I take the term myth here as "shared story" ... Damien Walter considers these shared stories, these myths, were, basically invariably, fantasies.
He also considers, modernity was a big effort to step out of make-believe and be rational.
I hold this never happened. Modernity never was rational. And myths, in the sense of shared stories, never was synonymous with fantasy. But first, let's hear Damien Walter:
13:52 the very long-term importance of fantasy to our world because in the pre-modern 13:58 world all societies 14:04 were based on a fantasy we could be more constructive and call 14:10 it a mythos but i mean it's also fair to call it a fantasy every human 14:17 civilization from the ancient Greeks to the slightly 14:22 less ancient Romans we go further back and look at the assyrian empire the first Babylonian 14:32 cities i could continue with a list of ancient civilizations but one thing in common 14:39 across these civilizations is that they had a shared story a narrative i often 14:47 talk about this and just reiterating it here a story a narrative a mythos 14:55 a fantasy because it was impossible 15:00 to know what was happening in the world [...] this is 16:56 how we lived in very unified communities 17:02 it's questionable how much individual identity anybody had 17:07 for thousands of years because we were submerged in into these mythic narratives these 17:14 fantasies okay and now we're trying to live very 17:20 differently we are trying to leave these fantasies behind and live in the modern 17:28 world and this is an incredibly complex 17:33 transition to make and very often we fail making it both as 17:40 individuals and as civilizations 17:46 we try to step into a world that is driven by reason driven by science driven by 17:54 technology uh by objectivity 17:59 but when this goes wrong there's an incredible temptation to fall back to 18:06 the pre-modern and the fantasy that shaped the pre-modern
Now, let's take individual identities first ... every individual is part of some collective or some overlap of collectives. Not true for Adam and Eve at the start ... except it kind of was. They began as part of the same collective as the unfallen angels. By sinning, they briefly became, and rendered their posterity liable to becoming, part of the collective of fallen ones. By repenting, they founded the Church Militant, that is people on earth who are trying to save their souls against a backdrop of sin already existing, and they entered it as two penitents.
But one thing is certain, modernity has not changed this. You can be a member of the Catholic Church, the Young Earth Creationist movement, cosplaying and reenacting, or sth similar, fandom of Tolkien and of Tomahawk (I just found out that what Tolkien was for Frodo, Joseph Samachson was for Tom Hawk), and of Tomb of Dracula (I thank Stan Lee for teaching me, even before I became a Christian, that vampires are afraid of garlic, Crucifixes and prayers in Latin ... a fine connexion between happy parts of my childhood and my attachment to the Latin Mass ...), but in each of these, you are not just an individual, you are also part of a collective. Virgil and Horace were not just the same civilisation, not just colleagues, not just both dependent on the mecenate Maecenas (the name giver of the concept mecenate), but also, as such, friends. What I can see from their poetry, they were different people, perhaps I'm a bit biassed due to not having read Bucolica, I suppose Bucolica is much closer to Horace's typical fare, and Horace approaches the Aeneid, when after the battle of Actium, he writes "nunc est bibendum," (I book, song XXXVII of Carmina Horatii) ... still, they were not the same person, they were individuals.
You could no more mistake one for the other, than you could mistake Tolkien for Lewis (I was going to suggest, they had no mecenate, but as both were paid by Oxford University for lecturing and tutoring in literature heavy subjects, English Language history, with Old English and early Middle English literature for Tolkien, English literature starting with Chaucer for Lewis, this is not strictly true). You could put the parallel further, just as both Virgil and Horace were patriots in face of Cleopatra, both Tolkien and Lewis (while wary of their ally Stalin) were patriots in face of Hitler.
So, being submerged under collectives does not make one not individuals, unless of course, the collective is making sure to make the individual not count.
Enlightenment or the Modern Project has not made us more individual, and in some versions actually battles to make us less so (Communism and National Socialism allow only élites — like SS officers or Nomenklatura to cultivate individualism, and I'm not even sure how much SS officers lower than Goering in rank were allowed to). So, let's get individualism vs collectivism out of the way.
because it was impossible 15:00 to know what was happening in the world
Each of us experiences consciously and remembers a not majority but still fair portion of 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86 400 seconds per day. This is 126 230 400 seconds in four years. After a year, any conscious second that too closely resembled many other conscious seconds is subsumed into a more abstract memory, which is to the individual memory input a bit like a wiki is to the individual contributor. In 72 years of life, or 80, let's say 76, if we live that long, that's 2 398 377 600 seconds, most of which are forgotten or resumed in remolded memories. If you read of someone's day with an outlook on their broader life, in five minutes, how much will that leave out? What you read may be totally truthful, but it is a fraction of what he could know of his day or his life, when he wrote that five minute read.
