The Sunset of Mythic Story and Meaning
When we read ancient stories and tales, we're seeing the lived experience of these stories through our modern paradigm filters.
The Mythic Dreamstate
Ancient stories were lurid, vivid takes sung and danced and told in a musical semi-dreamstate.
They provided a glimpse into the untamed and ever-wild part of our existence, they bathed the community in shared stories that explained how to live in the world.
"(S)poken discourse was inseparable from the endlessly repeated stories, legends, and myths that provided many of the spoken phrases one needed in one’s daily actions and interactions. To speak was to live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one’s closeness to those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed to speak through one’s own mouth. Such is the way culture preserves itself in the absence of written records."-- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.
Modern memes are an example of this discourse, calling upon instantly recognizable themes and creatively dancing around the details to create a memorable (and tiny) rift in the brain.
The human brain isn't entirely rational or fully conscious.
It requires myth and emotionally evocative stories to encode and direct action along lines of excellence in a life affording them meaning:
“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Mythic meaning can also be subverted and manipulated, directing people to point their flashlights at random noise.
Directing them to pursue lives diminished expectations, in a life affording them incapacity.
Cultural Gene Banks
In ancient times, civilizations were more diverse. The most long-lasting, effective civilizations created cultural gene banks in the form of stories and myth. These cultural myths taught them how to live in the world, how to solve 'black swan' environmental and societal problems.
But sometimes a nearby civilization marches in with weapons, and erases your civilization and its cultural gene bank from existence.
Over the past several thousand years, this has created a fairly monolithic world culture. Most countries aspire to the same McDonalds and smartphone and 20 brands of ketchup at the supermarket way of life.
This shift towards a monolithic world culture can be traced back to the dawn of written history, when an imbalance was introduced into Greek culture in the form of Socratic & Platonic worldviews.
The Sunset of Mythic Thought and Meaning
David Abram explains the process of Socratic reasoning, and its affect upon ancient Greek thought patterns.
I've rearranged this section from his book slightly, with respect to the author's meaning and intent:
"The Socratic dialectic—which, in its simplest form, consisted in asking a speaker to explain what he has said—was primarily a method for disrupting the mimetic thought patterns of oral culture.
The speaker’s original statement, if it concerned important matters of morality and social custom, would necessarily have been a memorized formula, a poetic or proverbial phrase, which presented a vivid example of the matter being discussed.
Ethical qualities like “virtue,” “justice,” and “temperance” were thoroughly entwined with the specific situations in which those qualities were exhibited. The terms for such qualities were oral utterances called forth by particular social situations; they had no apparent existence independent of those situations.
By continually asking his interlocutors to repeat and explain what they had said in other words, by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking, Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed.
Small wonder that some Athenians complained that Socrates’ conversation had the numbing effect of a stingray’s electric shock.-- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous."
Abram adds that this loss of mythic meaning was also enabled by written language, which created a framework where the world could be viewed and defined in absolute terms vs in mythical terms.
Abram also compares Chinese writing and thoughtforms to Greek writing and Platonic thoughtforms, and notes the differences in how the two cultures viewed the world. The Chinese retained more of the Yin-Yang original meaning of words and phrases, which are both physical and ephemeral.
My observation from studying history is that the more ancient the language, the more complex it is. The oral complexity of Vedic words and the symbolic visual complexity of Egyptian hieroglyphics encode more information per word than modern languages.
Language can be seen as a proxy for how our understanding of the world has become less nuanced over time.
Mythic Meaning and the State
The loss of mythic meaning was at the center of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings. It was a journey that Nietzsche began as a child, where he tried to "live life like any other young man and found that he couldn't do it".
Nietzsche found meaning in the act of creating through artistic expression, in a world where "any meaning of life in the sense of a supernatural purpose was gone."
Myth, to Friedrich Nietzsche, is a powerful force that binds society together. By embracing the illusion of rationality, the Greeks lost an essential part of their community:
“Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement. Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream from their aimless wanderings . . . Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation.”
Nietzsche believed that the ancient Greeks had achieved cultural balance, which was an element of their greatness. They recognized the Dionysian "horror of existence", and in response they crafted Apollonian illusions of "greatness and significance" in order to make their lives meaningful.
