We create a mythos in order to sustain power, to justify the social order of rules and regulations.
No. That's not my point. My point is that both this statement and the other statement that mythos implies law are "chicken and egg" arguments and are both wrong. My point is that some means of putting emotional oomph into social roles is necessary to result in order, which is a necessary survival tool humans have. ANY means of providing that oomph will work. It just HAPPENED that a bunch of humans coevolved mythos and social order and each has provided the sticking points for the other. We were pre-scientific, so it's no shock. We're now in a process of generating new ideologies as the West becomes increasingly post-scientific and post-modern.
but there are certain things that I think are valuable in those societies that we, as a literate culture have lost
Like what?
What role did Deism play (and, in a sense, science and perhaps protestantism) in the evolution of modern Democracy? Of course, there's the Greek/Roman influence as well. I guess that's what I'm curious. What are the structures not necessarily of social order, but legal power? How did they form (from early banking/temples and coinage)? How did they become what they are now? How did the stories we tell ourselves change through time? What paradigms forced changes? What are the things that are nearly universal in this history of myths of power?
It's true that we had some Deists running around in the early halls of power. We also had a LOT of non-Deist Christians, too. They were all pretty much universally suckers for romantic notions of classical civilizations, yes, and that does play out heavily in much of our iconography. At a structural level, though, I don't know how much these things had to do with anything. Britain already had a parliamentary system in place by that time. Our country's experiment was not some complete stab in the dark at democracy, but was a stab in the dark at taking a set of social structures already common to their cultural heritage and stripping out their relationships to monarchy and aristocracy. If you think about this in the sense that America was "new land" and people who'd come there to make their own fortunes didn't want British landed nobles claiming the old system over America, then much of this fits into place. Left to their own devices, they pulled from the only non-monarchial things they had at hand, including lessons from their Masonic lodges and readings they had at hand about other non-British republics, which were the idealized Athenians and Romans.
I once heard a professor say he loved political history because it's simultaneously clean and dirty. People speak lofty, and they act lowly. I think I like to look at the lowly so heavily because it humanizes our past, but I guess I overlook the lofty stuff, which is more of what you're focusing on in this thread.
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Date: 2007-02-08 05:45 pm (UTC)No. That's not my point. My point is that both this statement and the other statement that mythos implies law are "chicken and egg" arguments and are both wrong. My point is that some means of putting emotional oomph into social roles is necessary to result in order, which is a necessary survival tool humans have. ANY means of providing that oomph will work. It just HAPPENED that a bunch of humans coevolved mythos and social order and each has provided the sticking points for the other. We were pre-scientific, so it's no shock. We're now in a process of generating new ideologies as the West becomes increasingly post-scientific and post-modern.
but there are certain things that I think are valuable in those societies that we, as a literate culture have lost
Like what?
What role did Deism play (and, in a sense, science and perhaps protestantism) in the evolution of modern Democracy? Of course, there's the Greek/Roman influence as well. I guess that's what I'm curious. What are the structures not necessarily of social order, but legal power? How did they form (from early banking/temples and coinage)? How did they become what they are now? How did the stories we tell ourselves change through time? What paradigms forced changes? What are the things that are nearly universal in this history of myths of power?
It's true that we had some Deists running around in the early halls of power. We also had a LOT of non-Deist Christians, too. They were all pretty much universally suckers for romantic notions of classical civilizations, yes, and that does play out heavily in much of our iconography. At a structural level, though, I don't know how much these things had to do with anything. Britain already had a parliamentary system in place by that time. Our country's experiment was not some complete stab in the dark at democracy, but was a stab in the dark at taking a set of social structures already common to their cultural heritage and stripping out their relationships to monarchy and aristocracy. If you think about this in the sense that America was "new land" and people who'd come there to make their own fortunes didn't want British landed nobles claiming the old system over America, then much of this fits into place. Left to their own devices, they pulled from the only non-monarchial things they had at hand, including lessons from their Masonic lodges and readings they had at hand about other non-British republics, which were the idealized Athenians and Romans.
I once heard a professor say he loved political history because it's simultaneously clean and dirty. People speak lofty, and they act lowly. I think I like to look at the lowly so heavily because it humanizes our past, but I guess I overlook the lofty stuff, which is more of what you're focusing on in this thread.