INTO THE VOID: Western Consciousness and the Loss of Myth

 

 

INTO THE VOID:  WESTERN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LOSS OF MYTH

 

1. The Concepts of Myth

Myths arise in two principal forms – as narratives and as archetypes. In the first and broader sense, a narrative myth expresses a traditional belief or conjecture such as an ‘urban myth’ which is understood to be inherently fictional, but which illustrates a widespread imaginative conception. Narrative myths can also illustrate teleological or cosmological notions of human origins such as the Nordic myths. Myth in this sense should be distinguished from legend. A myth has a timeless and universalised character. Legends involve the making of fictions or stories which embellish historic or localised events such as the Arthurian sagas or those place-specific folk traditions which have evolved over time.  

However, there is a deeper sense of the term which points to a more variegated analysis. From this perspective a myth can be understood as a cultural, and therefore collective, symbolic construct whose denotata consists of those universal and unconscious archetypes (as expounded by Jung among others) which lie below the surface of the collective psyche of all societies or groups in all historical periods. The symbolic components of archetypal myths arise spontaneously, take different forms across time and function as portals through which the shared consciousness of human groups access deeper, and potentially the deepest, strata of meaning embedded within the collective psyche. This ‘esoteric’ knowledge is transmitted by the myth, often mediated by a priest/seer, and takes external form through the moral, aesthetic, religious and political institutions, values and rituals of human communities. In essence a living myth constitutes a metaphor for the ontology of consciousness as it has evolved throughout the whole development of mankind. This psychic ontology, as Kant indicated, functions both passively and actively, receiving external impressions through passive cognition and, via its epistemological or ‘categorical’ grounding, actively formulating the perceived and agreed structure of the physical world.

It can be argued that active myths are vital and perennial components of balanced human existence. By reifying, and thus circumscribing, the contents of the unconscious psyche, myths not only objectify and consecrate those contents, but, on Jung’s analysis, shield the individual from their potentially chaotic force. They ‘serve as a refuge for consciousness and as the last stronghold against the threatening embrace of the unconscious.’ (See: C. Jung: The Psychology of Transference). Moreover, by externalising archetypal contents through a public symbolic language, myths provide a lexicon of group cultural reference and consequently limit the tendency towards that psychological isolation, solipsism and anxiety which afflicts so many individuals particularly in industrial and post-industrial societies. In their most active and potent form, however, myths serve to project order and significance onto the perceptual manifold – onto a physical universe which appears inherently meaningless or hostile – and thus to imbue objects of consciousness with intention and value which is comprehended at, and derived from, pre-conscious levels. They function for both the individual and the group as a common psychological grounding or world view and as a crucial alignment with the architecture of nature, with its creative life and entelechy, without which, arguably, no culture or society can successfully cohere or evolve.

 

During the past two centuries, however, the mythic foundations that have sustained and developed Western societies ab initio have progressively weakened. Scientific materialism has modified human consciousness – and not only in the West – to an extent scarcely imaginable to those seventeenth century philosophers and scientists who sought to reconcile the empirical study of nature with established theology and metaphysics. The psychological constraints of the materialist world view, the impoverishment of symbols and the consequent desuetude of mythic structures have opened up an existential void beneath the feet of contemporary cultures, a void whose creative, technological and political implications I want to examine below.

 

Evidently, what can be described as ‘mythic consciousness’ has varied extensively across cultures, races and historic eras, expanding and evolving with the physical and intellectual evolution and aggregated experience of human groups. ‘Primitive’ or early myths typically featured objects and processes in the natural world – the sun, water, male and female archetypes, growth and fertility, birth and death, day and night, and so on. At this level mythic symbols provided an account or explanation not only of the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of external nature but of the tripartite relationship between the individual, the tribe and the natural world. By articulating cosmic narratives which encapsulated his myths, early man initiated an act of self-definition, involving both a psychic projection onto, and an objectification of, the external order with himself as active participant. Moreover the symbols and rituals surrounding this archetypal dimension were jealously guarded as hidden mysteries and imbued with metaphysical/religious significance.

 

Pre-dating the primitive, however, was the primal stage of human development, when, it can be supposed, the separation from animal nature was still in process and human consciousness was struggling to emerge from its original undifferentiated psychic unity. At this stage the perceived world was ineluctably permeated and informed by the collective unconscious. Inanimate objects in particular – stones, certain trees, hidden and sacrosanct places – seem to have functioned for primal man as symbols in their most potent form – as portals to unconscious life and as receptors of unconscious projection. For primal man there was no objectification and thus no division in his mental life: the myth comprised his inner consciousness and the outer world comprised his myth – the condition described by Lévy-Bruhl as participation mystique. The oneiric mental states historically attributed to, for example, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the so-called ‘dreamtime’ myth, can be seen as an echo of this stage of psychic evolution, which manifested the dominance of subjective pre-conscious mental life over external nature. From this perspective the primal psyche can be understood as manifesting the ‘infancy’ of mankind, closely related to the psychic condition of the newly-born who, still mentally within the ambit of the mother, have not yet achieved differentiated self-consciousness and separate ego identity.

