Aesthetic Determinism: Contemporary Mytho-poeic Political Thought

William Miller

wmiller711@gmail.com, wmiller@marymount.edu, millerpolitics.com

 

Paper presented to the Eric Voegelin Society at the 2024 APSA Conference in Philadelphia.

 

I. Introduction

Those of us in the field of political philosophy or political theory are used to discussing concepts and theories. I take a “concept” here to be simply a definable, articulable idea and not a mere image: visual, auditory, or other. Indeed, conceptual thinking in the practice of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of high order concepts and ideas is at the very heart of our study.

We look at concepts to determine if they are sound; for example, whether an idea that purports to be grounded in empirical reality can indeed be acceptably verified. Or whether an idea that purports to be useful, is in fact coherent, self-consistent, unambiguous, and non-tendentious: a good tool for discovering elusive truth.

Plato’s classic account of the “divided line” provides a most useful framework for understanding the role of ideas in pursuing philosophic truth. You will recall that the diagram he drew in speech—and perhaps in sand or on a wall in Athens—is a four-part account of the content of human thought. Three horizontal lines divided human thought into four kinds, ascending from the concrete to the abstract: from ground level of the barest sensory images, or “sense data” as I was once taught to call them, up through “things” that we can identify, then through the concepts or hypotheses —from common nouns to high order concepts—necessary for an act of identification and hypothetical thinking, thence to the highest level of thought: the final realm of intuition or  pure thought. As analysts of theory, we mill about on the third—and perhaps on the top—floor of that four-story structure, evaluating the third-floor ideas that have variously been translated as “hypotheses” or “graphic forms”.

Today, my paper is about political thought, but not about the higher order conceptual thought that analysts usually deal with. Rather, I am looking below Plato’s second line into the thinking that takes place in what is usually referred to as the lower two “visible” sections rather than the higher two “intelligible” sections of the divided line image.  The essay “Myth and Reality” by the cultural anthropologists Henri and H.A. Frankfort provides my point of departure. “Myth and Reality,” an introduction to mytho-poeic thought, is the opening essay to the classic study of ancient civilizations, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, still in print after seventy-five years.[1] Their essay cites Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. II. Mythical Thought as their only philosophic authority, and their account of mythical thinking closely follows Cassirer’s analysis.[2] We shall duly dig into Cassirer’s philosophy as well.

This paper focuses on the myth-making process, both the making of myths and the subsequent use of myth—the mytho-poeic consciousness or perspective, if you will—not on the myths, ancient or modern, that have been produced. It is my thesis—and I believe that Cassirer would largely agree—that for many if not for most people today, the principal method of understanding and discussing politics is still mytho-poeic thinking. And if this is true, it has significant implications for contemporary politics and government, and politics and government in all times.

II. Principal Characteristics of Mytho-Poeic Thought

What is “Myth”?

The central thesis of the collection of essays by the Frankforts and others on the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Hebrews, and Greeks in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man is that the ancients’ principal method of understanding and of explaining to each other the world in which they lived was mytho-poeic thinking. Cassirer’s theory of the symbolic form of mythical thought supplies the philosophic foundation      

“Myth” here, of course, is not to be understood as the opposite of “fact,” as it is commonly thought today, but as “story”—or, perhaps using the seemingly ubiquitous term in current discourse, as “narrative;” either “story” or “narrative” will do for us today. All myths are stories, that is to say, descriptions of dramatic actions, but not all stories are “genuine” myths, those produced by mytho-poeic thought. Nor are genuine myths simply another genre of literature, like mysteries or historical fiction. As produced in ancient and in contemporary primitive cultures, and perhaps even in today’s world, “genuine” myths of the kind which the Frankforts and Cassirer also refer to as “true myths” are fictional, but the fiction “is an unconscious, not a conscious, fiction.”[3]

They [the myths of the ancients] are products of imagination, but they are not mere fantasy. It is essential that true myth be distinguished from legend, saga, fable, and fairy tale. All these may retain elements of the myth. . . . But true myth presents its images and its imaginary characters, not with the playfulness of fantasy, but with a compelling authority. . . .

 

Myth, then, is to be taken seriously, because it reveals a significant, if unverifiable, truth—we might say a metaphysical truth.[4]

 

As a fundamental mode of cognition, a fundamental means of understanding reality, the myths created by genuine mytho-poeic thought always have reality as their object. This distinguishes true myth from art or fantasy, which, according to Kant, “is entirely indifferent to the existence or nonexistence of its object.”[5]

Nor is the subject matter of true myth always easily categorized—as cosmogonies or accounts of the actions of heroes and gods, for example. Mythical thinking can interpret any object whatever.[6] It is a particular mode of perception and conceptualization.

The Frankforts’ “Myth and Reality”

From the Frankforts’ “Myth and Reality,” we learn that mytho-poeic thought differs from what we might call, begging a lot of questions, “rational” or “modern” thought in several key ways. Ontologically, the ancients viewed the world in a way fundamentally different from the modern, rational view we are accustomed to:

            For modern, scientific man the phenomenal world is primarily an “It”; for ancient—and also for primitive—man it is a “Thou.”[7]

This ontological assumption attributes animal and human characteristics—sentience and

willfulness—to everything in the natural world, and this consubstantiality encompasses nature as well as the human or social world—society, tribe, clan—and sometimes even the tools man makes.[8]

In this environment of living beings, ancient man looks for causes by asking “who,” not “how.” Thus, the rock trips man, man does not trip over the rock! The rain broke the drought, not because of certain atmospheric and meteorological conditions, but because

The gigantic bird Imdugud . . . came to their rescue. It covered the sky with the black storm clouds of its wings and devoured the Bull of Heaven, whose hot breath had scorched the crops.[9]  

           

What must be emphasized if we are to understand mytho-poeic thinking is that this understanding of the world and its contents as a “Thou” and not as an “It” is not the result of a two-step process of personification. The understanding or apprehension of the world as “life” is immediate and irreducible. People who think mytho-poeically do not first recognize a stone or tree or river as an inanimate object and then consciously or reflexively refer to it and talk about it as if it were animate with will and understanding. The stone, the tree, the river are living, volitional beings: they are experienced as living beings. As the Frankforts say:

