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?