There is a lot of talk right now about the "woke right." Its a stupid term, but its deployment is strategic and designed to subvert a properly understood right-wing identity politics.
Yeah, "myth" is definitely the wrong word. I strongly prefer "mythos," both because it avoids the unfortunate connotation of "fictional" associated with the word "myth," but also because it's just more accurate.
Schmitt's essay was entitled "Die Politische Theorie des Mythus". "Mythus" is a now dated form of the German word "Mythos," which together with the English "mythos" was borrowed from the Latin "mythos," itself a transliteration of the Greek μῦθος. Which, yes, can imply a fictional account in the original Greek. But it can also convey the meaning associated with the English "mythos" but not "myth". In English, the word "mythos" doesn't really come with a pre-packaged connotation about the truth value of the subject matter. On the other hand, it does directly refer to not only "an account transmitted by word of mouth rather than in writing" but also "a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture". Which is most definitely what both you and Schmitt are getting at.
Personally, I've come to use it in contrast with a particular meaning of "logos:" "truth embodied in propositions." Mythos, on the other hand, refers to "truth embodied in narrative."
One of the problems I see in the US is if one’s political philosophical ontology, being that which binds a subject’s sense of Earthly belonging to communal belonging, is in turn bound to the history of the Christian religion and the depth of the ‘myth’ of the ethics set forth by the life of Christ and his followers and, in turn, the varieties of Christian institutions and practices that follow, how does that relate to the historical reality of the US being a colony based on the dispossession of the land’s indigenous people? And how does this relate to the essentially Lockean, bourgeois origins of the present US state in the liberal-individualist constitution?
For the meaning of Schmitt’s myth as ontologically binding to the history of place (I think Hölderlin’s poems offer a great example of this meaning as an alternative to the more recent c20th modernist versions of political nationalism) applies much more to Indians in what is now the United States than to Europeans who have migrated there over the past several centuries - who have left those places of long history where their language and its unique world-historical orientation has organically evolved. Either one admits to this as a form of fact or one sees a world historical mission belonging only, of all religions, to Christianity. If the latter is the case, is community on Earth then only possible in future as a kingdom of heaven? How does the Christian political community relate to other forms of religion, especially Abrahamic? Given part of the unifying myth of ‘Europe’ emerged via the unification of Christian nations in the crusades against the Other of Islam, does this become a friend/enemy political relationship between true religion claims?
Another thought: I think on a philosophical level, whether it is Heidegger’s ‘care-structure of Being’ or the analytic, cultural-historical and subtle ‘background practices’ of John Searle, we are always already enmeshed in horizontal forms of historical community; only that we often do not see these basic orientations toward others as they exist at a deeper level than political ideology. Much of what is here meant intersects with the historical language we speak, how we understand certain language-games, manners and what may be called the world-orientations that permit us, in almost a gestalt sense, of opening-toward, noticing and reacting to certain things and not to others. Community - the particular language-games and cultural mores that allow us to open toward, have a sense of conviviality with and trust some people more than others - is generally less cognisant than the things that we may overtly think make it up. Historically, the kinship form taken by the modern family is not necessarily the norm (one only need look at the scholarship on communality in early Christian groups, or even millenarian Christian groups, for an example of this). This is why Schmitt uses terms like ‘sense of naturalness’ rather than stating that they are in some metaphysical sense natural. Be that as it may, as a practicing Buddhist who has immense respect for Christ and his ethics, I think Christianity is of vital importance because, unlike disenchanted modernist society, it maintains for its practitioners not just an ontology but more importantly a feeling for the ontological - of we as human beings on Earth existing amongst other humans between birth and death in a mysterious universe… it maintains a sense of mystery.
To maintain this sense of mystery and, indeed, the miracle of Being in the face of the disenchantment and secularisation of instrumental modernity is of the utmost importance. One has to read quite far in the sciences to find an equal sense of mystery (it does exist though in science, and where there exists this sense of wonder, of thaumazein, there exists a place for God - it just does not exists in populist scientism). This can be a place where a deeper sense of community can also spring.
