Earlier this week, in writing about the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex" speech, I referred to a book-length analysis by Ira Chernus (a historian of religions, who's branched out in fascinating ways) that calls conventional images of Eisenhower as a frustrated peace-seeker into question. Yesterday, lo and behold, Chernus showed up with a fascinating essary distributed by TomDispatch, "How the Power of Myth Keeps Us Mired in War: Why Are We Still in Afghanistan?". It starts out like this:
When I try to figure out why we are still in Afghanistan, though every ounce of logic says we ought to get out, an unexpected conversation I had last year haunts me. Doing neighborhood political canvassing, I knocked on the door of a cheerful man who was just about to tune in to his favorite radio show: Rush Limbaugh. He was kind enough to let me stay and we talked.
Conservatives are often the nicest people -- that's what I told him -- the ones you'd like to have as neighbors. Then I said: I bet you're always willing to help your neighbors when they need it. Absolutely, he replied.
So why, I asked, don't you to want to help out people across town who have the same needs, even if they're strangers? His answer came instantly: Because I know my neighbors work hard and do all they can to take care of themselves. I don't know about those people across town.
That's it in a nutshell, and we could stop right there, but one of the things that makes Chernus well worth listening to is the way he draws things out, revealing both the core logic and maddening contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves and others to make sense of the world and our place within it. So he continues:
He didn't have to say more (though he did). I knew the rest of the story: Why should I give my hard-earned money to the government so they can hand it out to strangers who, for all I know, are good-for-nothing loafers and mooches? I want to be free to decide what to do with my dough and I'll give it to responsible people who believe in taking care of themselves and their families, just like me. I'll give my money to the government only to protect us from strangers in distant lands who don't believe in the sacred rights of the individual and aim to take my freedom and money away.
What a story it is -- a tale of mythic proportions! As an historian of religions, I was trained to appreciate, even marvel at the myths people tell to make sense out of the chaos of their lives. So I can't help admiring the conservative myth: so simple yet all encompassing, offering clear and easy-to-grasp answers that cut through the everyday complexities besetting us all.
Of course, the answers are far too simplistic, as stupid (in my opinion) as they are dangerous. But I was also trained to be non-judgmental and to admire the power of a myth even when I find it morally abhorrent. And this one is impressive, with its classic good-guys-versus-bad-guys plot line turned into a stark political tale of freedom versus slavery.
Here is where things get particularly dicey:
White Americans, going back to early colonial times, generally assigned the role of "bad guys" to "savages" lurking in the wilderness beyond the borders of our civilized land. Whether they were redskins, commies, terrorists, or the Taliban, the plot has always remained the same.
Call it the myth of national security -- or, more accurately, national insecurity, since it always tells us who and what to fear. It's been a mighty (and mighty effective) myth exactly because it lays out with such clarity not just what Americans are against, but also what we are for, what we want to keep safe and secure: the freedom of the individual, especially the freedom to make and keep money.
This myth is too powerful for any national politician to openly challenge, Chernus argues, and Obama has duly embraced it in his foreign policy speeches. But myths have variants, and Obama's limited defense of government as a force for good domestically in one such example.
It's worth noting, though Chernus doesn't discuss it, that this myth is all the more powerful--protected by the forces of denial--because of the contradictions it embodies, such as stealing Native American land, "building" a new nation on the backs of slaves, "finding" "our oil" underneath Arab lands, etc. And the intensity of denial no doubt plays a significant role in the white rage directed at Obama, as well as the pure fantasy fabrications of Beck, Bachmann and others. All these factors combine to create a veritable minefield--which I would argue Obama could best have negotiated simply by returning to New Deal Democratic Party roots, turning to class solidarity and the residue of solidaristic culture from the "Greatest Generation" as the basis for a unifying counter-narrative and contrasting mythos. In for a penny, in for a pound, as it were. But this was not his genius neo-liberal way, and thus he found himself on a particularly hostile minefield:
He's not likely to stand a chance of winning that battle if he tries to take on the myth of national security as well. Bill Clinton once put it all-too-accurately: "When people are insecure" -- which is exactly when they rely most on their myths -- "they'd rather have somebody [in the White House] who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right."
