Arthur Schopenhauer. Portrait by Johann Schäfer 1859
Conway's 2017 approach to a myth of Crowd Size now feels like a hundred years ago, but in another way something as intense as the origin of Christianity, or even the origin of the word Zoroaster, instead of Zarathustra, is rife with alternative possibilities, or alternative facts. Here I'm happy to argue that years and years ago, without myth we people would have failed, we'd have been canned food for the Saber Tooth Tiger, it's just that the Conway version of myth making remains fundamentally pathetic, a tragic misunderstanding of venerable and ancient myth making protocols. To dwell a while longer with myth, I always thought our generation of thinking emerged from the understandings drilled into us and our teachers by the influential Immanuel Kant. Kant enjoyed the idea that the enlightenment was a chance for us people to finish our apprenticeship, he saw our chance to "emerge from a self-incurred tutelage." His view of myth was: because of it, we people remained in a sort of bondage. At the same time, for the sake of his Lutheran students, he added the suggestion that God was mostly about morality, he went on to suggest that the pursuit of moral behavior within a society was an entirely reasonable search by reasonable creatures. Indeed that pursuit of morality was a Categorical Imperative about which we could do nothing, we just couldn't help ourselves but want to be nice, it was a Universal law in a Kingdom of Ends - we're talking The Metaphysics of Morals published 1797. Mind you Kant wasn't totally averse to mystery. Uniquely blessed as he thought we were by reason, he nonetheless reckoned we remained cave dwellers who could never fully grasp everything. Yet Kant had a reverence for the sets of emotions assigned to the word Awe and the word Beauty. He knew not why the starry night evinced both awe and a reverence for the beautiful in him and yet it did. It may have been a union of Georges Sorel's writing on the power of myth and Arthur Schopenhauer's understanding of myth and religion that opened a reverential door for me, or at least struck me with a liking. Sadly this side of the Appalachians, the more delicate English speakers are made nervous by something as harmless as the Frankfurt School's thoroughly reasonable, almost an embodiment of reason, collection of suggests that have been given the two words Critical Theory. This, shall we call it a gang land intolerance, does rather taint an environment increasingly dominated by the current iteration of state employed Brown Shirts, who presumably are beneficiaries of the very latest managerial Approach to the opportunities of Purity through Privatized Internment Camps. So instead of considering the role of myth in Sorel's Revolutionary Syndicalist views, his oligarchy of syndicates which for Sorel was to benefit the working man not the Indolent Capitalist, it's probably best all round if I wax more than somewhat on the Poodle loving and delightfully bad tempered Schopenhauer's understanding of myth. For those who may be temporarily disabled by a Post Irony Condition, yes, Schopenhauer's Poodles were a dog breed that originated in Germany, not, as some still believe, France. And for goodness sake, look at Arthur's face, you can sort of see him leading his people into the wilderness. Rest assured our guide Schopenhauer did indeed find humanity a constant source of "vexation and disappointment."