One last thing. The trajectory of post-modern and critical theory in the US has been rather unique in terms of it falling into a relativism and becoming bound to individualist identity claims. This is not its fate around the world nor how it is taught outside US eng lit and cultural theory departments. It is the uniqueness of the emphasis on cultural atomism in US ‘vertically’ integrated culture, where the unique individual is central, combined with the fact that there is very little semblance of any political left due to the particular virility of US anti-communism/marxism that seems to have enabled any sense of working class politics to be displaced on the left by the interests of generally university educated and PMC ‘marginal’ identities, for whom woke politics is also a form of personal power. A sense of community and solidarity based on class - which is a fundamentally realist economic relation and not just an ideology - constantly spontaneously emerges in workplaces as long as there are groups of people who have to sell their labour as a commodity by the hour to someone who uses that labour power as the real owner, the boss, of that work while a person js ‘employed.’ In every job I had my fellow employees would complain about how they were treated by managers and bosses. In some, protests were collectively organised. That sense of direct democracy is of course the origin of the definition of ‘left’ long before leftism as direct democracy became displaced by cultural ideas of ‘being leftist.’ The two are often confused and that itself is the work of ideology. The more they are confused, the more the former loses out to the latter and therein woke identity politics and a movement of ressentiment (to use the specific term) take over. Just as I think Nietzsche is wrong in reducing much Christianity to ressentiment, so too the historical political left has not always been one of ressentiment.
Btw, I’ll be sending your intro to friends as an excellent summary of woke idpol. Thanks.
Excellent post. Organize community is the only way. When I have IRL conversations about community vs individualism I use the analogy of a nuclear bomb, which works by splitting a lot of atoms and unleashing the combined force.
We built our mass society, full of people vulnerable to propaganda as you say, by doing a similar thing to communities and relationships: tearing them apart and harnessing the tremendous power inside. Every large organization we can think of, be it a business or a government agency, grew by tearing apart some aspect of old communal living and harnessed the collective power of millions upon millions of relationships. The impact has been more destructive than a nuke.
A week or two ago, my kids (who were starting to get really interested in Greek mythology) asked if "myth" means a real story or fake.
I gave them a distinction:
- "myth" tells you "what happens". It tells you what sort of world you're living in.
- "legend" tells you "what happened long, long ago". It tells you where your world came from.
(Aside: I came across somebody recently arguing for the necessity of "logomythy", being an awareness of the stories we tell ourselves about how science works. "Mythology", the dissection of mythos, is all very well and good, but it tends to the dissolution of the intelligibility of any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Something like that.)
This is not a thing for individuals, nor for “mass man.”
You are quite right. But there are other legitimate objections to group-level activism, because they involve accepting the regime's moral framing of collectivism.
One argument of this type is deployed mainly in the Balkans, though the Irish, the Scots and others have also favoured it. For example, Hungarians and Romanians have been arguing for 150-odd years over who was in Transylvania first. The idea is that, if, say, the Hungarians can prove that there were no Romanians there until after the Hungarians arrived, the Magyars have the best claim to the region and must be given political primacy. The legitimating moralism in this case would be that there was no conquest of one group by the other. If, on the other hand, the Romanians can prove that they were already in place, then *they* must be given political primacy. This argument therefore rests on claims of non-aggressive 'indigeneity'.
The British right-wing party Patriotic Alternative has of late adopted essentially this moral framing by proclaiming 'white Britons' 'the indigenous people of these isles' and basing their claims to political dominion on this (of course entirely factual) indigeneity.
But the use of the indigeneity argument presents five obvious problems. First, in a lot of Old World cases, it is factually insoluble. The Romanian-Hungarian dispute over Transylvania has never been resolved for reasons beyond the merely political; many legitimate linguistic and archaeological questions remain and probably always will.
Second, it is demonstrably irrelevant in the face of realpolitik. Europeans will never be taken seriously when they base territorial claims on 'indigeneity', because the 'indigenous' designation was never intended for them: only non-Europeans are 'indigenous'.
Third, for New World Europeans, who are in most cases conquering settler-colonists, the argument is useless. In almost every instance they are obviously aggressive intruders.
Fourth, it is an affront to thymos, because it accepts the morality of Third-Worldism: pace possibly offended Christians, it really is an unacceptable concession to slave morality.
Fifth, it accepts that the nation-state is at bottom nothing but a synthetic device whose foundational motivation was the exercise of power by one group over another; peoples are cohesive only in an historically contingent sense, based solely on the need to dominate other groups. Thus 'indigenous Europeans' must strive to capture perquisites from the state, becoming one of a congeries of interest groups squabbling over scraps from the master's table.
For these reasons Third-Worldism must be completely rejected by all Europeans. Their organic in-group unity should always be affirmed and theirpolitical collectivism be founded on their strengths--as culture bearers and creators---instead of the same historical helplessness and passivity invoked by 'indigenous' non-Europeans.
