| In my earlier diary, "Tales of the City Is Fiction--And Mythos", I responded to a post by Emptywheel, "The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction" primarily by shifting focus from the fiction/fact distinction, which I agree is culturally conditioned, to the mythos/logos distinction as laid out by Karen Armstrong in her book, The Battle For God. In this diary, I want to advance another distinction, that between cults, which are deeply associated with mythos and culture, which properly functions to integrate mythos and logos.
My argument is that culture is necessary to prevent cults from becoming dangerous, and that the current failure of the Democratic-controlled Congress to hold the Bush Administration responsible can be seen as part of a broader failure of culture to prevent such danger.
My specific focus involves three aspects of culture: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate. By "consciousness," I mean an awareness of what narratives are doing, both as logos and mythos. This requires cognitive functioning at least at Kegan's Level 4, which takes the construction of social roles and relationships as object, on which it can reflect and act. (See "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", section "Cognitive Complexity II: Kegan's Subject/Object Model.") "Critical engagement" means that one not only has this capacity to reflect and act, but that one actually does so. And the capacity to mediate means that the culture itself provides tools, up to the level of institutions, such as courts, schools, legislatures, research institutes, etc. which can be used individually and collectively to ensure, among other things that mythos does not swallow up everything else, and that logos does not crush the life out of mythos. |
| Recap
My previous diary ended with the following two paragraphs, which help establish the relationship between cults and culture I will elaborate on below:
For me, the issue is consciousness. At this point in history it's simply impossible to keep mythos and logos in separate containers. Oh, you can do it sometimes quite well, there's no denying that. And you should. But there are simply far too many ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another to ever put a stop to it, which is what Emptywheel's example of The Count of Monte Cristo says to me.
Fundamentalists are systematically dangerous precisely because they they're unconscious about how they have jumbled the two modes together. It's not the jumbling per se that's dangerous--although it can be. But if one is conscious, if one can critically engage, then one can confront and deal with the danger. These are key: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate, which implies an ability to hold others, and oneself accountable. These are the essential elements of culture that allow us to collectively and collegially and socially sort out the various narratives by which we make and remake our world.
Cults
In my previous diary, I quoted a passage where Emptywheel talked about The Count of Monte Cristo in the context of multiple different types of narratives about Napoleon that were circulating in Paris at the time. I quote now from the end of that passage, and continue to the next paragraph:
All these narratives about Napoleon usually get described as the cultural phenomenon that was the "cult of Napoleon" but, as events would later prove, that cultural phenomenon was in no way fictional.
In a world in which Jack Bauer has greater influence over our detainee policies than all the FBI's best experts on interrogation methods, we would do well to avoid the trap of "fiction" and "non-fiction."
I want to focus here on the word "cult". In the introduction to The Battle For God, Armstrong writes:
Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it.
This is, of course, presicely what conservatives feared about Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, as described in my previous diary. There is no doubt that Maupin developed a cult following, and even though the same word might not mean exactly the same thing, or function in exactly the same way, one can also say that sharing the experience of reading his work most certainly did work aesthetically upon his readers, "evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence."
Indeed, this can be said about gay and lesbian literature generally. The rapidity with which the gay and lesbian communities have formed has made the role of storytelling disproportionately more important than for other communities, but similar functions can clearly be seen in feminist, Black, Latino and other cultures. Meaning-making through narratives is an integral part of collective and individual identity-formation and reformation in opposition to identities imposed from without.
Cultic Knowledge--"24" And More
Now, about Jack Bauer. Can there be any other word for how his influence has spread than to refer to it in terms of a cult? And is there anything wrong with "24" that couldn't be handled with what I called for above--consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate? That couldn't, in short, be handled by a truly healthy culture? It is clearly not a matter of logos driving Jack Bauer's influence on American interrogators. It most clearly is an unmediated mythic process quite in line with Armstrong's description:
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.
It is precisely this sense of "sacred significance" and "apprehend[ing] the deeper currents of existence" that explains, at least in part, the utter contempt for democratic accountability--including consciousness, critical engagement, and capacity to mediate--that has run rampant throughout the Bush Administration. This describes a wide range of different sorts of actors. It is broadly applicable to the cultic mindset of neo-cons descended from Leo Strauss, for example, but it also describes the relatively simple-minded zealotry of a Monica Goodling, and the crabbed legal reasoning of a John Yoo, as well as the mindset of the actual hands-on interrogation/torture teams.
