Myth in the modern age

I found a very interesting blog about myth in our modern age, and how the 18th Century Enlightenment painted myth as hokum pokum from a bygone era. Many today assume the word, "myth", is used to describe something which isn't true. The author, John Michael Greer, uses another definition, he sees it instead as "story". The age of Enlightenment drew a line in the sand between Analytical and Religious proceedings, with both Scientists and the Faithful alike often choosing to see culture's religious stories as untestable superstition or the never-faltering word of God. The author of this article doesn't like this binary and makes the interesting claim, writing: "it reveals the awkward fact that the cultural narratives we use to make sense of the world today, however new they look, are generally rehashes of myths that have been around for a very long time. The anthropologist Misia Landau pointed out some years ago, for example, that contemporary scientific accounts of the rise of Homo sapiens from its prehuman ancestors are simply rehashed hero myths that follow Joseph Campbell’s famous typology of the hero’s journey, point for point." The writer is referencing the story scientists use to describe man's emergence from barbarianism: as a straight line where man is constantly advancing. Greer says it more elegantly as "the belief that all human existence follows a single line of advance leading straight from the caves to today’s industrial societies, and beyond them to the stars." Myth is what we use to describe the world around us, and even science cannot get away from it. Not the archaeologists, chemical engineers, statisticians, or mathematicians.

There was a Russell Brand interview on reddit the other day which reminded me of Antony and Cleopatra:



We use our icons as narratives to construct a story. The people in the tabloids aren't real, they are cultural beacons, gods, who don't really exist. Yes, there are real Brad Pitt's, Angelina Jolie's, Tom Cruise's, and George Clooney's; however, the image we get of them is something more than that. They represent everything we cherish and abhor in our culture. Charlie Sheen is now a bigger cultural icon than he ever was. What do we value? Crazy men who say and do what they want? He is certainly popular in the college crowd, but probably not in the middle-age woman one. You take other celebrities like Tyler Perry or Regis Philbin or Lady Gaga. It's as if they were house gods to certain subsets of people. Myth never goes away. We need it to paint a picture of who we want to be and don't want to be. We need personal, cultural, and national narratives as well. It lets us know who we are.

I was reading a Mel Gibson interview where he talked about his public perception, who he really was, his fame and how he could not put the tooth paste back in the tube:

WEINER: But your public persona is not really you.
GIBSON: It never is. Remember old Cary Grant. People said, “Boy, what’s it like to be Cary Grant?” [Imitates Cary Grant voice and says] “I wouldn’t know.” It’s like, “I don’t know who that guy is.”

WEINER: Did you ever question that you chose the wrong occupation — especially when the tapes were released? Did you think that, 'I’m sick of this and I chose the wrong job'?
GIBSON: [Hesitates] There are a lot of instances over the years, with the loss of personal anonymity, you’ll always look back at. Nobody warns you about that. You walk into that arena and your intentions are fairly pure — you just want to be good at what you do and do what you love to do. That’s all. It takes on another side life. There are all these side streets that you really have no control over. One looks back with regret on that. There was a moment where there was a fork in the road where you could have chosen one way or the other. For example, I know people because they know me, they’ve chosen another way because they don’t like what it does. You go back and say, if I could go back and make that choice again, I’d make a different choice. It’s unfortunate that I was 21 or 22 years old when I made the choice because without benefit of experience or any kind of maturity, one makes a choice in the spur of the moment, that you again can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Mel's public image is that of a wild, crazed man--anti-Semitic and into pain. South Park has done a parody of him more than once. I do think this is how people see him, and frankly that's too bad. I don't think he is a bad person, but that's what the public does: it makes you into an "image". A god of partying, disease, virginity, bashfulness, aloofness, depression, there is a celebrity for all these things. It's just how people see the world. They need a representation of a certain absolute. It gives them choices and black and white dichotomies.