For the record, I can hear your skepticism: How could a myth really save the world? While I appreciate your concern, I would like to assure you that I do understand that thoughts and ideas—stories—are powerless to save anything without action. We’ve already established that myths are stories we tell about who we are and what’s important to us. How, then, can a story save the world? It can’t. The story itself can’t save the world. Sorry. The myth is the end-product of wrestling with our values and identity. The myths we tell reflect the world we’ve created, and they give us a roadmap forward, not backward. So, Team Icarus needs to decide what kind of world to create. This is, of course, a lot more work than waiting for the magic beans of some story to sprout the world we wish we had. But this is World-Saving work, which is pretty heroic. So, let’s go Icarus, we’ve got some swimming to do.

Just one thing first, though: how, exactly, are we going to find the straws to spin into mythic, world-saving gold of epic proportions? Glad you asked! Years ago, I read Bill Moyers’s interview with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, and something Campbell said has stuck with me ever since:

“You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be.”1 (32)

The concept of a myth encompassing the entire planet and everyone on it has pestered me for years. Why? Because we don’t have stories encompassing humanity yet. The myths created in the past have presupposed an Other; a Them to vanquish that relegated some portion of humanity. Every era of human history boasts extraordinary moments, but one of ours may be that for the first time ever, we may really need a myth that includes the whole planet and everyone on it. Humans have populated the planet for many millennia, but for the first time, our interconnection is obvious. Please don’t misunderstand; we’ve always been Whitman’s leaves of grass, but now there’s no escaping it. We’re bombarded with this reality every day. The birth of photography, radio, television, and now the internet, show us undeniable proof that our root system sustains each blade of the whole. Each of these inventions has permeated our consciousness of each other more frequently and insistently than the last. Prior to these advances, humanity had word of mouth and, of course, the written word. The printing press is the only precedent we have of an invention that similarly revolutionized humanity and human connection, but—and I loathe to say anything that could be construed as criticizing the power of words because I’m all googly-eyed about words—but, the printing press still protected some barriers between us. In order to reap its benefits, a person had to be wealthy enough to afford both an education and the expense of buying actual books. When the first daguerreotypes were developed, people suddenly had the superpower of seeing beyond their own village or neighborhood. With radio, they could hear perspective beyond the scope of their own community or ideology. Television married these two bionic abilities, putting the world directly in people’s homes. And the internet has put the world literally in our hands at every moment, every day, all the time, forever. And, yes, there is financial cost to access the internet, but it’s cheap enough to have invaded every industry and institution and every person’s life. We rely on the internet in nearly every aspect of our lives to the point that many of us would struggle to survive if some catastrophic event severed us permanently from the internet. This level of interconnectivity is brand new. Before the internet, tv, radio, and photography democratized our access to the rest of humanity, the whole world was relegated to the privileged few who could afford it. Now, we’re swimming in unchartered waters of humanity because the world was revolutionized in the matter of a couple decades.

And so, for the first time in human history, we have access to all the other leaves of grass in the world. The marvel of 20th-century(ish) technological advances brought us together. But the same era that produced these inventions also spawned the first wars in human history in which nearly every person on the planet was affected by global problems. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, human nature being what it is, that the tools to access each other are also means of division. With barely more than a century’s experience of a globalized world, we don’t have much grounding to work together. We don’t have stories handed down from our ancestors showing us how to navigate this world. We don’t understand who we are now. We’re not clear on what’s important to us all. We don’t have any global myths. But these are sink or swim times—they usually are—and the water’s rising and we must create some new myths. How, then, can we find the story-threads to weave into global myth? We observe.

Campbell pointed out that we can’t predict what a myth will be because it requires some distance, some perspective, for realizations to find symbolic form. This is a fair point. We can, however, begin to poke and mull our realizations while we’re waiting around for the Muse of Myth to do her thing. Campbell deconstructed the process for us using George Lucas’s mythical narrative, episodes IV-VI of Star Wars as a guide.

“The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you’ve got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that…When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual…He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?…The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being.” (144)

Star Wars ignited the popular imagination because it grapples beyond the ancient good vs. evil to the extremely modern problem of retaining our humanity in a globalized world. We can thank George Lucas for doing the heavy swimming for Team Icarus here and presenting us with this new global myth, fully-formed Aphrodite-style (let’s just gracefully ignore episodes I-III). Thanks George Lucas! Stars Wars’ mythic symbols speak to us; they mean something to us because they help us process who we are and what’s important to us. Congratulations, Team Icarus! We might actually have a global myth here! But our work here is certainly not done, not by a long shot. We need to dig further, not so much for the fully-formed modern myths like Star Wars that have already been articulated by Team Icarus visionaries. It’s lazy to sit back and wait for others to do all the swimming. We must look for our threads of realization that haven’t found symbolic form yet. We must find the straws that we can weave into modern mythic gold.

