Mythos

I am getting ready to watch the Power of Myth, a six hour conversation between Bill Moyers and the late Joseph Campbell back in 1988. I have

Joseph Campbell

always been fascinated by mythology and have high regard to the role it plays in society. I've only, however heard of Joseph Campbell recently through a friend, who is currently writing a book that involve this matter. Joseph Campbell is a prominent and respected academic figure  specializing in the field of comparative mythology. This interview was most likely the last major television appearance he did before he passed away. I expect this conversation to deliver powerful insights so I am recording my thoughts on the matter  before I watch it, so I can see if my perspective would somehow be altered after.

What makes mythology special? I dare say that it is one of the pillar if not one of the building blocks of religion.

Bill Moyers

Mythology is a primal need. It is evident in the way we try to elevate the highlights of our lifetime to this status. A social change, a sporting moment, a critical discovery, a disaster averted, we package this instances such that viewed in posterity it will deliver awe, grandiose and an epic sense of proportion. But what is it good for? By modern standards we can probably all agree that it is an exaggeration, a misunderstood natural phenomena or a product of imagination. I'll focus on two aspect of mythology that fascinates me the most.

Mythology induces culture. When I was under going my industrial technician course in MFI Institute more than 20 years ago, there  was this story going around the campus about a guy named Rey Barzebal. He was a few years my senior and already a graduate by the time I got there.  As a college freshman he was sent to Fuji Xerox for an on-the-job training (hover here for more info on OJT).

This is a yearly part of the MFI curriculum that make this learning institution a cut above the rest. Students go through a trimester of gruelling academic training. At year end all of them are sent out into the work force to practice their theory, absorb current industrial best practices and evaluate if the training is inline with industrial requirement. The participating company evaluates the student's performance and this becomes part of their grade for the year. This goes on for 3 years. There are no school-break for the students of MFI. The company was so impressed by his performance that they offered him a job. The story goes that there was some tension between the school and the company who both wanted to keep him. It was rumored that significant money were thrown around to help him decide. In the end he took the high road and went back to school to complete the rest of his course.

After that incident everybody in school wanted to have the same thing happened to them. Year after year students sent to OJT were out performing one another partly to this end. It became a "culture of excellence". Later in life, Rey and I became good friends when we hooked-up as engineering undergraduate. It was disillusioning to hear the actual story behind the myth. I told him at one point that, had the story been told the way it actually happened, it would not have created the "culture" that it did (of course Rey's story is not the reason why the institute's culture of excellence persist to this day, but during my day it added a colorful flavour in an incredibly grueling academic existence).

Mythology simplifies the transmission of messages to future generation. For better or worse this aspect of it is true. Think of the story of Atlantis, almost everybody have heard of this story yet the only time it ever appeared in ancient record was on the lost dialogue of Plato. its not just a cool title either, the dialogue is actually lost in the mist of history. There is no organized institution that tasks itself to preserve the story. The story lends itself for easy transmission between generations.

There was this famous experiment done on monkeys some years ago. It started with a cage and a banana hanging down from the ceiling. A stair is place underneath the hanging banana so that it is accessible. Five monkeys were then placed inside the cage. Every time a monkey climb the stair to grab the banana, all the monkeys in the cage were hosed down with cold water (poor monkeys, this is a terrible experiment but there is a point, I promise). After awhile all the monkeys learned to stay away from the banana. Once the behavior was set, they pulled one monkey out and put a new one in its place. When this new guy tried to climb the stairs to get the banana he was prevented from doing so by the other monkeys. The experimenters kept on pulling out one monkey after another until they got to the point where none of the original monkeys were in the cage. Still then, when a new guy comes in and tried to grab the banana, the other monkeys prevented that new guy from doing so. Of course this is behavior-conditioning rather than a myth but the point is if you package the information with easy to access symbolism you don't need extremely smart individual to act as agents in preserving the message.

Now think about the collective knowledge of modern civilization. We may think that all this knowledge is safely locked and stored away and will never disappear. The reality is, the custodians of these knowledge are but a small group of people. Quantum physics, theory of relativity, advance medical sciences... only a handful of people truly understand this in practice. If somehow all these people were to perish at the same time... they just might take these knowledge with them. The succeeding generations may try to regain these knowledge but it is definitely not going to be easy.

In the novel Decipher by Stel Pavlou he postulated that if somehow our current civilization collapse, the populace of the future would be in dire situation because of all the radioactive waist that we left behind. We need some way to communicate to them the dangers of these sites. It would be improbable that any of our written languages survives. Warning signs we left behind would be seen by these future people the same way we see cuneiform left behind by the Sumerians. He suggested that the way to convey this message is through Mythology. It may not tell an accurate story but it may create a culture of fear around these sites that may just save their lives until they regain the science to figure it out.

Civilizations comes and go... but the mythology persist.