Two Heroes Offer Lessons from Their Personal Journeys 

Modern heroes don’t slay monsters who roam the world threatening the innocent and the vulnerable. Nor do they rescue damsels in distress. Unlike folk heroes or action figures, the true modern heroes, as the mythographer Joseph Campbell described them, undertake inward journeys, moving beyond their personal limitations to experience some inspiration or vision. In so doing, they gain a different understanding of what it means to live a human life. Such experiences resonate deeply within their own spirits, changing how they think and feel. In effect, the experience is a transformative one. Once a hero has taken such a journey, the next task is to return to the world and tell others about it.

In a new documentary out this week, “The Unbelievers,” scientists Richard Dawkins, professor emeritus of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist from Arizona State University, travel from Australia to England—and many places in between—to share the insights they have learned from their lifetimes of academic research and writing. They are just two of the leaders of an emerging group of scientists and other intellectuals known as the “new atheists.” In mythical terms they are on a mission to proclaim that contemporary science, not religion, gives us the better vision about what our universe is like and what the nature of the human condition is within that universe. 

Dawkins and Krauss tell their listeners that a universe can arise from nothing, needing neither a god nor some miracle to explain its existence.  And, in the general scheme of things, human beings are quite insignificant. The two scientists suggest that instead of turning to a god to give their lives meaning, people should find their own meaning and savor their lifetime. Dawkins in particular suggests that people can look to the scientific discoveries of our time for inspiration about the world around us: “Science is wonderful; science is beautiful,” Dawkins proclaims.                 "Religion is not wonderful; it is not beautiful. It gets in the way.”

Joseph Campbell also thought that science could indeed offer a “far more marvelous, mind-blowing revelation than anything the pre-scientific world could ever have imagined.” In fact, he said, the discoveries of science make the stories of the Bible and other ancient religions look childlike and tame by comparison. He also thought that the dogma of established religion obscured the true function of religion as a living myth, that is, to give a person a direct experience of the rapture of what it feels like to be alive. 

For Campbell, the question was whether science and technology would eventually make religion and magic fade away, or if science may someday help us better understand how the symbolic forms of myth arise from the human
spirit. He speculated that psychology (and no doubt neuroscience should be added to this now) could help us see why our common dreams become public myths, myths that can have positive, life-furthering ends. On the other hand, Campbell  thought that it would be artists—fiction writers and poets, painters and sculptors, musicians and  architects—who would articulate the contemporary vision. They, not the scientists, would interpret the symbols and create the stories that would help human beings live a good life under any circumstances. 

Today, the scientists are making similar claims for their own domain. They say they can help us understand who we are in this universe. And in some senses they can, but there is a difference. Scientists don't deal with symbols, metaphors, and stories. They deal with facts. Facts are processed through the intellect, whereas symbols, metaphors, and stories affect people at a deeper—dare we say spiritual?—level. Paradoxically, though, the unbelievers, the atheists, are more genuinely participating in building a living myth for today’s world than are the proponents of the ancient religions. This is especially true of the ancient Western religions, whose traditional sacred texts reflect far more foreign and primitive views of who we are as human beings and where we stand in this grand universe of ours.

“Our problem today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.”  Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)

Some of the best cultural observers in the late twentieth century discerned the initial impact of digital computers on our society and tried to remind anyone who would listen of its dangers. Their thoughts help us remember what’s central to living a full human life in this world full of shiny, wonderful gadgets and always, always, the next new thing.  Joseph Campbell’s life spanned a good part of the twentieth century. Born in 1904, this renowned expert in world mythology lived through two world wars, the Depression, the dropping of the atomic bomb, Vietnam, the domestic mess of the sixties, and the relentless encroachment of machines, first the mechanical ones and then the electronic ones, before his death in 1987. Late in life he spent many hours in interviews with Bill Moyers, the cream of which eventually became “The Power of Myth.” A highly popular, deeply interesting set of interchanges gleaned from those conversations aired on PBS soon after Campbell’s death. Subsequently, the entire set of conversations appeared in book form under the same title.

Although Campbell believed that we live in a demythologized world, he found that students around the country were attracted to his lectures in large numbers, mostly, he speculated, because mythology provided messages
unlike what ordinary course work at colleges and universities offered in his day. Myths are “stories about the wisdom of life. . . . What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re
getting information. There’s a reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.” 

One major reason for this was increasing specialization, something that has intensified in the twenty-first century. Campbell pointed out that specialization necessarily limits the field in which one considers any problem and tends to eliminate the life values, especially the human and cultural aspects of any specific issue. Generalists, on the other hand, have the advantage of a broader perspective and the ability to make more complex associations and perhaps gain deeper insights as well. They can take something learned in one specialty and relate it to something learned in different specialty. By so doing, they can discover similar patterns or contradictions or discontinuities that aren’t apparent when one specializes in a narrow field.

Growing specialization and a greater focus on the literal, factual level of life, “the news of the day and the problems of the hour,” have only become more commonplace since the 1980s. Information technologies, with its data gluts, information overloads, knowledge “management,” and, most recently, big data, have put an enormous emphasis on the technologies themselves and have changed the pursuit of knowledge into a process of learning how to access the information one might need to know at some point or other in the future. As a result, the continuum of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom has become jumbled, their meanings confused. Some now describe knowledge as “actionable information.” Others, emphasizing dramatic changes in the state of knowledge due to the Internet, claim that the nature of knowledge has changed fundamentally. Knowledge now resides in networks, they maintain. It can’t possibly reside in an individual's head. In fact, knowledge is probably, in David Weinberger words, “too big to know.” As for wisdom, many seem to equate wisdom today with the consensus of a crowd or, even worse, the dynamics of the marketplace.

