TO MYTH OR NOT TO MYTH
Geoffrey Hamilton
January 16, 1995
(The Trick - called Myth, history)
Parenthetical comments rarely have a content startling enough
to outweigh an entire piece of writing which surrounds it, but one by
Thomas Mann may do more than that, ". . .can one live and die more
significantly or worthily than in the celebration of a myth
". Here Thomas Mann describes, with a rhetorical question, what is
the highest aim for humanity, celebrating (honouring) a myth. He implies
that living and dying should be done for a myth
because it is the most significant and worthy (valuable)
aim. His use of "a" means he does not intend to point to any
specific myth. He does not ask why it is so but he has, without perhaps
intending it, summed up the meaning of life, despite any potential moral
implications of the comment.
Mann wrote his summation in a timely
period for testing it, in 1936, in the midst of the greatest struggle
humanity had up to that time experienced - if the rise of communism,
fascism, and their respective reactionaries' rise is seen as the beginning.
No part of the world was immune from the consequences of this prep war given
how imperialism had laid the ground for that possibility.
This great struggle was not about basic necessity, lack of food for
example. It was not about the survival of humanity. It was not even about a
"will to power". (These are all mythical imperatives anyway.)
The struggle was about competing myths.
Each respective myth offered a purpose to everything.
The opposing myths were 'just myths' and having no purpose seemed
the real alternative. Myth was the motivator, as it is in all
cases. Power was only the means to the end which was myth. Power is never
the object, even megalomaniacs like Hitler and Caligula had self-based
tenets that were more than power for the sake of power.
If myth was not the motivator what was? What can be? Can a universal
instinct to survive be that motivator when it is widely observed that many
people choose to die when they lack all myth? At the same time true believers
or fanatics are capable of wanting to survive the worst torture, and even to
die for a life affirming cause. In general, is it even possible to act for a
future event without imagining, inaccurately, what the outcome will be?
These actions are mythic projections into the future. The issue in the
1930s then was one between many insecure myths
When looking back, history's presentation of it must be examined.
The struggle between the various contemporaneous myths that began in the
early part of this century has been debated and studied, but will forever
remain hidden, as all actual history does. No more than other events, it has
been simplified by the desire to assign the labels good and evil to the
participants.
Some historians try to overcome this oversimplification by offering
more complex analysis of the events. But these analyses are still simplifications.
They are narratives with simple causal links and simple one dimensional
conclusions - compared with the actual number of events or actual
eyewitness accounts.
The historian, and much more so the lay individual, is required
to simplify all events if he is ever going to absorb any of it, and one
need not absorb it if one does not need to. (Need is determined by good/bad
labeling.) The point of this process of simplifying and assigning labels is
to simplify and justify one's own myths. Myths are strengthened by this process
The simplifying of the ideological/mythological struggle mentioned
above has served the winners' (our) myths, as much as did the winning of
the struggle. Part of the reason for the simplification process, of
assigning good and evil (the justifying mentioned above), is to increase
and decrease the value of the actions and goals of the myth holders involved.
This is not to say that myth is entirely arbitrary. It may seem
extreme but all myths' origins start at the end of an infinitely long web
of causal reasons for their existence. At a particular point earth
happened. Then earth's position and composition allowed only a certain
kind of life to develop. This life only allowed certain manifestations
to need myth to motivate themselves. Myths developed and changed without
a recorded way to compare the past with the present. Writing arrived and
allowed some comparison which in turn offered the possibility of 'progress'.
Myths and their ability to motivate could be tested by writing's
inaccurate but longer memory. The more widely the alternatives were
disseminated the faster was the change.
When dissatisfaction with the old
myths occurred the alternatives presented themselves as un-disproven
truths. But they had to be better than the past even when they were trying
to resurrect the past (as in Neoplatonism, the New left, etc.). The
result is that any myth's reason for existence is dependent on an unknown
causal relationship to the past. However the weakness of any one
myth against this comparative process means that more power is required to back it up.
The various states that have existed, have been using power to
counter the threat posed by competition with their myth from before the
Peloponnesian War. The most obvious power, coercion,
has worked successfully even to the present. The necessary twin to
coercion is persuasion which is intended both to enlighten people to the required myth and to hide the alternatives.
So far it has been shown that there are many possible myths, even
incompatible myths. What decides which is 'best' is first - power, second - one
decides for oneself
except in the face of higher powers, third - that myth is
arbitrary at its root, and finally - it is genetic in humanity.
Now returning to the struggle between communists, fascists,
imperialists, and the rest. Despite the above arguments which seem to
allow a non judgmental view of all myth and of the celebrating acts
committed by the participants, it is still difficult to transfer that
abstract suspension toward concrete figures like Hitler and Stalin.
We still tend to consider Hitler's acts a crime while acts like Truman's
and Churchill's a necessity no matter how much they can be correlated.
But if that reflex to judgment is suspended long enough to consider the
possibility of whether Thomas Mann's rhetorical question is right, what
can the answer to it be except that there is no worthier way to live and die
but in the celebration of myth?
The implications, though, seem horrendous. When a righteous
sixteen year old SS recruit from the Hitler youth kicked and spat on a
ninety year old women stripped naked to be de-loused he celebrated a
myth. When the commanding Japanese officer of a prison camp starved his
wards he celebrated a myth. When French and American occupiers of Germany
withheld available food from their prisoners of war they were celebrating
a myth. When the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima the bombardier celebrated
a myth. When Stalin collectivized the peasants he celebrated a myth. When
the English suppressed India they celebrated a myth.
All these acts seem 'negative' but they are celebrations of
myths. They are positive or negative, good and bad, depending on the
degree of acceptance that the myths have by the actors.
We today may like to hold on to the myth that all evil
people, all SS personal, are shown the evil of their ways, but evil
is not what the believer sees by celebrating their myths - at least
until the myth is lost. Imagine that some day Mahatma Gandhi's fasts
for peace will be seen as evil too and it is also possible to see how the
SS boy might have felt when he was no longer allowed by mythic
obligation to abuse the old woman.
Mann's 'meaning of life' can seem therefore to be a sad
commentary on human nature, but this is irrelvant. From the greatest
struggle that humanity has witnessed, to the act of taking ones' life,
myth is inescapable as a motivator. Myth justifies and condones, helps
itself and hinders its competitors, all the while avoiding self-consciousness.
It is the meaning of life no matter how it is manifested, nor how many times
it re-manifests itself. Thomas Mann did not ignite this idea in his time but
it remains a possibility to be reinvented again and again until its moment
of discovery reveals it for what it is.
GRH
