In case I didn't make it clear, The Old Way is a book really worth reading. The reader needs to be prepared for a sad ending, though. What would you guess would be the effects of an "advanced" society on a very simple, organic one?

There isn't any good thing that doesn't have a downside. The development of writing made our civilizations possible, but it also made literalism possible. I doubt the existence of fundamentalists among societies that shared their stories only through telling. Myth seems to be a matter of freely creating permutations; there isn't any one standard version of a myth. Only when stories came to be written down could anyone get the idea of labeling one version as authoritative. And even for a while after writing, the liberal view could have persisted. This could be away to look at the two accounts of creation in Genesis. We get all knotted up about the "contradictions" between the two, because we think in terms of a single, literal truth. We don't understand how the Hebrews could have accounted for the world in two different ways. We could be taking the content of the stories more seriously, and literally, than the the 'authors' did. Even today, the invitation, "Tell me a story," doesn't create an expectation that the teller will give us information, but that she will entertain us or stimulate our imaginations.

Saffron wrote:On the surface it seems incompatible that a society that believe in superstitions and uses myth to explain the world would be lacking in scientific skills. This is an erroneous assumption.

I came across a similar underestimation in the book Collapse by Jarred Diamond. Diamond is describing the disappearance of the Easter Island society of the big heads (moai). One of the big mysteries is how those massive statues called moai were erected without the help of machinery. All kinds of theories have been put forth to explain; even aliens. It turns out all this time no one thought to ask the current inhabitants, the descendants of the folks who did the job. Finally a few years ago an anthropologist thought to ask and apparently the people were somewhat insulted that no one had asked previously. Not only did the people know, but they were able to demonstrate.

All this was really to make the point that we modern people assume that science (logic and rational thought) and the stuff of the unconscious mind (story telling, mythology, the arts) are incompatible, at odds, in competition. I believe they are part of the same process. More and more research on the workings of the human brain back this idea up (have a look at David Brooks' The Social Animal).

Beautifully said, Saffron. Thank you. I love the anecdote about Easter Island. Since you and DWill have recommended so many books that I want to read, I have to mention again A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. He discusses the rise and fall of several civilizations, including Easter Island, from an anthropologist's perspective. This book had a huge effect on me, much as Collapse seems to have had on you. Easter Island is pretty interesting as a society that seems to have gone insane. Competing tribes cut down every last tree in order to appease their gods, although I'm probably oversimplifying things.

I have always enjoyed Brooks' column in the NYTimes. I'll have to take a look at that book too.

DWill wrote:In case I didn't make it clear, The Old Way is a book really worth reading. The reader needs to be prepared for a sad ending, though. What would you guess would be the effects of an "advanced" society on a very simple, organic one?

There isn't any good thing that doesn't have a downside. The development of writing made our civilizations possible, but it also made literalism possible. I doubt the existence of fundamentalists among societies that shared their stories only through telling. Myth seems to be a matter of freely creating permutations; there isn't any one standard version of a myth.

That would explain why those who collected texts for the Bible would include two separate creation myths. I believe the second creation story is of later origin and, yet, both versions were included. Why? Perhaps they could appreciate the strengths of both myths from allegorical or symbolic perspectives. The creation stories were known to be much older and from different cultures and appreciated as such.

Lately I've been lamenting the decline of reading. It's ironic, however, that the ancient Greeks held similar concerns during the cultural transition from an oral to written tradition. Socrates apparently cautioned his society against learning to read because he believed it would negatively affect the way we pursue and internalize knowledge. See Wolf's article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/opini ... 05396.html

I don't mean to harp on Campbell's shortcomings, but to me his discussions of the myth seemed rather clinical or sterile as if he chose to view them through one particular and rather esoteric lens. I would have loved some context, to learn more about the Aztec, African, and native American cultures from which the myths sprang. It would have made this book much more interesting in my opinion. That said, his discussions of Buddha really resonated with me and I even went out and bought Buddha by Karen Armstrong, who is a former nun. Despite her Catholic background, Armstrong really provides quite the scholarly, even Wright-esque, account of the Buddha myths. In fact, much of her introduction seemed perfectly relevant to our recent discussions about how the ancients read myths and to the discussions on BT about the relevance of myth and religion in modern times.

For example:

"The monks who evolved the Canon (Buddhism) would certainly have believed in the existence of the gods, even though they saw them as limited beings and, as we shall see, were beginning to regard them as projections of human psychological states."

and . . .

"The story of Gotama has particular relevance for our own period. We too are living in a period of transition and change, as was North India during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Like the people of North India, we are finding that the traditional ways of experiencing the sacred and discovering an ultimate meaning in our lives are either difficult or impossible. As a result, a void has been an essential part of the modern experience. Like Gotama, we are living in an age of political violence and have had terrifying glimpses of man’s inhumanity to man. In our society too there are widespread malaise, urban despair and anomie, and we are sometimes fearful of the new world order that is emerging.

