Over the past three weeks, Rachel Maddow has repeatedly had Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family as a guest on her show to discuss the unfolding revelations surrounding the secretive elite fundamentalist organization and it's Washington safe house on C Street. In doing so, Maddow has repeatedly hammered away at the point that what's involved here is far more than just standard-issue rightwing hypocrisy about sex. It's about the very essence of conservative belief in an unelected elite that is destined to rule without any accountability to those it would rule over.
This is the very antithesis of what America is supposed to be all about. And yet these people are part of a wider movement that is tirelessly trying to rewrite American history to make us believe that America was founded by people like them, to be a nation ruled by people like them, when nothing could be further from the truth. This false teaching of theirs is very much an example of mythos over logos, a system of meaning that is impervious to fact or logic.
On Thursday, July 9, Maddow and Sharlet discussed just how radically outside the mainstream The Family is-not just the mainstream of American political thought, but outside the mainstream of Christianity as well-fundamentally opposed to it, in fact:
SHARLET: What makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations-two things. You said that it's secretive. Indeed, the leader of the group describes it, he says, "The more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have."
And the other thing is the nature of the influence they want to have. I got to sit in on a spiritual counseling session between the leader of the family and Congressman Todd Tiahrt on the C Street house. I actually, met Senator Ensign there.
As the leader of the family was counseling Congressman Tiahrt, who had this very standard issue, bill of issues related to the Christian right, and he said, you've got to have a bigger vision of what we're talking about here. He described-he called it "Jesus plus nothing." And he said it's sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave his examples of men who he believed, understood the way power should wielded. He actually gave his examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.
Sure! What God-fearing Christian doesn't look up to Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin?
By now, you've probably seen at least part of the video of Delaware Congressman Mike Castle's town-hall encounter with the Birther base:
What struck me immediately on seeing it was how perfectly it epitomized something I wrote about roughly a year ago-the power of mythos as opposed to logos, a topic that has only grown more important over the past year, as all pretense of rightwing logos has crumbled into dust. As I explained, following directly in Karen Armstrong's footsteps from The Battle For God, logos is all about how things work, mythos is about what they mean. As I quoted from Armstrong in "Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos":
Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. 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. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.
In the good old days, people were smart enough to keep the two separate most of the time, but this has become virtually impossible as logos has become so incredibly successful over the past thousand years or so. This is the deep irony underlying fundamentalism-rather than being a reassertion of traditional religion, as it takes itself to be, it is a total abdication of the power of mythos on which religion ultimately rests.
Note: Polls have tightened some since I wrote the first draft of this on Friday, but there's nothing below that I would change at this point, having tweaked it already a wee bit this morning.
As we've now entered the last three weeks of the campaign, an instructive comparison can be made to where we were just entering the last three months of the campaign, when I wrote a diary, "Swing State Clusters Tell Story of Potential 'Map-Changing' Obama Landslide". (Some maps from that diary reappear on the flip.) Obama's lead in the national polls is up from where it was, as is his projected margin in electoral votes. But the number of Red States potentially in play has plummeted dramatically. There is fairly straightforward explanation for this--the normal consolidation of the bases, combined with the drop in undecideds as low-info voters finally tune into the race. But on the flip I argue for a slightly more nuanced exaplanation. To kick things off, here are the basics in visual form:
National Polls
Chris's Presidential Forecast 07/29
Electoral College: Obama 264, McCain 172, Toss-up 102
National popular vote: Obama 47.2%-41.6% McCain
Chris's Presidential Forecast 10/18
Electoral College: Obama 349, McCain 166 Toss-up 23
National popular vote: Obama 49.8%--43.2% McCain
You may think you've heard enough about [not-] Joe the [not-] Plumber already, and maybe you have. But this isn't really a diary about Joe. It's a diary about Versailles, my term for our contemporary version of the world apart in which the French ruling class lived, until the abandandoned people of France rose up and took away all their power, and a good number of their heads. Versailles is bigger than the Beltway, it includes the vast majority of the corporate media. In some ways, its an alien state of mind. It's bigger than what Digby and others dub "the Village," as it includes many unseen support personel, as did the original Versailles. It's full of experts who are wrong about everything, and never suffer any consequences as a result. It's dominated by Republicans, but it's a very bipartisan place. In fact, that's the key to its power, and the real point of this diary. I want to use Joe the Plumber to illustrate how the double mythos of Versailles keeps logos--and reality--at bay, and how we suffer as a result.
One mythos is that of St. Ronald and the wingnut right. The other is the bipartisan mythos. When the first mythos fails--in Iraq, for example, the second mythos backs it up, keepling logos, reality and the DFHs at bay.
In my previous diary, "Mythos, Logos, Racism and the 'Voter Fraud' Fraud", I wrote about why the right is so unconcerned about the factually baseless nature of their claims. Rather than making an argument about facts, I argued, they are making an argument about the nature of the world as it should be according their own narrow-minded views. The world of facts is the world of logos, and they are operating from the world of mythos. As Karen Armstrong explains in The Battle for God:
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.
What they are doing with their voter-fraud claims is, quite simply, a form of myth-making. On the flip I take a look at an example that illustrates what this means and how it works.
In early August, I wrote a diary, "Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos", in which I discussed two modalities of understanding, "mythos" and "logos." I piggy-backed on Karen Armstrong's discussion of them from The Battle for God. I continued the discussion in a follow-up diary, "Cults And Culture". While a great deal can be said about these two modalities, I want to focus on rather specifically on certain characteristics of the two, and how they can illuminate the specific dynamics of the conservative/GOP "voter fraud" hoax, as well as shedding light on more general pattern of how conservatives routinely out-organize Democrats in framing issues.
As I'll explain on the flip, the mythos/logos duality offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of how rightwing repetition of patent falsehoods comes to overwhelm the sporadic presentation of well-documented facts on the left. This is the subtext of what's going on with the GOP's "voter fraud" fraud, and it should help us learn to be much more effective in fighting back.
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.
And I mean it when I say, "the Count of Monte Cristo was not fiction"--even though it's one of the most compelling stories of all time and even though it gets stored in the juvenile fiction shelf of most libraries. "It's a book you read when you're fourteen," Slavoj Zizek scoffed to me once.
But the narrative was published in a newspaper. Not the kind of literary journal you think of when you thin of Dickens' serialized novels, but an honest to god daily newspaper, with each installment beginning on the bottom of the front page, just under the reports from Parliament.
Similarly, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City --a Balzac-styledz portrait of intersecting gay and straight characters and cultures in 1970s San Francisco--was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and while not a direct parallel to The Count of Monte Cristo, there are enough similarities that it immediately sprung to mind when I read this passage. Those similarities are perhaps best summarized by saying that both books, published in a newspaper, evoked and provoked a broadly-shared public mythos, a term explained below.
Emptywheel argues that the fact/fiction divide is culturally contingent, but I do not believe in so lightly dismissing the distinction simply because it is culturally contingent. More importantly, however, I believe that the distinction taps into--though it is not identical with--a much more fundamental distinction that I think can be very clarifying for us: the distinction between mythos and logos, which plays a crucial role in Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God, an invaluable book on the rise of fundamentalism since 1492 in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
