The Key to the Mythic Mode Is Ambivalence

A few things to share quickly today without much original content or context, the main point being "stories matter." The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell each other, and the stories we tell collectively as societies. They bear real fruit.

From George Lakoff:

Gavin Newsom's Campaign to Reframe - and Reclaim - Freedom

"If liberals do not concern themselves very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of conservatives in turning back the clock on progress in America"

— Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 1996

These words, written when Bill Clinton was president, have regrettably come true. Even as far back as three decades ago, it was clear that Republicans were intent on repealing things like abortion rights, as they have now succeeded in doing for tens of millions of women.

All of us know that this project to undo progress won’t stop there. . . . 

The main goal of “conservatism” has always been the conservation of patriarchy and racism to preserve dominant social status for the wealthy, the white, the male, the Christian, etc. In the Trump era, Republicans have made it clear that they will no longer let elections stand in the way of getting what they want. As they see it, there is no wrong way to achieve what they believe to be right. . . . 

In 2022, at least one Democratic leader appears to grasp this failure, and he’s trying to do something about it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has gained national attention over the past few weeks for his efforts to push Democrats to sharpen their communications efforts and reframe the debate. In ads, tweets and media appearances, Newsom has launched a one-man campaign to rally Democrats in defense of freedom.

“Freedom is under attack in your state,” said Newsom in an advertisement that ran on Fox News in the state of Florida. “Republican leaders — they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors. I urge all of you to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.” . . . 

It’s refreshing to see a Democratic leader finally try to proactively reframe the debate. At a time when the Republican Party has made it clear that they its members do not consider democracy and freedom as permanent features of life in the United States, it’s important to say that.

Freedom is the most crucial idea in America. We all cherish and support freedom, yet the very meaning of the word is disputed. Freedom means different things to different people, depending on their moral worldview. . . . 

They want to undo voting rights, worker protections, civil rights and environmental protections — all essential to modern American freedom. . . . 

Newsom has the right idea, but it will take more than one governor to reframe the debate after decades of failure by the Democratic establishment.

Remember: This is not about buzz words or slogans. It’s no mere “messaging problem.” It’s about exercising a basic effort to define the ideas and values that unite most Americans, and it’s about clearly saying how those ideas and values are threatened by Republican authoritarianism.

It's probably worth mentioning that today is an election day. I've been watching voters come and go all day, since the election office uses my library's meeting room as a polling location. For the most part, it's a primary election, building up to the general one in November. We do have one major issue on the ballot: abortion is a guaranteed right written into the Kansas constitution, and we're voting whether to change that or not. We are having the first election since the reversal of Roe v. Wade where the public gets to decide. We're getting record turnout for a primary. I, among many, await the results anxiously.

In a related vein, here's some commentary on laws that were passed before the Supreme Court's reversal, looking at other ways for conservatives to achieve their ends.

In the GOP’s New Surveillance State, Everyone’s a Snitch

From abortion to schools, conservatives are depending on everyday citizens to spy on one another.

These laws do not stop at targeting society’s most vulnerable. They also attack the legal and social norms that underpin our system of government. They turn citizens into spies in a surveillance scheme more reminiscent of a totalitarian state, and shred the vital principle that the laws are applied equally to all people.

These laws “allow you to stalk, surveil, harass, impede upon individual’s constitutional rights,” says Michele Goodwin, a specialist in constitutional law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “And that is why this is so dangerous to democracy.” . . . 

For them, the surveillance state ushered in by SB8 has forever altered the course of their lives, breaking democracy’s core promise of freedom to determine one’s life path. “You cannot have state-mandated reproductive laws taking away these choices from women in a country and a robust democracy,” says Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor who studies political violence and mass movements. “They’re just incompatible.” . . . 

Friends, neighbors, and even healthcare providers are now spies and liability is spread to everyone. Prosecutors were never going to be able to use SB8 to go after Herrera because it can only be enforced by civilians. But that detail did nothing to stop the new surveillance system from ensnaring her. . . . 

Hererra’s case demonstrated that SB8’s private enforcement mechanism is working. “Encouraging citizens to spy and denounce each other, it feels extremely authoritarian,” says Barbara Sutton, a professor and chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University at Albany, SUNY. . . . 

In 2021, states introduced 66 education gag laws aimed at curbing discussion of race, sex, and gender, according to PEN America. Nine would be enforced by private citizens, deploying vigilantes to enforce the sorts of “memory laws” that are hallmarks of authoritarianism, aiming to lull the masses by controlling what they’re allowed to know. “The war will be won in education,” Republican Richard Corcoran, then Florida’s education commissioner and a proponent of censoring CRT discussions in schools, said last year. “Education is our sword, that’s our weapon.” . . . 