This, Chernus argues, was the subtext behind how Obama first stumbled head-long back into Afghanistan, under the guidance of generals who've "given up on
the possibility of victory in Afghanistan." This means that the "classic version of the myth" involving total victory has had to be replaced by a scaled-down version, which "has demanded only that the good guys don't lose -- that they merely 'contain' the evildoers who 'hate our freedoms'", but even this has become problematic. From the generals' POV, this is very serious--which makes it serious for Obama as well:
If the U.S. loses in Afghanistan, the American public might abandon the myth that justifies the military establishment and its gargantuan budget. As a result, the generals prefer to fight on eternally.
President Obama is trapped at this point. He risks losing both a war and a presidency. Yet if he tries to ease up on the war accelerator, he knows he'll be pilloried by an alliance of military and right-wing forces as a "cut-and-run" weakling.
To get out of Afghanistan, we have to get out of the traps we're in--the generals, Obama, the American people as a whole:
Within the confines of the national insecurity myth, of course, those are the only two options. If pressure is ever going to develop to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, progressives will have to offer a new option that actually speaks to Americans.
And this is where the problems really begin, according to Chernus, because American progressives are deeply reluctant to engage in the alternative mythmaking that needs to be done--in part because their myth tells them that myths don't matter:
And there's the problem. Myths are like scientific theories. No mountain of facts and logic, however convincing, can change believers' minds -- until a more convincing myth comes along.
A handful of progressive political thinkers are trying to persuade the American left to understand this truth and start offering new political myths (their technical term is "framing narratives"). George Lakoff is probably the best known. His books are bestsellers. His articles on websites invariably go to the top of "most read" and "most emailed" lists. Yet he can't seem to make much of a dent in the actual policies and practices he'd like to change.
Progressives still shower the public with facts and arguments that are hard to refute, as (in the case of the Afghan War) the American people know. After all, more than 60% of them now tell pollsters that the war was a "mistake." Yet the war goes on and progressives remain the most marginal of players in the American political game because they don't have a great myth to offer. In fact, they've hardly got any good ones.
Political scientist David Ricci claims there's not much progressives can do about it, precisely because they already have one very successful myth that prevents them -- oh, the irony! -- from taking the power of myths seriously. The progressive heritage, as he tells it, goes back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when the radicals of the day decided that fact and logic were the source of all truth and the only path to peace and freedom.
(Although Chernus doesn't talke about this either, Lakoff is well aware of this problem, and has not only spoken often about the mistaken epistemology of disembodied Enlightenment rationality, he's gone much further in critiquing persistent elements of Western philosophy in the Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, co-authored with philosopher Mark Johnson. But an intellectual critique by itself is far from adequate to replaces the practices, habits and assumptions being criticized, and that's where things are hung up now on this particular front.)
There was a very reasonable basis for this turn toward rationalism:
The Bible and all the other ancient tales bind us to the past, they argued. As a result, humanity was letting dead people lock us into the injustices that bred endless war and suffering. It was time to let human reason open up a better future.
But this perspective is mistaken precisely in thinking that it somehow enables us to transcend our status as historical-embedded embodied minds. And thus, as Chernus puts it:
If progressives believe they are myth-less, though, they're blind to the one mythic plot they share with the rest of America: good against evil. Progressives act out that myth on the political battlefield every day, passionately fighting to defeat right-wing evildoers.
The problem is (and forgive me for repeating an old anti-left cliché of the 1960s, but it's true here): the progressives' political myth tells only what they're against, not what they're for.
In fact, deep down, most progressives do have a dim sense of their deepest principles: the Enlightenment ideals of peace, freedom, and equality based on the Romantic ideal of what Lakoff calls empathy, extended to all humanity and the biosphere as well.
But progressives don't wrap their policy prescriptions in mythic language that says clearly, simply, and patriotically what they're for. As a result, they can't compete with the myth of national insecurity. They've got nothing to offer in its place, which is at least one reason why, despite growing opposition to the Afghan War, they can't build a strong enough constituency to help -- or force -- Obama to end it.
Chernus goes on to argue that progressives need to to develop a myth of their own:
Progressives would find their myth emerging spontaneously if they just spent a lot more time thinking and talking about their most basic worldview and values, the underlying premises that lead them to hold their political positions with such passion.
A strong progressive myth could make it safer for a president to change course and perhaps save his presidency.
I'm not remotely convinced that anything could reach Obama at this point, but I do think that Chernus is right about the basic point here: Progressives need to supplement the other sorts of work they do with a serious commitment to figuring out what our myths are, and how they can speak to a wider audience. We do many things very well, even with odds high against us. But some things we do not even seem to recognize the need for. Myths give shared meaning to shared lifework. No one can live without them
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