| Mythos And Logos Introduced
In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong writes about the two contrasting modalities:
Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior.
The need for mythic understanding is deeply embedded in human nature. It sustains us in the face of chaos and confusion. But it can also lead us astray. What makes sense of our day-to-say lives is not necessarily true-in the case of slavery-based societies, for example. In such societies, the mythos usually declares that there are "natural slaves" who are incapable of thinking sensibly for themselves, and thus need their masters to make wise decisions for them. There may be all sorts of stories, from the mundane to the heroic to the utterly mythical, all reinforcing this particular view, both directly and indirectly. The stories all "make sense," they hang together in a web of mutually-reinforcing ideas, associations and impressions. They also recast the accidents of the social order in terms of eternal truths.
The fact that mythos can lead us astray like this does not negate the tremendous value it holds. Like fire, it can be terribly destructive, but it is impossible to conceive of human civilization without it. We have, unfortunately, been far more successful at taming fire than we have at taming mythos. We still have a long ways to go.
On the other hand, Armstrong explains:
Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.
Precisely because logos is forward-looking, it was perhaps inevitable that logos would come to play a larger and larger role in understanding the world, and mythos would struggle to regain its stature by imitating or even impersonating logos. We can see this, for example, in the guise of "creation science." The very fact that fundamentalists feel the need to present the Biblical creation myth as a "scientific truth" is a tacit admission that science-a form of logos-possess a superior stature in our society. But traditional religious believers would never have made such a concession. The truly orthodox traditional believer would feel no need whatever to lower themselves into such a game-for that is how they would have seen it: reducing profound truths of the soul to mere matters of factual circumstance.
Of course, fundamentalists are often helped along in their error by those so enveloped in logos that they deny the power, importance and significance of mythos. Neither mode of understanding exempts us from folly.
There is a certain natural affinity between mythos and conservatism on the one hand, and logos and liberalism on the other, which can be seen in conservative references to ancient and eternal truths, and liberal references to reason, progress, and novelty. But thess are only general tendencies, as there many great liberal and progressive leaders who speak in terms of eternal truths, and plenty of conservatives in business and industry who are quite obsessed with progress. Still, the basic fit of these orientations is significant, and should not be ignored.
Conservative Mythos And Group Dominance
In their book, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression, social scientists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto develop a general theory of hierarchically-organized societies, in terms of a balance of hierarchy-enhancing (HE) and hierarchy-attenuating (HA) concepts and beliefs, which they refer to collective as "legitimating myths" (LMs). They are, in fact, legitimately seen in terms of mythos, because they serve to provide a framework of meaning that goes beyond any particular circumstance, grounding the particular in the universal. As Sidanius and Pratto explain it, these HE-LMs and HA-LMs serve to justify the institutions of society as well as individual practices, and they are, in turn, influences by individual attitudes, which are shaped by a variety of factors. The overall interaction of the elements of their theory is illustrated in the following diagram:
It's not my purpose here to delve into the innards of this theory. Rather, I bring it up because it helps us understand how sets of contrasting beliefs can coexist in the same social system, and indeed, work in a sort of balancing tension with one another-one set enhancing group differences, the other set reducing them. The set of attitudes that incline one towards embracing the HE-LMs is known as "social dominance orientation," ((SDO) )and it can be experimentally measured by testing how one agrees or disagrees with a predefined set of statements and expressions-the "SDO scale", which has evolved through a number of versions over the years. Here is an example, with the first 8 items being pro-trait and the last 8 being counter-trait, to eliminate what's known as "agreement bias):
SDO-6 questions
1. Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.
2. In getting what you want, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups.
3. It's OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.
4. To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on other groups.
5. If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems.
6. It's probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom.
7. Inferior groups should stay in their place.
8. Sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.
9. It would be good if groups could be equal.
10. Group equality should be our ideal.
11. All groups should be given an equal chance in life.
12. We should do what we can to equalize conditions for different groups.
13. Increased social equality.
14. We would have fewer problems if we treated people more equally.
15. We should strive to make incomes as equal as possible.
16. No group should dominate in society.
Reference: Social Dominance, p. 67.
It is easy to see how SDO aligns with a conservative distrust of minorities and other outgroups, which is quite manifest in the attacks we're seeing against ACORN, and implication of hordes of black and brown people "destroying the fabric of democracy" as McCain himself has claimed. This is clearly reflected in the history of conservative opposition to power-sharing. This can be seen quite strikingly, for example, in the 1964 survey, reported in the 1967 book by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion.
Free and Cantril found what is certainly a generalized opposition to power-sharing, in the form of thinking that relatively powerless groups have too much power:
But this tendency was strongly correlated with how conservative people were, as measured by the most stringent measure they had-conservatism defined operationally, in terms of opposition to social spending programs (65% of people registered as completely or predominantly "liberal" on this scale):
If one has this sort of basic attitudinal orientation, and if this orientation makes one more likely to embrace HE-LMs, then it is only natueral that conservatives would tend to embrace beliefs about minorities and other "subordinate groups" corrupting the political process through their involvement. This is, quite simply, a natural expression of their mythos. They embrace narratives that reinforce the mythos, and reject narratives that challenge it. Infornation content-which is paramount for the world of logos-is irrelevant to them.
In my second early August diary, "Cults And Culture", I quoted this important passage from Armstrong:
Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.
This is something that movement conservatives understand instinctively. In the world of logos, repeating a lie doesn't make it true. But in the world of mythos, repeating anything makes it "true", because repetition shapes meaning, and meaning shapes reality.
And so movement conservatives tell their stories repeatedly without regard for whether they are factually true or not. Facts derive from the world of logos. But all that matters to them is the world of mythos. And in their mythos, white conservatives are the only real Americans, and everyone else is out to destroy America. Whatever story reflects that worldview is "true" to their mythos, and therefore "true" in the only way that matters to them. So they will repeat their actual lies over and over and over again, firm in their belief that everything they are saying is "true."
They did this repeatedly in their two-term effort to drive Bill Clinton from office. They've done it for decades now, pushing the myth of a Social Security "crisis" in order to destroy it. It's the basic formula on which virtually all their "think tanks" are founded: repeated messaging, regardless of empirical truth. The "voter fraud" fraud is simply the latest example to rocket to the top of public discourse.
For now, we have to fight back with everything we've got in the short run. But make no mistake, the GOP and the conservative movement will not let go of this unless we take it away from them and beat them over the head with it. Which is precisely what we should do.
We need to have some serious mythos mojo on the sujbect of voter suppression ourselves. This should be a major centerpiece of the next Congress, with hearings out the wazoo, not just in Washington DC where the Versailles media will try its best to ignore it, but in field hearings around the country as well.
And after the hearings, there should be legislation. Legislation to put the right to vote into the Constitution. Legislation to mandate the highest level of state responisibility to register people to vote. Legislation to ensure that voter ID laws come with strict provisions to ensure that the IDs are readily available at no charge. Legislation to mandate the highest possible level of transparency in the administration of voter registration and elections.
In short, there should be a major voting rights and election reform bill passed to address the full range of shenanigans and shortcomings that have come to light since the 2000 election. And it should be carried out in a manner that does everything possible to revive and reinforce the mythos of the civil rights movement.
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