb these coming crests one word to you, to you and your children:

stay together learn the flowers go light.

by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).

Keeping the Ball in the Air

I often say that the goal is to keep the ball in the air. In other words, let truth and meaning move in an infinite midrash. Imagining, and the act of interpretation, never end. This is the task imposed by myth, which opens and deepens, illuminates and confuses, because a myth is a means through which to see something, not a statement of “what is.” A myth is a map, as Ginette Paris says, not the terrain. A myth displays possibilities, but it doesn’t tell you which way to go.

I have embraced the exploration and use of this insight as my life’s work. But there is an unanswered question, a problem, and it has newly occupied me ever since I read and responded to Deepak Chopra’s post “Obama and the Palin Effect.” What is the relationship between myth and morality? Or more specifically, in a world of ever changing meaning and imaginative constructs, what is the basis for a moral or ethical system? How do I take the moral position, and I have, that Sarah Palin is just wrong about abortion and book banning and wolf hunting and the Iraq War, and keep that proverbial ball in the air? How convenient, if people just agreed on what is right and what is wrong. But we don’t.

The disagreement is a practical, albeit important one, if one is willing to just be absolutely, unequivocally right. But as Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people, but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.”