[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Dreams of a Better World

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (July 17 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


As it launched the modern worldview on its trajectory, the intellectual
revolution of the 18th century - the Enlightenment, as it's usually
called - passed on a legacy with profoundly mixed consequences for the
future. Central to the Enlightenment ethos was the claim that myths were
simply inaccurate claims about fact, and should be replaced by more
accurate claims founded on reason and experiment. This seems like common
sense to most people nowadays, but like most things labeled "common
sense", it begs more questions and conceals richer ironies than a casual
glance is likely to reveal.

One of those ironies became central to a discussion sparked by last
week's Archdruid Report post, when a reader took issue with my
characterization of progress as a myth. Like most people nowadays, he
assumed that "myth" meant a story that isn't true, and drew the usual
distinction between myth and science - that is, between the cosmological
narratives of other cultures, which don't usually make experimentally
testable claims about the natural world, and the cosmological narratives
of ours, which does. It took, as it usually does, several exchanges
before he realized that the popular definition of myth he was using is
not the only game in town.

What makes this ironic is that the definition of myth he was using is
itself part of a myth: the very one I mentioned in the earlier post.
Only from within the myth of progress - the belief that all human
existence follows a single line of advance leading straight from the
caves to today's industrial societies, and beyond them to the stars -
does it make sense to treat the belief systems of the past as inadequate
attempts to do what we do better. The notion that other mythologies
might have other purposes, and accomplish them better than ours does, is
practically unthinkable these days. Yet many traditional belief systems
have done a fine job of enabling the people who hold them to live their
lives in harmony with their environment for millennia, while modern
industrial cultures have proven hopelessly inept at this basic and
necessary task.

Now of course there are plenty of people nowadays who use arguments such
as this last to stand the myth of progress on its head, and insist that
these traditional cultures are more advanced than ours. As I see it,
though, the predicament we are facing demands something subtler. Rather
than swapping one narrative for its mirror image, it may be time to step
back and look at our mythic narratives as narratives, rather than
imposing them by force on the world around us.

This backward step has a useful if uncomfortable effect: it reveals the
awkward fact that the cultural narratives we use to make sense of the
world today, however new they look, are generally rehashes of myths that
have been around for a very long time. The anthropologist Misia Landau
pointed out some years ago, for example, that contemporary scientific
accounts of the rise of Homo sapiens from its prehuman ancestors are
simply rehashed hero myths that follow Joseph Campbell's famous typology
of the hero's journey, point for point. In the same way, those like Ray
Kurzweil who argue that the perfect human society is to be found in a
hypertechnological future, just as much as those who argue that the
perfect human society is to be found in a return to the hunter-gatherer
past, are simply projecting the myth of paradise onto one or another of
the very few locations a secular worldview offers for it.

All this has to be kept in mind when considering an odd phenomenon that
has become steadily more prominent in recent months, and seems likely to
become even more so in the near future.

Well over a dozen times in the last six months, I've found myself in
conversations with people who believe that the imminent crash of
industrial society will inevitably lead to the birth of the sort of
society they themselves most want to live in. What I find most
interesting is that no two of them agree on exactly what sort of society
that will be. Some of them come to the discussion with detailed plans
for their perfect future, backed up figuratively - and now and again
literally - with a backpack stuffed with supporting documentation
laboriously cherrypicked from their favorite authors and the media; on
the other end of the spectrum are those who have no idea what the world
of the future will look like, but cling to an unshakable faith that it
must be better than the world of today.

This astigmatism of the imagination is remarkably common. A good friend
of mine once recounted a conversation he'd had in the last days of 1999
with someone who confessed she was deeply worried about the imminent Y2K
problem. He assumed that she meant she was worried about the struggle
for survival in the aftermath of the massive systems collapse some
people were still predicting at that point, but she quickly set him
right. Her job was unsatisfying, her marriage was on the rocks, and her
life was at a standstill; what worried her was the possibility that she
might wake up on January 1 2000 to find that nothing had changed.

