Cultural Mythology: American Notions of Self and Country

Progress

I'm thinking about "progress," spurred on by David Brooks's assessment of the disaster in Haiti in a New York Times Op-Ed this weekend (article). Brooks believes that the effects of the earthquake are exacerbated by poverty, crowding, and poor infrastructure, and that those dismal conditions reflect a "progress-resistant" culture created, at least in part, by the continued practice of the Voudou religion. Brooks compares the Haitian standard of living and levels of economic growth to those of the Dominican Republic and Barbados. He doesn't say this, but the D.R. and Barbados are both predominantly Christian countries. They've joined the club.

Poverty is surely a major factor in Haiti. But the claim that Haitians bear most of the responsibility for it, by virtue of their mistaken beliefs, illuminates one of the real problems. Brooks says that he knows that we should be tolerate of other cultures and their belief systems, but... But what? Voudou seems strange and weird to many of us (zombies? possession by the gods?) but we shouldn't mistake our ignorance and parochialism for backwardness on the part of people we don't understand. Different societies can have different goals, Tibet being one contemporary example. Collectively, Americans act as if the world is soul-less, the repository of resources that must be, should be, used to fuel a material progress that has little bearing on morality or spiritual development. We do that stuff in church on Sundays, according to the book that was written up long ago. But our values aren't truth-- they're our particular form of impoverishment. True, it's difficult to find alternative paradigms since we've colonized almost everyone, through strength of arms, evangelistic fervor, Coca-Cola, or loans with enough strings to make rope.

I'm no expert on Voudou but I do know that the practice is dedicated to the development of individual consciousness in a soul-full world, a world of felt unities without our conceptual dualisms. It's a religion based upon initiation and revelation, not a dogma of "truth" written down centuries ago. Many Western observers have called Voudou morbid because it maintains an unbreakable connection between life and death. Emphasis on this cycle is not very progress-minded (linear), and seems negative in contrast to our dominant ideas about death, which are about denial; death doesn't really happen (we've got eternal life); death is a mistake that we'll find a cure for someday; death isn't a polite subject or good to dwell upon. But as Seneca said, if you don't know how to die well, you won't know how to live well, a sentiment also found in Buddhism.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion blends her personal experience of grief with research into Western attitudes and fears about death. It's a lovely book if the topic intrigues you.

Dogmas and metaphysics aside, if you can make a donation to Doctors Without Borders relief efforts in Haiti, click here. Please help.

Truth and statistics

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."
---Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien writes about war and being a soldier and memory and forgetting and history and suffering. His novel The Things They Carried was a finalist for a Pulitzer and Going After Cacciato (about a soldier who tries to run away from the Vietnam War) won a National Book Award. If you haven't read him you might want to, as one way to understand the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq (now Afghanistan) and what passes for "public policy" these days.

Truth is much more than a matter of statistics or facts, and sometimes has nothing to do with them. (There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics). We think they illuminate a situation but what they don't say is just as important. Here's one more thought that keeps circling through my brain:

The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of millions is a statistic.  ~Joe Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945

I hope you're not (just) hoping for health care reform

Some months ago I was writing about Prometheus and Pandora and the gift of fire. One of the pieces of that myth that I find so intriguing (and useful) is the contradictory image of "hope." Is hope a panacea or a motivator, a luxury or an existential necessity?

Here's the Greek myth. Prometheus, our divine benefactor, had sealed up all of the evils and suffering in the cosmos in a great clay jar. The first men were living the easy life, free of care, with the fruit falling off the vine. But then Pandora came along. There are some interesting parallels with the Christian myth of Adam and Eve--- man needs woman to be complete but she brings him down (that part is debatable, depending on your estimation of the value of consciousness and human creativity). In any event, Pandora was full of wile and guile and utterly charming. She was also greedy and curious. One day she sidled up to the great jar, pried off the lid, and let out a flock of troubles. Poverty, worry, sickness, hard work, nightmares, competition, bad art, and death, which now took many gruesome forms and no longer came as just a blissful sleep. Pandora slammed the lid back down but it was too late.

Hope was also in that great clay jar. In one version of the story, Hope is trapped under the rim and still flutters alone in the jar. In another version Hope escapes too, which seems probable given how much we hear about hope and talk about hope and pass it back and forth. Hope can bring a little light when times get dark, but is that all? Should we trust Hope? Why was Hope in that great clay jar with all of the other evils of the world? In our current moment, what does it mean to elect a President with a mantra of hope?

