Transcript:
My name is Shaun McMillan and this is the Best Class Ever.
In recent times the idea of truth is under attack. Facts are being called into question, words like, “fake news,” are being thrown around at the media, and people are holding their opinions in the highest regard. With the advent of the internet we are deluged with information, and now with social media we are flooded with constant conflicting opinions. When leaders undermine the authority of national institutions people have to rely more and more on their own intuitions. But science and experience has shown us that our intuition, while useful for making quick judgements, is totally inadequate for handling large scale crises.
So instead of jumping into the hot button issue of modern day politics, let’s instead take a step back and look at truth from the perspective of the ancient art form of storytelling and mythology.
Q: What Can Myths Tell Us About Truth?
First off: What is mythology? Myth has two meanings in the English dictionary. First a myth can refer to any story that is objectively untrue. Secondly, and more historically, myths are the grand old epic poems, the ancient archetypal stories we have been telling about creation and the evolution of man. Stories that go beyond the facts of who, what, when, and where to help us understand the deeper more critical question–why. These are stories so old and so common among so many various people groups that they are older than our oldest writings. They were being told from one generation to another through oral tradition long before anyone had developed any form of alphabet. They are stories about legendary heroes of old who dealt with supernatural forces.
Some of our greatest myths come to us in the form of epic poems like the Iliad & the Odyssey from Greek mythology, or Milton’s Paradise Lost which is a Christian retelling of the ancient creation story and the great battle between good as personified by the Messiah, and evil as personified by Satan.
Some of the oldest known civilizations have common themes among their stories including both creation myths, a mythical garden from which man was tempted and fell from grace, and flood myths are also quite common among the various cultures of these early empires. The ancient myths of the Messopotamian region were recorded by Moses in the first part of the Bible in the book of Genesis.
The Pervasiveness of Parables
The names, gods, characters, and details might be different but they share a lot of the same archetypes, themes, metaphors, and allegories. With the advent of reading and writing it became possible to cement each of them into their final edited versions. But these stories were told over and over again for countless generations allowing each storyteller to collaborate in the storytelling process. The stories contain both factual details and powerful supernatural imagery. The objective facts like age, location, or sequence of events may have changed with each retelling. How old was Adam when we had his children? It’s hard to say because even the way we measure days, months, and years changed over the course of time when these stories were being told. The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers we know, but the Gihon and the Pishon? Such details may have gotten changed or lost in the retelling, and they may or may not be objectively accurate in the final edited version. But the supernatural or allegorical imagery of a talking snake tempting a naked woman to eat a forbidden fruit–people tend not to forget those parts.
And so it is that these stories almost always include imagery that elicit powerfully emotional responses. They are universally relatable to human beings of all generations across time and culture. Though we cannot always objectively prove the details included in these stories to be factually correct, they are subjectively more true than any one person’s story because these stories come to us through the collaborative effort of so many generations of storytellers. Similar stories also emerged from entirely different regions. The localized details might change, but humans all universally have similar experiences. And it’s what these stories have in common that points out what is most true about human nature. We know it is not possible for animals to talk, for gods to walk the earth, or for a flood to drown your entire world, but these stories feel true.
Local vs Universal
Any one version of these stories may have been originally inspired by real people from real places, events that were originally objectively factually realistic. But enough people groups corroborated the story or related to the story to retell that story again and again with their own edits. These stories emerged from humanity. These stories are the story of humanity. The epics of mythology are the story of all stories, the meta truth or amalgamation of many individual truths.
What is more real? Local concrete observable facts or the far more useful abstractions that emerge from them?
Another important question this gets to the heart of is
Q: What is more real?
- 2+2=4
or - 2x + 2x = 4x?
Q: How do we define reality?
- What one observes through the senses
or
- abstractions that can be universally applied?
A child starts with concrete thinking. I have two apples. If I add two more apples I now have four apples. This is an easily observable truth, but it is very limited. It’s a local truth because it only applies to apples or perhaps to fruit. But once children get older and their brains become more developed they can advance from concrete learning to abstract learning. They learn that just as 2 + 2 = 4 and 20 + 20 = 40, 2000 + 2000 = 4000. We can derive from this the mathematical abstraction, 2x + 2x = 4x, or that two anything plus two anything equals four of that same thing. This formula is far more useful and incredibly powerful because it is universally true. It is knowledge that is transferable from one domain to another. From it we can even add things that are impossible to add. What is 2 infinity + 2 infinity? It would seem impossible to add infinities, but we can infer the answer through this incredible truth. So which is more real? 2+2=4 or 2x + 2x = 4x? The physical or the abstract? Well it depends on how you define reality. Though the more sophisticated ideas like love, wisdom, and life may emerge from more simple things like dirt and water, those sophisticated ideas live far longer than any one life and go on to shape the very nature they emerged from. So what is more real? The answer is not inherently obvious.
Is life made up only of matter? Or does life come down to what matters and the meaning we derive from it?
Things get even more tricky when we begin to look at matter subatomically because atoms, protons, and electrons don’t appear to obey even the same laws of physics as matter visible to the naked eye. But let’s leave quantum physics to the scientists for now and try to get back to storytelling.
