The Evolutionary Necessity of Myth

[WillCameron]

Ever since I was a kid I have been fascinated by ancient mythologies. Although I’ve never forgiven my mom for giving me Greek Mythology for Dummies, I think it speaks volumes on how myths are seen in our world today. They’re either fun fantasy for history nerds and children, or dummies. Why is it then, that myth is found in every human culture? If myths really are just pointless stories, why is it considered an essential element of culture itself? By the end of this essay, I’m going to help you understand how myths actually serve an evolutionary purpose for both culture and person.

As an atheist I can understand how ridiculous this may seem, but Jungian psychologist D. Stephenson Bond gives a pretty compelling case in his book, “Living Myth”. Just think about it. Evolution is about a species adapting itself to an environment. If you have a culture that develops a certain mythology, it is because they are trying to understand their place in the world in order to better live in that world. Despite their fantastical elements, a myth is not merely a story that is false and fantastical. Instead, when I say myth, I mean a story that is meant to determine how well a culture can adapt to the environment they live in.

As such, here’s a better way to look at how myth operates in your own life – given the environment you live in, what stories are going to help you become a better person who can navigate that environment better?

For example, let’s say you live in Ancient Greece at the height of the conflict between the city-states. It’s probably (maybe!) the case that the most important myths – stories – will be those of Achilles, Ares, and Zeus rather than the more pacifistic myths of Jesus or the Buddha. It’s not just that your lack of technology prevents a more sophisticated science. You need children to play as Achilles, to imagine what he’d do in various situations and against various foes, all so that they can internalize the very being of Achilles. This process will, in turn, help them grow up to be great warriors who can ensure the safety of your way of life, or at the very least, support such warriors.

Again, these stories aren’t just fanciful narratives, but are instead the stories that you have to tell yourselves about yourselves, about your world, and about how you should engage with the world. On top of that, once a culture becomes embedded within a myth, it’s not just the environment that you have to navigate. Myth also begins to give lessons for navigating the world that the mythology itself has created. If a culture’s mythology has stories about how to live correctly, then that creates demands upon people to live in that way. You have to follow the rules of the myth.

Another example, the Spartans had a sort of mythic figure named Lycurgus who is said to have created the militaristic way of life that most of us associate with Sparta. They tell themselves a story of a lawless dark age that was solved by Lycurgus, which is used to justify why they should dedicate their sons to the life of a warrior. It’s not just that they have a semi-magical myth about the origin of their people. This story justifies an entire way of life that demands how they must engage with one another and with the rest of the world.

The more complex the mythology becomes, the more energy people are pressured to invest in learning how to conform to specific ways of feeling, thinking, and acting.

The Fate of a Myth That Is No Longer Adaptive

If you read my previous essay, “The Conformist Cage of the Nice Guy,” then you know how dangerous the pull of conformity can be. This becomes even more important given everything I’ve said so far. If a mythology is meant to adapt us to a certain environment so that we can thrive, then what happens when that mythology is no longer adaptive? At that point we are demanding our children conform to a mythology that is actively making them less adaptive. If a story is not helping you navigate the environment, then by default, it is likely making you worse. The environment is always changing, so that means you and your myth must too.

For example, the history of North America is in part defined by the conquest of the Indigenous peoples. At a certain point in our history there was a cultural myth about the expansion of European peoples across the continent which led to the birth of modern capitalist liberal democracy. You can see already that there are two very different stories being told. On one side we have a positively framed story about the birth of modern civilization, and yet on the other we have a story about the genocide of an entire continent.

Both of these myths are kept alive through the way children play, though in a very telling way. As a kid living in Canada we often played cowboys and Indians. One of my friends was actually Indigenous. What was so interesting is that I remember that I had said that I wanted to be the cowboy and he could play the Indian. He refused because the cowboys are cooler. Now, you might look at that and think, it’s just kids playing games, but it’s not just that. He was literally Indigenous, he was literally a descendent of the “cowboy conquered Indian”.