In a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article, Michaels and Noll argue that by deputizing the faithful of the conservative movement to attack the communities they dislike, these laws not only control and marginalize, but also realign power in American society. Rather than protect minority rights, the courts become a tool of mob rule, the sheltering protection of the law shrinks, and the social fabric of democracy gives way to surveillance and fear. These laws “draw upon and reinforce anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies that are central to Trumpist politics,” they write.

Michaels and Noll see vigilante enforcement laws as an extension of America’s anti-democratic traditions of slavery and Jim Crow. The closest historical corollary to SB8, they argue, is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Under the law, local authorities in northern states were deputized to arrest enslaved people (or anyone accused of being one) and bring them before local magistrates; ordinary citizens could be called upon to aid in their capture and would be fined should they refuse. The act dangled financial incentives: Magistrates earned $10 for each person they deemed a runaway but only $5 for those they set free. Authorities who captured a fugitive received a bonus, while any person caught aiding a suspected fugitive faced six months in prison and a $1000 fine. In doing all of this, the Fugitive Slave law turned the country into a surveillance state where both enslaved people and anyone who wanted to help them were in danger of being turned in by their fellow citizens.

The comparison to today’s growing body of vigilante enforcement laws is eerie. Like the Fugitive Slave Law, SB8 ignores state borders. Anyone anywhere can sue those who aid an illegal abortion in Texas. Proceedings in court are stacked in favor of the vigilante: whoever they accuse must prove that they didn’t break the law, rather than the accuser proving that the law was violated, as is typical in the US legal system. Like the Fugitive Slave Law, SB8 uses a bounty system to incentivize enforcement: vigilantes are promised a minimum of $10,000 in damages for each abortion they sue over, as well as attorney’s fees paid by the accused. In Missouri, a proposed law would take this analogy even further by bringing liability to anyone who helped a Missouri resident obtain an abortion outside of Missouri. As in 1850, the carrot is money and the stick is fear. For more than a century after the Fugitive Slave Law, vigilantes enforced racial hierarchy through violence while lawmakers looked the other way. With rules like SB8, vigilantes are now again officially welcomed in the letter of the law.

As the article says, the activities encouraged--citizens suspecting neighbors and turning on one another--are hallmarks of authoritarian, absolutist states and are the antithesis of a free democracy. Yet the conservatives have done such a good job of controlling the narrative for such a long time that it's where we're finding ourselves. It's rather terrifying.

Looking at storytelling and the collective consciousness from a far different perspective is an excellent book I just finished: The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination by Philip Ball. A description, as I wrote in my review:

Some stories are so common and well-known, so often retold and reworked and referenced, that they have become part of the collective consciousness. Everyone knows these stories without ever having to read the original source material. Some are well-known for the superb quality of their storytelling (Shakespeare) and some for their popularity (Star Wars), but a particular set are so ubiquitous because they reflect society and can be used to represent a wide variety of views, beliefs, and situations common to the culture. These are what Ball calls myths. And he has identified a set of stories that have originated in the past few centuries because they are mirrors for life—and its associated anxieties, hopes, and issues—that has come with industrialization onward. These are the Modern Myths.

Each modern myth is associated with a particular author and piece of literature but is much more than that name. They are stories that have been told over and over again by countless people in countless forms—on stage, in movies, in comics, and more. Literary critics do not consider them particularly well-written, and it is this precise feature that creates the opportunity for readers to find various interpretations and meanings in the stories. Ultimately, the stories stretch and change and grow to reflect the psyche of society and its concerns at various points in time. The myths are mirrors that reflect culture and conduits for it to express itself. “’Maybe every ten years Batman has to go through an evolution to keep up with the times,’ [character co-creator] Bob Kane once suggested.”

Ball has identified the following modern myths (in chronological order):

 - Stranded on a deserted island (Robinson Crusoe)

 - Creator of artificial life (Frankenstein)

 - Hidden inner beast (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

 - Sexually attractive parasite (Dracula)

 - Overpowering alien invasion (The War of the Worlds)

 - Ultra-logical detective (The Sherlock Holmes Stories)

 - Vigilante law enforcer (Batman)

And the possibly emerging—though it’s too early to tell—myth of zombies.

It’s a fascinating book. It’s both a work of deep literary criticism and perceptive cultural analysis. The breadth and depth of Ball’s knowledge is amazing. The writing is dense but not difficult, and Ball is able to make it entertaining. I found the work engaging, thought-provoking, and resonant. For someone interested in the power of stories, it was delightful.

Some excerpts:

Myths are promiscuous; they were postmodern before the concept existed, infiltrating and being shaped by popular culture. To discern their content, we need to look at comic books and B-movies as well as at Romantic poetry and German Expressionist cinema. We need to peruse the scientific literature, books of psychoanalysis, and made-for-television melodramas. Myths are not choosy about where they inhabit, and I am not going to be choosy about where to find them.

