Price Point 20: What do we lose when we lose our ability to imagine?
The decline of artifice from Odin to Dahmer
This is sometimes about the technology and business of media and sometimes about culture. Today is culture. I hope your year is starting out well.
“There are no rationalists. We all believe in fairy tales, and live in them.”
G.K. Chesterton
Mythic tales are the mechanism humans have developed to allow ourselves to live in our vast, unexplainable universe without going insane. From Odin to Zeus to Orpheus and Eurydice to Kali to Hansel and Gretel, we have always interpreted the world through stories that order the universe, giving us a logical and purposeful place within it. These stories, or frameworks, come to us as myths. The existential randomness of the world — the awful truth — that so disturbed Sartre’s protagonist in La Nausée, for example, has been obscured for most in history behind an interpretive framework through which people understand themselves and their world. The world is not just a random series of events and horrible things, but has order, reason and sometimes even beauty. There are no myth-free cultures that have thrived and survived that I am aware of.
WWI, presaged by the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, dramatically put an end to many aspects of European culture, and perhaps especially to a certain openness toward illusion, and myth. There were realistic and gritty artists prior to 1870. Dickens comes to mind. But 1870 was a key turning point, as Paris, the modern Athens, was crushed by the Prussians; and the horrors of WWI provided more disillusionment. Now, our capacity unselfconsciously to engage with myth or to avail ourselves of its powers has been in decline as we have grown in the West in particular to be more skeptical. What might the consequences of this be? And is it possible to reverse our steps on this particular path?
The Mythic Mode
“Myth” can include traditional fables, religious stories, secular tales, memes, and other influential cultural understandings that situate us in the world. By referring to these as “myths” or by referring to them collectively as the mythos of a culture or individual, I do not mean to indicate that they are not “true.” I mean only that they are taking a narrative form and are functioning, true or not, as world-making frameworks for people. In fact, insofar as they successfully guide people and peoples though lives over time, they are in some sense clearly partaking of reality and in some sense true. Andrew Snyder put it well when he said:
Science deals with the world of matter whereas myth deals with the world that matters. Myth deals with the world of meaning. It might not describe our physical surroundings, but it describes our existential location.
(By the way, I recommend his podcast Mythic Mind.)
The most influential statements throughout history have not been arguments but stories. Jesus’s parables. The Mahabharata. Stories create myths. Myths shape ideals. Ideals shape frameworks, people and society. As Coleridge said, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
To have listened to The Iliad as a Greek in ancient Hellas, to have heard the Mahabharata in 500 BC, to have read Paradise Lost by a fireplace in 1666 in London, required a certain unskeptical embrace of a fantastical world — a romantic suspension of disbelief and a belief in something that could be greater.
To throw yourself into a musical like Pirates of Penzance (1879), one must suspend disbelief and accept some measure of artifice. Audiences didn’t consider whether Pirates of Penzance was fake or artificial or sufficiently gritty, they walked into its world and lived it with joy for a moment. They were not seeing it on a meta or ironic level.
La Boheme premiered in 1896. To love an opera, one must, for a moment, not be a skeptic, but one must accept its propositions. Even later popular songs like Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust (1927) have a sentimental romanticism to them that only works if you are not primarily in a skeptical state of mind. I would argue that in this era the mythic mode remained strong, though it faced emerging cultural opposition.
In the plastic arts let’s take Jacques-Louis David as our starting point, with illusion and meaning.
Casting Aside Illusion and Romance
There had been, since at least the Franco-Prussian War, a parallel avant-garde interrogating, as we might say, grandeur, beauty and illusion in favor of a less romantic mode. As Zarathustra said in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), “Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and those blasphemers died along with him.” Chipping away at the ultimate myth, the myth of God, was Nietzsche’s lighting of the fire.
We see the rejection of illusion and beautification emerging with Picasso in between the Franco-Prussian War and WWI.
In this evolution of art we are not asked to perceive a fictional world but instead, the painter is being honest that this is a group of colors, an intriguing graphic construction, that is making a strong aesthetic statement but it is not an illusion nor is it about beautification, it is not an idealization of form.
