New Mythologies, Crackpot Theories, and the Razor’s Edge

Share thoughts and ideas regarding what can be done to meet contemporary humanity's need for rites of initiation and passage.

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noman
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New Mythologies, Crackpot Theories, and the Razor’s Edge

Post by noman »

It was quite a shock to Western culture. Though it had been anticipated and talked about for many decades. It happened about forty-five years ago, in the Sixties. Western culture was confronted with a new and pressing problem: God was dead. It was even in the headlines.

Time, April 8, 1966

Praise be to Man. Humanism had finally won; game, set, and match. (stop cheering JJ)

Well, maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. Not everyone felt the shock, understood there was a problem, or would give a rat’s rump had they understood it. But those of us who came of age during this time, who liked to read, and who took an interest in high minded debates and theories, were bombarded with responses to the death of God. Joseph Campbell said his royalties went up ten-fold in the 60s. He also said that no one in the 20s thought we would be talking about religion in the 70s.

There were plenty of cults. But few of us ventured that far. I think most people were like me; aloof, reading and taking in the scene, good consumers of this new psycho/religious publishing cottage industry. Most books, such as the ones written by Joseph Campbell, don’t drive home a belief system, or doctrine, or inspire a new cult or religion, but rather present interesting and inspiring ideas.

Here are some examples:

Chariots of the Gods, Erich Von Daniken, 1968

This was an extremely popular theory and is often cited as a poster child for pseudoscience. The theory contends there is evidence that proves that extraterrestrials, space travelers, visited ancient civilizations on earth, bred with them, having a profound effect on humankind’s destiny.

* * * * * * *

The last three books written by anthropologist Marija Gimbutas:

1.) The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974)
2.) The Language of the Goddess (1989),
3.) The Civilization of the Goddess (1991)
According to her interpretations, gynocentric and gylanic societies were peaceful, they honored homosexuals, and they espoused economic equality. The "androcratic", or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gim ... rchaeology
No one doubts she was a fine archeologist. But I see the theory of a golden age of matriarchy and peace as part of the ‘cult of the noble savage’ that was so popular in the late 60s and early 70s. The death of God could well be replaced by a resurrection of the original Goddess of the Neolithic. Included is the idea of ‘a fall’, a motif that shows up in many mythologies old and new. Everything was better in ancient times. Now everything has gone to hell.
“We are still living under the sway of that aggressive male invasion and only beginning to discover our long alienation from authentic European heritage-gylanic, nonviolent, earth centered culture and its symbolic language, whose vestiges remain enmeshed in our own system of symbols.”

- Gimbutas
* * * * * * *

These were a couple of my favorites from the 70s.

The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra, 1975

and

The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav, 1979

Western science was a primary cause of religion’s demise. Young Westerners were looking with delight at Eastern religions and philosophies. What better way to enlightenment could there be but to combine the exciting discoveries in modern astrophysics and nuclear physics with Eastern thought.

* * * * * * *

Another favorite of mine to address the mythological crisis was:

The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker, 1973

Former President Bill Clinton listed Becker’s book on his 21 all time favorites. (The inclusion of his wife’s autobiography might be the reason for the odd number of twenty-one.)

In Denial of Death Becker took the highly respected theories of Kierkegaard (a devout religious fundamentalist) and Freud (a hard-headed atheist) and showed the kinship between the disciplines of religion and psychology. Also included, were general theories about mental illness. Schizophrenics, he argued, are more ‘realistic’ than we so-called healthy folks who need defense mechanisms to keep us from realizing the horror of our existence. He speaks of hypnosis, as a specific instance of ‘the spell cast by persons’ calling it the ‘nexus of unfreedom’ and cites the Holocaust as an example of the secret desire we all have to escape from the burden of decision-making. Becker raves about the theories of Otto Rank, who saw the human problem as two relentless and incompatible desires; to be one with all, transcendent, and to be an individual, unique and autonomous. Death is feared because it threatens to dissolve the self. Creativity is desired because it reinforces the self. The heroic individual reshapes the world, or himself. We are all artists and heroes in this sense.