Nietzsche saw the Dionysian spirit as being passionate and communal, but ultimately destructive. Staring too long into the Dionysian mirror would drive one insane.
He felt that the Apollonian spirit, by contrast, was orderly and individualistic. But it was also an illusion, a creed of perfectionism that would lead to excess and ruin, for it ignored the base truth of existence -- that life both chaotic and orderly, that people are both individualistic and communal.
Nietzsche asserted that a balance between the two was the basis of fine art and a healthy culture, which found its highest expression in the art of tragedy:
“The chanting of the chorus was the first form of Athenian tragedy... Captivated by music, audience members abandoned their usual sense of themselves as isolated individuals and felt themselves to be part of a larger, frenzied whole.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
In a tragedy, the audience could peek into the abyss and pull back. They would see feel and experience 'the other side' of mankind's communal chaotic existence.
Nietzsche believed that tragedy served an important role for the Athenians, for it provided a solution to a problem which plagued all humans -- the internal battle against angst and pessimism.
These tragedies, as a perfectly balanced form of art, justified mankind's very existence.
By breaking away from the Dionysian, Nietzsche believed that Socrates began denying vital parts of life. Socrates' Apollonian illusion was that the mind alone might find the true nature of being -- and even "correct reality's flaws".
In destroying the balance, and in placing the power of the mind over all else, Socrates eliminated the need for myth. This, Nietzsche argues, would ultimately drive mankind towards madness.
-- Quotes from: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
The Death of Mythic Meaning
When Nietzsche proclaims the death of God, it is deeply entwined with his concept of mythic meaning. People who are unbound by meaningful stories to live their lives by, or who live destructive and unhealthy stories, often live in ways that are harmful to social order.
Nietzsche believed that the Christian church's adoption and propagation of a Platonic, Apollyonic worldview would lead to its self-destruction by promoting an unhealthy imbalance.
In order to show this self-destruction in a more direct and visceral way, Nietzsche proclaimed the 'death of god' by giving voice to a madman:
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him ... What was most holiest and powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe the blood off us?"
The madman, shouting out these words in a crowded marketplace, was greeted by astonishment and silence. The madman, unperturbed, continued:
"I come too early ... my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way ... it has not yet reached the ears of man ... this deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars ... and yet they have done it to themselves."
Nietzsche's madman predicts the death of God. When mankind discovers that 'they have killed God', when the last traces of mythic meaning disappear from the world, then "universal madness will break out" due to the profound imbalance.
The imbalance is an Apollyonic illusion that the world can become as perfect as its base Platonic forms, that its people can be governed in perfect Utopian states, that rationality and reason can solve every problem, that there is no form or substance or meaning which cannot be reduced to its perfect-in-form component parts.
-- Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche "The Gay Science", trans. Walter Kaufman, Walter Kauffman "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist", Walter Kauffman, "Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy", Alan White, "Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth", Friedrich Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer", trans. Richard Polt, Walter Kauffman's Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Hollingdale's Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy.
The Golden Age of Pre-Socratic Myth
Most of our stories about life in Greece come from the golden age, while most of our metaphysics and political concepts come from the post-Socratic age.
Why are stories and legends from the golden age Greece to be so compelling, steeped in emotion nuance and beautiful insights into the human condition?
Why are the characters and events so memorable? Why did Romans copy-paste the ancient Greek pantheon and rename the files?
Why do modern stories lack that same brilliant technicolor, if nothing was lost in the transition from the mythic age to the post-Socratic age?
The Unbalanced Platonic Worldview
From a mythic meaning perspective, the concepts and ideas generated in the post-Socratic age were created from a state of imbalance.
And yet to a large extent, these post-Socratic concepts and ideas define our modern worldview. David Abram writes:
"The Platonic dialogues, written in the first half of the fourth century B.C.E., inscribe for the first time many of the mental patterns or thought styles that today we of literate culture take for granted.
While Socrates focused his teaching on the moral qualities, his disciple Plato recognized that not just ephemeral qualities but all general terms, from “table” to “cloud,” could now be pondered as eternal, unchanging forms.