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They don’t have morals. They explore human questions that are irresolvable, and they are polysemic: able to seed many different interpretations.

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Stories are at their most mythically fecund when they don’t entirely make sense.

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The key to the mythic mode is ambivalence.

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The point about modern myths is that they not just permit but positively invite new readings beyond their author’s horizon.

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It is the narrative nature of myths that allow them to do their cultural work. . . . there are “certain things stories do that simpler statements cannot.” They help us to refine our skills, our thoughts, our conception of the world, Johnston says, by allowing us vicariously and without actual hazard to place ourselves in new situations, to consider the responses of the characters, “weighing their choices and considering whether we would do the same under similar circumstances.” Ideas formulated as stories are congruent with our experience of the world—it is not simply for the purposes of entertainment but more for the purpose of aiding cognition that they take this form.

So then, what kind of stories serve this role? Fantastical ones often work best: in myth, says Levi-Strauss, “everything becomes possible.” Such stories, says Johnston, “can coax us to look beyond the witnesses of our five sense and imagine that another reality exists, in addition to the reality that we experience every day.” The very departure from realism that has led mythical narrative to be derided and belittled in the modern literature of the fantastic, in Gothic, horror, and science-fiction novels, is a key enabling feature of the work of myth. . . . 

I think we are all adherents of the modern myths I explore in this book, simply by virtue of the fact that we know the core stories and recognize them as being deeply embedded in our culture—and because we want to hear them, again and again, and to juggle with their implications.

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What is it, then, that distinguishes modern myths from the exploits of Thor or Theseus? It is this: these stories could not have been told in earlier times, because their themes did not yet exist. Modern myths explore dilemmas, obsessions, and anxieties specific to the condition of modernity.

It’s this novelty that explains why modern myths are being created at all: because the modern world confronts us with questions and problems that have no precedent in antiquity. Modern industrialized cultures face challenges that our ancestors did not: in the search for meaning within an increasingly secular society; in the disintegration of close-knit community and family structures; in the opportunities and perils presented by science and technology. And so our new myths deal with issues of identity and status, individualism, isolation, and alienation, power and impotence, technological transformation, invasion and annihilation. They speak of scientific discovery and spiritual ennui, sexual dysfunction and erotic displacement, dystopia and apocalypse. Modern myths do not feature kings and queens, dragons and heroes. They draw less distinction between hero and villain, human and monster. We ourselves play the roles of gods, and of course we are as vain, fallible, and compromised as the deities of Olympus and Asgard ever were. The evil forces, likewise, do not manifest as demons and malign deities but lurk inside us all.

Myth is where we go to work out our psychic quandaries: to explore questions that do not have definitive answers, to seek purpose and meaning in a world beyond our power to control or comprehend. By looking at the narratives that have become modern myths, we can examine the contemporary psyche and reveal some of the dilemmas and anxieties of our age: what we dream, what we fear. These stories provide a mental map of our dark thoughts. They are more honest than we dare to be.

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Because these works are not striving to be “high art,” they have the luxury of bluntness. They are without guile, as myths need to be. And they do not need to reshape some generative text, for the text is itself continually co-created, adapted, and modified. It is this relinquishing of narrative control to society that is likely to shape the modern myths of the future, which is why they seem likely to arise in media other than traditional literature.

I find it absolutely fascinating. If I had one request, it would be for Ball or someone similarly steeped in these myths to spend as much time on cultural analysis as this book does on literary criticism. Ball keeps his focus firmly on the myths; I'd like more on their interplay with society and what they say about who we are.

The length of excerpts I included in my review was ridiculous, so I didn't actually share everything I'd marked for sharing. Here are a few more things that resonated with me.

Of the common cross-breeding of theses particular mythical figures where they appear together in new stories:

This seems to be the final, validating stage of a modern myth. Like the ancient myths of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, it will merge into a pantheon.

A constant truth about culture:

All we can say for sure is that mythmaking will continue. We will do it together, and we will not know that we are doing so until it happens. For we do not choose our myths; they choose us.

Here's more about Frankenstein and, more exactly, author Shelley's choices:

Lipking’s perspective on Frankenstein is worth bearing in mind with all the myths in this book: They have neither a moral nor a single “meaning.” That, as I suggested earlier, is one of their qualifying features. To explain what a myth “means” necessarily neutralizes its function as a vehicle for exploring irresolvable questions and anxieties. “Despite the modern consensus,” Lipking says,

“Frankenstein does not admit of a resolution. The basic, defining questions it raises in the mind of a reader—is Victor an idealistic her or a destructive egoist? is the Creature a natural man or an unnatural monster? what moral are we to draw from this strange story?—never receive a satisfactory answer, or, rather, receive strong answer that directly contradict one another. This impasse . . . is the very heart of the novel. . . . Frankenstein teaches its readers to live with uncertainty, in a world where moral absolutes—even the ones we cling to—may cancel each other out.”