Many aspects of the Buddha’s quest will appeal to the modern ethos. His scrupulous empiricism is especially congenial to the pragmatic tenor of our own Western culture, together with his demand for intellectual and personal independence. Those who find the idea of a supernatural God alien will also warm to the Buddha’s refusal to affirm a Supreme Being. He confined his researches to his own human nature and always insisted that his experiences—even the supreme Truth of Nibbana—were entirely natural to humanity. Those who have become weary of the intolerance of some forms of institutional religiosity will also welcome the Buddha’s emphasis on compassion and loving-kindness."

The entire introduction is worth a read. You can read it online here:

http://englishonline4u.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/1082/

geo wrote: Lately I've been lamenting the decline of reading. It's ironic, however, that the ancient Greeks held similar concerns during the cultural transition from an oral to written tradition. Socrates apparently cautioned his society against learning to read because he believed it would negatively affect the way we pursue and internalize knowledge.

Kids probably develop types of abilities we haven't developed, through their immersion in the digital world. Maybe these abilities are in general more of a rapid-fire nature and rely on a different logical template. I see these signs in what my kids do with and seem to intuit about computer technology, whereas I'm mostly baffled. So, about the only thing we know is that we won't have it both ways, that reading as we have known it probably won't be as important going forward, but that maybe there is a benefit to the newer ways. I'm not completely sure what "digital world" means, come to think of it. I tend to think of the social media as the main part of it, and can see that the more people are plugged in to this, the less time they have to be by themselves. Being truly alone for long stretches is the prime requirement for reading, IMO. The medium itself, i.e., whether the text is paper or pixels, shouldn't make a crucial difference.

The late Walter J. Ong did ground-breaking work in the field of the transition from orality to literacy to secondary orality. I had one of his books in my hand a long time ago and found it stimulating. Here's a little from Wiki on him:

Ong's major concern in his works is the impact on culture and education of the shift from orality to literacy. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation.

Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes.

Because cultures at any given time vary along a continuum between full orality and full literacy, Ong distinguishes between primary oral cultures (which have never known writing), cultures with craft literacy (such as scribes), and cultures in a transition phase from orality to literacy, in which some people know of writing but are illiterate - these cultures have "residual orality".

Some of Ong's interests:

1. the historical development of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought
2. the mathematical transformation of thought in medieval and early modern logic and beyond
3. oral cyclic thought, which is characteristic of primary oral cultures, versus linear or historical or evolutionary thought, which depends on writing
4. the movement from oral heroic poetry to mock-heroic poetry in print culture to the realist tradition in literature to the modern antihero
5. the historical development in manuscript culture and print culture of the inward turn of personalized ego-consciousness, or individuality
6. the new dimensions of orality fostered by modern communication media that accentuate sound, which Ong calls secondary orality as it succeeds from, relies on, and coexists with writing
7. the origins and development of the Western educational system
8. the role and effects of Learned Latin in Western culture

Thanks for the Ong link. I had never thought much about the transition from oral to written. It's possible that engaging with the written word enables us to access material on a deeper level, but it's also reassuring that Socrates was likewise concerned. I can't really see a silver lining with the move to digital medium. The other day I gave my reading class a vocab quiz (multiple choice). One of the words they had difficulty with was "narcissus." Almost everyone got it wrong. (Curiously, very few could define the word "savanna" either.) So I brought in Bulfinch's Greek Mythology and read them the tale of Echo and Narcissus (plus the Wikipedia entry on Narcissistic Personality Disorder). I can see a day coming when Greek mythology will be so arcane that it will fall off the radar entirely. The relentless march of change.

You're a brave man, geo. I mean for facing the present (and glimpsing the future) full force in front of a group of young people. Ever feel as though you're in a segment of "Jaywalking"? There's one thing, at least, that I'll say for an unreconstructed fundamentalist--he probably knows the Bible well, which means that he's not stuck in his own time as so many others are.

Perspective, though, compels me to admit that when I was in grad school, the profs complained about our lack of cultural literacy, and their profs no doubt had similar complaints about them. Over a number of decades, the class labeled as the educated class has been getting dumber in terms of what it knows of the humanities.

Apparently I've turned into an old codger. I recall as an underclassman taking a Romantic Lit class—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, et al.—and being way, way out of my league. Our professor was horribly depressed about what a bunch of nincompoops we were. I'm still not ready to take that class.

David Brooks stood up for the humanities in one of his columns, a losing cause, he admits. I actually share this with my class so I can make the point that not all classes are directly related to finding a job, but that they still have worth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08brooks.html

It's tough because we need to be understanding of others' shortcomings, just as we would like others to be understanding of ours. The more we go on, the more there is to be held accountable for knowing. It's said that in the Renaissance a person (noble, with time on his hands) could reasonably expect to have a fairly deep knowledge of everything Western culture had produced to that point. Of course nobody could even come close now. Should we choose to have a shallow acquaintance with a lot or a deep one with much less?

Then, too, kids aren't stupid and will gravitate to where the rewards are. The rewards aren't set up by other kids, but by adults. For me the important thing now needs to be not how much you know--though the standard still does need to be raised--but the attitude towards broad learning as something that continues for life. Even for many smart people who went to the best schools, it seems that learning of the kind I have in mind is viewed as something they got over with, so they just coast the rest of the way. Is careerism the culprit?