Plato’s philosophical derogation of the sensible and changing forms of the world—his claim that these are mere simulacra of eternal and pure ideas existing in a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world—contributed profoundly to civilization’s distrust of bodily and sensorial experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us."
-- David Abram, "The Spell of the Sensuous".
Plato vastly expanded the scope of Socratic reasoning.
The Platonic worldview that emerged from ancient Greece proved to be highly influential, which led to a steep decline in mythic meaning.
It has also led to a steep decline in our ability to solve problems that can't be easily quantified, such as living a life of meaning and purpose.
Social Gene Banks
In the ancient past, there was a wide diversity of 'ways to live in the world'. There was also greater practical knowledge on how to solve problems, kept safe in a cultural memory bank that contained generations of wisdom.
These ancient social technology stores were the world's Svalbard gene bank, a repository of genetically unique ideas/solutions to rare social and environmental problems.
Today in the modern world, if you need a salt tolerant rice gene you go to the gene bank.
But if you need a humane solution for ADD young boys who can't seem to focus on their homework, you go to the ...
Unfortunately, we don't have a social gene bank. Most of our effective, time-tested social technologies have been forgotten or degraded -- along with the civilizations that kept this ancient wisdom vital and alive.
The Sleep of Reason Has Created Monsters
Our ancient Svalbard gene banks of wisdom were like topsoil, slowly accumulating over generations, the bad ideas washed away in spring floods but the good ideas accumulating in larger piles over time.
So it's taken time to see that we've built our modern world on a pile of silt and sand, rather than on solid ground:
We are not rational actors, we are not emotionally driven animals -- we are both.
We are not individuals, we are not communal -- we are both.
This duality has allowed human beings, and human culture, to adapt quickly to changes in their environment.
We have both eusocial and individualistic tendencies:
“An iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies." -- EO Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth.
Denial of this duality has allowed emotional, irrational monsters to grow strong.
In the absence of mythic meaning, people will create their own.
But what happens when one group's mythic meaning collides with another group's mythic meaning? What happens when the other side becomes the out-tribe, less than human?
We're seeing the results of that social experiment play out in the United States.
Revanchist anger, which leads to poor decision-making, which embraces juvenile nihilism as public policy, which provides a platform for cartoon leaders who promise cartoon solutions, which leads to depression over the lack of progress, which the powerful and 'elite' use to further divide the 99%, which leads to new and improved marketing campaigns that promise to fix everything, which leads to slightly more hope from the 99%, which leads to more anger when they're disappointed by corrupt and/or incompetent leaders who lied to them, which creates a self-reinforcing revolution of lowered expectations, which leads to even more revanchist anger, which is magnified by 'move fast and break things' technology companies.
Nietzsche's madman predicted what would happen when mankind discovers that 'they have killed God', when the last traces of mythic meaning disappear from the world.
The madman proclaimed that universal madness will break out, when the illusion shatters that living a life of meaning in a community with shared mythic stories isn't an essential element of human vitality.
When monsters have awakened from their sleep of reason.
Nietzsche's Search for Mythic Meaning
Much like the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche began his "frantic attempt to find personal survival" with the understanding that life was without any purpose, absent of mythic meaning.
Nietzsche began creating (writing) in order to justify his existence; and walked a fine line between illusion and insanity. Nietzsche "made his sufferings and torments the occasion for new insights."
He embraced the Dionysian:
"Dionysus is ...a symbol of the affirmation of life with all its suffering and terror ... the god of intoxication, decay, and dismemberment. Life, afterall, is always just at the edge of death and destruction. For Nietzsche, Dionysus is the symbol of delight and danger, the fundamental elements of personal liberation, a richness of living that is Yes-saying and refuses to compromise life to mediocrity and conformity."
Nietzsche was a complex man, whose embrace of "delight and danger" became more pronounced as his health declined - "he showed a growing lack of inhibition" in his final months of writing.
After his final collapse in Christmas of 1888 he penned a few final letters, in some of which he signed his name "Dionysus". One such letter read, in its entirety: "To my maestro Pietro. Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice. The Crucified."
Nietzsche did not fear imbalance, he believed that insanity was a "rest position" -- the state of a person who has given into the joy of unreason and irrationality. He saw it as a state of divine wisdom.