We should, he says, grant Shelley “the courage of her lack of convictions.”

In other words, the problems in Frankenstein that critics often perceive—its inconsistency, clumsiness, digressive nature—are positive qualities from the perspective of mythopoesis. The reason it is so depressing to see Frankenstein trotted out as a cautionary fable about the alleged unnaturalness and dangers of new reproductive technologies is not just that this distorts the message of the book but that Frankenstein could actually be an excellent vehicle for all the ambivalence, the open-ended possibilities and perils, the challenges to preconception and prejudice, that such developments usually generate.

This is simply a nice passage:

Horror movies are one of the most popular genres in cinema, and this is harder to explain, as well as more unsettling, than the public taste for pornography. It is one thing to suggest that fairy tales help children process and deal with the anxieties of childhood: feelings of jealousy and fury toward siblings and parents, the difficulty of socializing egotistical and selfish impulses, emerging sexuality, and so forth. It is quite another to understand why adults like to watch people turn into werewolves and tear others limb from limb.

I must admit I haven't read most of the titles Ball considers myths but, as he explains, they're so ubiquitous that we knew the stories anyway.

When the writer Will Self confessed that The War of the Worlds was “one of those books that I felt I’d read long before I actually did so,” he articulated one of the generic features of modern myths.

More about the qualities a book or story needs to become a myth:

The literary shortcomings Wells might have had in the conventional sense were beside the point. They understood that art doesn’t need a refined surface to reach deep levels of human experience. In speaking of what sustains Wells’s best books, Borges is also talking about the characteristics of modern myth in general:

Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things to all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own features and it is also a map of the world.

What makes this possible in a story, he adds, is, in essence, a distinct lack of craftmanship. The work “must be ambiguous in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author; he must appear to be ignorant of all symbolism.” Or, better still, he may really be ignorant of it.

I thought the strongest two chapters where the ones on Frankenstein and Batman--possibly because I was most familiar with the source material, but I think it was more than that. Here's a similar section about Batman to the one about Frankenstein above:

Batman persists for the same reasons Frankenstein persists: because we all know the story but can’t agree on what it is about. But as with all these myths, we are not totally in the dark. Batman is a product of mid-twentieth-century urban life; there is nothing remotely Victorian or Edwardian about him. He condensed from the fear that, in the city’s dim alleys and underpasses and backroom joints, teeming with hoodlums and gangland bosses, the rule of law will not be enough to protect us. In Bruce Wayne’s youth it was not enough to protect him. By avenging his childhood trauma, he may become a savior to us all.

Yet we are not fully convinced we can trust him. As a vigilante, he blurs the boundaries of hero and villain. Yes, he fights for law and order, but he is not constrained by them. His own bizarreness, behaviorally and sartorially, has confined him to the borderlands of society, where his anonymity offers freedom from social and legal norms. Only a man driven by revenge is ruthless and determined enough to battle the evil forces in modern society—but can that motivation be sustained without curdling the soul? Maybe a young companion will foster social bonds and thus temper his steel? We hope so, but we can’t be sure.

This reminds me of a favorite quote from Neil Gaiman.

Modern myth always seems to get refracted through the prism of childhood. If it doesn’t (appear to) start there, as Batman did, then we try to file it there anyway: the “young adult” section of my local bookshop has on its shelves Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and Robinson Crusoe. I know that YA fiction can be gritty fare these days, but all the same this feels like a containment exercise: read this stuff before you grow up. They’re only monster tales.

Perhaps this (dis)placement is not surprising, for the children’s section is often the best place to go looking, too, for the ancient myths. . . . It is not, of course, that there aren’t things from which children need to be protected—but modern myths are not among them, and neither will these stories be so easily neutered by turning them into children’s tales. It is a common trick to pretend that we are trying to protect children from what we fear ourselves.

The quote:

"I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were."

― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Finally, I love this because I agree that life is absurd, so I love anything that reflects life's absurdity:

So let’s just put it out there that Batman is absurd, and then we can start to take him seriously again. He is, after all, no more absurd and no less serious than life itself. There is no more dressing up in Batman than there is in the Catholic church, the British monarchy, or pretty much any state ceremony you care to mention. His response to his trauma and his demands for vengeance are no crazier than ours would be (given the chance), and his lavish excesses underneath Wayne Manor are tame compared to how some billionaires spend their money. Batman’s absurdity doesn’t distance him from life but makes him a good vehicle for commenting on it. And if we can’t be playful in analyzing the way he plays that role, we might as well pack up now.

There is no meaning of life, but we're going to keep looking anyway. Life is absurd. And that's why I love it.