Sam Smith
2009
Although America’s politics is increasingly being driven by myth, the media, academia and political activists tend to act primarily with dismay and disgust or satisfy themselves by labeling the myth followers as wing nuts. Serious consideration of this huge factor in American life is largely absent.
Little time is spent on how to educate people on a complex or scientific matter, to help them deal with probabilities as well as certainties, or how best to convince rather than merely to condemn.
Here’s a thought for starters: Bring together journalists, philosophers, pollsters, historians, anthropologists and activists to put the matter on the table. Begin with the premise that myth is normal in any culture; it even has important healthy functions. But what happens when, as now, myth gets out of hand? What causes this? How do we stop myth from being self destructive? How, metaphorically, do we return safely from Jonestown to the First Baptist Church down the street?
If there were such a conference – or, better, a series of conferences – here are some of potential topics:
What causes myth to change its role in the same culture?
How important are different segments of the culture in this: education, religion, media, political campaigns etc?
How does this shift reflect a failure to understand basic things like the variations in a multi-year chart of global temperatures? What can be done about this?
How do we raise the understanding of probability in dealing with such matters?
What is the best response to cynically created mythology?
What is the media’s responsibility in handling such issues and how could it do it better?
What are effective ways to move someone from myth to reality?
To what extent does the over-complexity of solutions (or of their administration) contribute to mythology? Is the lesson that we should more often break such solutions into smaller, more comprehensible parts?
To what extent does burying questionable items in a complex solution contribute to mythology and undermine support?
To what extent does the establishment’s tendency to say “Case closed” on matters with continuing doubt work against reality and spur myth? For example, the World Trade Center attack was certainly not likely the creation of George Bush, but that doesn’t eliminate unanswered questions about what happened in government before the attack or about the construction of the towers. To act as though it does seems to encourage, rather than eliminate, myth. This happens over and over, often because the government wants to put a matter aside and the media is too willing to help.
How can we teach honor for unanswered questions without embellishing them with unsupported theoretical conclusions?
What do history and anthropology tell us about myth and how it helps and damages a culture?
And that’s just for starters. The important thing is to start to recognize that myth is not something you change by name calling but by dealing with it as a force as real and important in its own way as climate change.
