What we need
Comment is Free’s ‘Belief’ asks whether we should believe in belief and makes a highly debatable assertion on the way.
[S]ocieties do need myths, as indeed do individuals. Take away their organising beliefs about their purpose in the world and both individuals and societies disintegrate: the belief that societies can function without myths, or rather that they should and will in the enlightened future, is itself a myth, and not a very helpful one.
Organizing beliefs are one thing, and myths are another. It is perfectly possible to have organizing beliefs about one’s purpose in the world without believing in myths. It gets rather exasperating sometimes noticing how sloppy and casual and offhanded people can be about mixing up their terminology. Yes organizing beliefs are generally useful (depending on what they are, of course), but that doesn’t just translate straight into ‘societies and individuals need myths.’
To be fair, while you’re absolutely right about falsely conflating “organising beliefs” with myths, I think the piece is putting forward a hypothetical ground on which Daniel Dennett’s argument could be criticised rather than making a statement of fact. My reading of it was more “if you believe that societies need myths in order not to collapse then belief in belief may be a good thing”
I disagree, Patrick. Brown (if that’s who it is), or ‘The Question’, is savaging Dennett’s idea of belief in belief, and questioning Dennett’s willingness to accept and tolerate differences of opinion. Dennett is saying that, as a matter of fact, many people who say they believe in God, or in the ‘truths’ of religion, are not really believers, but believers in belief. This may be wrong, but it is not obviously wrong, and it is not patronising. Dennett is also claiming that belief in belief is what is keeping religious belief alive, at least in most of ‘the West’, where religious believing has come under the severest scrutiny. Again, this is not, contra ‘The Question’ patronising. It is an empirical claim, and one well worth study.
‘The Question’ is claiming that Dennett is being brash and intolerant of the beliefs which people hold, even though he cannot prove them to be wrong, and that, in fact, myths (organising beliefs about our purpose in the world) are necessary in order for society to function. ‘The Question’ further claims that Dennett’s hypotheses are wrong, and constitute a myth about ‘an enlightened future.’ Nothing that Dennett has said suggests anything of the sort, and the person who wrote ‘The Question’ is simply wrong about this. Whether in fact society needs myths – and the word ‘myth’ has a fairly precise meaning in its theological applications – myths are stories that speak about another dimension of reality that help us to make sense of what would be, otherwise, an entirely senseless world – is perhaps an open question; but the fact, as Dennett points out, that people in Denmark are largely unreligious, and yet seem to be able to make sense of their world, suggests that the answer to this question is no. Certainly, the author of ‘The Question’ has not given us any reason at al to think otherwise.
Why don’t ANY of these people recognize that societies can do very well without religion? Many European countries are effectively atheist, and, moreover, they didn’t used to be. That shows 1) religion can be gotten rid of, and 2) societies don’t need to be buttressed by faith.
Because it’s so much more fun to pile on the “New” atheists! Andrew Brown thinks Michael Ruse is quite amusing…
patrick…I don’t see how there’s room for a different reading of a straightforward assertion. I don’t see how “societies do need myths, as indeed do individuals” can be read as “if you believe that societies need myths in order not to collapse then belief in belief may be a good thing.” A conditional needs to be expressed as a conditional; an assertion is an assertion.
I agree with you entirely, Jerry. But the question is not so much ‘Why do they not?’ but ‘Why can they not.’ It is very difficult for a captive of myth to understand how anyone can make sense of life without myth. That’s why they are so quick, as the author of ‘The Question’ is, to call anything a myth which provides a basis for organising individual and social life, and even if, as in the case of Dennett, this ordering myth is not expressed, they are quite prepared to fill in the blanks in order to make the claim stick.
Nonetheless, the claim that myth is not necessary in order to make sense of life is still something that deserves closer study, especially in light of the fact that the social conversation seems to be getting bogged down at precisely this point.
In any case, the most that the author of ‘The Question’ can claim is that Dennett’s belief that society will not disintegrate without a substructure of myth has not yet been conclusively proven, though the evidence that we have seems to suggest strongly that belief in myth is unnecessary for social stability and cohesion. Indeed, the fact that ordering myths themselves conflict so strongly, and the fact that this is becoming socially so very destructive, provide prima facie evidence for the claim that ordering myths, no matter how they may contribute to group solidarity, and no matter how individually satisfying, are not only false, but are becoming socially dangerous.
I suspect that more very serious work on this must be done, and done quickly, because the present stalemate is becoming a serious danger to us all. Of course, a lot of work has been done on myth as a cognitive strategy, but it is not making its way into the mainstream. As recent controversies indicate, there is now a deep breakdown of social understanding in Western societies over the basis and function of religion, and this is not going simply to disappear. Indeed, it is getting more and more incendiary. Perhaps AC Grayling is right, and we are watching what might be religion’s ‘last – characteristically bloody – fling.’ How we can make it less bloody is now something of great importance. I am not hopeful. Myth goes very deep, and, when it does, it is not really myth at all, as Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Onfay, Grayling, and others are aware. Perhaps the best thing to do is keep hammering away at it the core, until people are able to see the spell at the centre of religious believing.
(John Schumacher (Wings of Illusion) likens it to self-hypnosis, and that seems to me not far from the truth. That’s why it’s ‘can’ not ‘do’.)
Usually the “societies need myths” argument is a prelude to some bizarre crypto-conservative argument (although I’ve also known it to come out of otherwise well-intentioned leftists’ mouths) that things like “democracy” and “human rights” are themselves “just myths” that need to be supported by stout columns of supersitition, lest we find ourselves in a dystopian horror society.
It’s the “well, what keeps you atheists from murdering people?” pseudo-argument writ large.
Ophelia, Eric
Actually, on re-reading, I think you’re right – or at least, if my original reading was right, it’s exceedingly sloppily written.
In any case ‘myth’ is one of those horribly vague, slippery words that can come to mean pretty much whatever one wants it to – see dzd’s point above….
Oh thanks for this Ophelia.
As it happens I’m reading about narratives, individuals, and societies at the moment. It’s unfounded to claim that “societies need myths.” It’s just a stupid ungrounded thing to say. There may be an argument to be made that human beings have a preference for narratives and stories, but none that we “need myths.”
In addition, it’s a very not-neutral or objective thing to say. In the (old) literature on differences between so-called oral and so-called written cultures, it was common to claim a kind of developmental trajectory at the level of society. “Myth” was what primitive societies had (poor things, I guess they just needed myth so so much it stopped them from advancing) and “history” was what societies who had advanced themselves into literacy, got to have.
It’s all just bullshit. Myth is just a loaded and yes, slippery term that can hide a lot of snooty-pants ideology.
As another point, suppose societies need myths. Do we need to actually believe that those myths are *true*? No, we do not.
Maybe we need to have the Odyssey and the Iliad and the Tales of Hoffman and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the works of Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin — maybe people need analogy stories in order to understand things. (Not that I think we do, necessarily, but this is a hypothetical for the sake of argument.)
That doesn’t mean we need to believe that those stories are literally true! Indeed, a more skeptical approach to said analogies and myths is clearly better!