This does not mean (as is so often thought) that primitive man, in order to explain natural phenomena, imparts human characteristics to an inanimate world. Primitive man simply does not know an inanimate world. For this very reason he does not “personify” inanimate phenomena nor does he fill an empty world with the ghosts of the dead, as “animism” would have us believe. (Emphasis added.)[10]

 

I would hasten to add that the animate beings that populate the ancient world are not necessarily divine: not every rock and river is a god. After describing the mytho-poeic ecology of ancient man, the Frankforts incidentally add the comment “the gods also come into being in this manner.”[11] Experiences of the sacred always presuppose recognition of the non-sacred—the profane.[12]

            Epistemologically, the characteristics of mytho-poeic thinking as the mode of understanding the living beings who populate the ancient world follow closely from this ontology. The Frankforts emphasize that mytho-poeic thought is a mode of cognition, not mere fantasy or wild imagination. It is the way we know, and, except for those who are still recovering from their “Psychology 101” or “Introduction to Social Science” course, it is the way we still know and talk about other human beings.

The Frankforts distinguish among ways of knowing. To learn about things in the world scientifically, we must be active, treating them as objects and  mentally and physically working on them. We intellectually attempt to place particular objects within a framework of general or universal rules and concepts and seek to identify them as instances of a universal rule. To understand fellow creatures, we must in part remain passive, holistically—that is, emotionally and intellectually—“understanding” the creature facing us—“its fear, . . . its anger.” This “curiously direct knowledge” of a fellow being is “direct, emotional, and inarticulate.”[13]

The way of knowing “Thou,” whether a human being or a “personified” river, rock, or mountain—and by “personified” here I mean the river, rock, or mountain immediately apprehended as a living being—in the ancient cosmos, is closer to the second mode of cognition than the first but not precisely the same. To know someone else, we must be interactive with that living being: we must actively probe and act, but we must also be passively open and receptive to what the other being reveals to us. We find that each “Thou” with whom we interact is unique, and each such experience is a unique event: the “relation between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ is absolutely sui generis.” Thou is known as unique: not merely as an instance of universal laws: “Thou . . . is not merely contemplated or understood but is experienced emotionally in a dynamic reciprocal relationship.”[14] In genuine mythical thought there is no hypothetical thinking, no critical distance from the object, no application of norms or independent standards.

And finally, both the understanding and articulation of that experience is expressed in  stories—descriptions of dramatic actions:

All experience of “Thou” is highly individual; and early man does, in fact, view happenings as individual events. An account of such events and also their explanation can be conceived only as action and necessarily takes the form of a story. In other words, the ancients told myths instead of presenting an analysis or conclusions (emphasis added).[15]

 

The “truth” of the experience is represented in these stories. As quoted above, “It is essential that true myth be distinguished from legend, saga, fable, and fairy tale.” Nor is true myth allegorical: it is not a story-line conceived by an author and presented in imaginative fiction. It is spontaneous expression of immediately experienced reality: it cannot be considered fable or allegory, a product of an imaginative mind not tied to immediate reality. “In telling such a myth, the ancients did not intend to provide entertainment. Neither did they seek . . . intelligible explanations of the natural phenomena. They were recounting events in which they were involved to the extent of their very existence.”[16]

Main Points: 

 

·         Mytho-poeic thought presupposes a cosmos of life

·         The apprehension of the world as life, as a Thou, is immediate, not intellectually derived

·         Mytho-poeic thinking is a mode of cognition, a means of knowing the world and of expressing that knowledge, particularly appropriate to living beings

·         Mytho-poeic cognition requires holistic—intellectual, emotional, and imaginative— interaction with other living beings

·         Mytho-poeic thought expresses those experiences of the living world as stories, descriptions of dramatic interactions

 

I chose this essay by contemporary cultural anthropologists as my point of departure because they present the main characteristics of mythopoeic thinking in the context of an actual study of particular ancient cultures.[17] The philosopher Ernst Cassirer provides the philosophical and psychological foundation for understanding how mytho-poeic thinking functions in general.

Ernst Cassirer’s Symbolic Forms

Cassirer (1874-1945) was engaged in formulating a “philosophy of human culture.”[18] He understood human culture to be the totality of the expressions of our experience of the world without and within. His original title for his three-volume work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, was “the theory of the forms of spiritual expression,” “spiritual” referring here to the human spirit, the mental, emotional, and intelligent element of our actions which accounts for the ways we articulate our experiences. Cassirer argues that human beings express our experiences by objectifying them using “symbols” taken from the world around us. Symbolic objectification distinguishes us from the animals.[19] He adduces a number of forms of spiritual expression or “symbolic forms:” myth, religion, language, art, history, poetry, law, and science or “pure knowledge,” to name just a few.

I am not going to review all of the symbolic forms—Cassirer studies language, myth, and science in the first three volumes of PSF—but two of them, myth and language, are essential to our topic and are also, he says, the most primitive and fundamental modes of expression.[20] Though the first volume of PSF focuses on language, this initial discussion does not mean that Cassirer thought the development of language preceded the development of myth.

Language and myth stand in an original and indissoluble correlation with one another, from which they both emerge but gradually as independent elements. They are two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation, springing from the same basic mental activity, a concentration and heightening of simple sensory experience. . . . they are both resolutions of an inner tension, the representation of subjective impulses and excitations in definite objective forms and figures.[21]

 

Thus, Cassirer’s discussion necessarily extends beyond the Frankforts, whose focus was only on the ancient but fully-developed cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Hebrews, all of which existed long after language and myths first developed. These cultures already represent considerable progress in the forms of language and mythmaking. They also represent generations of tradition—teaching, conditioning, passing on, and amending the stories, language, and knowledge rooted in earlier mytho-poeic thought.

