Last paragraphs revised 20 April (around 4:00 AM)
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| Birth of Dionysos (at center, getting pulled out of Zeus's thigh, with his crown already on). Apulian red figure kraton, late fifth or early fourth century B.C.E., via theoi.com. |
The following statements are all probably untrue:
(1) When Zeus's pregnant girlfriend Semele saw him in his full divine splendor, the sight literally burned her to death, so he snatched the fetus and sewed it up inside his thigh in order to bring it to term.
(2) When Mrs. Bennett heard that somebody was moving into the big house at Netherfield she immediately decided the new guy ought to marry one of her five daughters.
(3) When the Moskva blew up and sank in the Black Sea, nobody knew what caused it to happen.
But they are untrue in obviously different ways, with obviously different functions, even if it may be difficult to say what the functions are.
The last, the lie, is the easiest: it's meant to deny the truth, which is that we know very well what caused the ship to sink, two Neptune missiles fired by Ukrainian forces.
Statement (2), an instance of fiction, seems to be intended to "entertain" us, whatever that means, but I think you could say more precisely that it's providing us with material for thinking about things, the conditions of our social lives, the "truth universally recognized" that Austen references in her cunning first sentence, the truth of which is in fact problematic, and the fact that the statement itself is not true, in the sense that Mrs. Bennett and her daughters and the house at Netherfield all never existed, is an important factor in the entertainment value; unlike gossip about real neighbors, gossip about imaginary neighbors doesn't implicate you personally, leaving you free to judge them, laugh at their humiliations, and identify with their sorrows and joys.
Statement (1), of course, is a myth, which is also material for thinking about things, especially on a more cosmic basis, of life, death, and the agricultural calendar, and independent of truth in a more complicated way, a kind of fiction that isn't asserted to be untrue, but set in a world infested with strange magic and populated by deities and demons and an afterlife, things you may "believe" in but can never directly experience in life. Or you can think of myth as material for thinking about religious practice, the collective rituals that constitute the real religion as I see it, the chanting and incense burning and dovening and firewalking and so on, which suspend time and help make it bearable to live with the prospect of universal death. (Buddhists, who don't have to profess to believe any of the myths of the Buddha and his avatars and Bodhisattvas, often understand this exceptionally well, but I believe it's very normal for the priesthood of other religions, including the Christian ones, to lose the sense that things like God stopping the sun in its course for an hour to allow Joshua to finish exterminating the defenders of Jericho, or God impregnating Mary at a distance so that she remains a virgin, "really happened" in our universe, but continue to respect the efficacy of the rites in alleviating the suffering of being human. I think they're very wise.)
So part of my disagreement with Jordan is that I don't regard myth as "sophistry" just because it isn't true, any more than I regard Pride and Prejudice as illegitimate for the same reason. (Conservatives who are unable to enjoy certain items of science fiction and fantasy because they don't approve of the politics are showing a strange incapacity to see that the rules for engaging with fiction are just different from the rules for engaging with reality.) I regard myth as of colossal importance to humanity. I love how it persists past the discovery of logic and empirical science 25 centuries ago and the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, in the form of literature that we all recognize as fiction, proving that it never did depend on truthfulness for its power.
And I absolutely deny the implication that mythology is responsible for the crimes that religion has committed throughout history. I would in fact blame that not on myths but on lies in the exercise of power, like "I was talking to God last night and he told me you should give me all your money", or "I was talking to God and he told me we have to get an army together to take Jerusalem away from the beastly Saracens" (which takes its inspiration more from an interpretation of history than of myth), or "I was talking to God and he told me we all have to vote for Donald Trump, because I know that's hard to believe, but apparently God has selected him as our savior."
Now, the really interesting thing about a lie semantically, which I think is my discovery, is that in order to be a lie, you require a corresponding truth, the truth it's intended to cover up. What you really did when you say, "Honey, I never even looked at her", etc. The concealed truth is an essential structural part of a lie, in the sense that it isn't a lie without one:
We don't know what sank the Moskva
——————————————
Ukrainian Neptunes sank the Moskva
Dionysos was born from Zeus's thigh
———————————————
??????
This is an essential part of the point I was trying to make about the "principle of explosion", and the technical reason why it doesn't apply to myth. (You might refer to myth as in a sense pre-truth, composed before the introduction of standards of evidence and logic invented by Chinese and Greeks and so on.) The thing Putinism and its American companion Rovism do that I noticed in that post is that it makes both the lie and its corresponding truth available to the discourse, whichever serves the commentator's immediate purpose.
That is where truth and corresponding lie are put on an equal footing and the contradiction simply ignored. Putin is like a Christian leader who says, "Of course I dn't think I'm getting instructions from God, do you think I'm an idiot?" and expects the audience to accept that at the same time as "I was talking to God last night", on pain of imprisonment or poisoning or defenestration. That's not just sadistic, it's something worse, inflicting a larger violence on society as a whole. This is the violence Putin commits when he (correctly) brings up the Iraq War as an example of how evil the US can be and then (falsely) as justification ("What about Iraq?") for his own invasions of Georgia and Syria and Ukraine.
In mythology contradictions may be simply acknowledged as part of the mix, an acknowledgment that the truth isn't really known ("But some say Dionysos was the son of Zeus and Persephone"), but in post-truth Putinism they are used to sabotage the whole concept of truth, leaving the population convinced that knowing the truth is impossible, and surrendering their minds to naked power instead.
Not all untruths are equal, and the new kind is a kind of nuclear weapon of untruth, devastatingly explosive by definition
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