* * * * * * *

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976

I would have loved this one a lot more had I read it back in the 70s and not just a couple of weeks ago. It’s a wild theory. Before the Axial Age Jaynes claims, people didn’t think the way we think. There was no subjective consciousness as we know it. Instead, the right side of the brain spoke (as an authoritative God), and the left side of the brain listened (as an obedient servant).
P73 Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Illiadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices. The gods were organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time, amalgams of parental or admonitory images. The god is a part of the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact that the gods never step outside of natural laws.

- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976
Wow! Does this ever feed the bulldog? God didn’t die. S/he has been redefined as the neural networks in the right side of the human brain. Schizophrenics and epileptics are diviners that hear the voice of God. So are poets.
From wiki:

Jaynes further argues that divination, prayer and oracles arose during this breakdown period, in an attempt to summon instructions from the "gods" whose voices could no longer be heard….Leftovers of the bicameral mind today, according to Jaynes, include religion, hypnosis, possession, schizophrenia and the general sense of need for external authority in decision-making.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mind#cite_note-1
This next quote illustrates ‘the fall’ motif in Jaynes’ theory. We went from hunter-gatherers with little social control, to ‘bicameral’ civilization with a somewhat peaceful social control, and then to modern man with a subjective consciousness and a society with less peaceful forms of social control.
P126 The speculative thesis which I shall try to explain in this chapter – and it is very speculative – is simply an obvious corollary from what has gone before. The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities. The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

P202 The gods were in no sense ‘figments of the imagination’ of anyone. They were man’s volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores admonitory and perceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then ‘told’ the man what to do.

In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian governments with militarism and police repression. This association should not be applied to the authoritarian states of the bicameral era. Militarism, police, rule by fear, are all the desperate measures used to control a subjective conscious populace restless with identity crises and divided off into their multitudinous privacies of hopes and hates.

In the bicameral era, the bicameral mind was the social control, not fear or repression or even law. There were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral men had no internal ‘space’ in which to be private, and no analog ‘I’ to be private with. All initiative was in the voices of gods. And the gods needed to be assisted by their divinely dictated laws only in the late federations of states in the second millennium BCE.
Within each bicameral state, therefore, the people were probably more peaceful and friendly than in any civilization since.

- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976
There is something that all of these books have in common. They expound ideas and theories that are fun and to some people frivolous. They are fun because they speak in some way to the pressing issue of the loss of myth. They are frivolous to some because they are ideas that cannot be prove or disproved by science and reason. I like what the philosopher Daniel Dennett says:
If we are going to use this top-down approach, we are going to have to be bold. We are going to have to be speculative, but there is good and bad speculation, and this is not an unparalleled activity in science. […] Those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun.

- Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren; essays on designing minds, 1998
I think Joseph Campbell’s work falls into this same category of relating many interesting ideas about religion, culture, narratives, and the human psyche, that are unproved and unprovable. I remember him on a talk radio show with Michael Toms. It was a call-in show. Someone asked him about Von Daniken’s theory of ancient extraterrestrials and he said he couldn’t comment because he hadn’t read it. I think he was being polite. Another caller started talking about a theory of spiritual moon beams that have an effect on people. He quickly said he didn’t know anything about it and then explained to Michael Toms that he was trained as a scientist first.

I propose that on the topics addressed by Campbell and similar scholars, in anthropology, art, psychology, philosophy, religion, literature, and mythology, one must walk a razor’s edge, between the hard-headed rationalism that would deny any discussion on topics that cannot be proved or disproved, and a frivolous mysticism that allows any theory, no matter how crackpot, to be seriously considered and appreciated.

So my question is this: how does one recognize a ‘crackpot’ theory? How do we walk that razor’s edge?