 

2. The Self as Object

The essentially inert nature of the undifferentiated primal psyche, however, restricted active engagement with, and control over, the natural world. Thus the development of the human race, responding, apparently, to evolutionary imperatives, increasingly entailed the suppression of divergent unconscious existence, and this, together with the parallel emergence of human language, resulted in a strengthening of noetic, linear and convergent structures of consciousness. The ‘fall’ of man from the uncomprehending innocence of animal nature into a state of psychic isolation, with its metaphysical conception of death (non-being), its incipient self-awareness and, crucially, its potential for evil, constituted what must surely be accounted as the primal existential crisis – a traumatic rupture in the hitherto integrated psyche which coalesced into perhaps the most deeply-seated and elemental feature of the collective unconscious. The many variations of the Garden of Eden myth can be seen to symbolise this alienation of the self from its primordial animal unity and the accompanying sense of loss, bivalency and incompleteness.

Earliest man, therefore, on his long road to psychic individuation, became self-aware through an act of selbstsetzungslehre – a process of self-objectification. Having lost his primal unity with nature, he was impelled to negotiate a new relationship with his identity as a determinate and reflective being. His unconscious psyche had not, however, been eradicated; rather it had been, so to speak, demoted. Beneath his newly-emerged selfhood lay a suppressed and largely autonomous and unpredictable psychic realm which erupted into consciousness in the form of dreams, visions, prophesies, irrational impulses, and so on. And this psychic substratum seemed not only independent of, but frequently antagonistic to, human purpose and reason. A new conflict-in-dualism had emerged and, (echoing the Garden of Eden myth), a new kind of knowledge. The primal ‘one’ had divided and become a dialectically unyielding ‘two’ with ego and non-ego (non-self, the other) striving for, but unable to achieve, definition through synthesis – positing the world as ‘alien object’, as Gegenstand, in dynamic opposition to the originally unified self in nature. (See: Fichte J.G., Grundelage der Gesamten Wissenschaftslehre; ed. W. Jacobs. Hamburg, Meiner 1970).

 In the twentieth century this existential dilemma reached its apogee and was definitively expounded by Heidegger. Modern man, he argued, and specifically post-religious man, found himself inexplicably ‘thrown (Geworfen) into being’, and had become ‘an entity for which being (Dasein) was an issue’. Dasein entailed the awareness of time and, with this awareness, came anxiety and metaphysical isolation. Without advancing a remedy, Heidegger had acutely diagnosed the modern crisis. And from the perspective of mythic consciousness, his analysis can be understood as pointing directly to the collective weakening of the West’s mythic world view and of the psychically-integrating symbolic language which formalised that view. Arguably, it is this loss which has cast modern man existentially adrift and forced him to ‘compose himself alone’ towards ‘ways of being’, none of which (as the subsequent discarding of Existentialist palliatives would suggest) has resolved the original impasse. (See: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Oxford 1962).

Throughout the hundred or so millennia since the emergence of the human species, the urge to resolve this dilemma, to recover this lost unity by reintegrating the isolated self with universal and unconscious nature, has evidently never weakened. It has remained at the core of the eternal human longing for completeness and transcendence. The loss of self has therefore come to be understood, albeit obscurely and often physically destructively, as an epitasis for the realisation of self, and mankind has developed many strategies for attaining this condition, from the rudimentary – the use of alcohol, drugs or mass group emotion, to the more evolved forms of art, music or religious transcendence.  And it was in response to this most fundamental and imperative of all human psychological needs, that mythic consciousness evolved.

The proliferation of mythic idioms has not of course been intentional or overtly creative in the sense that peoples and cultures have purposefully manufactured mythic stories or works of art – rather it has emerged through successive stages of human development and has metamorphosed as a result of the evident tendency of myths over time to lose their power as psychic symbols, prompting new and re-vitalised forms to arise. This is not to say that all exhausted myths are lost – they frequently survive as folk stories or legends which give historical context and reference to the cultures from which they once derived. It seems rather that they cease to live independently as functioning symbols and can no longer provide access to unconscious contents capable of being projected into, and illuminating, the objective world. Whereas in their full flowering, myths are experienced by their adherents literally as magical, as of deep religious significance and, therefore, of supreme cultural and even political importance, during their psychic debilitation this efficacy declines and eventually ceases to fulfil its crucial function. Peoples and cultures, in the West at least, have evolved dynamically over millennia, and those mythical configurations which sustained, for example, Classical Greece, took quite different forms during the Christian era. It is reasonable to suppose that, as human groups developed physically and intellectually, a coeval psychic expansion occurred, with myths progressively revealing new and ‘higher’ or at least more evolved levels of both the personal and collective unconscious. There seems to be a vast gulf between the primitive mythical significance of an inanimate object – a rock or tree – and the profound abstraction of the Christian Trinity. And yet both represent responses to the same existential imperative – the reintegration of the limited and fragmentary realm of temporal human existence with the eternal, unconscious and veridical life of nature. It is through the process of confronting this universal need that the higher religions as well as authentic art are generated, together with those (increasingly beleaguered) moral, cultural and political value systems whose purpose has been to raise their adherents to recognise and aspire to ‘eternal’ and ‘grounded’ truths rather than the desultory worship of abstract political ideologies, of repressive and fanatical pseudo-religiosity or, as exemplified by the modern West, the unrestrained and alienating urge towards a materialist Weltanschauung.