So just imagine for a moment what that’s teaching him about his own identity as an Indigenous person. What is that teaching me as a white kid playing with a boy who is Indigenous? We’re both learning every time we play cowboys and Indians that it’s a bad thing to be Indigenous, the cowboys were meant to conquer them, and that everything that happened to his people was a necessity for the advancement and progress of civilization.

The difficulty with this specific myth is that it’s not exactly wrong. Society has advanced in many ways with science, technology, medicine, and even civil rights. However, this “advance” has also had many negative consequences as well, with several studies showing Indigenous peoples being more likely to have worse health, be unemployed, have lower income levels, be less educated, and to end their own lives.

So my point is, we have a myth or story that tells an entire culture how to think about their history and what games their children should play to understand that history. And yet, this story fails to help many members of that very culture to effectively adapt to the environment they live in.

Now, with all of that being said, you might think, “well…doesn’t that mean we need to have stories about our past that are as accurate as possible? Sure I can understand how myths were stories that helped us understand ourselves and our place in the universe, but we need stories that are…true. We need to tell true stories about the conquest of Indigenous peoples and of the progress that we’ve made since that atrocity, so that all people can take advantage of that progress.”

And to all of that I say, yes, you’re 100% right. We need our cultural myths to track with reality as much as is possible. I’m not advocating for “right” history by a spooky government ministry.

However, your cultural myths and stories are not just about your past, which requires you to be as factual as you can be. Your cultural myths are also meant to help you understand what your future ought to be, which means what ought to stay the same and what ought to change. In other words, you want your myths to highlight the most important elements of the past in order to orient yourself in a present you can understand so that you can envision and move toward a future you want to create.

The fact is though, you will never be able to teach everything there is to know about the past and so that means some things won’t be learned by the vast majority of your culture. If your goal is to promote the flourishing of all members of the society, which personally I think it should be, then the specific myths you tell must support that as best as you can. Unfortunately, in every educational and media system there will be tradeoffs where a culture benefits from learning one thing, but is damaged by not being able to learn about some other thing, and vice versa. All of that means that no matter how selective you are, you may have to re-select for a better (hopefully) collection of historical facts.

So…how do we actually do that? How do you actually go through your culture’s past and create myths that can support the flourishing of all members of your culture, knowing also that no matter how well you pick many won’t even get access to those myths? Already you’re seeing the problems that arise here, but now we even have some government organization selecting which myths are the important myths that we should teach people (don’t they already?). And what about the interpretation of those myths? Any historian will tell you that one historical “fact” can mean many different things depending on what interpretation we draw.

A perfect example of this is seen in the movie Spiderman: Homecoming when Mary-Jane says the Washington Monument is a monument to slavery. Many self-proclaimed patriotic Americans criticize this message, saying there is no definitive evidence and that it’s just woke SJWs trying to make America look bad. The fact that there is controversy around this piece of history is precisely my point. We have a movie about a magical spiderperson fighting a birdperson and embedded within is a story about our past that either gets approving claps or outraged hands thrown in the air.

Regardless of whether or not the Washington monument was actually built by slaves, the fact of the matter is that this specific myth has not effectively adapted us to our environment and culture. Again, a myth is a story that is supposed to adapt a culture to its environment and to itself, and it needs to track to the historical facts, whatever they are. Obviously, myths are not meant to divide the people who follow them. But now, more than ever, we can’t even agree on which facts are actually facts let alone how we should think about those facts.

Mythological Symbolism Beyond Religion

It seems so strange to think that such a controversial point could rest on a single line in a superhero movie, but I think the example of a Spiderman movie actually speaks to something incredibly important about myth, which is also what separates it from a mere account of the historical facts. It’s the specific vehicle or package in which the myth is delivered that also defines how powerfully adaptive that myth is for the people who follow it. In the past these would be the fantastical stories handed down from elder to child, or rituals and ceremonies in which congregants would be handed the secrets of the universe, but today our myths are delivered to us by a movie industry that is primarily motivated by their multibillion dollar profits.

The philosopher Robert Ellis also identifies this as a problem, writing, “the majority continue to seek archetypes in a disconnected, deracinated way: for instance in films, television, video gaming, or population fiction.”