- NoMan

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Post by Cindy B. »

As for Jaynes' original theory, this one crosses disciplines and has spawned a considerable amount of scientific research over the decades, as well as being supported in many of its aspects by research in related fields. True, not everyone accepts the concept of a pre-existent "bicameral mind," but as a psychologist, the concept is not one that I'd call "frivolous." I wonder, too, at times about the initial timeline that Jaynes presented, but other than that, he and those who've come after him do have something to offer and worth investigating when it comes to consciousness studies and better understanding certain severe mental illnesses and other brain-related conditions...in my opinion, of course. :wink:

Cindy

P.S. A Wikipedia link? I suggest that this site would better serve: http://www.julianjaynes.org/index.html (Just so you know, in general I don't put much stock or faith in Wikipedia and in this case particularly so.)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

Evinnra
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Re: New Mythologies, Crackpot Theories, and the Razor’s Edge

Post by Evinnra »


So my question is this: how does one recognize a ‘crackpot’ theory? How do we walk that razor’s edge? – NoMan
How do we recognize a crackpot theory? It is through examining the evidence supporting the theory.

Yet, if it were simple to do, I think philosophers would be unemployed or even worse, people in general would be unmotivated to search for the truth. I for one use a single rule; if there is material (or in some cases merely rationally compelling ) evidence to support the truth of a theory, then I cautiously accept the theory to be useful. After this I try to see if the theory works, if it is consistent with those beliefs I have already tried and tested. My ‘maybe true’ basket is almost filled to the brim by now.
By the way, have you heard the latest on the dilemma of God’s existence?

‘God is dead.’ – Nietsche
‘Nietsche is dead.’ - God
:lol: 8)
'A fish popped out of the water only to be recaptured again. It is as I, a slave to all yet free of everything.'
http://evinnra-evinnra.blogspot.com

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Post by Cindy B. »

Evinnra wrote:God is dead.’ – Nietsche
‘Nietsche is dead.’ - God
Too funny, Evinnra!

One of my favorite bumper stickers: Oh, for my sake, evolve. --God

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

bodhibliss
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Post by bodhibliss »

Thanks for bringing up Jaynes, Noman - and your post, Cindy, inspired a lengthy, rambling meditation of my own on Jaynes that draws on ideas I've expressed here and there in previous posts in CoHO and elsewhere onsite

... but I figured that would take us waaay off topic, so posted it as a separate thread on Jaynes in the Mythology & Religion Conversation.

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Post by noman »

…I don't put much stock or faith in Wikipedia and in this case particularly so.

- Cindy
Whaaat? No faith in Wiki. I though Wiki was God. So I’m talking to a ‘a-wikiist’.

Truth is - I don’t exactly trust Wiki or anything else I see in printed ink or pixels. But I think Wiki is a great part of the mix. There’s an old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee. It’s a terrible thing to say about an animal so well suited to its environment, as though the Platonic form of horse is the standard against which all mounted creatures should be measured. Notwithstanding the political incorrectness of the saying, I appreciate the fact that Wiki is written by people with many different angles. Most articles are noncontroversial, factual information that few people squabble over. But if there is something political at stake – watch out. When I first learned about Wiki, I looked up the article on evolution. What a laugh. The editing history showed that the entire article had been replaced many times with the repeated phrase ‘evolution is a lie’ or else ‘blah, blah, blah, blah’.

But I love the fact that Wiki’s is ‘open’ to a variety of minds. I wouldn’t go to the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner website to get a review on their vacuum cleaners, nor would go to the Julian Jaynes Society website to determine the merits of Jaynes’ theory of the evolution of consciousness.

What I like even better than Wiki, to evaluate a theory such as Jaynes’, are the reviews at Amazon. Origin of Consciousness has 145 reviews. That tells me this is a very popular book. I would say all but about a dozen are positive. Of course, it is not a scientific survey. People tend to review the books they love the most. But I was impressed by the enthusiasm and zealotry with which reviewers wrote about Jaynes’ book, how vociferously they defended Jaynes against the few dissenters, and how many of them claimed the book had ‘changed their lives.’

This got me thinking about other popular books, from my era so-to-speak, that had a similar impact. After giving it some thought, I concluded that all of these books I’ve listed above have a common thread: they all address the loss of mythology in one way or another.

(I will jump over to Bodhi’s thread to talk about the specifics of Jaynes’ theory.)