But where do such supposed truths reside? Should the personal unconscious be regarded as anything other than a Freudian hypothesis – an inferior dimension of supposedly repressed or infantile desires? And is the collective unconscious to be understood as more than a theoretical repository of redundant evolutionary tendencies – a Pandora’s Box of primordial and ungovernable instinct? The answer may be that the apparently dualistic and dialectical paradigm of human experience (being and non-being; good and evil; love and hate, and so on) with its conatus towards reconciliation and synthesis, does indeed seem to point to a psychic nexus behind the manifold of existence. It is here, perhaps that some ultimate reintegration of the conscious and unconscious realms may be conceivable, but on a far more psychologically evolved, morally self-aware and rationally luminous plane than the opaque and undifferentiated mental life of primitive societies.

 

 

 

3. Western Myth and Christianity

In the West, since the fourth century AD, the vehicle for this apparent tendency towards psychic reintegration appears to have been the Christian faith. The historic evolution of Christianity provides an illuminating model of what might be called the ‘mythic cycle’ – of inception, expansion, dominance and decline. Understood in this sense, the mythic cycle can be seen to mirror the patterns of growth and decay of all the great civilisations – a correspondence that may not be fortuitous. The earliest followers of Christianity, those who had directly known, or had had contact with the disciples of, the ‘man-god’ Jesus, spoke of the inexplicable aura of transcendence that surrounded him. The reported episodes of his life – the birth, ministry, miracles, transfiguration, Eucharist, crucifixion and resurrection – appear, even as they occurred, to have been transformed into potent symbols of overwhelming and unfathomable significance to his contemporaries and successors. Thus, from the start, the mythic function of Christianity was virtually inseparable from the life of its founder. The semiotic force of this myth and the vigour with which it spread in the years immediately following the Crucifixion was clearly unprecedented. That a new and profoundly significant dimension had emerged from the unconscious psyche into human consciousness can hardly be doubted. The as yet unacknowledged, if not unknown, psychic element of agape, the direct experience of disinterested and transcendent love as a counterbalance to the pagan power worship of Greece and Rome, came to the fore and was to transform the future development of Western man. Christ himself gave a succinct and literal indication of this internalised, rather than extended or objective, revelatory dimension with his reported maxim ‘The kingdom of God is within you’ and his still more psychologically revealing ‘The house of my father has many rooms’.

That many elements of ‘primitive’ myth are also present in the narratives of Christianity can hardly be doubted – the god who dies or is sacrificed so that the land may regenerate and the tribe survive; the shaman figure which heals the body and casts out evil spirits; the ghost which returns to its earthly life in transfigured guise – all bear echoes of the mythic idiolects which had sustained mankind for incalculable millennia before the advent of the Christian era. The difference lay in the cultural depth and force which Christianity exerted on the eras which inherited and developed it. The spiritual energy which it engendered survived the final chaotic centuries of Roman hegemony, was sustained and guarded throughout the Dark Ages and underwent an extraordinary cultural flowering in Medieval Europe. The potency of its concepts and images, expressed through the symbolic lexicology of its credenda captivated and transformed Western culture for two thousand years. The revelatory transaction between the perceived physical universe and the glimpses afforded by the Christian myth of a sublime and profound realm of the human unconscious gave form not only to the theology and institutions of the Church, but to a corpus of architecture, poetry, painting and music unmatched in scope and quality in any previous human era.

It would be quite false, of course, to imply that Christian Europe resembled, even remotely, a golden age, suffused by love, moral rectitude and justice – far from it. The two millennia in question have witnessed an almost unbroken succession of wars, persecutions and discord. The difference between the Christian era and those which preceded and have followed it was essentially emblematic. The ideal of transcendental human love and individual and collective piety was established and institutionalised within a profound semiotic infrastructure which contained sufficient spiritual momentum to civilize and, arguably, redeem, whole tribes and nations from incipient barbarism and chaos. The Christian myth was not, and scarcely pretended to be, a universal panacea for temporal human suffering and evil. It functioned, in essence, as a disposition, a potentiality, by which the highest and universal aspects of the human psyche could be realised and hypostatized in certain individuals and groups. It posited a general standard of moral benevolence – a marker by which public polity was regulated and even the most despotically-inclined kings or emperors were judged. The term ‘truth’ is metaphysically evasive, but, even for postmodern human society, the moral and creative epiphenomena of the Christian myth, its laws, charities, art, music and architecture, if not the divine inscription of the myth itself, still retain something of their authority.