For my part, I knew quite a few people who became profoundly depressed
when the world still worked after Y2K came and went, and there are many
more people placing similar hopes on the potential catastrophes of the
present and near future. It might seem that coping with a boring job, a
troubled marriage, and a midlife crisis would still be preferable to
starving to death in a burned-out basement in the aftermath of a
cataclysmic social unraveling. The fact that many people in America
today see things differently is one of the least noted and most
troubling indicators of the temper of our times.

History has a good deal to do with the popularity of the belief in
utopia through apocalypse these days. Over the course of the 20th
century, the dizzying range of political-economic ideologies that once
jostled for position in the western world narrowed gradually down to two
- free market capitalism and Marxism - and then to one, which combines
most of the objectionable features of both. The collapse of the New Left
in the aftermath of the Sixties, and the abandonment of traditional
conservatism by the pragmatist Right of the Reagan era, left a political
vacuum that has yet to be filled. For some years now, as a result, most
radicals of left and right alike have pictured their task in the purely
reactive language of resistance and opposition, while the mainstream
parties abandoned their old commitments in favor of the pursuit of
business as usual for its own sake.

This has spared all sides the daunting challenge of coming up with
constructive proposals for the future, but the downside is that those
who sense the necessity for change are left with nothing but fantasies
of a perfect world after an apocalyptic collapse to feed their hopes. In
the process, it has been all too easy for many people to forget that in
every other example in history, the decline and fall of a civilization
leads not to utopia, but to a long and difficult age of warfare, mass
migration, population decline, impoverishment, and the loss of priceless
cultural treasures. Just as revolutionaries who insist that nothing can
be worse than the status quo are often unpleasantly surprised to find
just how much worse things can get, those who insist that today's
industrial societies comprise the worst of all possible worlds may find
themselves pining for the good old days of suburbs and freeways if they
get the collapse they think they want.

Furthermore, especially but not only in America, the last few decades
has seen the emergence of a culture of political demonology in which the
slight differences between competing political parties get redefined in
terms of absolute good and evil. Vigorous debate over the relative
merits of candidates for office is the lifeblood of a republic, but when
opponents of a public official don't seem to be able to walk past his
picture without screaming obscenities at it - and I have seen this on
both sides of the widening political chasm in America today - something
has gone seriously wrong. Carl Jung's useful concept of "projecting the
shadow" is more than a little relevant here; too many Americans nowadays
have fallen into the seductive but disastrous habit of blaming their
political adversaries for their own feelings of shame and resentment.
Even the briefest glance at history shows where that sort of scapegoat
logic leads, and it's no place any sane human being would want to go.

Still, sanity may be in short supply as the crisis of industrial society
deepens around us. Lacking a clear sense of the logic of myth - and the
legacy of the Enlightenment has made such a sense uncommonly hard to
gain these days - it's far too easy for people in crisis to get so
deeply entangled in mythic narratives that they lose track of the
direction those narratives are leading them. A good deal of what
happened during Germany's "few years in the absolute elsewhere" between
1933 and 1945, as Jung pointed out in a prescient essay, can best be
understood as this type of entrapment in a myth, with a grand Wagnerian
Götterdammerung as finale. It's entirely possible that some similar
madness could grip America in the years to come.

Whether or not anything so ghastly happens, the unfolding crisis of
industrial society is likely to bring in a bumper crop of misplaced
myths and self-defeating ideologies unless we can manage to gain a wider
recognition of the role of myth in public life, even - or, rather,
especially - in those modern societies that pride themselves on their
hard-headed rationality. When claims that an imminent catastrophe will
inevitably result in the coming of a desired new world are seen for what
they are - religious myths of apocalypse decked out awkwardly in secular
drag - it's easier to see through them, and also to notice that the same
claims have failed catastrophically every time in recorded history that
they have been projected onto the inkblot patterns of current events.

If we can regain a certain degree of mythic literacy, and apply it to
the myths that shape our public life, we might even be able to stop
thinking of modern industrial society as either the best or the worst of
human cultures, and recognize it as the ramshackle product of a long
process of evolution, containing much that is worth saving alongside
much that belongs in history's compost bin. We might also find ourselves
realizing in time that catastrophe is no guarantee of Utopia, and a
better society will emerge out of the wreckage of this one only if a
very sizable number of us are willing to muster the courage,
forbearance, and capacity for hard work needed to make that happen.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/dreams-of-better-world.html#links


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