The challenge here is simple: we have an administration that functions based on cultic "knowledge." As just indicated, the use of torture based on the model of "24" is but one example of this. And the administration itself is but a culmination of decades of movement conservatism, working through numerous different organizational and institutional forms, passing on various different forms of cultic "knowledge," and rationalizing the "protection" of such knowledge from any form of public scrutiny or accountability.
This is the big picture behind the Bush Administration's absolute refusal of any accountability to courts or Congress--the cult will not yield an inch to the critical and mediating demands of culture, which are absolutely necessary to safeguard the culture against takeover by cultic forces. And this is the big picture behind the Democrats repeated failure--or more accurately, refusal--to act according to their constritutional duty: it is an abandonment of the responsibilities of culture.
I want to be quite clear, I do not believe that cults are necessarily evil. They are not. In fact, they can be tremendously life-affirming, sources of profound meaning and connectedness. It is the failure to mediate their influence in various ways that facilitates the development of some cults into destructive channels. It is the responsibility of culture to ensure that cults may flourish without destructive influence, either on individuals, groups, or society as a whole.
Today, our culture is so diseased, so overwhelmed with the pernicious influence of movement conservatism and its myriad cults, that it readily attacks as cults those who are least cult-like and most logos-oriented, while defending true cults from even most cursory form of scrutiny. More generally, rational behavior is attacked as cultic, while cultic behavior is defended as beyond question.
Backstory
This is the great irony behind the rightwing obsession with the 1960s. While the right entirely ignores the major social accomplishments of the 1960s--the end of legal segregation, the promotion of equal rights for women, the rebirth of the modern environmental and consumer protection movements, etc.--it obsesses endlessly over generally cultural, non-political behavior. that often had a more or less cultic flavor to it, broadly identified as the "counter-culture." The right obsesses over the notion that the "counter-culture" has fundamentally corrupted the basically sound American culture--despite the fact that prior to the 1960s, white and male supremacy were endemic and rarely questioned.
Yet, for all its seemingly cultic character, the "counter-culture" produced very little in the way of enduring cults. It disseminated its influence on the wider culture, to be sure, but this occurred primarily through processes of cultural diffusion, in which practices spread because they are fundamentally compatible with the broader culture into which they spread.
This was not immediately apparent, of course There were intense narratives of otherness deployed against the youth "counter-culture." But these narratives were almost entirely bogus. Both the virtues and the flaws of the "counter-culture" had many more historical antecedents than the demonizing narratives of the time would admit, while what was new about it reflected a world-wide shift in values that would not become apparent until decades later with the advent of the World Values Survey. But even that shift in values had been anticipated by a long line of prominent American thinkers, from Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to the Transcendentalists, Abolitionists, and anti-imperialists of the 19th Century, and so on.
In contrast to all this, however, it was the right that proceeded to organize itself along cultic lines, in ways that grew increasingly elaborate and well-funded over time. By the 1990s, this culminated in a widespread militia movement, an insular talk-radio empire, and a multi-faceted cultic attack on the President of the United States that nearly drove him from office. Over and over again, plain facts were dismissed in favor of wild speculations, as documented by Gene Lyons in his book, Fools For Scandal and in the book he co-authored with Joe Conasan, The Hunting of the President. At the same time, the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming posed a real and growing threat to human civilization was dismissed as some sort of wild-eyed theory--as if the worlds climate scientists were all part of one big cult.
This was the background against which the Republicans stole the 2000 election, capped by a Supreme Court decision so lawless that it even declared itself not to be a precedent for any future decision.
But, of course when your worldview is entirely swallowed up in a cultic black hole, it is simply impossible to conceive of anything else. The only alternative to Bush stealing the election is Gore stealing the election-not a fair election, determined according to existing laws and legal precedents. And by the same cultic logic, since the Clinton impeachment was a baseless witch-hunt (whether admitted or not), any talk of impeaching Bush must also be a baseless witch-hunt. For the cultic mindset, there simply is no possibility of any alternative. Mediating the excesses of cultic activity-by the constitutional system of checks and balances, or the scientific system of peer review-is simply inconceivable. It must, instead, be a form of persecution from followers of another cult.
Thus, a crucial aspect of what we are fighting for today is the recreation of culture and its mediating functions, not to crush cultic practices, but merely to limit their destructive tendencies, which currently threaten to destroy the very Western Civilization they pretend to so vigorously defend. |
