Modernity and Meaning                                         

"Aren't you just another fascist?""Ummm... Sure. But I'm a fascist for the Left!"

Woody Allen's answer to girlfriend's question in "Manhattan"

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . .  The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.

Thomas Merton. "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.   

Hannah Arendt

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven... The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.

Adolf Hitler

The poet of today ...is profoundly inhibited by the dearth of shared consciousness of myth.  Our current motivating ideas are not myths but ideologies, lacking transcendental significance. This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for ... myth-consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not

long tolerated; it leaves me radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered.

Philip WheelwrightSource: essay on "Poetry, Myth and Reality" in "The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism" 1968

Art or culture or philosophy must ply its genius today against this most prodigious opponent in all of history-human self-obliviousness, man's deific powers of denial and delusion, the nescience buried in the heart of science. Art must keen its scalpel for one sure incision, it must razor the bladder of an inflationary corpus of hypertrophic beliefs so deftly that the violence is only felt after the fact. Delusion must be lanced like a boil bloated to purple distension: art is not the play of pretty illusions-entertainment is that whoring pastime-but rather righteous and wise disillusion, judicious severing of a malignancy. Art is far from amoral; it is in crusade against lying and trivializing conventional morality and must transcend that snakepit of corruption, certainly; but amoral it is not, in no way is it free to be neutral and objective. Art is either the lancet of a higher truth, a law superior to any of man's pleasant and flattering rhetorical reasonings, or else it has no authority, no right to command anyone's attention. Art traffics with the divine, that is, the hidden or occult, the mythic, which is after all of the very essence of man, the stuff his character and even his life are ultimately woven from. A wise society knows to have contempt for egomaniacal poseurs playing onanistically with art supplies, and a foolish society imagines that "art is whatever artists may do."

Kenneth Smith  

And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.

If your Spanish is a little rusty or nonexistent the following is a fairly decent translation of the above quotation:And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges

The poet of today ...is profoundly inhibited by the dearth of shared consciousness of myth.  Our current motivating ideas are not myths but ideologies, lacking transcendental significance. This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for ... myth-consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not long tolerated; it leaves me radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered.

Philip Wheelwright Source: essay on "Poetry, Myth and Reality" in "The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism" 1968

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

James Hillman

As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality of myth, I chose myth...Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth."

Kathleen Raine

I believe imagination is stronger than knowledge - that myth is more potent than history.  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts - that hope always triumphs over experience - that laughter is the only cure for grief.  And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Robert Fulghum (1937 - )

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero--really look--and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - )  

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Mythology is the womb of man's initiation to life and death.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987)  

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie deliberate, contrived and dishonest but the myth persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)

The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.

John C. Maxwell

It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.

Irwin Edman (1896 - 1954)

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.

Gandhi (1869 - 1948)