Modern Immaturity

Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth

“What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?” Bill Moyers asked the late guru of myth Joseph Campbell in the mid-1980s interviews that became The Power of Myth, the TV series and book. “What we’ve got on our hands,” was Campbell’s reply. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.”

Moyers: And you’d find?

Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to act in a civilized society.

Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done (The Power of Myth, pp. 8-9).

No longer, though, is scarifying physical trauma inflicted in the name of turning children into adults. That's an excellent thing, but perhaps it's not equally good that there is not much of an emotional, psychological, or spiritual rite of passage either. In our Peter Pan culture, we never really grow up.

No wonder today's polarized politics take on an odor of playground rumbles, Sharks vs. Jets with verbal stilettos. No wonder we turn so much more frequently to lawyers and law to settle our manifold differences. We don't have a unifying mythos any more, a common ground upon which to base our personal and communal rites of passage into maturity.

We desperately need one again, Campbell told Moyers. We need "the literature of the spirit" once more to guide us to eternal values, center our lives ... and save us from terminal immaturity. We need myths, particulrly those which speak of “youth coming to knowledge of itself," as “guidesigns” to our “inner thresholds of passage.”

But it can't just be the old myths recycled, without reinterpretation. They served particular cultures, often justifying hostility to other cultures, and often promoting indifference to nature. The myth we need now is a new, worldwide, nature-friendly myth:

... the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future [Campbell told Moyers] is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. … And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through [late adulthood and old age], and then to the exit; and then how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything (p. 32).

As Campbell pointed out, one of the things we lose when mythos falters is ethos, a set of shared — if not necessarily written — rules for conduct. Without ethos, there is no shame. Without ethos, there is Janet Jackson's accidental-on-purpose "wardrobe malfunction" at the recent Super Bowl halftime show. Without ethos, there is Abu Ghraib.

And how puerile, how juvenile both situations were, though one was as trivial as the other was horrendous. I mean, really: peeking at women's nipples is the preoccupation of a twelve-year-old boy. As is humiliating other people while mugging for the camera and saying, "Hi, Mom."

Christianity — my own religion, as a Roman Catholic — is supposed to be a unifying, worldwide myth. The word "catholic" means "universal." Joseph Campbell was a Catholic who departed from his church to spend his life finding what was, for him, a more satisfactory myth.

I don't necessarily agree with Campbell that the way to save the Christian myth is to make Jesus into a sort of Buddha walking the paths of the Middle East. I think the Gospel message concerning the existence, love, and forgiveness of God goes well beyond recapitulating the wise teachings of Gautama Buddha.

But, at the same time, I don't think the cultural conservatives who want to yank the church back 50 years, or a century, or five, have the right idea either. Campbell was correct to point out that monotheism has a long history of intolerance toward others, including other monotheists. No, we have to reinterpret the monotheist myth so that never happens again.

Actually, I see that in the offing. Under Pope John Paul II, and now under Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has been digesting the modernity implicit in its Vatican II reforms of the early and middle 1960s. It's been touching base with its eternal values, trying to see how to move forward without undermining them.

This is why we see such apparent contradictions as Pope Benedict reaching ecumencially out, as he recently did, to the Anglican Communion, while as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he refused to accept Anglicans as members of a "sister church."

In other words, all the hairsplitting going on now bespeaks a gathering of energies in preparation for a great leap forward in harmonizing the Catholic message with that of other Christian and non-Christian communities. It is like negotiators first laying out the boundaries within which all subsequent negotiations can proceed.

Seeing that is so doesn't necessarily make me all that happy or comfortable, as I happen to be a "liberal" who would like more respect paid to the earth-shaking 1965 document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," one of the highlights of Vatican II pronouncement. (See my earlier post The City of God.) This (in the words of TIME magazine) "mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture [meant] loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience."

But I do see that top-down authority can be loosened, debate can be encouraged, and individual freedom of conscience can be nourished only in an atmosphere of widespread personal maturity. Contrast that type of situation with the late-'60s outburst of radicalism. On the heels of Vatican II, "yippies" and New Lefters self-righteously throwing glorified temper tantrums became the norm.

So we have a sort of chicken-and-egg problem today. We need an aggiornimento, an updating of our central organizing mythos, if we are to reinstitute the rites of passage that can make us mature adults and give us a shared ethos. But we must be ready to manifest that greater maturity, if we are to be trusted not to rip the nascent new ethos to shreds, late-'60s-style, when erstwhile liberals like Joseph Ratzinger felt "mugged by reality."