Mythological Truth
Published in Spirituality, philosophy, theory of by Corvinity | 0 commentsThere are many kinds of truth, and much confusion results from failing to distinguish between them. One type of truth is described by the correspondence theory of truth: a proposition is true when it accurately or adequately corresponds to some reality. There are many problems with this definition of truth so long as one expects truths to be absolute. For instance, how can we know how accurately or adequately sense perception corresponds to “reality?” And how much does language itself affect the way we perceive the world? However, within a particular linguistic and perceptual context, it is entirely possible to make a useful distinction between true and false statements. For example, the statement “my car is red” clearly either does or does not correspond to a certain perceptible state of affairs, even if “red” is solely an arbitrary linguistic demarcation of a range of sensual experiences (color) that have little to do with the nature of the object in question, and “car” refers primarily to the uses to which the object can be put. (I’m not even going to get into “my” and “is,” or we’ll be here all day). We might call this kind of truth literal truth. Literal truth is a type of relative truth, because it is relative to the particular linguistic and perceptual context in which it is situated.
There is another type of truth which transcends language entirely. One might call this mystical truth. While literal truth is an attribute of propositions, mystical truth could be said to be an attribute of experiences. Ones manner of experiencing existence can be closer to or further from mystical truth. Since the content of mystical truth is indescribable in language, I can only indicate its existence here by contrast with the other two types of truth I’m addressing. Those who have had mystical experiences may have a sense of what I’m referring to.
There is a third type of truth, which is the primary subject of this post, and which I call mythological truth. Mythological truth is an attribute of stories. It is the kind of truth that allows fiction to communicate truths that a mere recounting of literally true facts cannot. It is the kind of truth that makes good history not merely a recounting of literally true facts—it motivates the selection of facts and how they are strung together. As an entrance into the discussion of mythological truth let’s look at one of my favorite passages about story, from Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story:”
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.
For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen – and maybe it did, anything’s possible, even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.
That’s a true story that never happened.
This passage begins to get at the distinction between mythological and literal truth, or what O’Brien calls “absolute occurrence.” O’Brien’s version of the story, the “true story that never happened” reveals something true about war, about the meaning of war, that the other story does not. However, the kind of truth that O’Brien is getting at in this passage is not precisely mythological truth as I define it. The “trite,” “Hollywood” story with which O’Brien begins also expresses a mythological truth about war. It is both true that war is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility, and that war brings out our capacity for courageous self-sacrifice for others.
So this example has revealed a couple of properties of mythological truth. One is that there is no such thing as mythological falsehood, or perhaps that all stories are both mythologically true and mythologically false. A myth—a mythological statement expressed by a story or set of stories—applies well to certain sets of facts, and poorly to others, and thus does not admit of empirical proof or disproof (I know that’s a big and not at all syllogistic leap. Hold on). A second property, suggested by the last sentence of the previous paragraph, is that mythological truths can be stated, or at least approximated, in something that looks an awful lot like a proposition. So is there a difference between the mythological truth expressed by a story like “Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.” and what is expressed by a statement like “war brings out our capacity for courageous self-sacrifice for others?” If so, what is it? And if mythological truths can, in fact, be stated as propositions, what differentiates them from literal truths? (I’ve already given away one answer.) So let’s take each of these two properties and unpack them a bit.
Okay. Property One, consisting of parts (A) mutually contradictory myths can be true at the same time, and (B) mythological truths are not conclusively empirically verifiable or falsifiable. A myth I like to think about in this context is the myth of progress, because it’s such a pervasive one in modern, western, and particularly [US]American culture, with many different kinds of effects. This myth is relentlessly articulated in fiction (Star Trek is a resplendent example). It has almost completely appropriated the term “evolution” except in the most rigid scientific contexts. It basically says, “things get better.” Whether it’s because of some metaphysical or divine urge or plan, or whether it’s because humans inevitably learn from our mistakes and create more and more perfect cultures, technologies, and societies, a graph with time on the x-axis and the goodness of things on the y-axis, will, however bumpy it gets, always have a general upward trend. There are many data points that we can use to support this myth. If you follow technological sophistication or complexity of social organization over the last 10,000 years, you will see a graph such as the one I’ve just described. But what happens if you look at biological diversity over the same time period? If you asked people in Burma or the Democratic Republic of the Congo whether life has gotten better for them and their ancestors over the last hundred or thousand years, what would they say? (I don’t know, but I imagine they would not give the same sort of answer that the average [US]American would give.) What happens when global industrial civilization runs out of the resources it needs to continue its current levels of consumption, as it’s on track to do fairly shortly? Well, we could use these other data points to argue for a counter-myth, that things get worse, or at least have been doing so for a very long time. We could say we’re in the height (or depth) of the Kali-Yuga, or that technology or civilization or agriculture is inherently destructive and alienating and we “civilized” folks took a wrong turn back in the river valleys of Sumeria, Egypt, India, and China, and in Mesoamerica and the Andes.
