Myths, Amplifiers, and Ideologies

James Carse, in Finite and Infinite Games, defines the key attributes of a myth:

“I do not understand the story in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms of the story… As myths make individual experience possible, they also make collective experience possible.”

Further:

“We tell myths for their own sake, because they are stories that insist on being stories – and insist on being told. We come to life at their touch.”

In fact, when you think more about myths:

“Myths are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meaning.”

And:

“We resonate with myth when it resounds in us.”

Carse says this to say about religions in that contex:

“Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an author (he cites the Vedas as an example). Even when sacred texts are written down by an identifiable prophet or evangelist, it is invariably thought that these words were first spoken to their recorders and not spoken by them… Muhammad heard the Quran and did not dictate it. Christians do not read Mark but the gospel according to Mark.”

 

Carse then moves onto the other side of the coin:

“The opposite of resonance is amplification… A loudspeaker is the amplification of a single voice, excluding all others. A bell resonates, a cannon amplifies. We listen to the bell, we are silenced by the cannon.”

We know the problem with the loudspeaker all too well:

“We do not listen to a loudspeaker for what is being said, but only because it is all that is being said… There is no possibility of conversation with a loudspeaker.”

 

Guess which side an ideology falls in?

“Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known, there is nothing more to say.”

But history is anything but a done deal:

“What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.”

An ideology that succeeds too well may yet sow the seeds of its own destruction:

“The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere noise.”

Are liberal democracy and political correctness failing for exactly this reason now? Did they silence all other voices far too well for their own good?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more