Cultural Mythology: Myth, culture, and consciousness

Silver bullet answers

I recently skimmed through Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us by David H. Freedman. No, he doesn't directly address our individual and collective capacity for myth-making, or suggest that our willingness to assign truth or authority to something actually reflects unconscious mythologies. If he had, that would have been a pleasant surprise. But he opens with this quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar error." 

"Deified its peculiar error." You may know that Shelley and his wife Mary (author of Frankenstein), were active opponents of the hyper-rationalism of their time. We're in the grip of the same tension today. "How can human beings know truth?" and "How many kinds of truth are there?" are perennial questions, and the task of discernment has not gotten easier for anyone who thinks.

Freedman's advice about how to avoid following really bad expert advice is of the simple sort that is deceptively hard to implement: maintain some skepticism but don't rely solely on your common sense, look at credentials even though they don't mean much, steer clear of simple theories about complex subjects, and cross your fingers. As befits the author of a book about the need for caution when listening to experts (double caution when the expert is self-proclaimed), Freedman warns the reader that his book could be "wrong." The problem of bad expert advice he says, is really insolvable.

(On that note, this blog contains no guarantees and it's highly suggested that you read between, below, above, and beyond the lines. But you already knew that).

Freedman's willingness to allow for the possibility that he's wrong could just be a nice twist, good for marketing and compatible with the original thesis. Who knows for sure? Still, it's a habit many of us should cultivate. Freedman provides so many examples of bad "expert" advice that you've got to wonder when we will start questioning our pursuit of silver bullet answers in the form of "facts." Maybe we have.

What's at the core of the earth?

Joseph Campbell used to tell a story about a conversation he overhead, between a young boy and his mother. The boy had written a paper about evolution for class. His teacher told him that evolution was wrong and that Adam and Eve were the first human beings. His mother actually agreed with the teacher, and when the boy pressed on and said that his paper was scientific, his mother got angry. Science, she said, was just a bunch of theories. To which her son replied, yes, but this theory has facts; scientists have found the bones.

Campbell told this story thirty years ago. At the time many people, Campbell included, thought that science would be the final nail in the coffin of widespread Christian belief. Not because science was "true" and Christianity was "false," but because our mythologies should be compatible with the science of the times and Christianity was not compatible. At least, not the way that it was commonly read and interpreted. Read as history, as "fact," Christianity doesn't make much sense. Metaphorically, taken as a mythology, it's quite rich. But for reasons that are beyond me, the idea that Jesus really lived has proven more popular than pursuit of the Christ-like dimension in each of us.

Campbell thought the misplaced insistence on historical, literal truth would dry up the last little drops of spiritual and psychological juice. But unfortunately, we're experiencing more and more heated and ridiculous arguments like the one the young boy had with his mother thirty years ago, and the hardening, the blind determination to literalize and factualize our beliefs and theories has infected scientists as well as theologians. It's touched many of us. Living with ambiguity is tough.

The symbols and the metaphors that we use to point to the ineffable can and should change as the cultural, historical, scientific context changes, so that they remain fluid and relevant. To truly operate as vehicles for religious (or mystical or mythical) experience, the concrete expression of belief must open out to something bigger. The whole has to be bigger than the sum of the parts.  "The tao that can be spoken is not the Tao; the tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao," says the Tao te Ching. Rigid dogmas and creeds can become ends in themselves. When you mistake the statue for the god so to speak, you've lost the experience of the god.

Image courtesy of the UK Space Agency.

Science, as an intellectual enterprise based in uncertainty and fueled by hypotheses, has the potential to provide us with metaphors and images that inspire the kind of wonder and awe necessary to mystical or religious experience. Contemplate the fires burning at the core of the earth, for example, and how little we know about them. What I am slowly learning about the earth is blowing my mind. After years of avoidance, science has become another way to probe the mystery that surrounds and permeates me. I hope to get more articulate on the subject.

Campbell thought that the image of the Earth, seen from outer space, could inspire a new mythology of global unity. It's an intriguing idea and I'm also inspired by the prospect of one human family and a planet-wide community of beings. Can such an image, one result of the quest for scientific knowledge, provide some raw material for a new mythology or ecopoetry? Maybe, if the inquiry is open-ended and the minds stay open, and if we are alert to the cultural myths that influence our questions and the answers that we accept.

Science

For some reason Robinson Jeffers keeps appearing in my thoughts and reading lately. I am struck by this poem, which speaks to the relationship between modern science and hubris, and the possible suggestion, by Jeffers, that cultural mythologies are the context. Our Western mythologies about human being, nature, and science lead us to overestimate ourselves and our knowledge... to beget "giants." Do you hear echos of the Titans, as I do?