In any case, the mythic cycle was turning. The expansion of Western consciousness which paralleled the rise of Christianity had, with dialectical symmetry, posited the conditions for Christianity’s eclipse. The powerful political-religious institutions of the Middle Ages with their hierarchical and introspective world view, gave way to new outward-looking and rationalist national perspectives in the Renaissance, with the growth of global exploration, the discovery of a revolutionary physical cosmology and, above all, the first stirrings of an empirical conception of man in nature. The full flowering of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a catalyst for the long process of attenuation of the Christian myth. The potency of the myth itself was fading and the profound interpenetration of conscious and unconscious psychic contents which it had precipitated was giving way to a new and powerful extraversion – which might be described as a European super-consciousness – and which in time was to evolve into modern scientific and technological materialism and an infinitely more objective, if not more rational, contemporary world view.

If the religious force of the myth was waning, its moral and cultural infrastructure persisted, as its fragile husk survives even today. The institutionalised framework of Christianity retained its social influence throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, co-existing, albeit uneasily, with the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian evolutionary theory, the anti-Christian polemics of Nietzsche and the eschatological materialism of Marx. It was not until the start of the twentieth century that the full effects of the weakening of the myth, of its rituals, sacraments and symbols, became apparent.

4. Contemporary Transformations

The change manifested itself mainly in the fields of culture, politics and technology and through a new and ambivalent human relationship with nature. At the cultural level, it embraced two distinct and, ostensibly at least, antithetical tendencies – primitivism and modernism. The urge towards the primitive was not new; in 18^th century France, Rousseau had conjured up his ‘noble savage’ as an antidote to what he saw as the over-formalised, artificial and emotionally repressive European classical culture of his age. But it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century with the decay of Romanticism – itself a last corybantic impulse to re-energise the European mythic consciousness – that the etiolated and displaced European imagination began searching for compensation in the form of the regressive and the primitive. If the symbolic mythic language of the West was no longer in common parlance, an older, substratal vernacular was available, which, in avant garde circles, was expressed by Picasso’s early success du scandale, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and in popular culture by the percussive and incantatory idioms of the former American slave plantations – ragtime, jazz and rock and roll. It is hard to overstate the dominance of the aesthetically primitive over Western mass consciousness in the 20th century and particularly in the field of popular music. It is no less difficult to conceive how extrinsic it was, until quite recently, to the indigenous European mind with its inherent predisposition to diatonic tonality – alien both to the ‘high’ culture of the educated and the ‘low’ culture of a folk vernacular rooted in local identity, sensibility and tradition. Its appeal to modern deracinated and de-mythologized Western populations lies precisely in its compensatory repudiation of embedded Western aesthetic norms, with their characteristic values of restraint, balance, emotional complexity and tonal diversity, and the substitution of a crudely rhythmic musical form based on African ‘talking drum’ call and response tribal chanting, which, modified by simple southern Baptist hymn chords such as the flattened fifth, resulted in the harmonically raw and ubiquitous quiddity of the blues.

The parallel twentieth century cultural ontogeny was the advent of Modernism. With its abandonment of formal representation in art, of tonality in music and of historical and vernacular sources in architecture, Modernism celebrated and promoted a new psychological individualism, in which the established and universal European conception of the ‘divine’ image of nature in general and the human form in particular was largely abrogated. Modernism in art, however, remains a relative concept. Throughout the twentieth century a wide diversity of movements and styles has evolved, not all modernistic in spirit or intention, and certain individual painters, for example those Expressionists of the Blaue Reiter group – Macke, Meidner and Jawlensky – or neo-romantics like Spencer, Nash and Hopper continued working within an identifiable European aesthetic tradition while attempting to re-energise and recast the mythic grounding of art via an innovative painterly approach. In a similar vein the Symbolist and Surrealist movements represented a nebulous programme to explore and externalise a newly-hypothesised but essentially reductionist Freudian unconscious. However, none of these painters or movements was truly Modernist and, although many were supremely important as artists, none expressed the authentic spirit of the age but seemed, rather, to identify with the protracted decline of Romanticism.

Of course, Modernism itself can be interpreted as a cyclical reaction to the hundred-year reign of Romanticism, as a kind of machine-age classicism or as art’s creative response to, for instance, the mechanical revolution of photography. But this is a limited analysis: Modernism’s abandonment of the formal idioms of art and music was not the result of a creative quest to discover a new language which would express underlying and unchanging human verities, but was essentially a response to the loss of a shared European mythic heritage. It manifested a new and effectively value-free aesthetic individualism energised by a transgressive urge to storm the historic ramparts of Western culture – an impulse which not infrequently overlay a dark, nihilistic, spiritual and moral negation – a Munch-like scream into the void.