      I do not want to go too deeply into the actual psychological process of language making and ritual-myth myth that Cassirer analyzes at length in his early works.[22] Cassirer explains that myth-making, like speech, is a means of expressing our emotional, not our purely intellectual or rational, reaction to phenomena.[23]  Rituals certainly have definite behavioral structures, and myth has its roots in rites. Myths or stories also have an intellectual structure to them, provided by language. Though it would appear, then, that myth-making follows upon the development of language, they are shoots, as Cassirer says above, “from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation.” They develop symbiotically over time; the question of which came first, he says, is “specious.”[24]

The roots of myth go deeper into the basic, animal, emotional reactions to phenomena that do not require language: they are expressed by animals and men in spontaneous reactions, physiological or physiognomic, and manifested emotionally.

 

Every organism ‘seeks’ certain things and ‘avoids’ certain things. . . . All this is regulated by a complicated network of instincts and motor impulses which do not require conscious activity (emphasis added).[25]

 

 The objectification of these spontaneous emotions begins in rituals: structured physical, non-linguistic, behaviors associated with or triggered by certain recurring stimuli. In other words, they precede language and therefore precede myth as spoken story.[26] They are also intensely social, not individual. In taking one’s part in ritual, the individuality of the participant is lost, traded for solidarity with the group.[27] Myths describes rituals.[28] This, I believe, is the central fact about myth that needs the most emphasis: rituals and genuine myths are expressions of man’s emotional responses to their experience, which are themselves the product of physiologic or physiognomic reactions.[29]

“Here we grasp one of the most essential elements of myth. Myth does not arise solely from intellectual [spiritual] processes; it sprouts forth from deep human emotions. . . . Myth cannot be described as bare emotion because it is the expression of emotion. The expression of a feeling is not the feeling itself—it is emotion turned into an image. . . . what hitherto was dimly and vaguely felt assumes a definite shape . . . .”[30]

 

“[I]n myth man begins to learn a new and strange art: the art of expressing, and that means organizing, his most deeply rooted instincts, his hopes and fears.”[31]

 

Cassirer also emphasizes that myths and words express collective, social feelings, not the unique feelings of individual human beings. The symbols used to objectify the sensory stimuli, both in the formulation of names and myths, understandably reflect the conditions in which primitive man lived—weather, geography, and particularly social order were prominent sources of symbols. Symbolic objectification is part of man’s process—the human task, he calls it—of differentiating “things” from the flow and flux of sensory stimuli that language-less primitive man, and babies everywhere, experience. The familiar environmental and social conditions thus provide the connectedness or the “logic” of the ancient cosmos. The natural world is fundamentally conceived as a social environment. The cosmos and the gods reflect the order of primitive society and vice versa. In the Frankforts’ Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, these “cosmological societies” are exemplified by the cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.[32]

Recalling the consubstantiality or “consanguinity,” as Cassirer calls it, of the cosmos of life in which primitive man lives, we can understand that “myth is an objectification of man’s social experience, not his individual experience,” which early on still required differentiation from the group.[33] Languages and stories are means of communication: their formulation requires the cooperation and coordination of the group. In ancient times, the thirty-five members of the tribe did not operate with thirty-five different languages or thirty-five different mythical accounts of reality.

Main points:

·         Mytho-poeic thinking is the human expression of our emotional reaction to phenomena.

·         Rituals and myths are the objectivizations of those emotional experiences.

·         Mytho-poeic thought is irreducible because emotional and physiognomic reactions are our “lowest stratum of sense experience,” lower even than sense perception[34]

·         Myths reflect their creators’ social conditions: they are social, not individual, creations

·         Rituals seek social, emotional solidarity 

 

Thus, in terms of Plato’s divided line, mythical expressions—mythical symbolic forms—and language precede the recognition and identification of objects represented by Plato as the second level from the bottom. Because it precedes or is more fundamental than conceptual thought, myth cannot be reduced to another distinct conceptual (“rational”) foundation, which foundation does not yet exist. Mytho-poeic thinking is inherent in human life.

The Appeal of Stories

 

A vital step in the search for mytho-poeic thinking in modern times is the attraction and appeal of stories in our world and throughout history. Though Cassirer does not directly address this question, I believe that recent research into the appeal of stories fits into his theory of the unconscious reactions animals have to certain external stimuli. Referring back to his comments on the “protoplasmic” flight-or-fight instincts of all living creatures, it appears that the appeal of stories also arises from “a complicated network of instincts and motor impulses which do not require conscious activity.”[35]

According to Cassirer, human culture is the sum total of all of the symbols expressing/articulating our experience of the world without and within. Mythical or mytho-poeic thinking is at the foundation of human culture.

Western culture and all the other cultures that I have studied in my lifetime are permeated with stories, some the primeval expressions of emotional reactions, but the bulk consciously created in more recent times to entertain, inform, and to simply articulate and convey to others. Stories (Geschichte) presented in epics, legends, scripture, and stories presented in the form of literature, movies, history (Geschichte), and fiction are essential for communication with one another on all but the most basic animal level. But there is the undeniable natural appeal of stories, as well. People—not all people, of course—get caught up in a story. Those who cannot are often called “unimaginative,” not a compliment. Think of the Homeric bards reciting the epics; then the millions captivated and enthralled by Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker.[36]

In recent years, this common-sense observation has been supported by hard science. MRIs reveal that listening to stories “light up” different areas of the brain, networks associated with language and “other neural networks, too.” “[Y]our brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller.”[37] “[M]otor and sensory cortices, as well as the frontal cortex are all engaged during story creation and processing. These networks are nurtured and solidified by feelings of anticipation of the story’s resolution, involving the input of your brain’s form of candy, dopamine.”[38] And that’s not the only biochemical reaction: storytelling triggers “dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, and endorphins,” says Philipp Humm.[39] Oxytocin seems particularly significant: “[W]hen we hear a story that resonates with us, our levels of a hormone called oxytocin increase.”[40]

These recent findings have not been lost on the business community—where salesmen

lead, can politicians be far behind?[41] Nor on those with broader perspectives:

“The scary thing is that stories are actually very effective ways to spread misinformation,” said [Reyhaneh] Maktoufi. Plus, some of the best conspiracy theories and propaganda employ skilled narrative techniques. “When you're really transported in a story, you're less likely to actually spot lies and falsehoods.”[42]

 

 

III. Age of Ideological Scenarios

 

Because “stories” or myths are today more an art form than the description of ritual or an expression of raw emotional reaction expressed in “genuine” or “true” myth, I have borrowed the artistic or aesthetic sense of “story” for my title “aesthetic” determinism. The aesthetic imperative is “to do what the story requires” or “to perform one’s role” or “to follow the script.” I have assumed or stipulated that all myths are stories, but that not all stories are myths, though the borderline between the two is not always easy to determine. When people act pursuant to an aesthetic imperative or cosmic screenplay, then morality, law, and even self-preservation are subordinated to doing what one must do according to the story or the myth. The emphasis on acting also suggest the element of ritual.

The most recent period in which aesthetic determinism was a major factor in political action was the first half of the Twentieth century, with roots in the latter half of the Nineteenth, when millions were enthralled by the cosmic scenarios of communist and Nazi ideology, what Karl Popper referred to “historicism,” plays “performed on the Historical Stage.”[43]

 Communism, of course, was but another millenarian fantasy rooted in Revelation chapter 20. The orthodox version of Marxism laid out a historical roadmap for communists to follow. The story was eschatological, a “teleological critique” in Professor Niemeyer’s terminology.[44]

Nazism was not a teleological ideology of the millenarian type. It rather projected an allegedly biological order upon reality assigning all human beings to their place on the chart: people were to behave according to their racial identity. Nazism was an “axiological critique.”

In both cases, many members of the ideological party no-doubt acted out of individual self-interest or lust-for-power.[45] But the symbols prominent in both movements were cosmic scenarios proclaiming the inevitability of future victory for the followers of the screenplay. The stories that were the foundation of the movements enabled the followers to understand and to explain the course of world affairs to themselves and others and to meaningfully struggle to achieve the end—la fine. They were both attempts to create cosmological societies.

Cassirer’s The Myth of the State, written during World War II, is an analysis of what he calls “the myth of the twentieth century:” the Nazi racial ideology.[46] He makes no mention of communism. After his excellent opening chapters summarizing and expanding upon his earlier discussions of “genuine myth” in PSF and Language and Myth, he provides a substantive history of the “legal state,” a discussion of the “philosophical” influences on the Nazi theorists—Carlyle and the hero myth, Gobineau and the racial myth, and Hegel and the nationalism myth—and two final hortatory chapters on preventing a recurrence of the totalitarian myths in the future.

He begins his book with the statement, “The preponderance of mythical thought over rational thought in some of our modern political systems is obvious.”  And he concludes with the statements that myth “is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity,” and:

“The powers of myth were [historically] checked and subdued by superior [cultural] forces. As long as these forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic, are in full strength, myth is tamed and subdued. But once they begin to lose their strength chaos is come again. Mythical thought then starts to rise anew and to pervade the whole of man’s cultural and social life. . . .”[47]

 

What he does not do is demonstrate systematically how the myth-making process so carefully laid out in the first part of the text relates to the contemporary myths, or totalitarian ideologies as we might call them, that he studies in the book. Indeed, he concedes, as he must, that the “new political myths . . . are artificial things fabricated by very skilful (sic) and cunning artisans. Henceforth, he says, myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon—as machine guns or airplanes.[48]

            We are left with an analytical focus upon the receivers, the consumers, of the myths, not the creators. “In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means—and our present-day [1940s] political myths have been such desperate means.” “In periods of relative stability and security, this rational organization [of society] is easily maintained.” But in critical times, such as post WWI Germany, even intelligent and well-educated individuals despair of rational solutions and are open to and reach for irrational, mythical salvation.[49] He vigorously warns of the consequences of such a choice—the elimination of individual responsibility, the relapse from critical thinking into complete acquiescence, the transvaluation of ethical values, and the transformation of language.[50] The focus of his study changes from myth-making to myth-following over the course of his discussion of “political myths.”

            In sum, Cassirer offers one of the earliest analyses of the modern, malignant ideologies that are based on cosmic screenplays.[51] He is greatly concerned about the reappearance of totalitarian movements in the future, but apart from his wise, heartfelt warning, he offers but few comments about the appearance of mytho-poeic thought in other contexts.         

The imminent threat of totalitarian movements based upon cosmic scenarios seems over for the moment, at least in the Western democracies. Certainly at home and in the world beyond, there are a few holdover millennialist and totalitarian movements that boast significant followings: ISIS and Shi’ite apocalypticism and a few environmental groups come to mind.[52] According to Kenneth Minogue’s analysis, in Western society the cosmological ideologues gave up their grand schemes—or at least temporarily stashed aside their characteristic millenarian symbols—in favor of a new, non-imagic symbol to motivate their followers—“ethics.” In light of the glaring failures of the Marxist and Marxist-clone movements to realize the earlier telos or denouement, ideologies based upon the fundamental and necessary Gnostic assumption that we live in an evil, oppressive world, says Minogue, now support a struggle for an “ethical” world: “a seductive invitation to join a movement bent on creating the better world to which all reforms must point.”[53]

But the new program at this time does not have the clarity of plot and character that the older scenarios provided and that a good story needs to captivate the masses. “ ‘Do this’ and ‘do that’ because it will make the world a better place” lacks the clear concreteness that myths, both primeval and conscious, possess. The motivation arises from an argument, not a story, not a description of actions. Where then does the emotion-driven participant in politics—particularly in the politics of Western democratic nations—exercise qualities of mytho-poeic thinking today?

IV. Contemporary Mytho-poeic Thinking.

Though as a society, we do not appear to be in the throes of a crisis of the magnitude that, according to Cassirer, sent Germany into Nazism, there is evidence of mytho-poeic thought or consciousness, both political and non-political, in contemporary life. I am not arguing that we are witnessing or are part of a period of time in which genuine myths, as described by Cassirer and the Frankforts, are being created or followed by masses of people throughout the world. Indeed, Cassirer conceded that modern political myths are “artificial things fabricated by very skilful (sic) and cunning artisans.” Where do we find the qualities of genuine myth today?