This tendency away from illusion was echoed in a substantial post WWI literature of disillusionment, including Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, presenting reality with a frankness new to poetry, also playing with narrative and calling into question at times the prospect of communication in a fragmented culture. This is very far from inviting the reader to accept a new illusion.
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
We see a matured version of the rejection of the artist as illusionist later in Jackson Pollock (this is the short version of this essay so we are skipping ahead a bit). Clement Greenberg enthused about the honest “flatness,” the of the new paintings.
Roland Barthes Rhetoric of the Image (1964) would go in to dissect the intention of images, introducing the idea of their sinister insincerity, their manipulative nature, and then also in writing, in Writing Degree Zero.
And poetry evolved to a still moving but much more gritty and realistic form with Frank O’Hara Steps (1964), among others:
god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
And we see the full flower of irony and the complete abjuration of illusion in art —
This parallels an emerging distrust of authority in religion and art, but, before long, also in politics. The assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, followed shortly by Watergate and the Vietnam War playing on the television every night, made their case against romance, grandeur and illusion and made their case for objective reality.
The Decline of Myth in US Pop Culture
We can see this evolution of mind in American entertainment. Oklahoma premiered on Broadway in 1943. I Love Lucy premiered in 1951. Katherine Hepburn and the transatlantic accent in film. All of these — the musical, the classic sitcom and the accent that no one uses in real life, are part an unironic modern but not post-modern fantasy world that accepts suspension of disbelief. All of this speaks to a residual ability to romanticize and indulge.
James Joyce was on the cover of time 1934. This kind of positioning is hard to carry off today. Today, Joyce, as an intellectual or a writer, could only be regarded with at least some measure of skepticism. He could be presented then, but not now, unironically as being possessed of great vision, sensitivity and insight, as having an aura of seriousness, as being a great person worthy of admiration. The semiotics of the image — his gaze off into the distance, his formal attire, the austere but sensitive drawing, the gravure style of the gildings on the margin of the image, suggesting elegant personal stationery, all in no half measure reinforce the idea that this is an august and authoritative personage.
The Sound of Music (1965) offered a break into song fantasy world while at the same time confronting the very real hostilities of World War II.
The musical declined rapidly as a very important film genre after 1969’s Paint Your Wagon. In general, grown up movies evolved toward a much more gritty and realistic style free of illusion, for example, The French Connection (1971).
In religion we see a decline in churchgoing.
One could do a whole essay on fashion, but suffice to say that from the Regency period to the Victorian era to the 1950s to now, we see amongst men a substantial decline in artifice and symbolism. That is, we see less aspiration toward any romantic or idealized form. And I do see these issues as being all of a piece — the evolution from rhyming iambic pentameter couplets to gritty free verse and the evolution from the Saville Row suit to the moda of Sam Bankman-Fried.
I Love Lucy could not be successfully carried off today because of its stylistic artifice and the suspension of disbelief it requires. In 2006, Lonelygirl15 premiered on YouTube to great success. Ostensibly the diaries of a young woman, in fact it was a produced show. Its appeal lay in its unfiltered sincerity. It anticipated the millions of influencers and TikTokers who are so popular now. Sitcoms have declined precipitously. But the descendants of Lonelygirl15, requiring no suspension of disbelief, looking right at you, are ubiquitous.
Part of why the Oscars are down 70% from their peak is that people have lost their attachment to stars. Without some sort of larger aura or belief in greatness, they become uninteresting. Part of this indeed may be due to the increased availability of interesting people and accessibility of the stars themselves, which erodes their mystery (you will note that the world’s biggest star, Leo DiCaprio, has no social media presence), but also it has to do with the idea that there are no stars because we have deprivileged and decentered cultural heroes.
The distaste for illusion and the preference for the sincere, gritty and real affects what we watch more broadly. Now we get true crime. TikTok. Reality. MILF Island. We mostly get things that do not call for much suspension of disbelief. So finally we wind up with Dahmer being a popular hit. We face the unvarnished truth.
