“By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.”
- Michael Moorcock, Mother London
We have come to believe that myths and legends are false. This judgement derives from living in worlds where truth is assumed to come from science rather than superstition. Yet myths and legends are not scientific hypotheses to be tested, they are the stories that establish and maintain who we are. If we did not have our myths to sustain us, our legends to remind us of our values and worth, we would, as Michael Moorcock attests in his award-winning literary masterpiece, Mother London, go mad.
There is a paradox at the heart of the twentieth century that is only mysterious if we fail to recognise this essential truth about what it means to be imaginative beings. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the next, there was a growing movement to reject religion and to accept rationality and science as a substitute . This, it was foretold, would usher about a golden age of human achievement and prosperity. Yet the twentieth century was the site of the worst brutality since the empires of antiquity, and by the end of those one hundred years, people were more miserable than they had been in times before. Yet we forcibly denied this, because technology had definitely made our planet a better place.
The irony in this picture will be lost to many who read it, who will say with a straight face that life today is clearly superior, citing a litany of claimed technological advancements - improvements in life expectancy, our capacity to travel the globe, the enormous store of information on the internet. In other words, technology is magical provided we praise its upside and paper over the downsides - that improvements in life expectancy were greater from diet and sanitation than from industrial medicine, that our freedom to travel comes at significant environmental and personal costs, that the internet is the greatest propaganda tool in history and so forth. Those who decried the myths and legends of religion enacted new myths and legends, and the legacy of this non-religion is just as painful to confront as Christianity’s weakness for empire. It is, after all, another empire we have built, imperial technocracy, the New Normal.
The enormous danger in pretending to give up myths and legends is precisely that we will not in fact do so - rather, we will abandon one mythos merely to adopt another. Faith in ‘magical science’ is a perfect example of the myths and legends that sustain us, and as such perhaps I have been too hard on the many people who have adopted this imaginary world as the foundation of their existence. After all, to have no such story to maintain us leads to madness and depression. It is hopelessness that awaits the person who gives up all beliefs. But then, isn’t there a rather miserable amount of this despondency around today…?
As my philosophical mentor Mary Midgley made clear in her books, the problem with the legend of technological salvation is that it cannot perform the cultural role of traditional religions. It inherits their weaknesses without preserving their strengths. The objection that religions ‘aren’t true’ misses the key point: the stories and legends of each religious tradition are repositories of virtue and prompts to duty, storehouses of the self-worth of individuals and the collective worth of families and societies. If we were capable of a clear-headed assessment we would understand such stories as essential... but we cannot do this. The mythos we have adopted blocks our capacity to appreciate the legends of others. This blindness is all but inevitable, since to live in a world is to be sealed within it. Yet there are a few of us who are capable of travelling between these worlds, a theme that infuses the entire vast and magnificent edifice of Moorcock’s writings, in fantasy, science fiction, and in his literary novels.
Myths and legends are not falsehoods that must be discarded, although the mythos that they ‘are false’ and should be forgotten is indeed something we ought to abandon. It is self-negating and preposterous. Stories, both religious and non-religious, define who we are and who we can become. You certainly don’t have to practice a religion - but you cannot get through life without a mythology to guide you. We are sustained by our stories - those that tell us who we are as individuals, those that remind us who we were as a people, and those that promise us hope for the future. The truths that can cross between our worlds are not limited to the mere facts uncovered by scientific investigation, but include the wisdom of stories that always exceeds its grasp.