I will take from Cassirer’s analysis his focus on the consumers, not the creators, of myth. The susceptibility to and acceptance of myths by people throughout the ages indicate that a significant characteristic of mytho-poeic thinking is now, and always was, a particular mytho-poeic social consciousness, or perhaps, “attitude,” that permitted and encouraged, not to say “forced,” people to accept the stories as reality: “forced” because to ancient man mytho-poeic reality was the only known reality, and it was maintained and taught by the culture. Today, modern “rational” thought is dominant, though not exclusive. My question is, “What leads people today to suspend disbelief and to submit to the aesthetic imperatives?” The physiological attraction of stories and the fundamental impulse—not free predilection—to respond emotionally rather than critically to the human activities of politics and government, puts the focus on the followers, not the leaders, in politics. Thus, to find mytho-poeic thinking at work in contemporary society, we must focus on the attitude and perspective of the followers not the creators of myth. 

           

            What characterizes mytho-poeic responses? Keeping in mind Cassirer’s observation that myth “is not always operative in the same way nor does it always appear with the same strength,” I suggest the following characteristics reflect the mytho-poeic consciousness. First, is an intense concern for life, for people, a reference to the environment full of life that confronted primitive man. Second, an immediate, irreducible, emotional response to phenomena. Third, a desire to lose one’s individuality, including one’s independent judgement and critical distance, by ritualistic immersion in society, in the crowd. Fourth, a discourse that comfortably focuses on and largely consists of descriptions of dramatic—human—action; in other words, stories and story-telling.

Let’s first look at mytho-poeic thinking generally, not just politically. Cassirer reminds us: “[E]ven in the life of the civilized man [myth] has by no means lost its original power. If we are under the strain of a violent emotion we have still this dramatic conception of all things.”[54]

Personally, I have had frequent dramatic conversations with my computer, my printer, and my car while “under the strain of a violent emotion.” Perhaps you have, too. Thinking as “phenomenologically” as I can, I cannot discern two steps in these conversations: “Step One: This is an electronic machine, but, Step Two: I am going to treat it now as if were a living being with a will of its own.” No, the emotional and the perceptual reaction that I immediately had was that I was in the presence of a living being—an evil living being—with malice aforethought. An irreducible emotional reaction to a living being.

A casual conversation at a family gathering twenty-plus years ago may also be relevant. I was speaking with an intelligent individual who was employed in a responsible, management position. When we were discussing mutual acquaintances, colleagues, and family members, their actions and feelings, what they said and did not say, what they should have or should not have done, she was relaxed and talkative. When the subjects of our conversation became just a bit more abstract and speculative than what was essentially gossip, her manner markedly changed. She became visibly uncomfortable when I asked about what might be called “policies” or “ideas”—nothing political, derogatory, or remotely confidential—until we returned to the subject of people. I have since noticed this with other educated, intelligent people, even old friends. Their interests are on concrete, personal, “sub-conceptual” subjects, best discussed through stories requiring the little critical or speculative judgment, and not on “topics” or “issues.”  I think both of these individual non-political behaviors reflect elements of mythopoeic consciousness.

I would also recall the earlier statements about the attraction and effect of story-telling and would add the common experience of melting emotionally and un-consciously into the crowd at games and concerts, especially exciting games and concerts. It feels good, especially if we win. All four of these examples emphasize the emotional, sub-conceptual consciousness of Plato’s first level of thought.

Turning to politics, it seems that the subject of politics in general immediately satisfies the criteria. Politics is about people, and while it should also be about reasonable policies, the current political atmosphere seems dominated by “personalities, not policies;” but that perspective is always present in some degree. The behavior that first suggested to me the presence of mytho-poeic thought in recent times is the intense emotional fervor present in many contemporary elections: the passionate rhetoric; the hate of our opponent, more than the love of our champion; the desire for explanation of salient issues by story or narrative rather than by rational argument.

The populist, up-from-the-bottom, influence of today’s American politics can be expected to inject emotional enthusiasm into our political dialogue; the frequent periods of populist politics in the past would so indicate. But populism derives much of its force from the concrete, material interests of its movers; the emotion of present politics lacks those identifiable, tangible interests.

The problems with mytho-poeic political thinking in today’s world? The experience of concrete interaction with politicians is all but impossible at the level of national politics. The interaction needed to know someone has been supplanted by interaction with an image, with a carefully constructed persona “known” via electronic media. Or, known at rallies and mass events where the politicians perform or interact with the “crowd,” not with individuals.

The preference for stories or narratives rather than rational explanations of any degree of complexity is also a problem. Like any drama, there is a focus on plot and characters: a primary focus on human action, on what people do, don’t do, should do; and with it a focus on human characters, on whether the human subjects are appealing or repulsive? In other words, the stuff of gossip. Attempting to understand complex subjects through narratives alone also encourages the acceptance of and use of tales of conspiracy. Politics has the raw materials for a “dramatic conception,” factual and fictional.

The natural, emotional response to drama is also hazardous. As we saw with the research on story-telling, knowledge of the mechanisms of human reaction encourages manipulation of those mechanisms. Political campaigns have become filibusters of accusations and stories calculated to excite and stir up emotions. The intricacies of policy not only are lost: they are even hard to find.[55]

I am not arguing that the appearance of this mytho-poeic attitude is a recent phenomenon, emerging first in the early twentieth century and perhaps enjoying a resurgence now. The politics of the post-Civil War years was characterized by robust partisanship and intense emotions.[56] Selecting candidates that “appeal” to the voters, trying to excite the voters, stirring up and motivating your base, these practices are and long have been a normal part of democratic politics. But our national politics have not always been so raucous, at least during my lifetime.