Yeah, "myth" is definitely the wrong word. I strongly prefer "mythos," both because it avoids the unfortunate connotation of "fictional" associated with the word "myth," but also because it's just more accurate.
Schmitt's essay was entitled "Die Politische Theorie des Mythus". "Mythus" is a now dated form of the German word "Mythos," which together with the English "mythos" was borrowed from the Latin "mythos," itself a transliteration of the Greek μῦθος. Which, yes, can imply a fictional account in the original Greek. But it can also convey the meaning associated with the English "mythos" but not "myth". In English, the word "mythos" doesn't really come with a pre-packaged connotation about the truth value of the subject matter. On the other hand, it does directly refer to not only "an account transmitted by word of mouth rather than in writing" but also "a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture". Which is most definitely what both you and Schmitt are getting at.
Personally, I've come to use it in contrast with a particular meaning of "logos:" "truth embodied in propositions." Mythos, on the other hand, refers to "truth embodied in narrative."
I like that. Yes, mythos is better for sure. The vagaries of translation work.
One of the problems I see in the US is if one’s political philosophical ontology, being that which binds a subject’s sense of Earthly belonging to communal belonging, is in turn bound to the history of the Christian religion and the depth of the ‘myth’ of the ethics set forth by the life of Christ and his followers and, in turn, the varieties of Christian institutions and practices that follow, how does that relate to the historical reality of the US being a colony based on the dispossession of the land’s indigenous people? And how does this relate to the essentially Lockean, bourgeois origins of the present US state in the liberal-individualist constitution?
For the meaning of Schmitt’s myth as ontologically binding to the history of place (I think Hölderlin’s poems offer a great example of this meaning as an alternative to the more recent c20th modernist versions of political nationalism) applies much more to Indians in what is now the United States than to Europeans who have migrated there over the past several centuries - who have left those places of long history where their language and its unique world-historical orientation has organically evolved. Either one admits to this as a form of fact or one sees a world historical mission belonging only, of all religions, to Christianity. If the latter is the case, is community on Earth then only possible in future as a kingdom of heaven? How does the Christian political community relate to other forms of religion, especially Abrahamic? Given part of the unifying myth of ‘Europe’ emerged via the unification of Christian nations in the crusades against the Other of Islam, does this become a friend/enemy political relationship between true religion claims?
Another thought: I think on a philosophical level, whether it is Heidegger’s ‘care-structure of Being’ or the analytic, cultural-historical and subtle ‘background practices’ of John Searle, we are always already enmeshed in horizontal forms of historical community; only that we often do not see these basic orientations toward others as they exist at a deeper level than political ideology. Much of what is here meant intersects with the historical language we speak, how we understand certain language-games, manners and what may be called the world-orientations that permit us, in almost a gestalt sense, of opening-toward, noticing and reacting to certain things and not to others. Community - the particular language-games and cultural mores that allow us to open toward, have a sense of conviviality with and trust some people more than others - is generally less cognisant than the things that we may overtly think make it up. Historically, the kinship form taken by the modern family is not necessarily the norm (one only need look at the scholarship on communality in early Christian groups, or even millenarian Christian groups, for an example of this). This is why Schmitt uses terms like ‘sense of naturalness’ rather than stating that they are in some metaphysical sense natural. Be that as it may, as a practicing Buddhist who has immense respect for Christ and his ethics, I think Christianity is of vital importance because, unlike disenchanted modernist society, it maintains for its practitioners not just an ontology but more importantly a feeling for the ontological - of we as human beings on Earth existing amongst other humans between birth and death in a mysterious universe… it maintains a sense of mystery.
To maintain this sense of mystery and, indeed, the miracle of Being in the face of the disenchantment and secularisation of instrumental modernity is of the utmost importance. One has to read quite far in the sciences to find an equal sense of mystery (it does exist though in science, and where there exists this sense of wonder, of thaumazein, there exists a place for God - it just does not exists in populist scientism). This can be a place where a deeper sense of community can also spring.
