In mid-1993 a discussion topic appeared on the WELL (electronic conferencing network)/ Mind Conference/ Topic #130/ Myths for the Silences to Come. The discussion asked what "mythology" might be meaningful in the world of the future. The starting assumption was that the old myths had somehow not stood up to the passage of time, and their collapse was related to the moral, ethical, spiritual confusion of the present age. How could the psychic security and ethical grounding that mythology gave to people from the earliest times be restored to the modern materialist, scientific age? I entered the discussion after many comments had already appeared and posted the following:

The hundred or so responses so far indicate people's longing for a "mythology" that would incorporate our modern scientific understanding, humanistic values, and the sense of interdependence/holism that is emerging out of New Science: ecology, physics, Gaiean theory. We need a body of stories to bring a unifying world-view to our fractured consciousness and give an effective moral paradigm for action in a world increasingly confused and corrupt. This longing for unity and moral guidance presently takes all sorts of directions we might regard as aberrant and confused themselves: the New Age attraction to aboriginal and earth religions, the militant fundamentalism of evangelical Christian sects, Zionism in Israel, Muslim radicalism in the Middle East, extremist Hinduism in India, etc. Yet even such wise men as Joe Campbell felt that the world would remain adrift until we contrived a new "mythology" that could incorporate the expanded cosmology and world-view brought by scientific understanding.

In Campbell's view the religious codes from 2000 years ago could not continue to hold power over the modern mind when they continue to root themselves in outmoded cosmologies, creation stories, and external moral imperatives (fear of heaven/hell). But Campbell felt that if the ancient traditions could be reconceived as holding truth metaphorically rather than literally, that they could continue to be immensely valuable for us. He envisioned that the narrow-minded institutions that divide us would have to dissolve, as would the tribalistic notions of "ethnic specialness" that go hand-in-glove with most belief systems. This, of course, is not exactly what we observe in the current global wave of factionalist fundamentalism, implying that perhaps most of mankind is not quite ready for the quantum leap that Campbell had hoped for.

First of all, the old mythologies are far from dead. Outside of Europe and its colonies, only a minority of people have adopted the rationalist scientific mindset of the West. S. America, Asia, India, Mid-East and Africa are still substantially under the sway of the ancient mythologies. For us rationalists, the limitations of the ancient systems (taken literally) are quite apparent, but (taken literally) they still provide the cultural foundation to most of the world. Most of the world's people still feel a strong ethnic identity (We, God's Special People); they seem increasingly willing to fight for "their people" while more modern ideologic allegiances come and go. While Americans claim to abhor ethnic wars and "genocide," we, of course, do nothing to stop the equally destructive spread of McDonalds, Madonna, and free Markets. But some of the peoples being consumed by consumerism are fighting back; we see more resistance to our "cultural imperialism" developing around the world. They are looking at the society we've created, and reject it. They should.

Looking at our own American culture, do we see rationalist humanism triumphing, creating a renaissance of hope and values? Not really. We're making wonderful scientific discoveries, but in other ways the "Decline of the West" continues as Spengler forecast. In the US, fundamentalist and New Age cults, psychic hotlines, and fringe healers thrive. Family life, public courtesy, and voting in elections wane. Increasingly violent and obscene media entertainments vie for the public's dollars. Perhaps America's rotting from within is telling us that Western rationalism hasn't yet got a satisfying answer to the full range of human needs. Certainly the paradigm of scientific determinism (world = a giant, complex machine) has a lot of explanatory power and has enabled us to control the material world as never before. But the deterministic view itself is morally empty, so in no way fills the gap it created by destroying the old myths and ethnic belief systems.

Humanism was supposed to replace the old proscriptive ethics based on myth, but has it? The dream of the humanist thinkers of the last few centuries was that the New $ecular Order (novus ordo seclorum), by giving man freedom from religious and political tyranny, would allow his natural goodness to flower and society to be transformed according to a sensible contract for mutual benefit. This belief system makes "perfect rational sense;" but the ultimate viability of the creed of democratic individualism has yet to be proven. It may, despite espousing ideals of human equity, not be able to change the nature of power and its tendency to corrupt whomever it touches -- the rich/ powerful may still connive to control and exploit the less powerful as they always have. With this basic primitive pattern still dominant in America and Europe, how much can we expect from Africa? Democratic ideals are a struggle to maintain here, and may be totally unsustainable where tribal warfare, slavery, and pre-literate jungle life were the norm just a few decades ago.

Whereas myth-based moralities could grip people at a gut level and "keep them in line" through fear and social pressure, it could be that humanist ethics simply lack this power -- they may rely on man being a bit more rationally enlightened than he is. Materialism, corruption, greed, and self-interest then have free rein. So it is not clear yet whether Humanism can fill the void left by the collapse of traditional religious values, human nature being what it is.

