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.
I always thought that the goal of the blogosphere was to raise the political dialog in our nation. To fill in the gaps where the mainstream media has failed. And, in general, we've done a pretty good job. We helped lead the charge and made the War the issue in 2006. We stood behind Chris Dodd and his fight against retroactive immunity.
But on one level, we have failed. When checking the blogs versus the mainstream media coverage of the Democratic Primaries, I honestly can't tell the difference.
A few months ago, Washington Monthly published The New Vision, by venerable JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson. While certainly a powerful message, I believe Mr. Sorenson's speech failed to directly address three pressing tactical issues facing the country at this point: our lack of a clear, distinct and progressive economic program, the need for a broader and more participatory politics, and how we might begin to rebuild our shattered faith in government. These issues were also addressed to varying degrees in Matt Bai's The Argument.
In the discussion following these two works, it seemed clear that the left certainly does have an Argument, but that argument just isn't sharply focused enough to work as a political force. The following post (and this accompanying slide presentation) is the speech I'd like to hear, and an explicit attempt to refine that focus.
The High Road: Principles for a 21st Century Economy
Dan Ancona
October 1st 2007
We stand here together today near a turning point in the American and global economy. Globalization, the information economy and planetary environmental degradation are forcing us to confront new and difficult challenges; planetary scale challenges unlike any that human society has faced. Like all difficulties, these new difficulties contain opportunities, and the opportunities before us are planetary-scale as well. Technology is unlocking new forms of cooperation and expanding the limits of human potential, but our democracy has not adapted to these profound changes.