One last thing. The trajectory of post-modern and critical theory in the US has been rather unique in terms of it falling into a relativism and becoming bound to individualist identity claims. This is not its fate around the world nor how it is taught outside US eng lit and cultural theory departments. It is the uniqueness of the emphasis on cultural atomism in US ‘vertically’ integrated culture, where the unique individual is central, combined with the fact that there is very little semblance of any political left due to the particular virility of US anti-communism/marxism that seems to have enabled any sense of working class politics to be displaced on the left by the interests of generally university educated and PMC ‘marginal’ identities, for whom woke politics is also a form of personal power. A sense of community and solidarity based on class - which is a fundamentally realist economic relation and not just an ideology - constantly spontaneously emerges in workplaces as long as there are groups of people who have to sell their labour as a commodity by the hour to someone who uses that labour power as the real owner, the boss, of that work while a person js ‘employed.’ In every job I had my fellow employees would complain about how they were treated by managers and bosses. In some, protests were collectively organised. That sense of direct democracy is of course the origin of the definition of ‘left’ long before leftism as direct democracy became displaced by cultural ideas of ‘being leftist.’ The two are often confused and that itself is the work of ideology. The more they are confused, the more the former loses out to the latter and therein woke identity politics and a movement of ressentiment (to use the specific term) take over. Just as I think Nietzsche is wrong in reducing much Christianity to ressentiment, so too the historical political left has not always been one of ressentiment.
Btw, I’ll be sending your intro to friends as an excellent summary of woke idpol. Thanks.
Excellent post. Organize community is the only way. When I have IRL conversations about community vs individualism I use the analogy of a nuclear bomb, which works by splitting a lot of atoms and unleashing the combined force.
We built our mass society, full of people vulnerable to propaganda as you say, by doing a similar thing to communities and relationships: tearing them apart and harnessing the tremendous power inside. Every large organization we can think of, be it a business or a government agency, grew by tearing apart some aspect of old communal living and harnessed the collective power of millions upon millions of relationships. The impact has been more destructive than a nuke.
Exactly. Good observation. And they break down society to release energy that they use up to accumulate power and money.
A week or two ago, my kids (who were starting to get really interested in Greek mythology) asked if "myth" means a real story or fake.
I gave them a distinction:
- "myth" tells you "what happens". It tells you what sort of world you're living in.
- "legend" tells you "what happened long, long ago". It tells you where your world came from.
(Aside: I came across somebody recently arguing for the necessity of "logomythy", being an awareness of the stories we tell ourselves about how science works. "Mythology", the dissection of mythos, is all very well and good, but it tends to the dissolution of the intelligibility of any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Something like that.)
This is not a thing for individuals, nor for “mass man.”
You are quite right. But there are other legitimate objections to group-level activism, because they involve accepting the regime's moral framing of collectivism.
One argument of this type is deployed mainly in the Balkans, though the Irish, the Scots and others have also favoured it. For example, Hungarians and Romanians have been arguing for 150-odd years over who was in Transylvania first. The idea is that, if, say, the Hungarians can prove that there were no Romanians there until after the Hungarians arrived, the Magyars have the best claim to the region and must be given political primacy. The legitimating moralism in this case would be that there was no conquest of one group by the other. If, on the other hand, the Romanians can prove that they were already in place, then *they* must be given political primacy. This argument therefore rests on claims of non-aggressive 'indigeneity'.
The British right-wing party Patriotic Alternative has of late adopted essentially this moral framing by proclaiming 'white Britons' 'the indigenous people of these isles' and basing their claims to political dominion on this (of course entirely factual) indigeneity.
But the use of the indigeneity argument presents five obvious problems. First, in a lot of Old World cases, it is factually insoluble. The Romanian-Hungarian dispute over Transylvania has never been resolved for reasons beyond the merely political; many legitimate linguistic and archaeological questions remain and probably always will.
Second, it is demonstrably irrelevant in the face of realpolitik. Europeans will never be taken seriously when they base territorial claims on 'indigeneity', because the 'indigenous' designation was never intended for them: only non-Europeans are 'indigenous'.
Third, for New World Europeans, who are in most cases conquering settler-colonists, the argument is useless. In almost every instance they are obviously aggressive intruders.
Fourth, it is an affront to thymos, because it accepts the morality of Third-Worldism: pace possibly offended Christians, it really is an unacceptable concession to slave morality.
Fifth, it accepts that the nation-state is at bottom nothing but a synthetic device whose foundational motivation was the exercise of power by one group over another; peoples are cohesive only in an historically contingent sense, based solely on the need to dominate other groups. Thus 'indigenous Europeans' must strive to capture perquisites from the state, becoming one of a congeries of interest groups squabbling over scraps from the master's table.
For these reasons Third-Worldism must be completely rejected by all Europeans. Their organic in-group unity should always be affirmed and theirpolitical collectivism be founded on their strengths--as culture bearers and creators---instead of the same historical helplessness and passivity invoked by 'indigenous' non-Europeans.
Ireland for the Irish!
Proddies out?