Pastoral and Utopian Perspectives
“The truth of a myth…is not its words but its patterns.”
—David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
In popular usage “myth” has come to designate a false narrative. It can be based on, among other things, superstition, propaganda or malice e.g. the myths of Hell, of Iraq having WMDs or the alleged myth of the Holocaust. Of course the falsity of this kind of myth can be denied by asserting its truth, its basis in reality. In this essay I use the word to mean “archetypal narrative,” a recurring or central phenomenon in human experience that is not dependent for its validity on specific details that can be proved or disproved. In religion and literature a myth is literally a tale of gods and heroes, often involving supernatural or prehistoric events that became definitive in the history or culture of a people. Examples are the Creation in Genesis, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian captivity in Exodus or the fall of Troy in the Iliad through Greek treachery and the Trojan folly of accepting the wooden horse.
While these myths are rooted in specific situations they expand beyond them to contain many similar ones in a continuum. Every belief system has a creation myth: our secular version is the Big Bang. The myth of deliverance from slavery or oppression through divinely-supported heroic struggle retains the same archetypal structure whether the specific situation involves Moses leading the Chosen People to the Promised Land, African-Americans fighting their way up from slavery or Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” rising to strike down a tyrant. In The March of Folly (1984) historian Barbara W. Tuchman articulates a myth of state hubris and folly that she identifies in the fall of Troy, the collapse of the Renaissance Papacy before the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the loss of the American colonies by the British Empire and the loss of Indochina to Communism by the United States. The truth of these myths does not depend on empirical evidence. Those claiming to have discovered traces of Egyptian chariots and weaponry on the bottom of the Red Sea now assert that they have proved Exodus to be true. But it was always true. Mythic narrative belongs not to historiography or archaeology but to religion and literature, where the truth of a myth is its timelessness – it is always happening. In fact the truth of a myth is discoverable not outside it but inside it, as Albert Camus showed in The Myth of Sisyphus.. These ideas are developed fully by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in his 1999 book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York and London: Routledge) and in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by H. Northrop Frye (London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1982).
The perfectibility of man is a concept we inherit from the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason when some Europeans tried to lead the human race out of the darkness of religious belief into what they considered the light of rational thinking. Christianity had long proclaimed the doctrine of Original Sin: because of the Fall of Man we were all conceived in sin, so that even newborn infants, without the sacramental cleansing of baptism, were filthy in the eyes of God. The evil, injustice and oppression that blighted the lives of all but the privileged few were thus inevitable. Our general consolation was that an evil elite may get away with it in this imperfect world but their souls belong to Satan: they will pay for their sins through all eternity. Our particular consolation was that our sins, if confessed and expiated, might be forgiven and our faith would lead us through the grace of God beyond the reach of Satan, sin and death to redemption and salvation.