But someone committed to the myth of progress could just as easily dismiss all of these objections as just bumps on the graph, even if they are rather large ones. Even if global civilization collapses due to unregulated resource consumption, humanity will just learn from the mistake and make things even better in the long run. Star Trek: The Next Generation is peppered with references to the dark, chaotic times of the 21st and 22nd centuries, after world war 3. So which is correct? Are things getting better or worse? Clearly, I am going to say both are true. (And both are false, but it is their truth that I’m more interested in, because we tend to be good at seeing the falsehood in others’ perspective and less good at seeing the truth.) As Karl Popper has pointed out, certain kinds of theories are not falsifiable. There is no data point or set of data that could possibly conclusively disprove the myth of progress. Even if all life on earth were annihilated in an absurd, venal, Strangelove-esque catastrophe, one could argue that it was part of the cosmic plan, or that humanity has ascended to some non-physical next step, or even perhaps that things veered off of their natural course because some knuckleheaded statistical outliers in the human gene pool happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for everyone else. (Okay, maybe one couldn’t argue these things because one would be dead, but you get the point.) Myths are not falsifiable, but this does not make them false. Nor does it make them less important or useful than literal propositions, which can be falsified. It just means that myths are subject to a different kind of truth than factual propositions and should be treated accordingly. Propositions supply facts. Stories and their underlying myths provide meanings.
Property Two: mythological truths can be approximated by statements that have the same linguistic structure as propositions. At the beginning of this essay I said that mythological truth is a property of stories, and yet in the last two paragraphs I’ve been discussing myths almost entirely in the form of abstract statements like “things get better,” or “war is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility.” These statements are not stories. They have the same sentence structure as a literal proposition like “my car is red.” I think falsifiability is a good criterion for distinguishing these two types of statements: literal propositions are falsifiable, mythological ones are not. But I’m less sure about whether “war is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility” fully expresses the mythological content of:
Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.
Stories, especially the ones I like to call “good stories” are much more nuanced in their articulation of meaning than any explicit statement of that meaning. In fact, when even simple, moralistic fables end with an aphorism stating the moral of the story, I have a subtle sense that a certain violence has been done to the story. I always feel bad for the crow who gets cheated by the fox because of his vanity. The mythological truth that O’Brien articulates above is more multivalent than my summary of it. Reading his story, I get a clear sense that it has meaning. He is not simply stating perceptible facts. The facts add up to something. “War is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility” is one (slightly redundant) possible articulation of something they might be construed to add up to. But there are elements even in the four sentences of this story that escape that particular meaning.
Now, why do I make this distinction between literal and mythological (and mystical) truth? How is it useful to us?
I mentioned above that the myth of progress has lots of effects on modern societies. Let’s enumerate some of them. I believe the current economic crisis and our response to it are, at least partially, results of the pervasiveness of the myth of progress. The myth of progress tends to produce a society that runs on debt. If we implicitly believe that we will have more in the future, it makes sense to spend some of those future resources now. If it is inevitable that housing prices will continue to rise and people generally assume they’re entitled to upward economic mobility, it’s easy not to notice that you’re part of an unsustainable housing bubble (or a mortgage derivative investment bubble). So when economic trends went down instead of up our society was unprepared to deal with it, making the crisis far more severe than it would have been had people had the reasonable expectation that at some point the boom and bust cycle would do that thing that cycles do. And of course the government’s response to the crisis has been more debt.
This response reveals the most frightening effect of the myth of progress: the assumption that the world economy will continue to grow forever regardless of any environmental limitations. Our culture broadly fails to distinguish between the literal, factual, observable upward trend in the material resources under humanity’s control and a mythological guarantee that this trend will continue. The result is that there are virtually no serious efforts being made to deal with the fact that we are using resources faster than they can be replenished and damaging the earth’s ecosystems in ways that could spiral out of control.
Another area in which the distinction between literal, mythological, and mystical truth is useful is in conversation about religion. Such conversation too often devolves into arguing the literal truth of religious stories. The Bible, for instance, is full of stories replete with mythological truths, which are frequently bypassed by believers and nonbelievers alike in service of a much duller discussion of absolute historical occurrence. Was Jesus, in literal fact, resurrected three days after he died? There are, perhaps, some tatters of evidence to be presented with respect to this question. But why do we care? When people debate the resurrection, what they are really debating is whether the meanings implicit in the story are mythologically true. If Jesus was resurrected, that means all sorts of things about the triumph of spirit over flesh, renewal, redemption, humanity’s place in the cosmos, God’s role in the universe and in people’s lives, etc. If we make a distinction between mythological and literal truth, we can choose to contemplate and converse about these mythological questions without engaging the literal truth of the resurrection. The same goes for every other story in the Bible, for every religious text and doctrine. And through contemplating the mythological content of religious discourse, we might even glimpse mystical truth. But if we bar the gates to religious thought with our literal, factual objections, then we can never walk in those gardens. We also impoverish ourselves if we are so committed to the literal truth of one religion that we refuse to examine the mythological content of others.
Essentially, the concept of mythological truth allows us to see the instances in which our own myths may be false, and to see how others’ myths are true, even when they conflict with our own.
This essay has been primarily an exercise in semantics. I have not made many explicit claims about the nature of things (though some of my assumptions may be showing). Rather, I have introduced new terms with which to discuss old concepts. However, new terminology can divide conceptual space in unfamiliar ways that bring attention to previously unnoticed features of its topology. So I invite you to try on this (nonexclusively) tripartite model of truth. Do the contours of your attitudes, beliefs, and experiences take on any new aspects in its light? I hope that the conceptual ground I have mapped out is fertile for you.