Like Joseph Campbell, the journalist and medical researcher Norman Cousins lived through the bulk of the twentieth century and observed the onslaught of technology with similar ambivalence and prescience.  "The essential problem of man in a computerized age,” he wrote in “The Poet and the Computer” (1990),  isn’t any
different than it was in previous times. “That problem is not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but how to be more sensitive, more sensible, more proportionate, more alive. The computer makes possible a phenomenal leap in human proficiency . . . But the question persists and indeed grows whether the computer makes it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it now is.” 

Computers as electronic brains can help enormously in vital research of many sorts, Cousins wrote. “But they can’t eliminate the  foolishness and decay that come from the unexamined life. Nor do they connect a man to the things he has to be connected to—the reality of pain in others; the possibilities of creative growth in himself; the memory of the race; and the rights of the next generation.” These things matter, Cousins went on to say, because in the computer age “there may be a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there is a tendency to confuse logic with values, and intelligence with insight.” All of which makes that this bright and shiny present and that enchanting next new thing seem quite ephemeral and even trivial in comparison to the really exciting journey of life and the challenge of how to live it fully in the midst of—and perhaps in spite of— all our digital machines.

I recently had a chance to revisit a wonderful series  of conversations Bill Moyers had with Joseph Campbell, a renowned and innovative  scholar of comparative mythology, a long-time teacher at Sarah Lawrence, and  the author of many books, beginning with The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948). The Moyers conversations, called The Power of Myth, originally aired on PBS in the late eighties. But now, even twenty-five years later, there is much
rich, relevant material in those programs and in a companion book that includes all twenty-four hours of those talks, which were whittled down to a mere six hours for the PBS series itself. 

Campbell and Moyers spoke over a period of two years at George Lukas’s Skywalker Ranch and later at the Museum of Natural History in New York. In the course of their talks, Joseph Campbell repeated several times in
different contexts that our contemporary life had no relevant myths. Things were changing too fast, he believed, for a mythology to form. He defined myths as metaphors, stories that harmonize our lives with reality. They express the experience of living in terms that are appropriate for a specific time. But our lives have essentially been demythologized in the latter part of the twentieth century (and perhaps even earlier). Yet the old myths are still useful as guides, Campbell always maintained; they provide messages and hints about what  it means to be alive. 

Various journalists, scholars, and innovative thinkers today are writing about the nature of our life today and how we can accommodate the prevailing technology and flood of information and live successfully amid all of it. In effect, they are attempting to articulate various parts of the dominant symbols, metaphors, and stories—a mythology of sorts for today. And so  I thought it would be interesting to use this blog to explore some these  writings within the context of mythology as Campbell defined it and to bring some of his wisdom to bear on the problem of how we live in this world of the early twenty-first century.

One of the most powerful symbols of our time is of  course the Internet, also known as the World Wide Web or just the Web, and it is having a profound influence on the way we think about things. Daniel Weinberger, whose book Too Big to Know I reviewed on January 24th of this year the shape and nature of knowledge: Human knowledge, Weinberger argues, is assuming the shape of—and the scale of—the Internet. One solution to the resulting information overload, then, is to build not hierarchies but networks. Weinberger claims this is a serious shift in knowledge itself (although I believe it may be more of a shift in our approach to perceiving and manage information). Weinberger writes: “The Internet’s abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified.”In case you don’t think this is necessarily a good thing, he expands on this vision: “The new strategy of publishing everything we find thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection.”

This may sound a bit like the Wikipedia version of knowledge, but with less rigorous rules. In fact, it closely  resembles a free-for-all of  knowledge. Weinberger sees the structure of the Internet changing our  understanding of scientific facts. He claims that authority no longer reigns, even in scientific research, because truth is always being debated and revised. But that has been the nature of science for centuries, as science learns more and more about the world around us. Weinberger claims we can best learn to use the Net by understanding that authority, or the truth, is “the last page in the linked chain you visit” does not follow. But this seems to be to be more whimsy
than anything else. In fact, given the uneven level of the quality of information one can find on the Internet, it simply doesn’t make sense to say that the last page is the final word on a given topic. The last page could be
completely specious, contradicting many highly informative pages that preceded  it. 

The idea that only now is knowledge networked is also very questionable. As C.W. Anderson points out in his review in The Atlantic of Too Big To Know, knowledge has always been networked, just not electronically. Using the example of finding the population of Pittsburg in 1983 in an almanac, Anderson writes: “What do
almanacs, census bureaus, government funding streams, volunteers, the notebooks volunteers carry, and libraries amount to, if not a network?” So too I would point out that learning has never been a linear process. As one researches a topic, one might move from a chapter in one book to a journal article to three books on the topic and on and on until one is satisfied of the grasp of the knowledge available. It wasn’t as easy as clicking on links but it was always a process of exploration with some serendipity and surprise always bound to be part of the experience. 

Nevertheless, Weinberger’s whole thesis is representative of a growing body of literature that derives its energy, its
vision, and its sense of mystery (often verging on mysticism) from the image of the Internet, and this phenomenon in itself bears more close examination. Is this the beginning of a new mythology, a new set of symbols and stories that help us explain to ourselves and each other what it means to experience life today?  Or is it just an overreaction to a powerful but essentially mechanistic intrusion of new electronic capabilities into our environment? Moyers writes that the last time he saw Joseph Campbell, he asked him if he still believed “that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.” Campbell thought about that for a moment and then replied, “The greatest ever.”
Perhaps the next phase is always the greatest ever, when it comes to science.  I’m not sure our grounding in our own human spirits though is making a comparable leap forward however. 
See also:  Joseph Campbell Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving his memory and  works, including making available a large collection on work unpublished during his lifetime.
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