{"id":200,"date":"2007-09-25T14:31:38","date_gmt":"2007-09-25T19:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/25\/power-of-myth\/"},"modified":"2007-11-02T02:02:37","modified_gmt":"2007-11-02T07:02:37","slug":"power-of-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/25\/power-of-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is an excerpt from the last chapter of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/biblio?isbn=%20184195716x\" target=_blank>A Short History of Myth<\/a> by religious scholar Karen Armstrong.<\/p>\n<ul>We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide. These myths have failed because they&#8230; have not been infused with the spirit of compassion [and] respect for the sacredness of all life&#8230;. These destructive mythologies have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, an attempt to exalt the self by demonising the other. Any such myth has failed modernity, which has created a global village in which all human beings now find themselves in the same predicament. We cannot counter these myths with reason alone, because <i>logos<\/i> cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.<\/ul>\n<ul>We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a &#8220;resource.&#8221; This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.<\/ul>\n<p>Speaking of myths, allow me to recommend a couple of videos about what we might call the dark side of myth. Myth can be used in a political context to short-circuit reason and manipulate human behavior through emotional appeals. The first, a series of three hour-long segments aired on the BBC in 2005, is called <a href=\"http:\/\/throwawayyourtelescreen.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/26\/the-power-of-nightmares\/\" target=_blank>The Power of Nightmares<\/a>. It concerns the strange parallels between American neoconservatism, represented by people like Richard Perle and William Kristol, and Islamic extremism, represented by Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The second video, called <a href=\"http:\/\/keep-smiling-through.typepad.com\/bgemp\/2007\/09\/once-upon-a-tim.html\" target=_blank>Once Upon a Time in Iran<\/a> (available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livevideo.com\/video\/ConspiracyCentral\/D11DE57856E44A0A8A4D26BEF5CD16B1\/once-upon-a-time-in-iran-pt-1-.aspx\" target=_blank>here<\/a> in a different format), follows a group of Iranian pilgrims to the shrine of Karbala in Iraq, where the Prophet Muhammad&#8217;s grandson Hussein died 1300 years ago at the hands of the caliph Yazid. It shows how Hussein&#8217;s resistance to tyranny helped to inspire Khomeini&#8217;s revolution against the Shah, seen as a modern Yazid, and is today informing the rhetoric of those who see Bush as yet another manifestation of Yezid&#8217;s spirit of tyranny.<\/p>\n<p>As Karen Armstrong points out, &#8220;we are myth-making creatures,&#8221; so it would be a mistake to believe we can do away with myths and survive in the world on reason alone. We tried this in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it didn&#8217;t lead to the promised era of equality and peace. The only solution seems to be to stay alert to the myths that saturate our environment. Myths that reinforce our existing beliefs are the most effective, because we don&#8217;t even notice them. It&#8217;s easy for an American to recognize the story of Hussein and Yazid as a myth, though it is based on historical fact, but we are uncritical our own myth of America as a beacon of liberty for the world. Faced with so many myths, the most creative response is to become mythmakers ourselves. We must never forget that we have the power to appropriate myths, adapt them, attack them, talk back to them, rework them and make them our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}