TEDxSalford

Myths and Modern Life

Once upon a time a young child was told some stories by their parents. Some of the stories really were tremendously long. Some short.  But most were in between. The child heard stories about fantastic places, princes and princesses, heroes and villains. Magic was commonplace; the world was strange and wonderful. Then, one day, the stories stopped.

The child had grown, passed through the many and varied trials of adolescence, into the world of adulthood. Waving goodbye with a satchel over the shoulder, they left home in search of something new.

After a long time in the wilderness, looking here and there for scraps of meaning, and working hard at many things, some successes, some failures, they found a link to a blogpost on tedxsalford.com about myths. They clicked it.

Ok, Lets stop here.

There’s a pretty good chance that you can recognise something of yourself in the above tale: it’s vague enough to make you think that it’s talking about you and the only fact it uses – that you’re reading this blog – is a self-evident assumption I made. So, what am I getting at?

Well, when we are young, myths surround us. Whether it’s the T.V or our parents reading the popular myths and legends from books – The Brothers Grimm, Aesop, and the varied interpretations of folk-tales like Little Red Riding Hood – these tales are a formative part of our moral compass; they arguably form the basis of the way we comprehend the world.

Stories are integral to our understanding of the world and of ourselves. One part of us is always trying to construct a narrative. Daniel Kahneman calls this The Remembering Self, which is mentioned briefly in his TED talk about experience and happiness, and covered in more detail in his frankly brilliant book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” This self is influenced by experience, which must include the stories we have read, seen, or heard.

If we didn’t believe this then censorship of children’s stories wouldn’t be such an issue; which is a problem we see continue through the teenage years, into adulthood and then, undoubtedly, we leave to posterity the forces competing for control over the ‘right meanings’ a story should convey.

You might think that I’m bringing together a lot of different things here. We we’re meant to be talking about myths, damn it, not teen and literary fiction.

Ok, I hear you. But there is something that brings all of these things together, and it’s worth thinking about too, I promise. To get to what that is however, we have to know, what exactly is a myth these days?

One meaning is that a myth is something we think true that’s actually false. This is usually what it means in titles like “six slimming myths smashed” that appear alongside your news feed or elsewhere (although in these instances, we can’t really say who is telling the truth, and the real motives are debatable) and it is also the way we tend to throw the word around in conversation: “I heard the food there is amazing, but it’s a myth really because I could cook better food myself”.

A second sense of the word is similar, but not quite the same; it is used as a line of questioning to tackle large conceptual issues which affect the shape of society. Broadly speaking, it’s the images we see in commercial advertising: beauty, status, and happiness.

The difference is that when we talk about a myths in this way we’re not saying they don’t exist, but that the truth, value, and merit of them is (arguably) subjective. Among other things, this allows us to squabble over which celebrities we find attractive and defend our brilliant taste in music.

Third is are the great historical and symbolic myths. Those the stories from antiquity that we have carried through to the present day, for example Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey”. These narratives are the kind we have told each other for millennia in order to gain insight and perspective on the world, and they tend to have a moral purpose; but one is not spelt out for us – we must interpret it.

Devdutt Pattanaik explores the way these kind of myths have differed between The East and The West in his TED talk, and tell us how he thinks they have had an impact on the ostensibly detached world of business.

What I found interesting is Pattanaik likens myth to irrationality. I’m not sure I agree with him, because there are at least two general ways we can approach this third kind of myth, which I will call clinical and symbolic.

Anybody that has read even one work by psychologists Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung will have experienced the kind of mental gymnastics that symbolic interpretation can sometimes entail. Scholar in mythology Joseph Campbell, who you can watch on YouTube talking about his interpretation of the , used the tools of psychology to theorise on the function of myths; writing a book “The Hero With 1000 Faces” which aims to show that all myths have a similar form.

It’s a classic book well read by many in creative jobs, and the quotes that you can pull from it often read like this:

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths

It seems pretty profound. So you’re excused to stroke your chin pensively for a moment or two if that’s your thing.

Done? Ok, lets take what I called the scientific approach. To do this, we’re going to go on a little jaunt with that quote down logic lane. It won’t take long, let’s try to solve this riddle.

First, if myths are public dreams then by Campbell’s definition, a dream is a private public dream.

So now we know what dreams are. But then if dreams are private public dreams doesn’t that mean that myths are public private public dreams?

As you can see, this process of understanding isn’t going to get us anywhere.  We would simply be adding adjectives ad infinitum (forever) until you can’t tell your public from your private parts any more, which is very embarrassing.

We might reach a conclusion that what Campbell is saying is simply absurd. That it’s just meaningless sophistry. However, there is a problem.

The tools of this kind of logic are not totally up to the job in this case. Campbell’s book is written in a style where the meaning seems to run away from you before you can catch it properly…

Rather than presenting you with an argument to follow Campbell delivers his insights through the stories that he’s studied – it makes the meaning elusive and encourages a personal interpretation of the mystery.

Mystery is a powerful force, and J.J. Abrams, Director of “Lost” has talked about how he uses a sense of mystery to tell his stories, drawing inspiration from the unknown contents of a box with large question mark on it that he refuses to open.

Not opening the mystery box and Campbell’s quote share the qualities of being absurd when approached with the clinical method; the quote doesn’t make sense, and the box is probably just empty. Only when they are approached with a view to understand what they symbolise can we take anything from them; in the boxes case, the wonder of what could be inside makes it a symbol for infinite possibility.

That narrative hungry part of ourselves feeds on the mythical symbols constructed around us; though most of us think that we are done with myth once we hit a certain age, anybody who has felt like they relate to Clint Eastwood, followed celebs obsessively in the glossies, or simply wondered about what’s coming next in their own story, has never stopped believing.