I also love the reference to Actaeon. If you need some background to that myth, here are links to previous posts: "Meeting Artemis" and "Actaeon and Artemis."  Now for the poem:

Man, introverted man, having crossed

In passage and but a little with the nature of things this latter century

Has begot giants; but being taken up

Like a maniac with self-love and inward conflicts cannot manage

   his hybrids.

being used to deal with edgeless dreams,

Now he's bred knives on nature turns them also inward:

  they have thirsty points though.

His mind forebodes his own destruction;

Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among leaves and his

  hounds tore him.

A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,

A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this

  infinitely little too much?

---Robinson Jeffers

Wrong

I'm intrigued by the current interest in why people act irrationally and make errors in thinking. There are quite a few books out on the subject (The Black Swan is one that I've read), and even more that raise the question. In my last post about Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, for example, I talked about the seemingly illogical stops and starts in the progress of scientific thought, an intellectual enterprise that is ostensibly rational.

At the risk of over-simplifying, the answer to our puzzling irrationality is a lack of understanding about our need to mythologize and a lack of consciousness about our mythologies. We are not so much irrational, as we are driven by a kind of logic that we scarcely acknowledge. I wonder if we are on the collective brink of a new understanding about what it is to be human. Will our investigations into the collapse of multiple paradigms of "truth" lead us to the re-discovery of myth making as a defining human activity?

I recently read a review of Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing us---And How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David H. Freedman, that hints at this possibility. The reviewer, Dr. David H. Voelker, writes,"On the surface,Wrong is about the untrustworthiness of expert advice, but it has much deeper implications. As William James observed a century ago: 'Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.'”

James is best known for his reflections on philosophy, religious experience, and culture. Modern people have been more or less willing to challenge the relationship between belief and truth in a religious context. Subjectivity is part of religious experience. But the assumption that we can clearly delineate objective and subjective arenas hides the degree to which belief is elicited and required whenever someone assumes authority for "truth."

Apparently, Freedman provides ample evidence to distrust "expert advice" and concludes with eleven rules for not being misled. I'm curious whether he uses the words "myth" or "mythology," and I'll let you know after I read the book. If you pick it up, please share your thoughts.

Read the rest of Voelker's review, "How Much Does Being Right Matter?" at Skeptic magazine.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Phillip and I recently made a long car trip. On the way, we listened to the digital recording of A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Motivated by the realization that he didn't understand anything about the universe, planet Earth, or the conditions that make life as we know it possible, Bryson traces the history of Western scientific thought for non-scientists. I can relate to Bryson, and I learned a lot.

There were fifteen discs (yep, it was a long, long, ride), testimony to the long history of scientific investigation and the tremendous amount of accumulated scientific information. But as Bryson repeatedly observes, human beings still know next to nothing about the the forces upon which our lives depend or how we, or anything else, came into being.  Our knowledge is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Some people--including some scientists--- believe that human beings will always be in a state of partial ignorance because the universe is too complex for us to grasp, and/or because we are part of it, embedded in the mystery. A human being cannot step outside of the cosmos, so our perspective and understanding will always be a function of our involvement. This is a humbling reality, often hidden from view by the workings of our collective technological fantasies.

The existence of the unknown (and potentially unknowable) unites myth and science, just as it unites myth and religion, myth and politics, myth and psychology, myth and art, and any other set of human ideas. Human beings understand, learn, and express themselves through metaphor, which allows us to bridge the gaps, but not close them. Science is mythological because it depends on metaphor. But there's more. Science is a mythology because it is theory (story) that attempts to answer the big existential questions and explain the unknown. How the universe came into existence, for example, and how it will end.

Scientists, and anyone else who depends upon and uses scientific knowledge and theories, need to be alert to the inherent human need to mythologize. Myth contains the meaning of the scientific enterprise. Unconscious mythologies cause blindness. Over and over and over again, Bryson recounts a story of rivalry, of ridicule, and the rejection of a theory that was latter embraced as truth. Some of them are almost laughable in retrospect, but don't fool yourself into thinking that people in the past were just more ignorant.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, an analysis of the history of scientific ideas that popularized the concept of a "paradigm shift" and destroyed the "myth" of a logical, rational, steady progression toward increasingly accurate scientific knowledge.  Kuhn doesn't talk about myth or use the term "mythology" and neither does Bryson. But both provide a perspective on the evolution of science that can be read as a case study for the power of unconscious cultural mythologies.

Of course scientists are fallible human beings, subject to prejudices and blind spots, and controlled by the same cultural mythologies that govern the rest of us. But can we keep this in mind when we turn to the "experts" with technology to save us? And can we question our own participation in the scientific mythology of our times?