In any event, art ceased to function as a shared language – as a unifying social construct. The modernist artist no longer saw himself as an inspired journeyman but as a secular mystic, a guardian of impenetrable and, outside a restricted circle of initiates, incommunicable, truths. To ‘understand’ modernism was consciously to identify with a self-regarding and largely metropolitan elite. The masses (and the bourgeoisie) were ipso facto excluded from the modern artist’s self-communing and, in contrast to their predecessors, from participation in a wider cultural community. A range of aesthetic orthodoxies was imposed. The ‘surface’ of a work, for example, became its paramount conveyor of meaning, a surface which might provide a transitory aesthetic frisson for the viewer and which often dwindled into whimsical pattern-making but which in any case intentionally eschewed (or ironically subverted) all historic, symbolic and cultural reference and thus mythic depth. This bleak existential perspective entailed the destruction and re-casting of the formal idioms of art in a number of ways: by jettisoning cultural seriousness and revelling in paradox and the absurd, as with Dadaism; through the aridity of hard-edge abstractionism as exemplified by Barnett Newman or, pace Picasso, via a primitively-inspired degradation of the hitherto-idealised forms of nature. The human form, when it was featured at all, was intentionally de-mythologized and de-spiritualised – in effect animalised. The noblest images of Western man, from the vast theophanies of Michelangelo to the humane idealisations of Reynolds and Gainsborough, down to the ethereal essays of the Pre-Raphaelites, mutated into the visceral deformities of Picasso, Soutine, Bacon, et al. These purposeful distortions of the human body stand in total antithesis to the tortured images of, say, Grünewald, whose depictions of corporeal suffering, notably in his Crucifixions, were executed within a fully-realised and grounded mythic framework. Grünewald’s transcendent conceptions have no counterpart in twentieth-century Modernist angst and nothing is further from them in spirit than the ostensibly comparable work of Francis Bacon which, although technically brilliant, represents a morally-debased and mythically-void pastiche of those metaphysically-aspiring and agonised Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic expositions of human physical frailty and spiritual anguish. The sense of corruption, perversity and emptiness which underlies Bacon’s work is not accidental, but represents a conscious celebration of what, in a more mythically-attuned age, would be perceived as metaphysical evil. However, from Marcel Duchamp to Tracy Emin and from Jean Genet to Gilbert and George, innumerable twentieth century examples point to the mythic destitution of Modernism. The unifying characteristic – the adjective is itself an antonym – of twentieth-century art, music and literature is that of fragmentation, of an aesthetic free-for-all, in which the shared cultural ground of previous ages has fallen away and no agreed paradigm other than that of unremitting and randomly-conceived originality has provided a new foundation. Thus in its latest, and arguably final, mutation, Modernism has developed into Conceptualism, a purely postmodern aesthetic in which value and therefore official acceptance is sanctioned by a self-perpetuating soi disant critical elite and works are judged solely on their gnomic and jejune novelty and by their purposeful rejection of all previous canons of aesthetic value.

The Modernist antipathy to myth reveals itself most tellingly in the post-war productions of Wagner’s music dramas. Performance art creates special difficulties for radical Modernists; the supreme masterpieces of western culture can hardly be sidelined by contemporary producers of music and drama for in these areas the twentieth century avant-garde has triumphed to a far lesser extent than in the plastic arts. While a picture, sculpture or installation can be viewed momentarily and passed by, extended performances of sonically-experimental, atonal or ‘free’ music require a greater investment in time and concentration as well as the suspension of culturally and psychologically embedded musical responses – and even the most cultivated audiences have largely resisted these aesthetic demands. Predictably, therefore, concert halls and opera houses have concentrated on staging tonally-coherent, key and tempo-structured works and the late-romantic operas of Wagner in particular have continued to arouse intense and dedicated levels of enthusiasm among audiences. These works, through their inspired integration of music, staging and drama, potently communicate the archetypal symbolism and transcendent power of myth as perhaps no other music, or indeed art, has ever done. It is not an exaggeration to argue that, for many, Wagner’s towering universal genius offers an alternative spiritual language to the enervated religious symbolism of late Christianity. It is for this reason that the mythic power of his Wort-Ton-Dramas has agitated so many disparate groups – exciting the ideologues of fascism; provoking both unease and reluctant recognition in Modernists; and continuing to arouse deep antipathy in many postmodernists. However, all factions, whether supporters or opponents, must contend with the music itself, which can neither be ignored nor, without losing its very essence, be adapted or subverted. Whereas Modernists (following George Bernard Shaw) attempted to apply reductionist ideological concepts to Wagnerian themes, depicting them as metaphors for the crisis of capitalism, the (characteristically) postmodern approach has been to eliminate the mythic foundation of the dramas by severing the imaginative unity of the themes themselves – principally though their staging. Thus in recent years The Ring has been set variously in a power station and a 1930s grand hotel; Meistersinger in a fast-food outlet; Tannhäuser in a Latin American fascist army barracks, and so on. It is important to realise that none of these interpretations is designed to illuminate the works themselves, or to argue any deeper meaning. The key postmodern axiom, emanating from Derrida, that a text’s interpretation should discount any intention of its author and be subject to multiple possible readings to expose and undermine its frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings has nowhere found more fruitful application than in the deconstruction of the mythic imagination of Wagner. The more antithetical the settings and costumes to the mythic essence of his work, the more audiences can be distracted from its psychological and symbolic power and directed towards an appropriate postmodern response. A cordon sanitaire of irony and scepticism is thus erected between the apperception of the music and an audience’s fully-realised emotional and intellectual response to the creative scope of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself.