To even read in five minutes about even one day with just an outlook on the life of a person, obviously will take you five minutes, if you do that with only one person. We are 8 billion persons currently alive. To read about each would take 2 400 000 000 000 seconds. It would take you 1000 or 1001 of your lifetimes. And it would be that short only if you needed no time to sleep or eat or do other things. Then imagine all the people already dead. Some people pretend, whether they are right or wrong, that the ones now alive are more than have ever been alive together, so that dying is no longer "joining the majority" (as it was not yet the case when Abel died, but that's not where they take their estimates from). If so, that study would take 2001 lifetimes.
We inevitably know only some of the things that happen in the world. Most of us will know of peace treaties and of divine miracles (which unlike peace treaties are not broken) from hearsay, or by indirect inference from their situation. Knowing some was obviously equally possible to Assyrians and Romans, Babylonians and Greeks. One of the things that have been more possible genuinely to know the last 150 years is the food peoples eat elsewhere. In the late 1800's, German people could read about Mate in novels by Karl May. In 2024, Mate is both drunk from a bobadilla in Paris (and presumably Germany too) and also as a kind of lemonade, in Germany and in Paris too. Reminds me, up to stamping holly as poisonous, people drank holly ... and the poison in holly was basically the same as in coffee or chocolate. It's caffeine. The poisonous effects were what overconsumption of coffee would today cause in convulsions or Caffeine-induced anxiety disorder, or the stupid idea to test on pets, as dogs are far likelier to die from even small doses of caffeine or theobromine. Or, a stunt to make people consume coffee instead of holly, depend on imports rather than their garden ... Yerba mate and holly are both the genus ilex, in Linnean nomenclature.
What does it then even mean to say people in the premodern past knew very little? I'll quote parts of what I left out:
they had some progression of 15:24 knowledge the Romans knew quite a lot more than the Assyrians did but they still knew very little and ordinary 15:31 people knew very little
Obviously, from what I said, from a human point of view, we all know very little. It's part of the human condition. But presumably, Damien Walter meant sth. I'll wager, he meant primarily two things.
- Galenos was substantially a better doctor than an Assyrian had been 1000 years before him (and yes, Galen was preserved in the Middle Ages, that was not a technology loss, at least not overall and where it partially happened, it was reversed);
- Assyrians were flat earthers; Romans were round earthers; both considered the heavenly bodies as moving around us and had no concept (that we can identify as such) of solar systems, galaxies, Big Bang, light years of distance ...
In other words, Damien Walter pretends that Newtonian mechanics as sole (or as approximation of sole Einsteinian) cause of movement in celestial bodies is "knowledge" and any other explanation of what happens is "myth" ... I disagree. Just as I disagree that holly is poison and coffee totally safe. The idea was probably circulated to get the poor to consume little caffeine, by reducing the homegrown caffeine to decorations, put on par with belladonna, while their paymasters or landlords could still get their caffeine by imported coffee or tea, the Heliocentric Revolution, about the same time, and Siccar point's view on the "ages" by James Hutton c. a century later, and in between, Hume's denial of miracles, are all, not just myths, but in fact untrue myths. Bluffs at worst, bad guesses at best, and often enough bad guesses at first and then promoted as useful bluffs.
Either way, the Enlightenment Myth has shown a huge capacity for displacing the Christian shared story, or if you wish, the Christian myth, which as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien will tell you, is myth coinciding with fact. This makes me prone to presume that much, if not all, of the Enlightenment Myth, is myth coinciding with non-fact. Like the non-fact that holly is less safe than coffee.
Similarily, since Roman times, Christianity as "myth" or society cohesive narrative has more than once (from St. Bathildis of Neustria and Burgundy to Wilberforce), while not in principle condemning slavery, managed to practically abolish it. Modernity, by contrast, equally has a knack of not in principle accepting slavery (except in the very first century of it ... I think Charles A. Coulombe may have a thing or two to say on the connexion of slavery and rising modernity in his book Rum: The Epic Story of the Drink That Conquered the World, 2004), so of not in principle accepting slavery any longer, still more and more and more than once reintroducing it. Basically every kind of slavery to which people in England were subject in the time of Chesterton, was a modern one.