If you know anything about the psychologist Carl Jung, then you likely already know about the archetypes. Beyond anything else we could say about the necessity of myth, I think archetypes are the key piece in explaining precisely why myth is such a necessity in our lives and why movies currently fail utterly as a vehicle of myth. Ellis has a beautiful book called Archetypes in Religion and Beyond that goes into depth on updating the theory of archetypes with the latest science.16 We’ll be going into this work much deeper in the next essay on the necessity of developing a personal mythology, but I want to spend some time explaining what exactly an archetype is.

Ellis defines the archetype as a, “schematic, diachronic function: any symbol that helps maintain meaningful inspiration over time.” For example, when you watch an inspirational movie and feel motivated to start taking action on your goals, this is because an archetype of the Hero has activated that feeling within you.

The reason this works is because the movie was able to trigger within you the full process of accomplishment. Through the narrative you were able to connect your regular life with the regular life of the hero at the beginning – you could actually relate to him and his struggles. Then you were given the feeling of failure, the feeling of hitting obstacle after obstacle…but choosing to continue marching forward even when things seemed so hopeless. And then, the feeling of finally getting a taste of success, the feeling of the breakthrough as you overcome all obstacles and finally achieve your dreams.

You get to live the achieving of your dream vicariously, through the characters in the movie. It’s not just the embodied, emotional experience, but also the fact that it’s a narrative – you meet the characters, get to know them in a way that feels very real, and then see them go through the full process of achievement. It’s activating all of these connections within your understanding of what it takes to achieve, making it seem possible for you, so that you almost get a sense of direction in your own personal life toward the accomplishment of your own goals. Like, “if this character can achieve, well then maybe I can too.”

But that’s kind of the issue. The mythologist Joseph Campbell talks about the psychological function of myth being a guide through the stages of development. While movies today can motivate many of us to achieve, we often aren’t given a specific pathway forward. Maybe we watch 300 and feel inspired to get in the gym and become a Spartan, but then this motivation slowly dies down, we cave on our diet, and next thing we know we’re back jerking ourselves off in between rounds of the latest video game. Why exactly does this happen?

The reason is that we don’t have a cultural myth that can guide us forward beyond our selfish, materialistic concerns. I think hitting the gym is an amazing thing and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get jacked. However, that’s nothing to orient an entire life around. It eventually feels stale and empty because getting jacked doesn’t necessarily make us happy or fulfilled in life. Maybe we do it to get girls but after getting to a 225 bench press we realize we still haven’t even worked up the courage to talk to a girl. Maybe we got into the gym to have the discipline to dedicate ourselves to our career but we realize we’re in a career we hate, that doesn’t make us feel fulfilled or like our life has meaning and purpose.

A cultural myth is meant to motivate us to evolve ourselves psychologically, to bring us together under shared goals that we actually care about, to help us understand the world and our place in it, and to direct us toward something outside of ourselves that we can care about more than our daily, selfish concerns.

Today most of us spend our lives wasting away in front of a black mirror. Today we are polarized more than ever and can’t agree on simple details of historical facts. Today our trust in science, our greatest tool for discovering what is true, is trusted less and less every year. Today we direct our lives toward fawning over celebrities and helping the hyper-rich become even wealthier.

The causes of these issues are many. I’d be severely out of touch if I suggested that the only solution was a cultural myth. However, the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has worked in-depth on the meaning crisis, or an explanatory framework that helps us see why so many of us struggle today with anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness despite the fact that so many of us live healthier, safer, more entertaining lives than ancient kings.

What Vervaeke says is that we not only need stories containing meaningful archetypes that can motivate us toward goals we can actually care for, but we of course actually need goals that we can actually care for. Let alone the kind of work we need to do on ourselves to be able to achieve those goals.

Without a cultural myth so many of us are cast adrift on an empty sea wondering why we feel so alone, why we feel so hopeless, nihilistic, and stuck in our lives. We bury our sorrows in cheap pleasures that have no bearing on our lives – superhero movies, video games, celebrities, and porn. None of these things can ever hope to be something for us to orient our lives around, and yet for far too many of us they are the only things we have to do so.