Architecture, with its blend of the aesthetic, monumental and functional, stamps a larger and more durable imprint on human communities than any other creative endeavour and the evolution of European architecture has closely shadowed the Christian mythic cycle. From the early developments of the Romanesque it blossomed into the unexampled grandeur of the European High Gothic, with an explosion of ecclesiastical building ranging from the simplest hamlet church to the majestic and overwhelming masterpieces of Chatres, Rheims, Canterbury, King’s College and countless others. At its peak between 1150 and 1450 the boundless physical energy and creative imagination of Christian society produced architecture of a style and richness which combined rationally coherent physical structures with intuitive and organic decorative symmetries, thus achieving an extraordinarily acute expression in stone and wood of the mythically integrated configuration of the human psyche. However as the Renaissance moved into the Enlightenment this sublime natural spontaneity declined under the influence of an objectifying, and necessarily self-limiting, new European consciousness and the Classical models of Greece and Rome exerted a (far from adverse) dominance until the arrival of nineteenth century bourgeois eclecticism. By the turn of the twentieth century, Modernism was in the ascendant, and this, allied to the development of industrialised building materials – characteristically steel and stressed concrete – sounded the death-knell for the humane architectural tradition of the West with its fertile cultural continuities and historic references. A new generation of architects and city planners whose battle-cry was ‘form follows function’ now eagerly embraced the myth-free utopianism of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Ideologically, Modernist architecture was and remains predicated on a machine-age functionalism and a wholly materialist conception of the human condition in which intuitive, intellectual and individual human perspectives are subordinated to an abstract aesthetic of reductionist formal structures conveying a narrative of mass social planning. This, in turn, through an alliance of architectural orthodoxy, profit-orientated commercial building practices and the visual and historic illiteracy of new power elites – most notably city regulators and planners – has resulted in the so-called New Brutalism characteristic of the contemporary urban landscape.

 

5. Myth and Ideology

Accompanying these aesthetic developments and closely allied to them has been the advent of what might be called ‘myth-substitutive’ political ideologies. Across Europe, between 1789 and World War One, a new revolutionary populism emerged which largely overthrew the increasingly exhausted mythic institutions of monarchy. In most nations this took the form of democratic republicanism; a few evolved into constitutional monarchies, which sought with varying degrees of success to reconcile mass parliamentary representation with the quasi-mystical and transcendent symbols surrounding a personified crown. However, in the first half of the twentieth century darker forces erupted. First Communism, followed almost immediately by Fascism, trumpeted their strident and alienating messages. No longer were the transcendent and the eternal to be the (albeit frequently unrealised) sanctification of human existence within an historic European Christian culture. Now a radical but primitive tribalism emerged, predicated on arbitrary and strategic disjunctions of class or race. State-orchestrated mass emotion replaced the inward search for spiritual life while martial or collectivist goals superceded the ideal of virtuous and morally inter-dependent communities. The Christian quest for the higher integration of human consciousness had been replaced by a quasi-mystical worship of power and domination, whose engine was the officially-sponsored hatred of selected but necessarily abstract human groups. Of course, the mythic element in these Modernist ideologies was not absent – it had taken the downward path, so to speak, awakening the destructive and archaic elements which had been so assiduously and programmatically relegated to the primitive unconscious by centuries of Christian conditioning, and bringing them back into the world as political ideals and social realities. Like Modernism, these utopian chimeras were doomed to fail – they grew out of the shell of post-Christian mythology and their feigned causal links with the forces of history and nature was in itself a traducement of the mythic idiom.

If, as I have argued, utopian ideologies are myth-substitutes – that is to say myths emptied of symbolic and rooted psychic content – then Marxism as the ideology of Modernism has undoubtedly been the most influential utopian programme of the twentieth century. Consequently, its failure has been all the more disconcerting, particularly for those legions of academics, intellectuals, trade unionists, and aspiring social planners who espoused it with near-religious fervour. Communism, particularly at the start of the century, gained its enormous political and cultural momentum, partly because it seemed capable of addressing and resolving the European existential and social crisis which had been precipitated by mass industrialisation and partly due to its apparent ‘real world’ utilisation of Hegelian metaphysics. But Marxism, predicated as it was on the supposed science of economic relations, died, ironically, by its own hand – by the failure of its own economic model and by the masses’ own rejection of the totalitarianism entailed by the logical contradictions in Lenin’s doctrine of ‘centralised democracy’. Marxism’s myth-substitutive utopianism for all its supposed scientific-historic authenticity revealed itself to be nothing more than a repressive and demonstrably fallacious political abstraction which lacked the psychically-grounded power of authentic myth to engage and motivate the professedly materialist, but essentially quasi-metaphysical, social forces which it claimed to personify.

The subsequent ideological hiatus has been filled, not, as might have been expected, by a modification of socialist theory, but by the anti-utopian counter-ideology of postmodernism. This mutated offshoot of Marxism not only denies the possibility of objective moral or philosophical truth, which it holds to be a merely tactical device in the eternal war of power relations, but in doing so denies the possibility of truth itself. The antipathy of postmodernism to the past in general and to an empirical reading of history in particular is surely not unconnected with the failure of the scientific historicism of its progenitor. It is as though, having retreated from the intellectual battlefield of Marxism, its demoralised troops have waged a scorched earth policy and have sought not only to recast the basis of human reasoning and value but to deny its objective possibility. The destruction of meaning thus becomes the final act of revolutionary revenge.

