Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness? I think not. For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth? The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond.
Yet, in our society, myth as it is conventionally understood has become practically a synonym for falsehood. To be sure, we commonly hear discussion of various social and political myths these days (the myth of the American frontier, the myth of the Founding Fathers, etc.) The more enlightened clergy even talk freely of the "Christian myth." But myths so openly recognized as myths are precisely those that have lost much of their power. It is the myth we accept without question as truth that holds real influence over us. Is it possible that, in this sense, scientific culture is uniquely a-mythical? Or is it the case that we simply fail to look in the right place–in the deep personality structure of the ideal scientist–for the great controlling my of our culture? . . .
What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth. Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value. And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere. From Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), pp. 214-15
See also Parts II and III.
I’ve not had the time or the energy to get back to this larger theme that I began exploring this summer. (See posts here and following in June and July.) I am interested in understanding better this process of by which the collective representations we call reality are created and maintained and its relationship to the collective mentality that Roszak describes above as myth. I honestly don’t think it can be done in some consciously manipulative way (that leads to Jacobinism); it has to evolve out of our present social constructions in the light of new discoveries we must make regarding largely unknown possibilities lying dormant in the human soul. Otherwise it’s just the old endless cycle of action/reaction.
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