Cassirer said, myth, and we might add, the mythical consciousness, “is always there,” and he urged reasoned, critical thinking in political discourse. Reason, as Hobbes famously said, “is not, as sense and memory, born with us, nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is, but attained by industry.”[57] We’ve got to work at it. We must cultivate our critical judgment and do our best to rationally govern the emotions arising from our spirit and our appetites below. “As long as these forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic, are in full strength, myth is tamed and subdued. But once they begin to lose their strength chaos is come again.”[58]

Select Bibliography

 

Ernst Cassirer. An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.

 

________ . Language and Myth, translated by Suzanne K Langer. New York: Dover Books, 1946. First published in 1924. 

 

________. “Language and Art I” and “Language and Art II.” In Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, edited by Donald Phillip Verene, 145-195. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

 

________. The Logic of the Humanities, translated by Clarence Smith Howe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960, 1961. Originally published 1942. Available on Internet Archive.___

 

________. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.

________. The Philosophy ­­­of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought, translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Volume 2 of the three, now four, volume work on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, it was first published in 1925.

 

________. “Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space.” In The Warburg Years (1919-1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Chapter first published in 1931. Stable URL—https: //www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm3n3.12.

 

________. Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945. Ed. Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

 

Cabañas, Kaira M. “Physiognomic Gestalt.” In Learning from Madness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

 

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harper and Row, 1961.

________

 

Frankfort, Henri, et al. The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946.

 

Katsur, Ira Irit. “Gestalt Psychology as a Missing Link in Ernst Cassirer’s Mythical Symbolic Form.” Human Studies 41 (Spring 2018): 41-57. Stable URL—https: //www.jstor.org/stable/44979877.

 

O’Connor, Edwin. The Last Hurrah. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1956.

 

Pedersen, Esther Oluffa. “The Holy as an Epistemic Category and a Political Tool: Ernst Cassirer’s and Rudolph Otto’s Philosophies of Myth and Religion.” New German Critique 104. Vol 35, No 2. (Summer 2008): 207-227.

 

Prior, Marcus. “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 49 (July 2005): 577-592.

 

Zweig, Jason. “How to Stay Sane When the Market Goes Wild.” Wall Street Journal. August 10-11, 2024, sec. B1, p. 1.

 

 

On Stories and Storytelling

“Storytelling And The Brain: Understanding The Neuroscience Behind Our Love For Stories,” Philipp Humm, Power of Storytelling.com (February 7, 2023)

 

Our love for storytelling is deeply rooted in our brain and its unique structure and function. By triggering dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, and endorphins, you can capture your audience’s attention, evoke empathy, and make them feel good. 

 

“The Science of Storytelling: Why We Love Stories,” by Joshua VanDeBrake, published in The Startup and on <medium.com> (September 27, 2018).

 

You have likely heard that storytelling is important for business, marketing, and for life in general. Likely, you’ve heard that it’s a powerful tool and that it has a potential for massive lasting impact.

There is a scientific explanation for our love of stories: when we hear a story that resonates with us, our levels of a hormone called oxytocin increase.

 

“How Stories Connect And Persuade Us: Unleashing The Brain Power Of Narrative,” By Elena Renken, npr.org (April 11, 2020)

 

On functional MRI scans, many different areas of the brain light up when someone is listening to a narrative, Neeley says — not only the networks involved in language processing, but other neural circuits, too. One study of listeners found that the brain networks that process emotions arising from sounds — along with areas involved in movement — were activated, especially during the emotional parts of the story.

As you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller, says Uri Hasson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University.

 

“The Neuroscience of Storytelling,” by NLI Staff, The NeuroLeadership Institute (September 30, 2021)

 

When we see or hear a story, the neurons in our brain fire in the same patterns as the speaker’s, a process known as “neural coupling.” You also hear it referred to as “mirroring.” According to highly-cited work by Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson, these processes occur across many different areas of the brain, and can induce a shared contextual model of the situation. The motor and sensory cortices, as well as the frontal cortex are all engaged during story creation and processing. These networks are nurtured and solidified by feelings of anticipation of the story’s resolution, involving the input of your brain’s form of candy, dopamine.

That’s why when we experience an emotionally-charged event or hear a story of the same nature, certain parts of our brain release excess dopamine, making it easier to remember something with greater accuracy.

 

“Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling,” by Paul J. Zak, Harvard Business Review (October 28, 2014)

 

In subsequent studies we have been able to deepen our understanding of why stories motivate voluntary cooperation. (This research was given a boost when, with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, we developed ways to measure oxytocin release noninvasively at up to one thousand times per second.) We discovered that, in order to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first sustain attention – a scarce resource in the brain – by developing tension during the narrative. If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters. This explains the feeling of dominance you have after James Bond saves the world, and your motivation to work out after watching the Spartans fight in 300.

 

These findings on the neurobiology of storytelling are relevant to business settings. 

 

 

“Why the Brain Loves Stories,” by Calli McMurray, BrainFacts.org (March 4, 2021)

 

The brain is a story addict, always on the hunt for a character. If you’ve listened to hours of podcast episodes or stayed up until 3 a.m. binge-watching a TV series, you know the power of good narrative.

 “The scary thing is that stories are actually very effective ways to spread misinformation,” said [Reyhaneh] Maktoufi, [a Civic Science Fellow in misinformation at NOVA]. Plus, some of the best conspiracy theories and propaganda employ skilled narrative techniques. “When you're really transported in a story, you're less likely to actually spot lies and falsehoods.”

 

“The Big Question: Why Do We Tell Stories?” by The New York Times (December 8, 2022)

Christopher Wheeldon: ‘The Tormented Tempest of the Human Condition’

 

We tell stories because it’s easier to comprehend deep truths through myths, legends and universal ideas. Because music and movement are universal, even primordial, the deep part of us that understands the arc of a story is particularly illuminated by dance.