The Christian mythic cycle, then, reached its terminal stage at the beginning of the twentieth century with the advent of Modernism and its associated ideologies. Consequently, the Western mind has come to disregard any lingering impulses from its mythic heritage and has focused instead on a psychically circumscribed and highly objectified reality which is capable of an infinitely greater management and manipulation of objects and facts than ever before. Nothing more aptly expresses this new one-sided and externalised psyche than the advent of computer technology. Computers greatly facilitate and accelerate the process of organisation, communication, production and consumption which modern man increasingly regards as the sole business of his being in the world and in this they can be taken as a metaphor for both modern and postmodern consciousness. The binary reductionism of computers points to no reality beyond itself and acts as a kind of template for all reductionist scientific models of the human mind. This represents the antithesis of the mythic domain of contemplation, self-realisation and transcendence. Computers do not, nor can they, examine themselves or their existential status and it has become axiomatic for modern science and philosophy to draw parallels between their infinitely complex but one-dimensional functionalism and human consciousness. The dominant role of computers in our culture would surely have baffled medieval man, not in regard to their calculating abilities which he might well have appreciated but in their essential banality and in the inordinate amount of time and attention paid to them. The urgent question from our distant forebears would surely be: ‘but how can you live fully in your brief window of time and find meaning in the patterns of your world without an active conception of eternity?’ The answer might well be: ‘we never think about such questions because we have created many different ways of distracting ourselves. If we have a mythology it subsists in sport, celebrity and entertainment. We need no gods.’ And Medieval man would have retired, shaking his head in bewilderment.

 

 

6. Moral Perspectives

The consequences of the inanition of mythic structures are apparent not only in the superficiality of so many contemporary preoccupations and attitudes, but, more disturbingly, in the moral sphere. Cultures emanating from authentic mythic structures conceive of moral consciousness as being founded on internalised human sensibility and exhibiting a tenuous link with the essential self or ‘soul’, which is itself a participant in universal and eternal verities. The delicacy of this bond is expressed through such spiritually-conceived (and to modernist sensibilities, meaningless or risible) notions as personal ‘purity’, ’sanctity’ and ‘holiness’ and conversely as ‘defilement’, ‘corruption’ and ‘evil’. In myth-grounded cultures such as Christianity moral discourse is predicated on these psychic universals and all social morality is founded upon them, including such deontological prescriptions as Kant’s moral law and even the apparent functionalism of utilitarianism. In all such systems the onus falls on the individual, both introspectively and as a participant in the wider society, to regulate his or her conduct for the greater good.

Postmodern or myth-free morality, by contrast, is founded on a tendentious conception of ‘social justice’ in which the individual is a claimant on ‘rights’ defined and delivered by the group. The basis and content of such rights are mutable; they are predicated on linguistic description, (facts are only facts ‘as described’) power relations and motivations. They are identified by their opposition to necessarily abstract antagonistic (i.e. bourgeois) interests which seek to ‘oppress’ and ‘stereotype’ the individual and deny his or her ‘empowerment’. That such concepts as personal empowerment are wholly elusive and invite the question ‘to what end?’ indicates the exiguous intellectual foundations of postmodern morality, which is based on a relativistic superstructure of competing claims rather than the categorical imperatives of human conscience and conflates the freedom of moral judgment with the determinate restrictions of political ideology. In practice, politically-instigated rights, when decoupled from the wider moral community, tend to evolve into little more than charters for narcissistic self-assertion.

Consequently it has become apparent that the moral consciousness of Western man is more unsecured than for almost two thousand years. The fading of cultural institutions grounded in an historic identification with the architecture of myth is evidenced in the post-ideological manifestation of the 'politics of identity', expressed through the often irreconcilable claims of ethnic and racial groups, of gender campaigners, sexually-divergent minorities and others. These alliances are supported by a range of precepts which have become mandatory as the de jure moral orthodoxy, serving to intensify perceptions of victimhood, formalize grievances and selectively privilege factional ipseity. They are sustained by a network of state regulators, a secular and autonomous re-embodiment of a priestly caste, which functions independently of grass-roots political inclination or will. Operating through a left-liberal infrastructure, this new establishment is visibly and implacably consolidating its power and has already implemented a framework of social and cultural legislation which has suppressed whole areas of legitimate public discourse. Increasingly, no unsanctioned opinions can be expressed while at the same time the destruction of established social identities, structures, traditions, neighbourhoods and landmarks and the tolerance of aberrant behaviour which would once have incurred local outrage and official suppression, is facilitated under the ubiquitous umbrella of human rights. Because opposition to such transgressions does not conform with the postmodern world view detractors are frequently ridiculed or ignored by authorities and given indifferent support at best, and threatening discouragement at worst, by the police. As Melanie Phillips has put it: “the effects are plain to see… the transgressive becomes the norm while the normal is discriminatory; victims become aggressors while aggressors are indulged”.

