In Part I of our search for global myths, we explored why we even need global myths, where we might find them, and we delved into the specific need for myth about the individual’s place in the scheme of a larger humanity. In Part II, we’re going to look at a new problem facing humanity as we become increasingly interconnected on a global scale: the health of our physical environment. Despite our recent governmental policies, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe we should implement policy to limit carbon emissions. According to a November 2016 Yale poll, this isn’t even a partisan issue: “Democrats (85%), Independents (62%) and Republicans (52%) all support setting strict limits on these emissions.” So we’re not going to get mired in debate over if our home is in danger or why. We’re going to do what we do best over here: we’re going to look at some narratives from the past for clues about the myth we need to create to save our planet and ourselves.

In Part I, we thought about the idea that it hasn’t even been 200 years since people have had the tools to experience globalized humanity—200 years is the breath before a sneeze in the scheme of human existence on this planet. Humanity hasn’t yet truly faced a global threat in recorded history—meaning a threat against every person in every part of the world. The closest we’ve come is localized devastation: draught, earthquake, and perhaps of highest literary significance, flood. We have ancient texts describing devastating floods, which are often described as a destruction of the entire world. And to the people of these stories, the area destroyed by their floods was the entire world because it encompassed the limits of their scope of perception. From the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh:1

               Six days and seven nights
               came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land.
               When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding,
               the flood was a war—struggling with itself like a woman writhing (in labor).
               The sea calmed, fell still, the whirlwind (and) flood stopped up.
               I looked around all day long—quiet had set in
               and all the human beings had turned to clay! (Tablet XI: 127-133)

to the story of Noah’s Ark in the book of Genesis:2

“The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.”  (New International Version, Genesis 7:20-22)

to many other ancient flood myths from around the world that you can read about here if you’re interested. We even have scientific theories about such a flood that may have literally happened. It’s reasonable to theorize that ancient flood myths grapple with our origin and our need to rationalize devastation. That need, which is really a manifestation of the search for Truth, is the whole reason that we humans even trifle with literature. So, what are those flood narratives trying to teach us? Essentially, they’re saying the same thing: humans screw up and natural disaster is the kick in the pants they need to pull themselves together.

Humans are screwing up today. Humans have always screwed up. It’s in our nature to screw up; to divide, to Other, to bask in our hubris as we flap our clever contraptions too close to the sun. The problem we face now is that our cleverness, which has helped us to soar higher than we’ve ever been capable of in the past, also puts us in distinct danger of not only melting the wax in our wings, but of setting the whole world on fire. This screw up—the unmitigated disregard for the health of our planet—is one that won’t just plunge us into the sea to cool our wings for a bit. It could light us on fire; and burning fireballs can’t swim, so that spells Game Over for Team Icarus. But if we know we’re screwing up, why can’t we figure out how to knock it off? We already know what to do, don’t we? Our rock-star Team Icarus legions of scientists tell us not only what’s happening now, but how to reverse course. Yet we waste our time bickering instead of swimming together. The stakes we face today are perhaps higher than ever in human history, but we don’t learn the lessons that our ancestors toiled to articulate so we could live in a better world.

Just about a century ago, the poet William Butler Yeats voiced the devastation he witnessed in his own time. I admire his big-picture, humanity-encompassing view of the world; he adored folklore and mythology, and used them to symbolically inform his writing. He’s a Team Icarus heartthrob if ever there was one, but definitely not one to sugarcoat the world he observed. In response to the Russian Revolution, which transformed Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union, Yeats wrote the poem, “The Second Coming.”:3

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Chances are that even if you’re not familiar with poetry, this one is ringing some bells. It has been widely pilfered by popular culture, perhaps more than any other poem, likely because it resonates so strongly. It terrified us a century ago and it still terrifies us today. In the first stanza, Yeats mourns the loss of civilization he sees in the world. He calls human eras “gyres” and describes being on the precipice between one era ending and a new one beginning. At the start of the new, “widening gyre”, humanity is spinning out of control, spinning farther and farther away from the origin of our humanness, our humanity. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” (ahem, hello Icarus!) because good people stand by and watch powerlessly as others destroy. And Yeats has a good point: what rough beast is slouching towards its birth? What is that beast? Is it sentient? What does it want? Why does it slouch? What is its intent? Why doesn’t Yeats just spell it out for us? Why is this poem giving Team Icarus nightmares a hundred years on? Why?! What?!

Let’s all take a deep breath before we hyperventilate. This poem keeps scaring the pants off us because we’re still turning in that same widening gyre Yeats is writing about. A hundred years isn’t very long at all in the scope of human history, and we’ve spent the last hundred frantically moving forward ever-faster, without much understanding of what or how we’re doing it. He conjures “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi”—by which he means that he’s tapping the collective unconsciousness that weaves together the whole of humanity—and he sees something that “Troubles my sight.” He sees darkness; destruction; slaughter. He sees the death of civility as the slaughter of humanity. And that rough beast? That guy is the slaughter of humanity made manifest.

While Yeats doesn’t seem to have been particularly concerned with the preservation of the environment, he was most definitely concerned with themes of humanity, most notably the link between art and politics. As we read “The Second Coming” a hundred years after it was written, Yeats’s rough beast takes a new form: the wholesale ruin of our environment. Yeats may have been unaware of this particular threat to human existence, but as we look at the world today, we see ever more frequent, distressing storms and flooding, years that continue to break historical records for heat, melting ice caps, and rising waters. These events are facts, not opinions. They have been observed, measured, and verified. Regardless of your personal theories as to the cause of these facts, they nonetheless constitute a rough beast slouching toward its birth. And that’s terrifying; it should be terrifying. We should use our terror to galvanize us into action instead of merely lacking conviction, because the people who profit from keeping things status quo sure are full of passionate intensity to keep on profiting.

What, then, do we do here, Team Icarus? You don’t need me to tell you to cut back on fossil fuel consumption, or meat and dairy consumption, or any of the other solutions scientists have proposed to attack this problem. It doesn’t appear that we lack conviction; but perhaps what we do lack is action behind those convictions. We must unite our voices to counter the passionate intensity of irresponsible stewardship. And guess what? We are. Cities, states, businesses, and universities all over the country are banning together as a group called America’s Pledge to affirm the United States’ commitment to meeting the goals outlined by the Paris Agreement. This group is comprised of people and businesses with conviction, who are ready to step up and take action. This segment of Team Icarus is swimming hard. If you would like to join in the swim, go check out businesses, investors, schools, cities, counties, states, and tribes committed to saving the interconnected home we all share. Reach out to your elected officials; if they’re swimming hard, let them know you appreciate it, and especially at the local level, ask what you can do to help. If they aren’t swimming well, implore them to start. Spend your dollars at companies that are swimming with us. Each one of us is responsible for taking care of the planet. Every one of us is accountable to the rest of humanity. This isn’t just kumbaya; we need to swim together on this or else we will literally be swimming. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to keep my swimming metaphorical. 

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Notes:

Image credit: Artwork by falco is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons

1)     The Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. p. 101.

2)     The Student Bible. New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. 1996. p. 32.

3)     Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Seventh Edition, Volume 2, Edited by M. H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2000. pp. 2106-2107.