myth-calculation

The current audiobook that's accompanying me on my travels is "A Short History of Myth" by Karen Armstrong. It's a good book -- not technically perfect, and certainly very broad of brush, but 'good' in the sense of getting my mind rolling in ways it wouldn't on its own.

Her basic thesis is that the ethos of myth, the spiritual anchor for all of the civilizations before ours, is now seriously on the decline. As a (post)modern culture, we suffer from a lack of viable mythology to ground us in common story, bind us together in shared aspirations, and inspire our own heroism by imitation.

I can get behind that thesis. I might even go so far as to say that US culture, at least as far as I've experienced it, is the undisputed leader in corporate mythlessness. The other cultures I've encountered, even the very westernized ones, all have their few and proud heroes of lore, known and revered and to some extent imitated by every schoolchild.

But who do we have? My parents' generation had Davey Crockett and Paul Bunyan and Buffalo Bill, Batman and Superman and Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk. I suppose they're still around, but they've been by most accounts superceded by the new heroic hordes: real live humans, whose reputations take on -- often undeservedly -- mythic proportion. They are rock stars, sports stars, TV stars, movie stars, artists and politicians, among others. We're confusing 'heroes' with 'celebrities,' and in the long run that doesn't give us much beyond ourselves to emulate.

In many ways, I'd prefer not to meet my mythical heroes, not to experience their blemishes. I like my heroes heroic, thank you very much, confined to the pages that birthed them, well-behaved in their repetitive exploits. There aren't many arenas in my life in which I prefer predictability, but let's corral our heroes within some limits, shall we?

So I agree that we're deplorably absent anything resembling a mythical collective unconscious, but let's be realistic: in our fiercely independent and decidedly relativistic milieu, I think the pertinent question is not "How do we create this missing aspect of culture?" but rather "Where do I find the mythology that guides me?"

At least for myself, I can answer that question. First and foremost, I find my guiding mythos in fiction. Some of it is fantasy and sci-fi -- well-suited for the task -- but much of it is just a collection of novels that have punctuated my life. More and more lately, I'm assimilating visual fiction-- mostly TV series, but movies, too, especially the ones with a mythology of their own.

I resist labeling sci-fi and fantasy "escapist." Anything that points us toward something bigger, more honorable or more courageous than ourselves; any work that manifests a truism of the human condition, is not 'escape'-- it's myth.

In some ways, it's more real than 'real life.'