Many or most of the social ills which so disturb this, the richest and apparently the most physically secure and rationally-organised society in human history can be ascribed to the deterioration of its mythic grounding – and thus to an unassuaged longing and an unattributable anxiety. Bereft of culturally and psychologically sustaining institutions, modern society turns on itself. While the raw physical poverty of previous ages has effectively been eliminated in the West, symptoms of cultural psychosis, of social and moral anomie, have multiplied exponentially. Steeply-rising  levels of depression, mental illness, obesity, drug use and alcoholism, together with random violence, the prelation of transient, unstable or deviant sexual norms, the increasingly bleak and seemingly anti-human built environment – even hostile inter-personal contacts and public incivility – these and many other aberrations reflect an irrefutable existential void, which politicians are unable or unwilling to confront or from which they vainly promise deliverance through ever-greater public spending, social regulation or market liberation. Such negative aspects of human behaviour are in their deepest sense, unnatural. They betoken a longing for transcendence and in their tragic and futile re-enactments indicate the paucity of spiritual consolation available to modern man.

 

7. Myth and Postmodernism

I have tried to demonstrate that authentic myth, both expressed and institutionalised, is the indispensable condition for viable human societies. The West, many feel, is now reaching the end of an historic cycle of power and creativity, arguably the most dynamic and sustained in the history of mankind. The question facing Western civilisation now and in the immediate future is therefore becoming manifest, and is not necessarily within its competence to answer: is its mythic foundation capable of self-renewing or re-energising, and if not what follows? This is far from being an abstract or academic point. The cultural self-disgust, the rejection of its identity and history, which has accrued in the West and most notably in England since the failure of utopian Modernism, has recently taken new and darker directions with the advent of postmodernism which, as I have argued, in its purposefully self-subverting and truth-abrogating nihilism is the first system of thought in human history to deny the possibility of objective value, of universal moral imperatives and of intellectual consistencies. The Christian myth, whose symbolic reification has hitherto been so vital and sustaining for the European psyche, has lost it potency, and, as though in response, European mass consciousness is showing itself increasingly indifferent to, or openly contemptuous of, the moral and spiritual traditions enshrined in those symbols. The transgressive urge towards the ‘ruining of the sacred truths’ as Marvell expressed it, constitutes both an act of iconoclasm – of external destruction – and an internalised and calamitous act of mythic self-repudiation. Postmodernism instinctively comprehends, and seeks to further, these developments. Thus the Church – with its ever more hesitant and equivocal promise to sustain post-Christain links with transcendent reality – is anathema to the postmodern programme and every attempt is being made to suppress its vestigial authority.

As Hegel indicated, a sublation derives from the contradictions inherent in an extreme collective psychological displacement. This in turn generates an equal and opposite compensation or rebalancing – an enantiodromia. The radical and destabilising vision of emptiness in the postmodern perspective has attracted and subsequently fostered its antithesis – the resurgent fundamentalism of radical Islam. Whereas the ideological polarity of Modernism manifested itself in a strategic contest between Western liberal capitalism and Sino-Soviet communism fought on the common ground of industrial-scientific materialism, postmodernism posits a deper, more inscrutable, polarity between, on the one hand, its perpetual subversion and reformulation of the apriorisms of Western cultural identity and, on the other, its facilitation of the inimical factionalism of Islamism which has proliferated in the West through the ersatz ideology of multi-culturalism. Within this context Islamism has been granted a new dialectical legitimacy and in the process has come to intuit the imbalance behind the overwhelming economic and technological hegemony of the West and the latter’s deep cultural incertitude. The oblique but discernable tendency of postmodernism to accommodate the narratives of Islamism indicates the structural coherence of this dialectic and sharply delineates the two correlative facets of the Western predicament – the nihilistic and the regressive.

Consequently the fragmentation of established moral, aesthetic and ideological norms, which accompanied Modernism in the twentieth century, is reaching its apogee with the fragmentation of Western cultural identity in the postmodern twenty-first, together with the necessary, albeit paradoxical, homogenization of all critical interrogation. Every such insurrection, of course, produces its social and political synonym, its objective materialization. It can be envisaged that the moral and intellectual rebellion implicit in the postmodern project will, in some future climacteric of despair, initiate a process of communal self-immolation, the consequence, perhaps, of the recrudescence of political or religious conflict or of some domestically-generated mass assault for which – appropriately – the modern age has developed and disseminated the efficient means. The weakening of any residual allegiance to the symbols of national integration and institutionalised affiliation – a key postmodern attainment – articulated in both the culture of the ‘self' and ‘the celebration of diversity’ will inevitably nullify a collective response. The risk is therefore unambiguous: the final implosion of Western societies may result, not from an external act of force majure, but from an afflation of cultural worthlessness manifesting itself in internalised factional conflict and an irrevocable breakdown of social cohesion.

No political 'solution' whether democtatic liberalism, free-market capitalism or socialist dirigisme – and no economic palliative – higher or lower levels of taxation, increased or reduced public spending, unbounded personal or collective prosperity – is capable of resolving, or even grasping, the profound nature of the existential crisis facing modern Western man. Social and material philosophies are by their nature unable to orientate humanity in its eternal quest for the personal and institutional realisation of universal meaning. A new vision and new symbols are needed and humanity must pray – perhaps literally – that they emerge before long.

 

© Charles Jackson, April 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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