The kind of people who tell you, "you are more free to form your own identity, if you know you developed slowly from apes by inevitable misfortunes culling away the ones less evolving, in the places where needed, obviously apes remained apes in Africa," are also telling some of you "no, you are not free to form your identity on parenthood, in order to continue evolving, we intend to arrange artificial misfortunes on the gonads, if not physical persons who have them" — in the 19th C. their racism was mainly ethnic, and Marx dreamed of eradicating Celts and Negroes. In the 20th C. their racism has (especially since 1945) shifted to a more case by case approach to eugenics (though the sterilisation of vagrant people in Sweden up to the 70's was indeed likely to target Lapps, Tatters and Gipsies more than ethnic Swedes or Finns).
Kent Hovind has given the world Dinosaur Adventure Land. Evolution believing and Big Bang believing fans of secularised and public only education systems have given the world the kind of schools in which possibly Cassie Bernall, certainly someone, said "yes" about believing in God. And was then killed by Harris or Klebold. So, no, I think, when it comes to toxicity, Modernity has a much steeper downward record than Christianity has a slow upward record. Plus, Harris and Klebold were Evolutionist Atheists, not Young Earth Creationist Christians.
But even so, wouldn't it be irrational to believe just the Christian myth of all myths not derived from the works of scientists, and totally disbelieve all the others? Yes, it would. And that is the exact reason why I also believe in Greek myths about city founders and heros. I do not believe their theology. I do not feel inspired to worship Delphic Apollo on reading Oedipus Rex. I feel more inclined to thank God for St. Paul casting OUT Apollon from a poor slave girl, who, having become useless was probably freed socially as well as spiritually, even if the story in Acts doesn't say so. Now, Damien Walter considered this rejection of modernity as a temptation, even as a temptation to irrationality. I disagree. I think Modernity is the most toxic of myths, and more toxic than any of the pre-modern ones, one of which was not just historically true, like the account of Oedipus could be and the Book of Acts is, but theologically as well, as the Book of Acts is, and the tragedy of Sophocles isn't. Apart from Modernity being very meagre on history and totally abject on theology, and used by the news slave hunters, it is also pretty unique in its distortion of history and of science in the service of its own toxic myth. Damien Walter calls the "return to pre-modern fantasy" Fascism. I'm tempted to reply, not with anything in Lord of the Rings, but simply the end of The Silver Chair:
For, with the strength of Aslan in them, Jill plied her crop on the girls and Caspian and Eustace plied the flats of their swords on the boys so well that in two minutes all the bullies were running like mad, crying out, "Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn't fair."
Since reading that, I have been aware that "Fascists" is not just a description of various movements in the 1920's and 1930's, sometimes extending dictatorships into the 1940's and beyond, not all of which were good, but not all of which were bad either, it's also a Commie cuss word, a way of marking out someone they dislike as bad without having to defend that classification by classic moral values, simply by making anti-Fascism a bogus political morality. It is ironic that a man who pretends to be concerned about individuality is so concerned about being anti-Fascist, that in practise he subsumes morality (usually an individual concern) under a specific tribal version of politic morality. It is nearly as ironic, but not as bad, that C. S. Lewis, who was far closer to the Left condemning both Spain and Italy, than Tolkien was, by those lines, made me lifetime immune against imagining a thing is bad just because someone can describe it as "Fascist" ....
Apart from genuine historic memory, though the oracle that misled Oedipus may have been re-labelled as Delphic Apollo after an earlier one was forgotten, Pagan mythology unfortunately also had another source of "knowledge" which wasn't a true one. Delphic Apollo. The closest we get to that cult might nearly be Voodoo mediums. But in social importance the closest, and in internal mechanism the second closest, we could definitely name Scientism, the belief in Modern Science (done by a specific ideology), as a legitimate source of information, trumping both history, and the divine revelation, garanteed by non-Apollo and even anti-Apollo miracles, which is historically attested in the Bible and in Church history.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Thomas Aquinas
7.III.2024
Damien Walter cited from his video:
Lord of the Rings and fascist fantasy
Science Fiction with Damien Walter | 6 March 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K7MXRHKAEc
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