Fiction VS Nonfiction
When you get caught in a hurricane or swept up in a flood, does it matter to you which continent is or is not not also flooding at that same moment? To you it feels like your whole world is under water. Fiction captures the human experience in a way that factually true nonfiction can never capture. I cannot comprehend when a person tells me that 500 million people died during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. But I am moved when you tell me the story of the one person you loved most in this world and how powerless it felt to watch them succumb to sickness. We cannot know what any other person thinks or feels, except we can, through stories. For empathy is the one truly great human super power.
Nonfiction tells us who, what, when, and where. Sometimes it even tries to explain how. But fiction tells us how it felt. Any avid reader can tell you that a fictional book written from a first person perspective is by far the most moving of all. Which is more relatable? The third person which sounds like, “Jane told him she loved him just before she died?” Or the first person version, “Then she said to me with her last dying breath, ‘I love you.”
The Book was Better
I know more of us watch movies than read books these days, but if you ask book readers why they love reading so much, they will often describe how reading is a medium of the mind. You create the image of the character in your head and you can get inside that character’s head. When you are inside the character’s head literally reading their thoughts you get to know them inside and out. Books written in first person allow you to relate to the protagonist on such a deep level that it gets you closer to them than any closeup in any film. You know their innermost fears. You see their vulnerabilities. Their doubts and inner conflicts. You see their flaws. Their sincerity. It’s ironic that these characters, who aren’t even real but only a figment of some author’s imagination feel more real to us than the real figures from history. We use words like sincere to describe them yet it is all an illusion. Picasso said,
“Art is the lie we use to tell the truth.”
-Picasso
Fictional stories are also critical to humanity because they uphold the ideals that we all aspire to like virtue, goodness, faith, wisdom, and love. The facts from nonfiction like names, dates, and details of who, what, when, and where don’t give us any clue about why. As the philosopher Hume said, “We cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.” Or if I were to rephrase, “We cannot figure what we should do by learning what something is.” Meaning and purpose comes only from the story we tell ourselves about those details. These myths we shroud those stories in are critical to the human experience. This is why we cannot deny the power of narrative or rule out the part they play in finding truth.
“You cannot derive and ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.”
The Philosopher David Hume
The Bible
And the oldest best seller, the Bible, allows us to know even the thoughts of God when you read its older more mythic parts. A more scientifically minded person might argue that one cannot know the thoughts of God. One cannot even prove that He exists or disprove that He does not exist, and thus conclude that this has nothing to do with truth. But we only discover new truths when we allow ourselves to entertain thoughts beyond the confines of what we already know. We must not be afraid to venture out into the unknown.
The Collective Unconscious
Myth allows us to tap into the collective imagination of generations upon generations of storytellers. This dataset includes much more than just what we can observe through our physical senses, and includes the common patterns found within the human psyche. It taps into those visual metaphors that are so common to so many of our dreams. Myths defy the logic of the waking world, and allow us to dive into the more spiritual world of the soul. Can our brains tell the difference between what happens to us when we are awake and what happens to us when we are dreaming? Does one feel any less real than the other? We know that there is so much more to the world than just what we can see. And it really does matter how we feel about what we see. But science doesn’t feel.
Science is a powerful tool that gives us a small but true insight into what is and how it works, but it cannot even touch the critical question of how one should live or not live and why. It gives us weapons, but does not tell us why we should or should not use them.
Life is more than just matter. Life is what matters–purpose and meaning. For this we look to stories.
Q: What is the Modern Day Equivalent of Ancient Mythology?
In the age of reason science has emerged as one of the most powerful tools of the modern age. In the light of this enlightenment many western academics look down on mythology as merely fiction, or obsolete relics of ancient ignorance and superstitious rubbish. But what mythologies do you think contemporary culture prescribes to? What do you think is the modern day equivalent of ancient mythology?
Now in the year 2020 at a time when the entire world is on lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are constantly flooded with anxiety inducing news updates. What do we turn to for comfort in order to escape this anxiety? Just as we have always done, humanity is finding solace by escaping into the world of myth and fiction in its most recent form of film, video streaming, and television series. And today there is no genre of storytelling more popular than the SuperHero genre. Is this a new genre? Comics may have only been around for 100 years, but legendary heroes with supernatural abilities and demigods are as old as the hills.
So next time let’s talk about Superman, Batman, and the Avengers. And let’s discuss the different philosophical ideologies they represent.
Pitch for Life of Pi
If you find today’s subject interesting there is a film I would love to discuss. To really feel the difference between the mythical subjective truth of fiction, and the cold realistic truth of nonfiction I suggest you read the book or watch the film titled, “Life of Pi.”
I won’t say much about it for now because it’s really a great puzzle with some huge reveals. You have to pay attention when you watch or else you might not fully understand it. It doesn’t hold your hand or explain itself in great detail, but it requires you as a viewer to actively engage and interpret the story as it is told in its two forms. It is a movie that really lends itself to great discussions so consider it your homework–really fun homework. I will give you two weeks to watch the film. We won’t discuss it next week, but the week after.
But I will make a post on http://bestclassever.org/film-club-life-of-pi/ for you to offer up your ideas, questions, and opinions before I have my say. So you have until October 13 to watch the film, visit the website and comment to have your say.
