A Myth lingering

I’ve long been fascinated by the academic idea of “myth” as roughly “the stories by which we live our lives.” In that sense, a myth can be true – indeed, one would hope we’d live according to truth, not delusion.

As Wikipedia says in its opening paragraph on mythology:

…The term “myth” is often used colloquially to refer to a false story; however, the academic use of the term generally does not pass judgment on its truth or falsity. In the study of folklore, a myth is a religious narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Many scholars in other fields use the term “myth” in somewhat different ways. In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story...

It was in this academic sense that C.S. Lewis wrote of myth becoming fact in the incarnation of Christ.

There was a time in my life when myth becoming fact would have sounded like gibberish – arrestingly expressed, but gibberish. I know this to a certainty, though I discovered Lewis in college, because I remember branding a new faculty member in my evangelical Protestant boarding high school as “liberal” because he spoke of certain fiction (probably Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner) as being “true.” “Truth” was “fact” – like in the Bible – I knew deep in my bones.

How I could believe that when Christ said “I am the … truth” is beyond me. (It’s obligatory, it seems, for former Evangelicals to call their upbringing “fundamentalist,” but this is one intellectual roadblock I had that seems to warrant the equation of evangelicalism and fundamentalism – at least as expressed at my boarding school.)

One such true myth by which we refuse to live is the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair mythically is about scapegoating and bigotry, with the bending of the rule of law thrown in for good measure. (Oh my! People do still hear about Dreyfus, don’t they? It’s not a myth if they don’t.)

I say we “refuse to live by it because of interment of Japanese during World War II and the interment of suspected bad guys at Guantanamo Bay even today. Sometimes, wrongful convictions through prosecutorial misconduct generally is the phenomenon writ small.

There is a review of a newish book on the Dreyfus affair at the Financial Times which may be of interest. I had forgotten how long the scandal echoed loudly in France, and I had no idea that it may have influenced Theodore Herzl to found modern Zionism.

I have tended to admire France, grudgingly (I was treated as haughtily there as any other American), for marching to its own drummer, but the record clearly is not all admirable.

Then again, what history is all admirable? Even modern Israel is writing chapters that, G*d willing, they will some day rue.

Even when I was a kid, we didn’t go to the farm

Georgetown Porcher Patrick Deeneen asks “what’s wrong with this commercial?”

He wasn’t able to wait very long before volunteering his answer. But before you peek at his answer, let’s try another one. What’s even wronger with this commercial?

Hint: The only medical malpractice case I won for a client involved a small-town doctor who didn’t “palpate” the ribs and abdomen of a traumatized patient (because of revulsion at her obesity, we hypothesized) who was bleeding to death internally from exactly the injuries that a physician trained in trauma would expect. His examination might as well have been a cheery “Hi, Ellen!”

Anyone here use Skype? My daughter-in-law is an immigrant. For 10 years, she only “saw” her grandmother occasionally via Skype. Grandma flew to the U.S. 8 days ago. Guess which my daughter-in-law prefers?

Nothing against Cisco or Skype, but reality is better than virtual reality most of the time.

Education as counter-hegemonic

Over on the Porch, much of the talk is about education. Two recent posts there highlight some of the changes in higher education of which, it often seems, many are unaware because the change has been over maybe five decades or more.

For instance, Ted McAllister, one of the less active Porchers, riffs briefly on Pepperdine’s substitution of “first year” for “freshman:”

I’m struck by how thoroughly universities have largely given up any sense that they should serve as repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom, replaced by an embarrassingly old-fashioned and moralizing (and hence not morally serious) crusade to be institutions of social transformation.

Jason Peters focuses not on the crusade to be institutions of social transformation, but the pervasive money orientation of the whole enterprise:

What makes all of this so disheartening is that it is cast in monetary terms in the first place—and exclusively. Clearly the value of an education must be realized in dollars. Education is no longer an end but a means only—and a vulgar one. In such talk as we meet here it is impossible to make sense of knowledge “acted upon, informed, or . . . impregnated by Reason.”

“Repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom” are deeply counter-cultural in a consumerist society. We need our institutions of higher learning to be such repositories, not agents of faddish social transformation.