We've touched on a number of ways that a culture benefits from having an intact religious system, usually mythologically embodied: the mythic stories give people a sense of place, purpose, community, and codes for living. Deriving from deep in our collective being, they activate our intuition and feeling, and usually engulf the body in ritual, song, dance. They offer glimpses of transcendance of the mundane -- parts of life ignored and untouched by rationalism. But, for all the social benefits and personal attractions, we don't know whether a mythic mindset can co-exist with a scientific mindset. Can any unifying system of stories, beliefs, images, that we would recognize as a "mythology," co-exist with rational empiricism? Isn't it the business of the rational mind and the scientific method to dissect, deconstruct, and destroy myths?

Socrates' contemporaries realized that his dialectic investigation of all things (radically questioning each other, our minds, the world) meant the death of mythic understanding. Although the Moyers/Campbell TV interview series was called "The Power of Myth," in fact, Campbell's deconstructing of myths into their metaphorical meaning epitomizes just the sort of logical inquiry that had rendered myths impotent. Myths' power to inform a total society rested fundamentally in their being taken literally and locally. Ritualized mythic systems always relate a certain (special) people to their very particular geography. Traditional mythic systems have levels of secret knowledge, regulated by an initiation process -- the depth of secrecy being proportional to the power in the images and stories. So, in the ancient world, as now, mythic systems were often used by a priestly/monarchic hierarchy to reinforce their power over the populace (Egypt, India, China...). Even in much less hierarchic aboriginal societies (Amerindian, Australian, African...) the cultural stasis embodied in the mythic traditions, really was fundamentally at odds with the spirit of democratic individualism. The mythic and modern mindsets seem to represent radically different ways of viewing our place in the world.

The ideologic/political war raging between Western scientific, material humanism, and the world's assorted holistic, pre-rational traditionalists (Moslem/ Christian fundamentalists, New Age mystics, tribal peoples...) really reflects a war within our consciousness. We see the power of rationalism, but feel it is very incomplete; we still feel the need for a unifying, holistic scheme to give us "values" amidst a personally chaotic world. We don't know yet if we can make a consistent, seamless fusion of these two aspects of ourselves.

Many great scientists have struggled with this dichotomy: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Eddington, Bohm. It is possible to conceive of a certain "level of description" of the physical world in which science has its play, and another finer realm, where words and concepts fail, the transcendent. One suspects that advanced thinkers who allow room for both these realms have seen through the stories that constitute religious mythology into their metaphorical aspect.

For most people, I would suspect, crude amalgamations of belief systems and selective perception allow them to "get by." The logical inconsistency of their actual life with their mythological beliefs probably is never examined.

It is not inconceivable that the gap will eventually be bridged by science as it evolves. Both physics and life-sciences are striving for "unified theories." Perhaps some fusion of understanding will occur; its ultimate resolution into some formulation, a higher dimensional calculus, might be comprehensible only to super-brain computers, not by men at all. But perhaps some abstracted version of the "big theory" could be conveyed by an interwoven body of stories. As a sort of prototype of such stories, consider mathematician E. A. Abbott's Flatland, written in 1880 or so -- a simple tale of creatures living in one and two dimensions, and their difficulties when they start to accidentally explore the third and fourth. Relativity, paradigm shifts, and expansion of consciousness were all pre-figured in this magnificent little fable.

After a few weeks, and many more responses in the topic thread, I had this to add:

I've been lurking [reading without commenting] for a while, but have been very intrigued by the entries of geoffad, mareev, and rushkoff, among others. The problem is I can't respond with anything brief -- if I contemplate a response, my thoughts explode in all directions, then little second and third order sub-explosions go on for hours -- fractal fireworks of the mind!

Nested stories (stories within stories, like Arabian Nights, Mahabarata, etc), self-referential and recursive art (Escher, et al) show that people have intuitively realized and worked artistically to represent the Complexity of life for a long time. The new technologies for creating virtual realities, Hypermedia, and Hypertext would add new powers to the artistic toolbox. But mareev is challenging us to go beyond using the new media merely to create exciting synthetic virtual worlds -- she's saying we need to create dances / stories / images / idea-systems, that somehow do what mythic systems did for ancient peoples. This is a very tall order, coming up against some deep contradictions, as I expounded at length above. Mythic systems of the past had unifying power because (and only as long as) they were literally believed, completely encompassed and structured reality, and embodied paradigms of values to guide communal life.

I don't mean to say that story-systems wouldn't be a part of the (meta-mythic) Big Picture; they could have a key role, especially in conveying bits of the Big Picture to children, and to others (most of us) who need metaphors to make scientific and spiritual truths comprehensible. But the foundation of the meta-myth must be our most comprehensive (albeit evolving) perception of how things really are, and how that translates, if it does, into behavioral codes. Otherwise, there will be no healing of the schizophrenic division between our most profound knowledge and the (now totally divergent) way we run our societies and personal lives.

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