Summary: Take five minutes from your daily diet of news about America’s problems. Pouring more water on a rock does not make it wetter. Instead consider where we might find the inspiration to fix them. Here is a suggestion. Post your suggestions in the comments.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album(1979).
Looking at politics in America and understanding our situation brings forth dark thoughts, for those willing to cast aside tribal parochialism. As describe in dozens of posts on this site, the burdens of self-government have become too great for us to bear. Our national motto seem to be “It’s not my fault”, (it should replace E Pluribus Unum on the dollar bill). This is the ethos of a nation in decline.
“An experience of profound contempt is necessary in order to grasp our situation, and our capacity for contempt is vanishing.”
— From Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, in the chapter “Values”.
Rather than wallow in our problems – the most popular form of politics among Americans today – we can look for sources of inspiration. What might those be?
When a people’s conceits and delusions are burned away, they must fall back on our core beliefs. Those are seldom enough, at least IMO not enough for America. Other nations have their sacred soil, their shared blood, or their common religion. We have belief in freedom, free markets, human rights, and a republican form of government — all valuable and important ideals, but abstractions. America is in a sense an intellectual project, which gives it a basis in our minds but not our hearts. Increased diversity, a result of our leaders opening the borders, makes this kind of ideological cohesion increasingly difficult.
So it should not surprise that these beliefs did not prevent us from our current situation. Americas is like a jet aircraft with sputtering engines, its pilots bickering, and its passengers panicking. Neither self-interest nor love of our nation provide much strength in such a crisis.
Our last refuge
“Myth supplies models for human behavior, and gives meaning and value to life.”
— Mircea Eliade in Myth and Reality(1963).
America was founded as a political project, but survived and prospered due to the culture we built. Allan Boom explains what this means, and what it does for us.
“{It is} everything that uplifts and edifies a people, as opposed to commerce. It constitutes a people, binding individuals into a group with roots, a community in which they think and become a moral unity – of which the arts are an expression. It is the peak expression of man’s creativity, our ability to break out of nature’s narrow bonds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science. It is profounder than the modern state, which deals only with man’s bodily needs and tends to degenerate into mere economy.” {Slightly edited.}
Bloom also notes that many foreigners sneer at our accomplishment.
“Charles de Gaulle and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, see the United States as a mere aggregation of individuals, a dumping ground for the refuse from other places, devoted to consuming; in short, with no culture.”
We will prove them wrong. We have taken the refuse from other nations, but with them have forged something new and great.
The bad news, and the good
Much of America, especially its Left and its intelligentsia, despise our culture. They prefer to trash it in favor of radical experiments, with us as lab rats. Our culture has become a battleground instead of a source of strength.
All that leaves us are our myths. Myths inspired the people of ancient Greece and Rome, and can do so for us. Unfortunately our modern myths reflect the spiritual weakness that is one cause of our crisis. For example, most of them tell about about people who find a magic dingus and become great, or have powers bestowed on them by some Powerful MacGuffin. James Bowman calls these Hollywood’s “slacker heroes”, fun escapist fantasies.
“In XXX
, for instance, the charm of the scenario lies in the idea that lazy, undisciplined slackers like, well, moi, can wander in off the street and instantly outperform the highly trained secret agents that were the role models of yesteryear (or a) similar imposture: that enough of the right technology can render skill and discipline unnecessary. …Discipline, practice, sobriety, hard work, training, all of this counts for nothing. I could do that all that stuff – being the kind of “street-smart” character that I am.”
Fortunately we have other myths that better match our past, that better meet our needs, and that can lead us to a greater future. They provide stronger food for our spirit and imagination. Let’s use them soon, since they too are under attack. They are a kind of social capital that must be used or lost.
Bruce Wayne as a young boy watched the murder of his parents, and spent years studying and training to become Batman, one of the most formidable men of his time. Determined that other children will not suffer his fate.
James T. Kirk studied for years before entering Star Fleet Academy, working to fulfill his dream of becoming a great Starship Captain. When an instructor at the Academy his students saw him as “a stack of books with legs”, familiar with both ancient philosophy, such as Spinoza’s (mentioned in the TV episode “Where No Man has Gone Before
More recently we have Fullmetal Alchemist
“Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To gain anything, something of equal value must be given. That is life’s First Law of Equivalent Exchange, and applies to thing tangible and intangible – matter, energy, and spirit.”
It is a more sophisticated version of “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
There are scores or hundreds of these modern myths, only a few of which find a home in our minds. It is easy to say “these are just stories. But they represent a part of us – of our culture, our society – to which we can look to for inspiration in the dark times ahead. Let’s act soon, because time is our enemy.
“People need stories, more than bread, itself. They teach us how to live, and why. …Stories show us how to win.”
— The Master Storyteller in HBO’s wonderful Arabian Nights.
For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about heroes, about reforming America: steps to new politics, and especially these…
- The problem with America lies in our choice of heroes.
- We want heroes, not leaders. When that changes it will become possible to reform America.
- Hollywood’s dream machine gives us the Leader we yearn for.
- Are our film heroes leading us to the future, or signaling despair?
- Why don’t our dreams of a better world inspire us to act?
- We like superheroes because we’re weak. Let’s use other myths to become strong.
The big book about superheroes
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
By Joseph Campbell (1949).
This is the book that sparked serious research in to the function and significance of myths. See Wikipedia. From the publisher.
“Since its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell’s revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In these pages, Campbell outlines the Hero’s Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world’s mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.
As relevant today as when it was first published, The Hero with a Thousand Faces continues to find new audiences.”