* * * * * * *

About Nietzsche’s death of God Evinnra. I read somewhere that some Nietzsche zealots in the 60s had a mock funeral for God. All of my life this has been the focus: the death of God and what to do about it. But it was just recently, being the slow thinker that I am, I began to realize that this hasn’t been the primary problem of my generation. After all, God was dying for Diderot and Voltaire. But God was replaced by a belief in man and human reason. This is the Enlightenment project.

But for many reasons too involved to explain, the Enlightenment project disintegrated in the 60s and 70s and the era of Postmodernism and social construction was born. Postmodern thinker Michael Foucault is often thought of as a disciple of Nietzsche. He asserted that knowledge and power are inseparable. He died in the early 80s in the AIDs epidemic from partaking in San Francisco’s emerging liberal gay life-style. Foucault’s spoke of the ‘death of man,’ mimicking Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’. But he was referring to the end of the Enlightenment project with its faith in man and human reason.

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspa ... anaher.htm

I know it sounds cynical but he had good intentions. In order to achieve the higher goals of a more egalitarian society we must reach beyond man in a sense.

In the mid 80s, one of the most enduring myth/rituals of the New Age began in the San Francisco bay area. It is a yearly festival that continues to this day not far from where I live in the high desert, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

It is called:

Burning Man

Though the organizers would never admit to any connection to the philosopher Michael Foucault, I can’t help but believe the icon was chosen at least in part by his influence.

- NoMan

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Post by richard silliker »

NoMan

So my question is this: how does one recognize a ‘crackpot’ theory? How do we walk that razor’s edge?


Intuitively.

RS
"We sacrifice the whole truth of any given experience for the value to which we are constrained".

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Post by Evinnra »

noman wrote:

In the mid 80s, one of the most enduring myth/rituals of the New Age began in the San Francisco bay area. It is a yearly festival that continues to this day not far from where I live in the high desert, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

It is called:

Burning Man

Though the organizers would never admit to any connection to the philosopher Michael Foucault, I can’t help but believe the icon was chosen at least in part by his influence.

- NoMan
Burning man, to purge man? You know me NoMan, it just does not register with me that mankind is beyond hope. Whoever says otherwise is considered a crackpot by me. Why? My intuition is currently screaming at me saying 'don't quit just before reaching the finish line'. We are about to grow up. :)
'A fish popped out of the water only to be recaptured again. It is as I, a slave to all yet free of everything.'
http://evinnra-evinnra.blogspot.com

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Post by Neoplato »

Burning man, to purge man? You know me NoMan, it just does not register with me that mankind is beyond hope. Whoever says otherwise is considered a crackpot by me. Why? My intuition is currently screaming at me saying 'don't quit just before reaching the finish line'. We are about to grow up.
I’m glad to see you don’t consider me a crackpot. :D

Well…at least on this point anyway. :wink:
Infinite moment, grants freedom of winter death, allows life to dawn.

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Post by Evinnra »

Neoplato wrote:
Burning man, to purge man? You know me NoMan, it just does not register with me that mankind is beyond hope. Whoever says otherwise is considered a crackpot by me. Why? My intuition is currently screaming at me saying 'don't quit just before reaching the finish line'. We are about to grow up.
I’m glad to see you don’t consider me a crackpot. :D

Well…at least on this point anyway. :wink:
Our telepathy does not seem to work well in the past week or so Neo. :roll: I have always believed in your mind being far superior to most. In fact I felt it was you who thinks that I am a crackpot. If you are pessimistic about the future of mankind, I can understand that but you don't strike me as a person who makes sweeping statements and writes off humanity as a whole based on gross generalizations :? .
'A fish popped out of the water only to be recaptured again. It is as I, a slave to all yet free of everything.'
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Post by Neoplato »

Evinnra Wrote:
Our telepathy does not seem to work well in the past week or so Neo.
Probably "sunspots". :D
If you are pessimistic about the future of mankind, I can understand that but you don't strike me as a person who makes sweeping statements and writes off humanity as a whole based on gross generalizations
Actually, I'm much more optimistic than I used to be. Humanity will find a way to endure. :D
Infinite moment, grants freedom of winter death, allows life to dawn.

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