Check out Naomi Klein's vocabulary of "Hope"  for a suggestion or two. Stop hoping, she says, and start demanding. Let's start with the public option and move on from there. If you're merely "hoping" and have not contacted your members of Congress to insist that they support the President, I encourage you to do so. The House victory is a start but the Senate will be more difficult and the wrangling is far from over. Isn't dependable health insurance sturdier than the "hope" that you won't get sick?

A new way forward

I'm posting the link above because I agree with this agenda, and it points to a problematic paradox that I think we need to consider, namely, that we've become the tools of our tools. Institutions and ideas that should simply be the means to a desired end have become an end in themselves. Arguably we need banks or something like them to facilitate credit and other transactions, but these are functions, tools to reach a set of goals that reflect our values as a society. Somehow, it seems to me, we're now in service to banks and other economic ideas. We're perpetuating them and working for them as if they have intrinsic value without enough attention to what they are supposedly designed to do for us. We're tinkering with the engine without asking if the car can get us anywhere that we really want to go. I think the heated ideological arguments that take the place of discussions about practical issues are evidence that our values, our collective agreement about our destination, have gotten confused and murky.

This brings to mind a story from the Popul Vuh, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. This book is an interesting creation story but it's more than ancient history. The Mayans understand the text to be alive, full of insight about the present if properly interpreted. According to the Mayans, the creation of human beings was part of the gods' vision of the earth but they fail three times before they create us. The gods want human beings who will walk, work, and talk articulately, who will be able to understand the complex and beautiful rhythms of the world and the nature of the gods and participate appropriately. This vision is hard to realize.

The first human beings can't work or talk and they become animals. The second set are made of mud and they can't do much either. They slowly dissolve. Finally the gods decide to try wood. The wooden people look and talk and reproduce a lot like we do but they fail to harmonize with the rhythms of the world in an orderly way and they neglect the gods. They create a certain kind of chaos that ultimately destroys them. This chaos first takes the form of hurricanes and the proliferation of dangerous life forms. (If this sounds far fetched to you, consider the increase in storms and natural disasters linked to global warming and the rampant destruction of forests, reefs, and wetlands, the emergence of AIDs, and mad cow disease and other flues for example, traced to farm practices conducted with a cocktail of chemicals and disregard for the natural order.) Then the tools of the wooden people turn against them. They are all killed, killed by the instruments they initially employed to create a world out of harmony with what is, a world out of balance.

Today we are metaphorically run over by our cars, poisoned by our "food," and sweating, stressing, round the clock to meet the needs of our possessions.We are not the wooden people says the Popol Vuh, but we can't just keep going either, worked by the very tools that have brought us to this place.

Eshu's cap

I’ve been thinking about the current health care debate, Obama’s push for bi-partisanship and unity, and Eshu’s cap. I’m frustrated and saddened by the hostility and lying but I’m not in favor of papering over differences either. I wonder if Eshu has a hand in all of the turmoil.

Eshu’s black and red cap symbolizes the crossroads. It also reminds us that there is more then one side to any issue, that truth is a matter of perspective. Which side of the road you stand on determines what you see. The first step toward learning Eshu’s lesson is the recognition that we rarely occupy neutral ground, and that our perspective usually prevents us from seeing the whole picture. We have to be willing to move, to cross the road.

But there is a deeper message in this story and Eshu’s action. Eshu teaches us that agreement begins with the recognition of difference. The two friends had an illusion of unity. But we humans are not one being with one heart and mind, with one set of eyes and a common perspective. As the story shows, that kind of unity is a delusion that is easily punctured by the appearance of a contradiction or a mystery, and leads to fighting and greater confusion.

The two friends understood their situation when they saw that the cap was both black and red. What unified them in the end was the experience of being caught up in their respective truths, and the appearance of the solution (seeing both sides of Eshu’s cap) that rendered them both “right” and also wrong. Agreement is not a matter of convincing someone that black is red or red is black. Agreement, unity, springs from a third option that encompasses both views. This often seems impossible and I don’t envy Obama the task. But the black cap and the red cap were, after all, two sides of one hat.

A trio that acts as a multitude

Is a huge change, a mega-shift in values and consciousness underway? The collapsing economy sure seems significant; we might nationalize the banks, we’ve got CEO’s asking employees to give back their fat bonuses and people in Congress making speeches about corporate greed and incompetence. (I’m honestly glad, but I do hope we get to their role in all of this before we choke on the self-righteous indignation). Global warming is an admitted reality and Chevron places full page ads in The New Yorker calling on us to join them in a sustainable, energy efficient future. We have a brand new, young, black president, a president with plans to make the country more fair, more green, healthier, and better educated. A president who talks about patiently rebuilding and hard work ahead that won’t get done in a day. No more in and out, one week of shock and awe and a few handshakes and back to the corral type rhetoric.

