This is the
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conservatism of Burke and in certain respects of Jung and Eliade. Then there is the Whig sort of conservative, far more common in the United States than the Tory.
These conservatives are fundamentally more concerned with economic than social values; they idealize not the Middle Ages but the free enterprise, laissezfaire economics of the early industrial revolution. Whig conservatives like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, and insofar as they are social conservatives it is because they value the work ethic and productive stability they associate with traditional propriety.
Campbell was really mostly the latter, the Whiggish sort of conservative. Although he dealt with what, to the Tory or Germanic volkish mind, was the archaic and medieval raw material of the other conservatism, he managed—apparently hardly realizing he was doing so—to follow Jung by individualizing that material into models for personal inner realization and success.
What kind of society would Campbell's view of myth construct? Not Jung's Burkeanism of tradition and reasonable democracy, or Eliade's newfound American utopia of level pluralism. Rather, it would be a society of heroes like the principals of Star Wars who follow their own myths, and a ground crew of those who are not heroes but who sing about heroes, and the songs keep the social order together. For while Campbell might have liked a Jeffersonian utopia free of government coercion and egalitarian, he would probably have realized that, in a truly unconstrained social order, elites, by birth or talent or more likely both, will like himself rise naturally to positions of greater wealth and influence than the ordinary. But all of that will be according to myth. Whatever one does in this society, one identifies with the mythic archetype of that role: the soldier or policeman with the primal swordsman, the scientist with the whitecoated heroes of his kind, the mother with the Great Mother one with the earth, lovers with Tristan and Isolde.
It would be a society like that of the tribes of Native America: the lone warrior and vision quester, the sacred dance complete with ritual clowns around the fire. A century or two in the future, it might be set in outer space, an epic of brave explorers of strange planets and staunch settlers conquering new worlds. In the process, they would be defying and defeating the armadas of collectivists who, like the Anglo whites, sought to reduce their lives to bureaucratic forms and their songs to paper music.
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This is a fantasy, and an unlikely one at that. Star Wars notwithstanding, the brave new world of the conquest of outer space, or of any reasonable future for our overpopulated planet, will require cooperation and organization on a scale that would need to be managed by a powerful government, not by individual heroics. If a speculative book like Freeman Dyson's Imagined Worlds is on the mark, the technological creation of collective human minds through "radio telepathy," group minds and personalities that would prevail because they would be far more powerful than any individual could be, may be possible in as little as a thousand years—and their coming would mean the ultimate defeat of the individualist creed. 63 Indeed, Campbell himself was increasingly aware that he represented social values with more past than future, however much he argued otherwise.
There is, however, more to Campbell and politics than individualism. One must also look at the concept of myth as a political reality and political force. This is important, and is on a different level of discourse than the supposed message of the particular myths one favors. Three points may be made about political myth as Campbell presented it. First, societies need a cohesive story about who a people are, what they can accomplish, and what their deeplevel values are. Second, the social myth can only be received and employed by individuals through individual choice. Third, dominant myths and symbols can change, and must as one order gives place to another, especially the coming third age of the Spirit.
Campbell would doubtless argue that the spiritual age will actually require the midwifery of apparently conservative politics, since the requisite emergence of the sacred within, rather than in the plant or animal or in the sky, calls for that neartotal freedom for individual creativity and enterprise that Campbell considered the core value of conservatism. This, he considered, is the political position that fits better than any other the nonpartisan, antiideology, neutralobserver posture of the early Mann or the twoeyed artist. He may never have fully confronted the contradiction this stance presented in respect to the totalitarian regime Mann had fled, though he made up for that in his opposition to Stalin and Mao. At the end of his life he had only begun to face a similar contradiction in U.S. conservatism, in respect to such issues as its alliance with fundamentalist Christianity and the exploitation of nature.
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But, however laden with contraries in the real world, Campbell's politics will have an impact in proportion to the extent his stories shape the fantasies and dreams of men and women, which they will then enact in their own ways in the twentyfirst century. In a world of stories past, present, and to come, these will be dreams reminding us that our psychic origins are buried deep in a fabulous past, that in the present one can follow one's own bliss and become whatever one really is within, and that the unimaginable future of spaceships and heroes will be made for people who can follow inner joy wherever it leads.
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5—
Conclusion:
The Myth of Myth
What does the saga of the twentiethcentury mythologists mean for the politics of myth and the myths of politics?
First, like many reconstructions of favored pasts, their enterprise said more about the time of their reconstruction of the past than of times past. Mythological scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been in deep tension between a meaningladen assessment of myth—romantic in foundation and based on a view that myth is the voice of primordial organic society—and the kind of Enlightenment perspective more inclined to laugh at its absurdities and, at best, to make it a matter of philological and historyofreligion investigation. Victorians like Max Müller, or the pioneer anthropologists Edward Tylor and Sir James Frazer, come to mind as representatives of the latter camp. They saw in myth little more than a disease of language, prerational science, or the magic that preceded religion even as religion preceded science.
Other nineteenthcentury figures, particular Germans like von Herder or Schelling, saw the significance of myth quite differently. They were the spiritual ancestors of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell. In
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their eyes, the distant world evoked by myth was numinous with significance for understanding the whole panorama of human life past and present, not merely of scholarly interest. Myths were like cryptic gnostic revelations, bound to be of unimaginable importance if one could only crack their code. Yet the fathers of modern mythology were also persons of the modern academy. This meant that, in their intellectual training, they were children far more of the Enlightenment than of the romantic reaction so far as scientific and scholarly values were concerned. They had to use modern language and methods in their mythological endeavors though their ultimate goals might have been better understood as a branch of gnosticism or mysticism. Such reactionary sympathies as they possessed stemmed from semiconscious and unresolved tension between the nature of their material, as it came out of a luminous but unretrievable archaic worldview lit by romanticism, and the modernist milieu within which they worked and whose concepts of knowledge they largely accepted.