Given that Lucas was successful in shaping the undercurrent of fear about humanity in the face of bureaucracy, we can look for clues about other fears we face. Ultimately, myths help us to confront and vanquish the beasts of our fear. If we dive down the rabbit hole of humanity’s congenital Us vs. Them mode of thinking, we can explore new variations on Lucas’s theme. In addition to the racial and religious tensions that that seem always to simmer around the world, we’re now adding political division to the pot. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was targeted, using the country’s racial and religious divisions to exacerbate its political ones, and the U.S. hasn’t been the only victim. Our response seems to be not to engage in civil discourse to work together, but to stigmatize anyone different than us; to Other people we disagree with. This leaves us with a big problem: how in the world are we supposed to swim together if we keep pushing each other down?

America has already created a narrative about this issue. Americans have styled lots of narratives about themselves, but we’ve long told the story about being a melting pot. The idea is that people from all over the world, different kinds of people, all come together in the United States, their differences melting away until they become a new people, forged by the common belief in liberty. When I was in sixth grade, I had one of the truly gifted teachers I was fortunate enough to encounter in the course of my formal education. Mr. Currier introduced me to the concept of the U.S. not as a melting pot, but a salad bowl. The distinction is that rather than homogenizing the population, we should retain the cultures and heritages that make us unique, creating a well-balanced whole. It was the first time my 11-year-old-self had ever thought to question this old American standard. Mr. Currier didn’t coin the idea, but he did introduce me to the idea of shifting our narrative, to widen the arc of Us to include the Them. It’s a profound shift. If the expectation is that everyone must become homogenized, that they must divorce one identity to claim another, the natural consequence, at best, is polarity, division, and tension. It’s practically a gift-wrapped weapon for anyone smart enough to use it.

Are we then doomed to drown ourselves? I don’t think so. The solution lies, I think, in embracing difference. We could say, I may be [insert any identity you like], but I am also a human being, sharing this planet with every other human being. This doesn’t necessitate division; if I can have local identities and a global identity, so can everyone else. The writer Rebecca Solnit explores the navigation of difference in her luminous book, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In chapter 18, “The Global Local, or Alterations in Place,” she examines discomfort with abandoning individual or local identity in favor of identifying as a larger whole. She opens the chapter by sharing an anecdote about a debate she had with her aunt over The Family of Man. The Family of Man was a modern art exhibit in 1955 with an accompanying book by the same name. Solnit writes:

“It was popular to denigrate it for its insistence on a universal humanity painted in the broadest terms, its photographs suggesting that motherhood or voting or work was ultimately the same everywhere, in disregard of the differences that postmodernism and multiculturalism have emphasized. My aunt exclaimed, ‘You don’t understand what it was like then, how divided we were, how important it was to find common ground after the war and the Holocaust and with the racism that was still rampant.’”2 (96)

This anecdote gets to the heart of our issue. The Family of Man clearly throws its lot in with Team Icarus, aiming to unify and heal division, but it raised the hackles of people feeling as though it calls for the abandonment of more local identities. If Team Icarus is to swim, we must do so in the manner of a crew team: each of us swimming to our very best ability; each using our unique perspective to further the effort. Solnit concludes her essay in true Team Icarus-style:

“From the wild coalitions of the global justice movement to the cowboys and environmentalists sitting down together, there is an ease with difference that doesn’t need to be eliminated, a sense that if the essentials of principle or goal are powerful enough you can work together, and that perhaps differences are a strength, not a weakness. A sense that you can have an identity embedded in local circumstance and a role in the global dialogue, an interest in networks of connection and a loss of faith in the reality of clear-cut borders…The Maori of New Zealand have had significant success in reviving their language, and Native Hawaiians have modeled their language programs after the Maori and in turn become models for the wave of language preservations and promulgations across Native North America. So this other globalization, the globalization of communication and of ideas, can be the antithesis of the homogenization and consolidation.” (99-100)

We don’t need to sacrifice one identity for another. We don’t need to stop being Identity X in order to swim with Team Icarus; the team needs all its swimmers. Your identity can buoy us along in ways that mine can’t, and vice versa. Perhaps the navigation of the local vs. global identities is a new thread of realization we can pick up in the quest for a new global myth. Now we need to let the realization percolate and see what kinds of symbols we dream up. Because the answer to the question about where we’re going to find these new myths is staring us right in the face. Seriously; go look in the mirror. The eyes you see there are the ones that we need to have on the lookout.

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Notes:

Image credit: "Blue Marble - Image of the Earth from Apollo 17" by NASA 

1. Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday. 1988. 

2. Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Nation Books. 2016.