Despite that…what cultural myth could we possibly have to adapt us to ourselves and to the environment, to perform the evolutionary and psychological function that myth was meant to perform?

The deconstruction of Christianity, paganism, and all other mythologies was an absolute necessity because of the very real issues they had. They were oppressive stories full of bullshit that ripped us away from reality so that we wasted our lives praying to make believe men, women, and animals living in the sky for the vein hope of an afterlife that doesn’t actually exist.

The simple fact is that we cannot go back to a cultural myth that doesn’t track with historical fact, nor one that contains pure metaphysical nonsense masquerading as an ultimate truth. In the essay after the next I’ll be going much deeper into the dangers of myth, because again, as an atheist I am very much aware of the dangers of religious belief.

However, the major point I’m trying to make, is that we still need a cultural myth moving forward even if we cannot find one by looking backward. Even if you connect with Christianity and wish to bring it through the great filter of rationality and deconstruction, you must actually bring it through the filter. You cannot go back and assume that everything will work out fine because the environment is continuously changing and so your cultural myth must itself, continuously change. Anything else is a utopian ideal.

So where does that leave us? How can we actually move forward as a people when every avenue for cultural myth seems empty at best and dangerous at worst? The path, at least to my mind, is to begin cultivating a personal myth. If you want to know more on that, then please stay tuned for the next essay.

Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the essay, so please join the conversation in the comments below. You can also check out the videos already on my channel. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I wish you the best on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 - O’Neill, S. (2018, September 25). Myth. Obo. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0191.xml

2 - Smythe, W. (2014). Myth. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (pp. 1211–1214). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_195

3 - Bond, D. S. S. (2001). Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life. Shambhala.

4 – Mastropietro, C., & Vervaeke (2021) Gnosis in the Second Person: Responding to the meaning crisis in the Socratic quest of authentic dialogue in J.Rowson, J., & Pascal, L. (Eds). Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity. Perspectiva.

5 – The Conformist Cage of the Nice Guy

6 - 8 Key Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Canada. (n.d.). Retrieved July 31, 2024, from https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/8-key-issues-for-indigenous-peoples-in-canada

7 – Brinkley, Alan. American History: A Survey. 12th Edition, McGraw Hill 2007. Retrieved August 4, 2024, from https://teachermetzler.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WHY-HISTORIANS-DISAGREE_-Facts-Versus-Interpretations.pdf

8 – Fuster, J. (2017). “Spider-Man: Homecoming”: Was the Washington Monument Actually Built by Slaves? TheWrap. https://www.thewrap.com/spider-man-homecoming-washington-monument/

9 – The Washington Monument. (n.d.). National Museum of African American History and Culture. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://nmaahc.si.edu/washington-monument

10 – Washington Monument—Built to commemorate the first president of the United States, the monument has also become a hallowed symbol of DC. (n.d.). DC Historic Sites. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/655

11 – Basket of Deplorables. (2017). Spider-Man: Homecoming; The Washington Monument Was Not Built By Slaves. Youtube video.

12 – Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says. (n.d.). Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://carnegieendowment.orgundefined?lang=en

13 – Tyson, B. K. and A. (2023). Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/11/14/americans-trust-in-scientists-positive-views-of-science-continue-to-decline/

14 – U.S. is polarizing faster than other democracies, study finds. (n.d.). Brown University. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-01-21/polarization

15 – Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada 2023. (n.d.). Statista. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/

16 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing.

17 – Moon, S. A., & Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). Building the Cathedral: Answering the Meaning Crisis through Personal Myth; 9798728831211: Books—Amazon.ca. Retrieved July 21, 2024, from https://www.amazon.ca/Building-Cathedral-Answering-Meaning-Personal/dp/B0915PKWBY/

18 – John Vervaeke (2019) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis—YouTube. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ

19 – Mastropietro, C., Miscevic, F., & Vervaeke, J. (2017). Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Retrieved August 4, 2024, from https://www.amazon.ca/Zombies-Western-Culture-Twenty-First-Century/dp/178374328X/