Even Avatar and Marvel films I would argue give you everything on a plate and do not ask you to believe in anything larger or any larger principles. It’s imaginary, but you’re not being asked to imagine or participate in a romantic and magical vision of the world — once you accept the superpowered premise, it all works according to the rules of our world. Superheroes aren’t real, but they are conveyed in a realistic, not romantic, mode. There is nothing about them that might lead you to conclude that “the world is not just a random series of events and horrible things, but has order, reason and sometimes even beauty,” and in that regard they stand in contrast to for example, It’s a Wonderful Life, which otherwise may seem more realistic.
The abandonment of myth and illusion has not occurred equally in all cultures. In India, not a hotbed of postmodernism, romance and the suspension of disbelief remains strong in all aspects of popular culture. We certainly see it in film, where we see the survival, indeed the necessity, of the break into song sequence in virtually every film.
In Latin America, the persistence and strength of the magical realism tradition puts them well beyond the US in their openness to magic.
I should mention, finally, that religion, and particularly the Catholic Church in the West and Hinduism in the East are holdouts, to a large extent, against the modern skepticism and do try, within their sphere, to preserve elements of mystery and magic and an overarching story in their mythos and ceremony.
National Myth
Most countries have a national story, or myth, that conveys some sense of purpose, direction, and patriotic correctness associated with the country. In the case of the United States, these traditional stories, such as Christopher Columbus, Thanksgiving, George Washington crossing the Delaware, pioneers, cowboys, The Underground Railroad, The Texas Rangers, Tom Swift, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone, Jackie Robinson, The Alamo, The Great Brain, Abraham Lincoln, and others seem to be losing purchase with time, with the decline of myth in general, and by consequence of direct attack on American history from elements who wish to reframe it or “problematize” it.
It is possible to replace myth within a culture. China is a fascinating case. The Cultural Revolution set out to destroy the Four Olds, and indeed did discard many elements of pre-Revolutionary Chinese culture, including various lifeways, Buddhism, Peking Opera and supporting myths. But it leaned very hard into mythologizing the Revolution and the Communist Party. And judging by China’s stability since then (and perhaps also by the recent popularity of the Wolf Warrior films), this seems to have been successful.
Consequences
We do not know, but it is easy to believe that the loss of the capacity for myth in America and Europe could have profound consequence. This is a dangerous time because instead of replacing one myth with another, we seem to have moved to a situation where we simply lack a common mythos in our society. But perhaps we can propose a law of myth, which is that if you remove myth, something, perhaps something deleterious, will always replace it, and it may change people. No one can have no story. An analogy might be made to Russia in the early 90s where after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one could say that Russia had lost its story. What it did was it went through very hard times and then found a new storyteller.
Does the diminishment of myth reduce the openness of people to the call for romance and adventure in their personal lives and in their thinking as citizens? To finding meaning in life and seeing one’s self as part of something good and important? As you lose the ability to see others in a heroic light, as possessing some grandeur or even value, do you also lose the ability to see yourself as having a grand or worthy mission? If so we might draw a connection between this loss and perhaps the decline of marriage, and the rise of suicide or drug abuse. We might expect in such circumstances to see the rise of dark role models — perhaps Andrew Tate? — who appeal to the most base and primitive models of life. We certainly are seeing all of these things.
Thus Spake Zarathustra:
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast?
There are what I would call extant minor myths. The mythos of being part of technical progress. The mythos of being a participant in social progress. These for some appear to have replaced religion. I think that they do not, however, measure up to the old myths in their breadth or power.
We may recall Keats’s explorer in On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer (1816) —
with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Once one is atomized and storyless, perhaps we lose our ability to make a wild surmise. Perhaps we are deprived of the romance and purpose stories might have imparted to our own lives, illusory or not.
In 1789, Blake wrote The Rose as part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience.
The Rose
O Rose thou art sick,
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The skepticism and sophistication of experience, — the focus on the awful truth — which puts aside the old mythos and all openness to mythos, is arguably Blake’s “invisible worm.”
The Hindus say that we are in the last phase of Kali Yuga when all good qualities of men diminish and all pure qualities decrease and that Kalki, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, will return and set the world right, or at least set it to the next phase of the world in its infinite cycle of phases.
Who is the tenth avatar of Vishnu? Could it be you?
When we lose the ability to imagine, we risk losing any greater vision of life and our call to adventure. The question is whether we can get it back.
As
said on Twitter,It may be worth a try.