A good friend told me recently that a blog post I wrote was over his head. He has now, perhaps, told me why.
He asked me what my evidence was for the case I was making.
Which seemed odd, since I thought I had laid it all out pretty systematically.
So I repeated the list of literary references I had used:
Heracles
Moses
Romulus
Cyrus
Telephus
Gilgamesh
Lohengrin
Siegfried
Perseus
Sargon
Paris
Karna
Tristan
Danae
Agaea
Andromeda
Ophelia.
His response was that he had only ever heard of one person on that list, Moses, “but never read his work.”
This, I think, says something important.
This is not a man off the street. This is a guy with two degrees, a college instructor. A college English instructor, an instructor in the Humanities. How much worse the case must be for the average Canadian or American.
Moses, of course, wrote the Bible. Or at least the first five books of it.
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| Moses rescued from the rushes--Dura-Europos |
I think this shows we have stopped educating our rising generations in any meaningful sense. We stopped some time ago. These stories and texts used to be the entirety of our education, in terms of its content.
For good reason. These stories told us what we most needed to know.
There is no way to talk about non-physical experiences of any sort without using either metaphor or narrative or both—an “objective correlative,” as TS Eliot calls it. Like these stories.
Yet ALL of our experiences are non-physical. All of them. As Berkeley rightly pointed out.
Without this common language of symbol and myth, we can no longer communicate with each another, on anything other than a caveman level.
“Gimme meat.” “Sex now.” We can talk only about physical wants.
No wonder modern life feels increasingly empty and meaningless. No wonder there is a “spiritual catastrophe” going on, as Leonard Cohen called it. No wonder the statistics for depression and for mental illness generally are scraping the stratosphere en apparent route to infinity and beyond. No wonder America, Europe, “Western civilization,” and civilization generally (it is a mirage to suppose there is any intact civilization outside the West that might take over. They all fell earlier.) seem to be coming apart. No wonder we can no longer talk to one another, but only swing our fists. Even in the bedroom, between men and women.
This is where it began.
People have solid grounds, of course, for thinking studying literature, myth, religion, philosophy, and history is a waste of time. There are no jobs to be had there.
But this is tautological: there are no jobs there, any more, because nobody any longer values myth, literature, religion, philosophy, and history. There is not even any puzzle here involving chickens and eggs: the devaluation had to come first, and then there were no jobs.
Granted, these stories may not give you much practical help currently in finding or even performing a job.
But a job is not much good when everything else is falling apart; especially if you are psychotic, drug addicted, and hopelessly alone. You may not be making it in for work anyway.
And those jobs that need have nothing to do with the Humanities are exactly those jobs that are easily replaced by a machine. And that is already happening, rapidly.
I am not talking here of the “Western canon.” “Western” is a red herring. We would do as well to study the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Confucian classics and those two vast literatures, of India and China. (I do not speak here of the Quran and Muslim literature, because it is already a part of the larger West). In fact, we really should study them all. But the same myth motifs and plots tend to be found all over the world. So do the same philosophical issues, and the same philosophical positions.
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| Dragons are in folk tales everywhere. |
Besides giving us a common language of narrative, allusion, and metaphor, so that we can communicate our own thoughts and feelings to one another, necessarily, most of the best thinking of the past ten thousand years or more have been expressed in this language of myth and story.
If we do not know or understand it, all of that is lost.
This is, taken together, the myths, the stories, the fairy tales, the philosophy, the recorded history, the literature, the rock upon which all civilization is built. It is what our passage through the cosmos on this strange round rock has been about, as sentient beings.
You don’t think anyone figured out anything important or useful in those thousands of years?
You think it is better to smash all the statues, forget it all and start again from scratch?
Clearly, many people do.
These are what is properly known as bad people.
And this impulse seems to be deep within the culture now. My friend’s protest that he could not understand in the end still seems odd. He did not really need to know any of these characters or their stories. I had not been relying on allusion: I think I had given the relevant details when I referred to them.
It was as if he saw a myth or a word from literature or history, and a lamp in his mind at once went off.
There is worse. When I noted that the typical fairy tale involved a wicked parent or step-parent, my friend queried this. He said he could think of only one example, Cinderella.
I would have thought that Disney had preserved at least a decent selection of the traditional fairy stories. Perhaps, however, they pass over us in flickers of light and are forgotten, as the typical movie seems to be. It is only a few hours entertainment, and in most cases we cannot remember much about them a few days later. Eye candy, but leaving nothing to ponder about.
Fairy tales do not belong in that medium. They were orally transmitted for unknown generations. This means they were composed to be memorized, contemplated, thought about in our solitude and leisure.
Here is the list I offered him, more or less off the top of my head, of familiar fairy tales that seem to include some version of the theme of a wicked parent.
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| Briar Rose |
How many of them do you know well enough that you could retell the basic story to your child? This, after all, is the medium, memory and oral transmission and retelling, for which they were intended.
Snow White
Hansel and Gretel
Rapunzel
Little Red Riding Hood
Cupid and Psyche
Puss in Boots
The Ugly Duckling
Dick Whittington and his Cat
Aladdin
The Gingerbread Man
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Little Match Girl
The Musicians of Bremen
Sleeping Beauty (Disney version of Briar Rose)
Briar Rose (Grimm version)
Rumpelstiltskin
Beauty and the Beast
Perhaps it was here, in the nursery, where the holocaust began. This is when and how we began seeing ourselves and other people as objects.
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