Every pirouette, every carried lift [of Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet], has brought us to this moment where stillness reigns. It is a beautiful example of how movement — and the spaces in between — resonate with us on a deeply emotional level. Dance can convey fear, love or joy, or even go deeper into the tormented tempest of the human condition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outline

 

 

I.                    Introduction

II.                 Principal Characteristics of Mytho-poeic Thought

a.       What is myth?

b.      Frankforts’ “Myth and Reality”

c.       Cassirer’s symbolic forms

d.      The Appeal of Stories

III.              The Age of Ideological Scenarios

IV.              Contemporary Mytho-poeic Political Thinking

Select Bibliography

Stories and Story-telling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[1] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. The essay is hereinafter referred to as “M&R.” For many years an abridged edition of the book was in print as a Penguin paperback with the apt title Before Philosophy. Plato might have entitled it Back Into the Cave.

[2] The 1925 edition of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen II: Das mythische Denken is cited. Hereinafter referred to as “PSF II.” Also cited are works by Paul Radin and Rudolf Otto.

[3] Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 74. (Hereinafter referred to as “EM.”)

[4] M&R, 7. Cp. Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), hereinafter referred to “MS”: “It is true that in later times we find myths made by individuals, as, for example, the famous Platonic myths. But here one of the most essential features of the genuine myths is entirely missing. Plato created them in an entirely free spirit; he was not under their power, he directed them according to his own purposes: the purposes of dialectical and ethical thought. Genuine myth does not possess this philosophical freedom; for the images in which it lives are not known as images. They are not regarded as symbols but as realities.” MS, 47.

[5] Cited by Cassirer in EM, 75.

[6] EM, 73: “There is no natural phenomenon and no phenomenon of human life that is not capable of a mythical interpretation, and which does not call for such an interpretation.”

[7] “Myth and Reality,” 4. MS, 37: “[R]eligion and myth begin with the awareness of the universality and fundamental identity of life. . . . It is not necessary that this all-pervading life be conceived in a personal form (emphasis added).”

[8] M&R, 4. Cassirer refers to this as “consanguinity”: the view of life of the primitive mind “is a synthetic, not an analytic one. Life is not divided into classes and subclasses. It is felt as an unbroken continuous whole which does not admit of any clean-cut and trenchant distinctions (emphasis added).” “The consanguinity of all forms of life seems to be a general presupposition of mythical thought.” EM, 81, 83.

[9] M&R, 6.  Politically, Müsil’s second reality comes to mind. The Frankforts’ and Cassirer’s point here is that mythical reality is not imposed or projected upon “true” reality: mythical reality is the only reality available to primitive man.

[10] Ibid., 5-6. Mircea Eliade emphatically makes the same point in The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1959), Harper Torch Book edition, 16.

[11] Ibid., 17. The experiences of the living things that fill the world of ancient man are not necessarily hierophanies or theophanies. Mircea Eliade argued that within the “profane” world in which ancient man lived, parts of that living world—living parts of the world—would manifest themselves to man as extraordinary, as sacred or divine. Rudolf Otto, whose work was the inspiration for Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, also focuses more on these experiences of the divine than on mythic experience.

[12] EM, 80.

[13] M&R, 5.

[14] Ibid., 4.

[15] Ibid., 6. Cassirer: “Nature, in its empirical or scientific sense, may be defined as ‘the existence of things as far as it is determined by general laws.’ Such a ‘nature’ does not exist for myths. The world of myth is a dramatic world—a world of actions, of forces, of conflicting powers. In every phenomenon of nature it sees the collision of these powers. Mythical perception is always impregnated with these emotional qualities.” EM, 76. Emphasis added; footnote deleted.

[16] Ibid., 7.

[17] “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 64-91. Critical philosophy or idealist philosophy consciously focuses on how we know things, thus assuming that we do know things.

[18] See his “Introduction,” in his 1942 book The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960, 1961)

[19] Cassirer seems to say that symbolic objectification is the or a distinctly human task: Explaining that symbolic expression “is the common denominator in all [man’s] cultural activities” such as myth, language, art, and religion, he continues, “These activities are widely different, but they fulfill one and the same task: the task of objectification.” MS, 45. Emphasis in original. See also his lecture “Language and Art II," in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 166-175.

[20] He indicated that had he the time, the symbolic form of art would also have been included in the work. See the chapter on art in Essay on Man (1944) and the 1942 lectures on art and language in Symbol, Myth, and Culture.

[21] Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Suzanne K Langer (Garden City, NY: Dover Books edition, 1946), 88. Hereinafter referred to as L&M. Language and Myth was originally published in 1924, when Cassirer was working on volumes one and two of PSF. Accord: “Myth is an offspring of emotion[,] and its emotional background imbues all its productions with its own specific color.” EM, 82.

[22] See generally his 1920s works Language and Myth and the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, particularly volume two on Mythical Thinking. In particular, L&M, chapters 3 and 6; PSF II, Pt. 1, chapter 1, “The Mythical Consciousness of the Object.”

[23] L&M, 35. Among his studies of mythical thought, in addition to L&M are The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought, volume 2 of the three-, now four-, volume work on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, first published in 1925; chapter 9 of An Essay on Man, published in 1944; and Part One of The Myth of the State, published in 1946. Chapter four of The Myth of the State is particularly relevant to the Frankforts’ essay, which appeared the same year. See note 2, supra. Cassirer, while not using the term “mytho-poeic in these texts frequently refers to “mythical thinking” and the “myth-making” function of the mind.

[24] L&M, 88.

[25] MS, 44. See also EM, 77, where Cassirer contrasts the fundamental, distinct physiognomic qualities of our experiences from the mere perceptual or sensory qualities. Consider the “outside in” approach to acting: act sad and morose and you will feel sad and morose.

[26] EM, 79: “Myth is not a system of dogmatic creeds. It consists much more in actions than in mere images and representations.” “That ritual is prior to dogma . . . seems now to be a generally adopted maxim.” “To study myths, we must first study rites.” MS, 24. Cp. PSF II, 38.

[27] MS, 284-285. [Sacramentality]

 

[28] MS, 46. “But if these rites are turned into myths a new element appears. Man is no longer satisfied with doing certain things—he raises the question of what these things ‘mean’.”  The Frankforts’ comment that rituals are the acting out of myths thus puts the cart before the horse. See MS, 42.

