Bjørn Stærk, March 2008
Today's myths are about historical figures, not gods and heroes.
Traditional myths were meant to describe the structure of the world people live in, and the forces that operate in it. The events in the story took place in the past, but they were also eternal, and relevant to daily affairs and rituals. Myths were educational, they taught you about good and evil, life and death, peace and war. Understanding the myths, and obeying their lessons, was necessary for survival and prosperity.
Myths were not doctrine, something you had to believe in in order to please the gods, and they were not just stories with a moral. They were somewhere inbetween: True stories that contained lessons for the present.
We don't have much of a religious mythology today, but we have something very similar: Historical mythologies, myths that are based in history. By "myth" we can mean two entirely different things: a myth can be a belief that isn't true, and in a sense this is also the case with historical and religious myths. They aren't entirely true. But they are more than just not true. A myth in the sense I mean here doesn't relate to objective reality at all. It can be partly or even mostly true, but it is not anchored by its factual value, it's anchored by its educational and moral value.
An example of a myth in the first sense (ie. not true) is the belief that Columbus discovered that the world is round. This is a popular misconception, a funny anecdote many of us heard once and didn't bother to check. It's not true, but it is anchored to reality: When I tell you that it is false, (Columbus discovered America because he miscalculated the size of the Earth - everyone else knew there was no way he could sail all the way to Asia by going West, and they were right), you think "huh, that's funny, I never knew", and adjust your belief. Simple and painless.
An example of historical myths in the sense I want to discuss (moral lessons) are the ones that form the Hitler mythology.
The Hitler mythology is a collection of stories about the Second World War, where some of the people and events involved have ascended from reality to the mythical level. They are no longer historical subjects, but eternal symbols of the forces at work in the world we live in.
Adolf Hitler was not just a German dictator who led Europe into a disastrous war, he is the eternal personification of evil. He is the tempter, the deceiver, the enemy. Winston Churchill was not a multifaceted character in British politics, he was the tragic hero who Warned Us Against Hitler, and thus against all Hitler's before and after. The Munich agreement was not a complex diplomatic event, but the symbolic betrayal of good to the forces of evil.
The Hitler mythology is made of up mostly true facts. Many historical mythologies are. The people were real, the events happened. But the facts have been moved from the historical reality into a story reality, a reality that is ruled by laws of moral relevance. The facts are fairly true, but the purpose of the myth is not to be true but to be relevant.
Historical mythologies incorporate historical facts, but they go beyond the facts, and they exclude other facts that don't fit. In the Hitler mythology, Munich symbolizes the futility and perversity of appeasing evil. Chamberlain becomes that aspect in all of us which hopes to avoid confrontation, that weasely character in a movie who hopes to make a deal with the bad guys.
Reality is more complex. Historians debate whether Britain and France could have won a war in 1938, and whether it would have been politically possible to launch one, living as they did in the shadow of World War I. After Munich, Chamberlain ordered the acceleration of British rearmament, and a year later he said no to the annexation of Poland. Cowardice, or a combination of necessary caution with an understandable aversion to war?
The point is not that this or that interpretation of Munich is the correct one, but that there are different interpretations, and that historians do not agree. They often never do. And this is what separates mythology from history: History is uncertain and complex, and hard to exctract a clear moral lesson from. Mythology is certain and simple, with clear and eternal moral lessons.
To a historian, a bad outcome doesn't tell us that the decision that led to it was stupid. If I gamble and lose, did I lose because the odds were bad or was I just unlucky? Or perhaps the odds were bad, but I had good reason to think that they were good. Should a historian then conclude that I was a fool, or that I acted as one might expect from someone in my situation?
Historical mythology does not care about these questions. It ignores uncertainties, and takes a detour around nuances.
Historical mythology is judgmental, it's purpose is not to understand but to teach and guide. "Do this, don't do that. I know you think this sounds like a good idea, but let me tell you a story about someone else who thought that, and made a real mess." Historical mythology doesn't care about the past for its own sake, it cares about the past only insofar as it is relevant to us, here and now.
It is not wrong to look for moral lessons in history. Where else would we find them? And it is not wrong to tell stories about the past. We have no other way of understanding it. But we must be aware of the dangers, and our own limitations, when we do this. Otherwise we reduce the past to a collection of mythic symbols and figures, like a modern Olympus.
The best antidote is to not try to understand the past through a single perspective and a single story, but a combination of many, using different starting points.
The Hitler mythology "begins" in the early 1920's, and ends with the defeat of Germany and Japan. It is the story of how fascism rose to power in a climate of cynicism, pacifism, and doubt in the merits of democracy and capitalism, forcing democracy to rediscover itself and reaffirm its values.
But what happens if we use a different starting point for our mythology, for instance the year 1900? Now we find a story about arrogant imperial powers, who stumble into a meaningless war that causes the Russian revolution, then force a harsh peace settlement on Germany that aids the rise of nazism, making a follow-up war inevitable. The lesson of the Hitler mythology is that we must stand up to evil. The World War I mythology teaches us about diplomatic caution and the high price of nationalism and arrogance.
Or maybe we should begin our story in the ideological flora of the mid-19th century? This gives us a story about the birth pains of modern Europe, in which socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, nazism, social democracy and liberalism represent various approaches to the problem of replacing autocracy with a political model that involves the masses.
Whether you mythologize these stories or stick to historical reality, your choice of starting point affects the story. Move your focus, to another time, or another place, and the story changes. The story of colonization is different when told from a European perspective than when told from the perspective of the colonies. The facts are the same, but the stories change. The point is not that any story is equally valid, and thus equally invalid, (there's only one past), but that we need many perspectives to see the whole picture.
We need a demythologized Hitler story, but we also need the imperial Europe/World War I perspective. We need to know the history of Western Civilization, but we also need to hear history told from the perspective of China, India, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. The more perspectives, the better we understand, and the more immune we become to historical mythology.
But this is rarely done. Sadly almost any mention of historical events in the media is mythological in nature. Whether it's a casual reference to the "Dark Ages", (invented by Petrarch in the 1330's) or the "witch hunts" (a fascinating and complex event), or you hear a pundit or politician warning us against a "new Hitler", history today is our mythology. The stories are fairly restricted by fact, but they serve the same purpose as traditional mythology did: To provide moral lessons for the here and now.
Bjørn Stærk, 2008
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