It was, in Nietzschean terms, the path of an artist who had stood too long at the canvass staring into the abyss:
"To create things upon which time tries its teeth in vain; in form and in substance to strive after a little immortality - I have never been modest enough to demand less from myself."
Unapologetic to the end, Nietzsche found his path to meaning and immortality in the form of artistic creation.
Nietzsche's search for meaning may not be his most important philosophical contribution, nor his most profound insight into the collective soul of mankind. But it is, perhaps, the most human.
For in his search for meaning, Nietzsche came to understand ways in which we could "save ourselves from living lives that we [would] come to view with regret rather than with pride" -- by striving to overcome our inbound limitations and create magnificence, rather than wallowing in shame and self-loathing.
In a world without myths, in a world without meaning, Nietzsche showed that we must create our own myths and our own meaning if we want to live lives along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.
-- Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche "The Gay Science", trans. Walter Kaufman, Walter Kauffman "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist", Walter Kauffman, "Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy", Alan White, "Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth", Friedrich Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer", trans. Richard Polt, Walter Kauffman's Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Hollingdale's Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy.
The Extended Phenotype of Myth
Nietzsche's solution was to create, to dance, and to play -- knowing that it was all in vain but deciding he didn't give a damn.
But that doesn't work on a societal level. Not in a world with nuclear weapons and 8 billion people who rely on a stable climate and industrial food production to survive.
Because of modern humanity's power and ability to change the world around us, our stories and myths have enormous power:
“There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world.
Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world.
And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
-- Daniel Quinn, Ishmael.
Further Exploration of Ideas
I'll be exploring these ideas further on the Fragments of Pre-History blog.
There's a brief Coda and Appendix below, if you'd like to keep reading.
Coda: Fragments of a Technicolor, Experiential, Animistic, Phenomenologistic, Anarchistic Dreamworld
“So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.”
― Derrick Jensen, What We Leave Behind
“I realized how truly different their reality was. My reality is made in my head; I create roles for myself, I create a structure that requires certain activities and prohibits others. I live in time; I have an agenda. Their existence had no reality until they lived it.”
― Robert Wolff, Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing
“Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.”
― David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
"One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken (the form of) engaged withdrawal, mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community.
They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.”
-- David Graeber, ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’
Appendix A: Neitzsche's Reputation and Intellectual Legacy
Friedrich Neitzsche died at age 55. His writings and philosophy were misappropriated by his sister, and by the German government.
This misinterpretation had a disastrous affect on the study of Nietzsche's works, for by the time his works were all released into English the early 20th century most scholars did not have to read far into Nietzsche's writings - they already knew what to expect from them.
A rehabilitation of Nietzsche's legacy began during the 1950s. Primary among these revisionist scholars was Walter Kauffman, who sought to remedy the inadequacies of early translations.
Kauffman felt that one of Nietzsche's most maligned concepts was that of the will to power, which he believed was clearly power over self rather than power over others.
Tad Beckman summarized Kauffman's translations of the will to power as follows:
"[The will to power] is always used in connection with the idea of self overcoming and it always occurs within the life of the mind. When we look deeply into ourselves, we must be hard and we must be demanding; furthermore, we should look for that in which we are weak (in which we take the easy paths) and overcome those by demanding more. Life is not merely to be survived; we cannot survive life anyway. Hence, life is to be lived with high demands and expectations!"
-- Tad Beckman article discussing Kauffman's translation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", the original website source no longer exists.
These high demands and expectations were to be directed at one's self and not at others, for Nietzsche's conception of the will to power was an internal battle -- a self overcoming -- and not an external battle.
Closely related to the will to power concept is the Overman, which was used to justify German militarism and racial eugenics.
Kauffman also deconstructed this idea, tracing it back to its original Nietzschean meaning:
"Nietzsche himself remarked that 'scholarly oxen' had misconstrued the notion of the overman as if it referred to a species that might come into being as the next step of evolution. In fact, Nietzsche urges humankind to "remain faithful to the earth ... we should conceive of a higher type of humanity, that we may exert ourselves to realize."
-- Walter Kauffman, Nietzsche, Friedrich from Collier's Encyclopedia.