[29] MS, 44-45: Cassirer refers to animals’ “instinctive emotions”—for example, fear of certain other animals or shapes. In animals, “The awareness of . . . different emotional qualities neither presupposes an act of reflection nor can it be accounted for by the individual experience of the animal.” We hear this popularly discussed as the “lizard brain” or the “flee or fight” reaction. Cassirer says that the difference between the animal and human response to such perceived emotional qualities is that man differentiates the emotions more specifically and expresses them symbolically instead of in simple, unstructured behavioral reactions.

[30] MS, 43.

[31] Ibid., 48.

[32] EM, 79, 80: Citing Durkheim: “Not nature but society is the true model of myth. All its fundamental motives are projections of man’s social life. By these projections, nature becomes the image of the social world,” not vice versa. “The fundamental social character of myth is uncontroverted.” Cp. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, ch. 2.

[33] MS, 47.

[34] EM, 77-78, 82.

[35] See note 23, supra. (MS, 44.) See also the short appended list of sources and summaries hurriedly gathered on the subject.

[36] “Captivate”: to make captive; “enthrall”: to enslave.

[37] Elena Renken, “How Stories Connect And Persuade Us: Unleashing The Brain Power Of Narrative,”  npr.org (April 11, 2020)

[38] The NeuroLeadership Staff, “The Neuroscience of Storytelling,” The NeuroLeadership Institute (September 30, 2021).

[39] “Storytelling And The Brain: Understanding The Neuroscience Behind Our Love For Stories,” Power of Storytelling.com (February 7, 2023).

[40] Joshua VanDeBrake, “The Science of Storytelling: Why We Love Stories,” in The Startup and on <medium.com> (September 27, 2018). Cp. Paul Zak, “Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling,” Harvard Business Review (October 28, 2014): “This research was given a boost when, with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, we developed ways to measure oxytocin release noninvasively at up to one thousand times per second.”          ???

[41] Ibid. VanDebrake, note – supra: “You have likely heard that storytelling is important for business, marketing, and for life in general.” Zak: “These findings on the neurobiology of storytelling are relevant to business settings.”

[42] Calli McMurray, “Why the Brain Loves Stories,” BrainFacts.org (March 4, 2021). Reyhaneh Maktoufi is a Civic Science Fellow in misinformation at NOVA.

[43] Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1, 4th ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 8.  Under his concept of “historicism” (not Strauss’s “historicism”), Popper describes the central historicist doctrine as “the doctrine that history is controlled by specific historical or evolutionary laws whose discovery would enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.” Ibid., 8. Popper’s book, first published in 1944, focuses on Nazism and Communism as prime examples of historicism. Cassirer’s Myth of the State is also an analysis of 20th century totalitarianism, but only in the form of fascism and imperialism, not Marxism or communism.

[44] Gerhart Niemeyer, Between Nothingness and Paradise (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1971).

[45] See Hermann Rauschning’s The Revolution of Nihilism (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939) for his argument that many higher-level Nazis were ready to discard the racial “myth” once it had exhausted its appeal and ability to motivate the masses for another myth to propel the “movement.” Similar stories abound about apparatchiks in the second half of the twentieth century, laboring in the party only for personal gain or power.

[46] See Part III of the book: “The Myth of the Twentieth Century.” Part II on the concept of the “state” comprises over 130 pages. 

[47] Quotes from MS, 3, 280, 298.

[48] MS, 282. Cp. Kenneth Minogue’s claim that the central idea of “an ideological life” is “less a doctrine than a machine for generating doctrines.” “My argument, then, is an exploration of the hypothesis that there is a pure theory of ideology, and while from one point of view it is a critique, from another it is a do-it-yourself ideology kit (emphasis added).” Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, 2d ed. (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), 2, 8.

[49] 279-280, 289.

[50] Cassirer’s short analysis of the transformation of language by totalitarian movements provides insights in such ideologies as underly the present political correctness and woke-ness movements. Cp., Minogue, Alien Powers.

[51] Compare Cassirer’s analysis to the different subsequent conceptualizations of ideological thought in, inter alia,  Norman Cohn’s five characteristics of “millenarian salvation” in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957, 1970); Eric Voegelin’s conception of “gnostic mass movements” in "Ersatz Religion," in Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1960);  Richard H. Cox, Ideology, Politics, and Political Theory (1969);  Gerhart Niemeyer’s “total critiques” in Between Nothingness and Paradise (1971); Frederick Watkins’s five distinctive characteristics of ideology in Kramnick and Watkins, The Age of Ideology: Political Thought, 1750 to the Present (1979); Roy Macridis’s definitions of ideology in Contemporary Political Ideologies (1980, 1983); Noel O'Sullivan’s four characteristics of the “activist style of politics” in Fascism (1983); and Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (1985). 

[52] See Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March, 2015; Richard J. Ellis, The Darkside of the Left, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998), chapter 9: “Apocalypse and Authoritarianism in the Radical Environmental Movement.”

[53] Minogue, note 47, supra, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” xxx-xxxi. Minogue’s Twentieth Century paradigm “myth” is Marxism, not Nazism.

[54] EM, 77: “If we are under the strain of a violent emotion we have still this dramatic conception of all things.” MS: “Even in primitive societies where myth pervades and governs the whole of man’s social feeling and social life it is not always operative in the same way nor does it always appear with the same strength.”

 

[55] I recently reviewed the primary election brochures for five candidates for congress. The online brochures consisted of extended resumés and “vision statements.” Not one explained the candidate’s position on any particular issue!

[56] That period was also influenced in part by the millenarian scenario explained so well by Ernest Tuveson in Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. You also may want to compare a recent newspaper article—“Campaigns Go Light on Policy Specifics,” in Wall Street Journal, August 24-25, 2024, A1—with the conclusion of Peggy Noonan’s weekly column in the same issue, A13,  on the presidential campaign: “This is going to be all about policy”!

[57] Leviathan, chapter 5.

[58] MS, 298.