21st Century Politics and the Return to Myth
- linanasrelhag
- Dec 19, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 21, 2023
If the 21st century has revealed something to us, it is the continued prevalence of myth throughout modernity. Despite the characterization that modern life is marked by rationalism and scientific inquiry, myth persists at all levels of our social reality. In fact, our contemporary moment can and should be characterized as an explicit return to myth. Indeed, we can find many examples throughout the mid twentieth century not only discussing but re-inscribing the importance of myth. A sentiment that pervades pro-Palestine demonstrations today and can be seen on the sign above, "you know what also died in Gaza? The myth of western humanity and democracy".[sic][1] In this context, the use of the term myth serves two purposes; (1) it provides a criticism of purported Western values like democracy, equality and human rights, and (2) it implicitly announces that myths are valued in some sense or another. They are valued as ideals. Indeed, as Cedric Robinson writes, "without myths, that is, without meaning, consciousness is set adrift into terror.”[2] The entirety of the Enlightenment project is itself a project of mythmaking, of manifesting the ideals of progress, the scientific method and so on. Despite this, myths are rarely acknowledged for what they are --myths. Myths and mythologizing are largely understood either through the historical lens of their past function, or negatively as a akin to lies, fictions, fantasies with any serious discussion of myth today typically confined to the literary field.
Indeed, literary scholars have developed very interesting studies of myths and the power of/ need for mythologizing. American literary scholar Joseph Campbell was celebrated for his extrapolation of myths from the literary and religious context. Campbell's work drew on insights from psychology, social theory, and philosophy to make sense of the human need and desire for something beyond material reality hence the emphasis on myths and mythmaking practices. In his work The Power of Myth (1988), Campbell aims to reconnect people with, "the literature of the spirit," something beyond the 'purely physical' that allows us to, "feel the rapture of being alive." (pg.1) Another literary scholar, Nelson Goodman, is credited with popularizing the concept of 'worldmaking' in the text Ways of Worldmaking (1978). Goodman proposes that the world is 'made through a process of language.' It is formed through expression and understanding. Worldmaking and mythmaking are virtually indistinguishable in terms of methodological approach. 20th century critical theorists, engaged in the political problems of their day, were not far removed from this perspective. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) names the enlightenment as a fundamental myth for modernity. Enlightenment, they write was a program of disenchantment. “It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.” (pg.1) And yet, the “cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself.” (pg. xvi) Similarly, as questions about the 'problem of modernity' grew in this period, a recognition of the ‘unreal’ emerges throughout academic scholarship. Feminist psychoanalytic philosopher Teresa Brennan in her work Exhausting Modernity (2000) similarly describes the problem of ‘reality’ as the problem of fantasy. The foundational fantasy, she tells us, is the notion of individual self-containment which she notes is not only a modern idea but “very probably a Western prejudice.” (pg.19) In the preface to his 1957 work Mythologies, philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes describes a shift in the value and structure of myths from ancient to contemporary period. Myth, he writes, is a kind of speech or form. “Rather than being defined by the object of its message, [it is defined by] the way in which it utters this message,” he continues, "human history…converts reality into speech…mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history.” (pg.109-10)Barthes' characterization of myth as a process of understanding, of 'converting reality' approximates enlightenment conceptualizations of history. And while we continue to recognize the role of myth in ancient life –as a matter of genuine method –we also understand it as antithetical to the aims of modern inquiry and analysis. But the contradiction remains, myths prevail in all spheres of human life and the existence or development of more 'concrete' methods has not dispelled belief in them, nor has it eliminated the need for myths.
This emphasis on language as mediating reality need not be confined to a 'postmodern' critique. To borrow some phrasing from critical and cultural theorist Suhail Malik, "Everything now seems to be “post-” something else, which indexes that our understanding of what is happening now has some relation to but is also disconnected to historically given conditions. If we are... now post-everything — it is because historically-given semantics don’t quite work anymore." [3] Language as the structure of human social reality does not represent a major shift in thinking and the insistence that language mediates our reality is perhaps more persuasive today because ours is a time where the material and immaterial are not confined strict patterns of development and flow. The material world is manifest instantaneously through emergent technologies; actions are received before they are thought; words are used to both invent and deny the existence of world events and we are increasingly reliant on speculative frameworks for political, financial, and economic decision-making.
Whether ancient or contemporary, Barthes understood myth to be a fundamentally historical project because it is the result of human will; the choice to elevate a certain vision of reality that does not strictly arise from the “nature of things.”[4] Barthes does not lessen the existence of a material reality in acknowledging the work of myth. Instead, he notes that much like the broader split in Western inquiry between science and art, the shift from ancient to modern mythologizing is characterized by this fraught dichotomy of ‘scientist’ and ‘writer.’ Despite the host of problems arising from the conceptual split of objectivity vs. subjectivity, the objective, the scientific, the historical remains bound with the realm of ‘freedom’ [5] in much of the critical political literature of the 20th century. Making the scientific more 'real' simply through the insistence that this is the only legitimate space for envisioning the future. But if the present has revealed something, it is that despite attempts to suppress the work of myth and all that falls outside the realm of scientific inquiry, our world is increasingly fixated on desire to believe in something.
This fraught dichotomy, critiqued by many in the twentieth century, remains central to various currents of thought in the present. But in the twenty-first century –our period of deepening contradictions—the constraints of objectivity have left us no choice but to imagine the end. Ours is a time of catastrophe, both emergent and continuous, it is a time of ‘no future’ (Fukuyama 1989: Brown 1999: Fisher 2008). As a result, the present is marked by the incoherence of misinformation, climate denialism, political polarization, conspiracy, and war mongering. These are the defining features of our political moment and what is required of us is perhaps the most difficult question to parse out. Many have insisted on uncovering the ‘truth’ and the re-invigoration of democratic principles through truth. Here, mythology is framed as the enemy of progress.
Mythology remains the realm of anti-science, promoting the uncertainty and volatility of non-verification. But this anti-scientific method has much to tell us about reality. Rather than opposing myth and narratives to science, my aim is twofold: (1) to understand them as fundamental aspects of scientific inquiry and a key element in the mobilization of ‘fact’. And (2) to recover science as a space of experimentation, a place for ‘tinkering.’ I use facts here to mean that which relates to existence. But what exists in the world is as much a question of conceptualization as it is of physicality/matter. Understanding contemporary mythological practices, particularly in the political sphere, can help us to make sense of not only the historical failures of various projects, including the project of liberal democracy, but can also help to dispel myths of the 'end' as not only on the horizon but also inevitable.
Any examination of social hegemonies, political narratives, and the foundational myths that structure Western inquiry divulge these practices as more than reflections but projects that build entire worlds. Political reality cannot be divorced from language and the work of imagination. In recognizing the necessity of a different kind of speech, I draw from Barthes’ insistence that myth is a form of speech [6], one that is useful in recovering hope and helping us chart alternative approaches to political methodology. In light of this, I believe we must understand politics as a process of mythmaking.
[1] A variation of a tweet published on November 4th, 2023 by user @worldobserver0 on X which stated "You know what else died in gaza? The myth of western humanity and democracy."
[2] Robinson, Black Marxism (1983): 301
[3] Malik and Avenessian The Speculative Time-Complex (2016)
[4] Barthes Mythologies(1957): 110
[5] Ibid. 12
[6] Ibid. 109
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