It’s thrilling, but hard to tell if this is paradigm busting or just somewhat new means to essentially the same old ends: the United States stays at the top of the global heap because we somehow deserve to be there. We show a new level of restraint but still consume 1000 times what the average African manages, and go “green” by sacrificing habitat, views and solitude so private concerns can make money on our public lands. Despite the United Nations and conventions and treaties and alliances, we continue to independently assess our (best) national interest and wonder why the rest of the global community isn’t grateful when we pursue it. The American Way of Life, an inviolate standard for those who already enjoy it.

I don’t know how our current situation will play out. In search of a precedent or a model or something to ponder, I turn to the Titanomachia, an ancient story about one of the biggest shifts in world order imaginable, one with some parallels to our current situation. In Theogony, his account of the origins of the world, the Greek poet Hesiod tells the story of the Titanomachia, the war between the Titans and the Olympians. My apologies Hesiod, for the rough paraphrase…

In the very beginning there was Heaven and Earth. Heaven and Earth had many children; the Titans, some other divine forces, the Cyclopes and creatures, including three sons who were misshapen and not to be spoken of- Kottos, Briareros, and Gyges. Earth got tired. She was forced to give birth too often, to produce too much, and she wanted a rest. So Earth went to her children to ask for help. She had made a sickle. They were all afraid of their father but the oldest son Kronos was a big schemer and hated his dad so he volunteered. He cuts off his father’s testicles and the age of the Titans begins.

The Titans are excessive in every way, arrogant, greedy, lawless, and jealous of power. They lock the trio of misshapen brothers up in the underworld as a security measure. Then Kronos weds his sister Rhea. They have twelve children, the Olympians. The last child born is Zeus, also called the resourceful.

Kronos had been told that one of his son’s would overthrow him. Anxious to avoid the prophecy, he swallows each child as soon as it is born, much to the distress of mother Rhea. So before Zeus’s birth, Rhea plots to save him. She gives Kronos a stone to swallow and he doesn’t notice the difference (details, details). Zeus is spirited off to the island of Crete to be raised by his grandmother.

When Zeus grows up he challenges Kronos, who vomits up Zeus’s siblings. Zeus frees his brothers and sisters, the Olympians, with the idea of establishing a new world, a new order. He is after all, one more step removed from the chthonic powers, the inhuman powers of heaven and earth, and he wants to be free.

Let’s pause to note two things. One, the impetus for this huge transformation, the call for a new order, originates in the pleas of the earth, answered by forces that we can only imagine as winds, storm, fire, drought, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, heat waves and cold snaps. The plight of the overtaxed earth puts everything into motion.

Two, the Titanomachia begins with the arrival of Zeus and the Olympians as worthy challengers. Where are we in our version of this story? The signs of the Titanic are all around, in the excess that colors almost every aspect of our culture. As the only organized opposition, as government (which is Zeus-ian) President Obama and the forces he catalyzes seem to be the Olympians. Assuming this is true, President Obama as Zeus has just stepped onto the field, just begun to rally forces for change. Nothing lasting has been won.

The Titans and the Olympians fight for ten years, evenly matched, even though Zeus is given lightening and thunder by the Cyclops, even though the Titan sisters side with him. Zeus has the other Olympians and most of the powers in heaven and earth on his side and he still can’t win.

There is one group excluded from the fighting, excluded from everything, from all the cosmic affairs. The three misshapen brothers living in misery in the underworld. In the ancient Titanomachia, Earth urges Zeus to go to these terrible, frightening guys, free them, and ask for help.  Zeus takes this advice.  “If you will fight with me,” Zeus tells them, “you’ll have permanent freedom. I’ll give you your proper place in society.”

Kottos, Briareros, and Gyges are game and they fight furiously. Because they each have fifty heads and 100 arms they fight like many more than three. The misshapen brothers pelt the Titans with stones and very quickly, with the help of the Olympians (whose morale is definitely improved) the battle is won. Zeus is head of the Olympians and a new cosmic order.

Something powerful and hideous but also trustworthy decides the war. Something previously rejected, hidden, buried. A trio that acts as multitude. Who or what are Kottos, Briareros, and Gyges today?