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Gaffer Variety:
On Myths 017:
By Willie Gaffer:
December 5, 2005:
Man does not create myths. Myths are born and grow out of man's experience. The tragedy for man is not when the myth is born, but when it dies. Then begins the struggle. Such is our current condition. Centuries ago, the mean warlike Jewish Semites created the myth of Yahweh, an all powerful, mean spirited, nasty, vengeful God, just like they were at the time. That worked fine for them and for the early Christians. Lately, in an increasingly technical era, it has not worked so well. We were too curious and cynical, so we tried to examine this Jewish God. We put God under the bright white light of the examination table and darned if he didn't disappear. Oh, oh! What now? We were unprepared and at a loss. We had nothing ready to replace God. Suddenly, we had a void where our myth should have been.
What we did not take into account is that our ethics were based upon that myth. We have lost our myth and with it we have lost our ethics. As a result we have no rules to live by. That is why the kids in the inner cities go back to a tribal culture. They are trying to create rules to live by. The larger culture has failed them. Bad as it is they have created their own ethic. To be effective an ethic need only be consistent within itself. In that sense, it is much like a system of mathematics. Boolean algebra is like that. So long as it does not contradict itself it is effective and useful. We find the same kind of consistency within the ethics of the youth gangs.
We judge these kids in these gangs and tell them how terrible they are behaving. Those kids are not stupid. They know we are judging them by an ethical standard we no longer observe. They see corporate crooks with bulging bank accounts walking around free, laughing at the workers and stockholders they have raped. They see dishonest representatives handing out pork to each other like it was free lunch time. They see a court system that colludes with criminals. They see a president who lies about Iraq then gets their friends killed in a senseless war. Who are we kidding? We have no ethical standards.
So, what are these missing ethical standards I am babbling about? As I implied the ethics are simply the rules we live by which are based on the value system of a culture. We call that value system the ethos of the culture. In all cultures, these basic rules people live by are not stated. They are implicit in the culture, its myth, and the ethics that come out of that myth. We no longer have those implicit rules. In the West, we have lost them because our myth died. We see some vestiges of it in some small towns and villages, but culture wide we have lost it. The ethic we lost was essentially the puritan ethic which is detailed in the Ten Commandments.
The myth we lost was not a very good one anyway. It has always been in danger because the people who ran it insist on taking it literally rather than metaphorically. Metaphorically, it is not difficult to view the earth as the center of the universe. Literally, it is impossible. The church fathers should have embraced Copernicus. Instead they murdered his students. They were insane with their own power. If these fools had seen their myth in a metaphorical sense they could have embraced all of science and maintained the myth.
In a very real way, the early church leaders destroyed the church as it was aborning. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It was immersed in dualism anyhow and would have destroyed itself sooner or later. Dualism in this sense is the nonsensical concepts that the world is ruled by the antagonistic forces of good and evil and that humans beings have two differing natures, those being the spiritual and the physical. Jesus was a Jew who was born into a primitive dualistic culture. That primitive dualism became an integral part of the church as it developed. This dualistic, polarized, either/or, good and evil view of reality is a necessary part of the Western mindset. It was born and grew out of the unnecessary dichotomy which grew up between science and spirituality.
In the West, we tend to see the universe as a bunch of separate and different things. That puts God outside of us. We see our myth as being about our separation from that God. With or without God, the concept of separateness is simply not true. Fortunately, our respected scientists are beginning to discover that. Still, there are a huge number of terrified small minded men threshing around in American who are trying desperately to restore a dead myth. We can detect their desperation by the volume of their screams and the dishonesty of their methods.
It may be useful for man to have a mythology, but it is not necessary to subscribe to one that is dead. The pressing questions now become, can we rebuild the national ethos? Can we build up a better foundation for a set of rules to live by? Can we, or should we, create or embrace a new myth? If so, how do we restore our myth and understand that it is a myth and not a set of scientific truths. For myself, I'm not sure we need a myth but I am sure we need an ethic. All I need do is look around me to see the effect of not having an ethic to know we need one. We need rules to help us function as a community rather than a mob of people.
Let us look to the East for an example. Easterners have an ethic which is not particularly tied to their religious philosophies. The underlying ethos of China and much of the East is a system of behavior called Confucianism. It has stood the test of time. It came to life before the third century BC and has served them since then. Now we don't want to become Chinese or even emulate the Chinese, but we should notice that a set of ethics need not be tied to religion as they have been in the West.
Another thing we can notice is the Eastern ethics including their religions are not dualistic in nature. There is no polarization in Eastern religion because the opposites are seen as complementary rather than adversarial. Without Yin there is no Yang. Hence, they do not normally see the world in terms of good and evil. They tend to see it as a single balanced entity. As I said, these are just things to notice, net necessarily things to emulate. The point is that an ethic need not be based in a religion or any other myth. It need only be consistent within itself and easily understood by the members of the tribe or culture.
I think it is time to evolve beyond myths. I would suggest
that, in place of our dead myth, we develop a theory of human
spirituality based on the facts we have and what we can surmised
from them. The strength of this idea is, our theory can adapt
to new truths as they appear. That gives us a place to stand which
can only get stronger as we learn. We will always have a place
to stand. A myth, especially when the leaders insist on taking
it literally, rather than metaphorically, cannot adapt to anything.
Eventually it must become sand beneath our feet. A myth will ultimately
fail, but a theory will not.
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