Page 28
The Medicine of the Modern World
By the late nineteenth century, then, romantic mythologists had made myth potentially available to thinkers requiring such a resource as medicine for the ills of the modern soul. Myth was an elixir very different from those fashioned in the laboratories of modern individualism. To recapitulate, there were three main differences: the mythic world pointed to a collective, not individualistic, society, and so its creativity was likewise collective rather than individual; in the world of myth nature was not alien inert matter merely subject to technological use, but possessed subjectivity continuous with the human and the divine; and this alternative universe, recovered from the springtime of humanity, like romanticism itself exalted nonrational, intuitive, "poetic" ways of knowing. Myth connects the self to society and world, unlike rationality, which depersonalizes and objectifies that which is other than self.
But what of the "lost" modern proletarian, so deprecated by W. H. Riehl? What of the lowly modern urbanite, whom José Ortega y Gasset and C. G. Jung were to call "mass man," whose rootlessness and depersonalization amid the masses of the modern industrial city seemed like a dark parody of tribal collectivity? Volkish writers and their allies exalted the "rooted" rural classes while deploring the empty, wandering lives of urban masses in the gloomy new cities built by the industrial revolution.
Here comes a paradoxical but very important twist in the dialectic of myth. Mythologists worshiped at the shrine of tribal collective consciousness in the beginning, holding that myth was not composed by a single person but was the voice of the "people." But in the modern world, at least until racial consciousness was again gathered into the "single will" of the people on which the Nazis harped, collectivity simply became "mass man." Glory lay with the individualism of one who, patterning himself on ancient hero myths, won solitary triumphs on behalf of all. Modern humanity was no longer the primordial well of collective inspiration, but had seriously fallen from it into ''mass man." Out of that pit salvation can only be individual, yet it must reflect values larger than the individual if the mythic dimension of the modern hero's calling is to have any meaning. The paradox of collective and heroic in myth was never fully resolved.
Even in primordial tribal societies the hero's role was ambivalent, for the hero must emerge out of an organic society that has a rich
Page 29
collective consciousness. The hero who transcends that collectivity must also be a part of it, so that it is the tribe's values that are made visible and timeless in the grand and authentic gestures of the hero, the Odysseus or Siegfried. Today the collective has degenerated, through a false uprooted individualism wrought by commerce and industry, into the depressed counterfeit collectivity of the modern city. It can only be rescued, modern mythmakers might argue, by new heroes who retrieve the power latent in ancient symbols, not excluding the fasces, the swastika, the hammer and sickle.
The possible political concomitants of this kind of mythology are almost too obvious: one wants a homogeneous, largely rural, and "rooted" society with a hierarchical superstructure; this society should possess a religious or mystical tendency able to express its unity ritually and experientially. Today such a society could only be recovered through a new enactment of the hero myth by one able to awaken the primordial but slumbering values of this people and call them into being again. This is one direction mythology could go, and has gone, in the modern world: nationalism, especially when based on a single leader embodying the people's Geist and idealized to heroic stature.
The two major apertures available to generic myth in the modern world were in individual psychological procedures and in nationalism. Other possibilities were preempted. Liberal or radical reform was taken over by secular myths such as Marxism or by the myths of specific relevant religions, as in the Christian social gospel.
Social roles had their indigenous mythic models already staked out in the earlier mythic revivaclass="underline" Victorian reconstructions of chivalry provided models for the English gentleman, Daniel Boone epitomized and idealized the American frontiersman. The catastrophic twentieth century called for something more: myths to radically transform nations; myths to transform, not merely legitimate, individual roles.
On the face of it, tools were available for both individual and national courses. The very individualism on which twentiethcentury mass man quixotically prided himself, together with the notion of progress, made people want to progress inwardly, to inwardly simulate growth and evolution, by moving from one psychic state to a better one. In the hands of Jung and Campbell, mythic scenarios were readymade models for individuals in the process of inner transformation.
Nations also could move on to what they trusted were higher stages of their own development through attaining the inner cohesion
Page 30
and unity of purpose afforded by a mythic model, with reference back to the "organic" society supposedly realized in mythic times. This is what Eliade meant by
"Romanianism" in the 1930s, and what Jung at the same time called "Wotanism'' in regard to Germany.
These two processes, the individual psychological and the nationalistic, were ostensibly at odds with the fundamental character of modern society—its scientific,
"statistical" homogenization, its professedly democratic institutions. Moreover, the modern mind cannot really countenance the possibility of any sort of largescale change except through the political process. The mythology movement therefore had to be in some way (maybe only a mythic one) political.
But it could not be liberal or progressive in the ordinary sense, since that implied only more of the same, scientizing and bureaucratizing human life rather than mythologizing it. It could not be conservative in the usual sense either, since that also implied more of the same science and bureaucracy, save now more in the hands of business corporations than of government. A radical change, such as the mythologists required, could only be reactionary, returning in significant ways—maybe only individually, maybe nationalistically—to an idealized traditional world.
But here is where the approach of the mythologists needs to be set carefully against that strand of thought which led to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. In fact, the gnostic mythology of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, contemplative in fundamental intent, contrasts significantly with the apocalyptic definition and use of myth in the political wing of modern mythology. In the end, Jung, Eliade, and Campbell turn out to be more oriented toward individual than national transformation, though no less significantly political for that reason.
Apocalyptic and Gnostic Myth
The cleavage between Enlightenment and romantic views of mythology is but a special case of a larger divide in modern thought between the Enlightenment and romanticism. That is between the Enlightenment perception of the individual as autonomous; and a second school, which arose together with romanticism, that affirmed the determinative role of history and society on individual lives. The first was the gift of Locke and his followers, the second of Hegel, Marx, and their heirs. The latter emphasized the extent to which one's
Page 31
very consciousness—the favored term—is shaped by one's place in the unfolding of history, or by one's socioeconomic status.
No more than a glance at the horrendous slums and industrial conditions of the nineteenth century was needed for those persuaded by the communitarian or organic view of society to posit certain situations as considerably more disadvantaged or oppressed than others. Justifiable in its original setting, this finding was ultimately to lead both to salutary democratic reforms from the abolition of child labor to the legitimization of unions, and to the twin evils of twentiethcentury Marxist and fascist totalitarianisms.