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.
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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)
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.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
* * * * * * *“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.
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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.
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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).
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.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
From wiki:
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.
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
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: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
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.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 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